Please note that the following information is reposted from the Ars Technica Team Lamb Chop (TLC) website as a service to those list members who may not regularly visit them or the newsgroups for project updates and information. Many thanks to the dedicated TLC members and SETI@home staffers who devote many, many hours of hard work in the keeping the communications channels open and the project moving forward in an upbeat, positive manner ;^) . Reference Links: Team Lamb Chop @ http://tlc.hagabard.com/ . The Petition to SETI@home @ http://www.mindspring.com/~johnfrancis/PETITION.htm . -- Jeffrey Ottie ================================================== Petition There has been a petition floating around concerning what some call a lack of activity over at the S@H offices <SNIP> Eric Korpela came through today with a response to the petition on alt.sci.seti. I will let him tell you about it all: >It's a respectful petition. I hope it's feasible to implement the >recommendations ie there's the manpower to do it. Unfortunately, it isn't yet feasable to do much of what the petition requests. You may not have noticed, but we've had a significant amount of problems and down time in the last month, including restoring both the online science database and the "master" database from backup. That has basically put us at a standstill in postprocessing for more than a month. A couple months ago I would have projected that we'd be at the point of having click-plots for all of the data analyzed so far, and would be well on the way to generating maps of double and triple detections. At this point, I'd say we're still months away from that point. Because of the server reliability problems we've been having, we're considering a change to the online server that would increase reliability at the price of slowing down the post-processing. In response to the specific points: 1) The question of which of the 2 billion or so signals is "interesting" depends upon us getting to the point of making maps of double and triple detections and stellar coincidences. As the "top 20" pages show, sorting by power or chisquared leads to a page dominated by entirely uninteresting signals. Every signal in the top 20 pages is either RFI or a computational error. The list of potentially interesting signals is currently endless. A lot of reduction still needs to be done before we can publish a real list of "interesting" candidates. 2) The science newsletters are a resonable indication of the status of the postprocessing. We were at a virtual standstill prior to the start of this year because our databases were overloaded. Installation of the "master" database machine early this year has sped postprocessing by orders of magnitude. Currently the redundancy checkers and the clickplot generators are running. The next two steps, frequency correction and zone RFI removal are waiting until there is a significant clean dataset in the master database. They should start shortly. I expect that a science newsletter will be released regarding these steps. Following that there will be an iteration of repeat finders and more complex RFI rejection. Following the first iteration, we should be able to produce a list of interesting candidates that has less than a billion items on it. 3) I'm not sure the word numerous really applies to our security breaches. To date there has been one instance of a comprimise of the security of our systems (the Alf hack), and one hack that exploited the RPC the client uses to get user information. I get the point, however. I will suggest to David that he implement a password change CGI. Should SETI@home II come to pass there will also be a client password to prevent unauthorized users from returning results using your accounts. 4) We've kicked around the idea of milestone recognition for some time, with the usual idea being small gifts that increasing in value to with number of work units completed. In general we've been too overwhelmed with daily operations to implement anything. We've also considered that providing another incentive to cheat might not be the best thing to do at this point. I find it difficult to believe that any milestone recognition would be a source of revenue. Above all, everyone should be aware of how limited a resource the time of the members of the team here at Berkeley. Because of other constraints I've had to reduce my SETI@home time to about 30% (which tends to be about 20 hours a week). I'm recently back from my third trip to Korea in the last nine months. Of course my departure marks the point at which all hell broke loose. I'm about 4 weeks behind in answering SETI@home related email. If any of us had an extra 8 hours a month to write a newsletter (a much better estimate than 30 minutes, this email is taking longer than that) we'd do it. It's not that we aren't appreciative of your collective efforts. We just don't have the time to express it. Right now our effort are dominated by keeping S@H running. Post processing is the second priority, and that's where signal information you seek would be generated. The third priority is trying to make sure that SETI@home will continue. None of these tasks are easy. All of them consume more man hours than we have available. Well, it's time for me to get back to work. There's a problem with one of the science database that cause the failure of one program last week. I should be fixing it... Eric ================================================== == Unsubscribe instructions: http://www.talkspace.net/mlists/setiathome.html This list sponsored by talkspace.net: building space communities online. Mailing list services provided by klx.communications -- www.klx.com
