I hear ya Enigma. Just check my profile...yup, done the UN volunteer thing also for various "things" they got going on, plus volunteer my services to charities who also need some high end unix administration work done.

I hear ya Enigma. Just check my profile...yup, done the UN volunteer thing also for various "things" they got going on, plus volunteer my services to charities who also need some high end unix administration work done.

Thanks Mike, at least someone did :->. Pity the "powers that be" don't comment. Now that this thread has been conveniently unstickied, it will no doubt fall into oblivion.

Mikey, you definitely have a point. But its a pretty big baby now, 7 years old..... perhaps its time for 'it' to grow up a little.

"I'm trying to maintain a shred of dignity in this world." - Me

Thanks Mike, at least someone did :->. Pity the "powers that be" don't comment. Now that this thread has been conveniently unstickied, it will no doubt fall into oblivion.

Mikey, you definitely have a point. But its a pretty big baby now, 7 years old..... perhaps its time for 'it' to grow up a little.

Enigma, I have started a thread over on your team forum about this situation, you have access to my pm there. You can mail me on fuzzy dot hollynoodles at gmail dot moc if you want to offer your help, so I look forward to hear from you.

And yes, I unstickied the threads as I have used the input in them to make a report about the different issues for not being able to donate to Eric and Pappa and make suggestions for what can be done. But if you have suggestions, we are very interested in knowing them, please contact me either way. Maybe you have ideas we haven't come upon yet, and we certainly can use all the help we can get.

Thank you.

Thanks Mike, at least someone did :->. Pity the "powers that be" don't comment. Now that this thread has been conveniently unstickied, it will no doubt fall into oblivion.

Mikey, you definitely have a point. But its a pretty big baby now, 7 years old..... perhaps its time for 'it' to grow up a little.

Enigma, I have started a thread over on your team forum about this situation, you have access to my pm there. You can mail me on fuzzy dot hollynoodles at gmail dot moc if you want to offer your help, so I look forward to hear from you.

And yes, I unstickied the threads as I have used the input in them to make a report about the different issues for not being able to donate to Eric and Pappa and make suggestions for what can be done. But if you have suggestions, we are very interested in knowing them, please contact me either way. Maybe you have ideas we haven't come upon yet, and we certainly can use all the help we can get.

Thank you.

Fuzzy,

Yes, i read what you posted on our team website (there are several replies), we also started another thread "About SETI@HOME", you may want to take a look.

Regardless I believe there have been a number of suggestions already made here such as project priorities and leveraging candidate analysis to attract more donations rather than building modules to collect more data to crunch (in fear of running out of data)....

Even 4 or 5 posts above, it has been suggested to approach the SETI Community (500K strong?) for SKILLS instead of $$$ (such is done on U.N. projects) so items like web development could be done by donation (saving $25,000 from the existing budget).

If the SETI team were inclined to allow limited access to a database with a subset of production data (crunched signals) for Development and UAT purposes, a candidate analysis engine may possibly be written (again community skills).

I am confident that if the crunchers that developed the BOINC optimised clients were asked to look at designing an engine for analysis of candidates they would JUMP at the opportunity.

Yes there would be logistic and possibly security challenges but IMO they would be one time issues.

"I'm trying to maintain a shred of dignity in this world." - Me

Thanks Mike, at least someone did :->. Pity the "powers that be" don't comment. Now that this thread has been conveniently unstickied, it will no doubt fall into oblivion.

Mikey, you definitely have a point. But its a pretty big baby now, 7 years old..... perhaps its time for 'it' to grow up a little.

Enigma, I have started a thread over on your team forum about this situation, you have access to my pm there. You can mail me on fuzzy dot hollynoodles at gmail dot moc if you want to offer your help, so I look forward to hear from you.

And yes, I unstickied the threads as I have used the input in them to make a report about the different issues for not being able to donate to Eric and Pappa and make suggestions for what can be done. But if you have suggestions, we are very interested in knowing them, please contact me either way. Maybe you have ideas we haven't come upon yet, and we certainly can use all the help we can get.

Thank you.

Fuzzy,

Yes, i read what you posted on our team website (there are several replies), we also started another thread "About SETI@HOME", you may want to take a look.

Regardless I believe there have been a number of suggestions already made here such as project priorities and leveraging candidate analysis to attract more donations rather than building modules to collect more data to crunch (in fear of running out of data)....

Even 4 or 5 posts above, it has been suggested to approach the SETI Community (500K strong?) for SKILLS instead of $$$ (such is done on U.N. projects) so items like web development could be done by donation (saving $25,000 from the existing budget).

