2003 must have been a Great Year for Aquiring raw telescope data. So many tapes went unsplit and set aside from that year. I like the 2003 Work Units. They Crunch Well and have no Bad aftertaste. Wonder if Arecibo is still Gathering Data as quickly now? On the Status Page

http://setiathome2.ssl.berkeley.edu/sstatus.html

It says Arecibo is still Up, Running and Gathering more Data. I seriously Doubt we will ever run out of Work to do. Even when Classic Closes and the SETI Classic Crunchers move to the more efficient SETI BOINC system of only giving out Work Units 4 times.

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AFAIK, Aricebo collects data at a constant rate. The same rate today as it did in 2003.

It is a little odd to see a 2003 tape running now though - must have dropped behind the filing cabinet...

As for running out of work, the very fact that units are _only_ sent out 4 times will make this quite likely. Your suggestion that work will never run out sadly isn't the goals of the BOINC project which is heavily geared towards alternate projects for just those times when there is no work.

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If we do run out of work someday it wont be for a Long time. We have hardly put a dent in Crunching anything in 2005 yet. Maybe Half of January and a Few days in February. It is going to be a Tail Chase. Now if and when Arecibo gets its 7 Channel receiver up and running and the Parks Telescope in the Southern Hemisphere gets plugged into the System we will have Loads of Stuff to Crunch. Then there is Astropulse too which is related to the same Data.

AFAIK, Aricebo collects data at a constant rate. The same rate today as it did in 2003.

It is a little odd to see a 2003 tape running now though - must have dropped behind the filing cabinet...

As for running out of work, the very fact that units are _only_ sent out 4 times will make this quite likely. Your suggestion that work will never run out sadly isn't the goals of the BOINC project which is heavily geared towards alternate projects for just those times when there is no work.

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From what I read about this subject is that all the tapes went into a box, they get mixed up. Some 2003 data had been in that box, yet.

Since we are looking at more data (doing WUs only 4-7 times, instead of the dozens that Classic did), we are probably getting into more tapes that have been sitting around a while.

So we might be empting the box a little, but as the other observatories come online, we should have plenty of work to keep us busy.

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My movie https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/502242

Okay. I must have answered this in three other threads pertaining to this same topic already. But perhaps let me add a little more info this time that may shed light on the '03 data.

Data tapes come from Arecibo and end up in a pile next to my desk. We have, on average, a backlog of about 6 months' worth of tapes to split into workunits. There's no care taken to keep these tapes in chronological order (there's no need to, and there's better things to worry about). When it comes time to make more workunits, I grab a random tape.

This stuff I already mentioned elsewhere. BUT! There's more: We do actually check the quality of the data before throwing it into the splitter - we don't want to make a bunch of workunits with excessive RFI, or machine noise because the telescope was under maintenance, etc. Basically every two hours we compare the current spectrum we are recording against what we'd expect to see, and if it's WAY off, we probably have garbage data (so WAY off that we are positively not throwing out ET signals but obvious earth noise clobbering the relatively quiet noise from space).

Back in 2003 we had our large backlog of data, so we had a chance to be more selective with our tapes, not splitting anything that had the chance of being bad data. So a lot of 2003 tapes never made the cut at that time. Since then, we have determined that perhaps we were being a bit too selective - some of the data checks were failing the same time every day (perhaps this was a reflection of sun position affecting our receiver - I'll leave that up to the real scientists around here to decide). I was also cutting tapes when it failed a data check 1 time out 8, thus "throwing away" 87.5% of good data because 12.5% seemed squirly.

But of course we keep these tapes around, so this data wasn't actually thrown away - just settling to the bottom of my data tape box for later reconsideration.

That's all.

- Matt

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-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude

Okay. I must have answered this in three other threads pertaining to this same topic already. But perhaps let me add a little more info this time that may shed light on the '03 data.

--cut message---

But of course we keep these tapes around, so this data wasn't actually thrown away - just settling to the bottom of my data tape box for later reconsideration.

That's all.

- Matt

Is it possible to run the WOW signal through setiathome? Is it on a tape? Would it get flagged?

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