If the SETI team were inclined to allow limited access to a database with a subset of production data (crunched signals) for Development and UAT purposes, a candidate analysis engine may possibly be written (again community skills).

I am confident that if the crunchers that developed the BOINC optimised clients were asked to look at designing an engine for analysis of candidates they would JUMP at the opportunity.

Yes there would be logistic and possibly security challenges but IMO they would be one time issues.

But I certainly hear what you are saying, and I'll add a "volunteer" link to the front page at some point in the next few days and see what response we get.

--SNIP--
Any how, regarding finding volunteers, it's an idea we have tried in the past and continue to try. There are some things, like application optimization (for which I am extremely grateful to the volunteers, and I have gotten more of the code since the interview, once I found out where to go for it), that it works well for. I'm not sure that it works too well for web development, aside from some PHP development. The primary problem is the interface between the web site and the back end science/candidate identification. It would really help if the web developer had scientific programming experience. Much of what we need to do on the requires visual communication which is best done in person. The time commitment is fairly substantial. Those things pretty much leave out volunteers with 9 to 5 jobs. But if anyone in the Bay Area wants to volunteer, I'll be happy to take you up on it.

The requirements for helping with the candidate identification are probably a bit harder to find. We really need a scientific programmer with SQL database experience and a strong understanding of statistics, or a physicist/astronomer/mathematician with a strong C++ programming background and database experience. It would be difficult to accomplish much in less than 15 hours a week. Again, any volunteers, feel free contact me.

In my limited view of the current situation, i cannot see the funding problems disappearing, period. However i do strongly believe once some results start flowing back to the public (feedback is important for ANY project) from candidate analysis... people will get excited and be more eager to donate (IMO) hell you could even attach new logo's to peoples ID's indicating they are a 'Candidate Finder'. Or feedback to the BOINC client "Level 1 Candidate Finder" or some such 'badge of honor'.... depending on the quality of the signal they returnd (just an idea). Enigma.

Well, in my humble view this SETI project needs some sort of evaluation – 1) what purpose does it serve, 2) who does it serve and 3) at what (acceptable) cost.

Correct me if I’m wrong (I admit I haven’t done all my school-work before writing this…), but initially this project was about finding some kind of sign/signal that someone else is “out there”. During the years the project has run, this has (wisely so, IMHO) been expanded to include regular astronomy science, not really related to SETI as such. Also, the project is at the forefront of “distributed computing”, breaking new grounds in this area.

The project, as I see it, therefor serves (at least) 3 purposes: a) The Search for Extra-Terrestrials, b) general astronomy science and c) computer science… c) both on the software and hardware level.

Quite frankly, I’m amazed that/if a big university like the University of California doesn’t find that enough reason to keep it properly alive and funded. To me that seems like an awful lot of opportunity, both in the area of “regular” science/engineering, but also with respect to student projects… too much to let go down the drain. I wonder, frankly, how a university can allow itself to disregard something like that…. It sure doesn’t recommend itself that way, if you ask me…

Add to this the ressources donated by millions of participants on a global scale – personally I can inform you that participation roughly costs me (= donation, as I see it… as good as money...) about $ 1,000 a year – or more… I don’t count - just for the extra electricity spent on letting the machines crunch SETI WUs. But science/Astronomy has my interest, so I don’t mind. 3 FTE seems like an extremely(!) low price, considering the millions of participants worldwide and the donations in time/ressources they grant. Kinda embarrassing, I’d say?

"I'm trying to maintain a shred of dignity in this world." - Me

...

The requirements for helping with the candidate identification are probably a bit harder to find. We really need a scientific programmer with SQL database experience and a strong understanding of statistics, or a physicist/astronomer/mathematician with a strong C++ programming background and database experience. It would be difficult to accomplish much in less than 15 hours a week. Again, any volunteers, feel free contact me.

...

But I certainly hear what you are saying, and I'll add a "volunteer" link to the front page at some point in the next few days and see what response we get.

"I'm trying to maintain a shred of dignity in this world." - Me

Well, in my humble view this SETI project needs some sort of evaluation – 1) what purpose does it serve, 2) who does it serve and 3) at what (acceptable) cost.

Correct me if I’m wrong (I admit I haven’t done all my school-work before writing this…), but initially this project was about finding some kind of sign/signal that someone else is “out there”. During the years the project has run, this has (wisely so, IMHO) been expanded to include regular astronomy science, not really related to SETI as such. Also, the project is at the forefront of “distributed computing”, breaking new grounds in this area.

The project, as I see it, therefor serves (at least) 3 purposes: a) The Search for Extra-Terrestrials, b) general astronomy science and c) computer science… c) both on the software and hardware level.

Quite frankly, I’m amazed that/if a big university like the University of California doesn’t find that enough reason to keep it properly alive and funded. To me that seems like an awful lot of opportunity, both in the area of “regular” science/engineering, but also with respect to student projects… too much to let go down the drain. I wonder, frankly, how a university can allow itself to disregard something like that…. It sure doesn’t recommend itself that way, if you ask me…

Add to this the ressources donated by millions of participants on a global scale – personally I can inform you that participation roughly costs me (= donation, as I see it… as good as money...) about $ 1,000 a year – or more… I don’t count - just for the extra electricity spent on letting the machines crunch SETI WUs. But science/Astronomy has my interest, so I don’t mind. 3 FTE seems like an extremely(!) low price, considering the millions of participants worldwide and the donations in time/ressources they grant. Kinda embarrassing, I’d say?

But what happens if the result is 'NOTHING FOUND SO FAR' in those reports? Does that help? I don't know. We could have pumped tons of cpu power and could have found NOTHING!! THAT would take some propaganda to show that the Projects need to continue. I am NOT stopping, but what about those that see the reports and say 'hey wait a minute, 7 years and nothing found so far'? I am NOT saying that nothing has been found, I am saying WHAT IF? That may be some of the fear in doing the actual report.

Pappa said Boinc Synergy says we have almost 200,000 active crunchers, how many will we lose if a report comes out that is not favorable? With all my heart I HOPE the report comes out VERY FAVORABLE!!! But what if it does not, will we EVER see 200,000 again? What will happen to Boinc then? What would happen to
SETI?

Enigma, as far as I can grab from the responses of the team they got it and try to implement it. But the real problem is what to do now if they don't have the funding to keep the service up AND do the improvements fast.

I see your point, but it won't help to repeat it over and over if the guys at SAH have no proper funding. They need more donations, marketing and some press coverage (hopefully that laptop theft thing might generate some news, but even that SAH is in trouble IS worthwile news for science mags and science TV shows - which hopefully results in some revenue). Even posting here takes his share of time and they are just a few guys, so they have not the time to casre about marketing probably which results in only relying on donations.

What we can do is get them some funding by donating ourselves or getting them some press coverage and I am sure we will have our results online in no time. That honour badge is no bad idea either or a "race" who manages to make the highest donation.

"I'm trying to maintain a shred of dignity in this world." - Me

But what happens if the result is 'NOTHING FOUND SO FAR' in those reports? Does that help? I don't know. We could have pumped tons of cpu power and could have found NOTHING!! THAT would take some propaganda to show that the Projects need to continue. I am NOT stopping, but what about those that see the reports and say 'hey wait a minute, 7 years and nothing found so far'? I am NOT saying that nothing has been found, I am saying WHAT IF? That may be some of the fear in doing the actual report.

But this is a ridiculous position, it's like conducting an experiment but never looking at the results to see if the outcome was positive or negative... in fear of your critics. Why conduct it in the first place?!
Strangely enough the 2002 analaysis yielded some results already.

Pappa said Boinc Synergy says we have almost 200,000 active crunchers, how many will we lose if a report comes out that is not favorable? With all my heart I HOPE the report comes out VERY FAVORABLE!!! But what if it does not, will we EVER see 200,000 again? What will happen to Boinc then? What would happen to
SETI?

...
And I do agree with you, and always have actually, we NEED to do the analysis, because this IS a Science Project! Yes the money was gotten to prove that DC was possible, but the idea was that DC could be done for Seti.

The requirements for helping with the candidate identification are probably a bit harder to find. We really need a scientific programmer with SQL database experience and a strong understanding of statistics, or a physicist/astronomer/mathematician with a strong C++ programming background and database experience. It would be difficult to accomplish much in less than 15 hours a week. Again, any volunteers, feel free contact me.

"I'm trying to maintain a shred of dignity in this world." - Me

Eric is taking time out of a very busy schedule to come here and explain to us and answer our questions, what does that tell you about him? I'll say, we have never got so much information than since Eric took over the contact on the board.

Thank you Eric.

I'll very happily endorse that. It's what is known in management circles as a "Meet & Greet" the troops exercise, which always goes down very well.

Off the top of my head - Could Eric make a 30 second video clip, explaining the situation and asking for help, which was downloadable off the SETI web pages? That sort of hands-on personal approach could pay so much dividends???

"I'm trying to maintain a shred of dignity in this world." - Me