Where is THIS Seti's science ?

There are links somewhere to the broadcasts made 3 years ago for the 10th Anniversary, there was loads of info there if I recall. Also we are still waiting for Nitpicker to do the second sifts.

I think that at present it is a fair comment, that the Lab staff do spend rather more time in admining servers than they would like to do. Because of that, there is a consideration being given to re-locating the servers elsewhere upon campus, that would release them from a lot of that work. Relocation

In terms of Nitpicker, I also share your disappointment that this initiative appears to not have borne any fruit so far, but there must be good reasons for it. As for Professors, I don't believe there are any Seti staff at that academic level. The Space Sciences Lab (SSL) has Professors at Director and Associate Director level. Seti@Home Director Dr. David Anderson is a PhD, as is Dr. Eric Korpela, and Project Scientist Dan Werthimer is a visiting Professor. Dan

This link gives a wealth of information about Seti and the people behind it. Seti background and incldes the videos I was talking about previously.

Keep the faith my friend, I have for over 12 years, I'm sure you can as well :-)

Yes and we have had a couple interesting signals found. But without being able to control where our data comes from (as in coordinates in the sky), and without the help of the "Nitpicker", we will just have to wait to see repeat signals...

And wait is what we do.
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-Dave #2


3.2.0-33

There are quite a few PhDs involved with the project; I think that their other academic responsibilities take up most of their time. It's true that the NTPCKR system hasn't been used as much as it should have been... hardly. I think that this is because it is integrated with the upload/download servers that are badly in need of an upgrade, however if I remember correctly GPUUG contributed a NTPCKR server and it's usually inactive. There's a GPUUG fundraiser to get a new upload/download/NTPCKR server which will (we hope) run all the time. But it's going to need $20K and only about 3% of this has been raised.

The problem always has been, and continues to be, that SETI is poorly funded worldwide and this project runs on a shoestring budget, which leaves it vulnerable to outages and means there isn't enough processing of the results. Remember the WOW signal that everyone still makes a fuss over and even celebrates the anniversary of? This was a one-off, with no audio, never confirmed by any other location or by re-observation. In other words, I'd bet there are a hundred, if not a thousand signals somewhere in billion-plus SETI@Home results database that far exceed the WOW signal.

I just dropped two grand on a new cruncher to be starting up soon (I hope) but my investment is only minor compared to that of others. For example, msattler has probably twenty grand worth of computers and pays a few hundred a month in electricity bills. It would be beyond a shame if this was all going to waste. Considering the importance that it would have to all of humanity and the future of our species if a confirmed extraterrestrial intelligence was discovered, it's even more of a shame that SETI programs have everywhere been blocked, marginalized, defunded and deprioritized.

So, I will have to make up for this however I can. This project isn't perfect or optimal, but it's the best we have right now, so I keep at it.
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“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.”
--- Margaret Mead

It seems to me that a number of people are willing to drop quite abit of money on high performance hardware for the purpose of crunching more work units, but, if the objective is scientific results, a better use of funds would be contributing to the project for upgraded hardware. I assume part of the reason for investing in your own hardware rather than contributing towards upgrading the project's hardware is that: 1) you'll own the hardware 2) the pursuit of work credits.

Yes and we have had a couple interesting signals found. But without being able to control where our data comes from (as in coordinates in the sky), and without the help of the "Nitpicker", we will just have to wait to see repeat signals...

And wait is what we do.

From the beginning the PhD's involved with this project apparently haven't generated any scientific or statistical papers for seti@home...

Andrew Siemion and several other members of the SETI@home team have recently published a paper on SETI observations of the Kepler field, which is discussed here.
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... I don't see any scientific papers specifically on statistical analysis of the mountains of data they've raked in from seti@home users.

• Use of the collected Arecibo data to map hydrogen throughout our galaxy and so build a detailed map of our galaxy itself;
  
  
• The development of one now significant branch of distributed computing;
  
  
• The development of building a community to support distributed computing;
  
  
• And from that, all the spin-off projects utilising Boinc;
  
  
• How to usefully use ultra-low-cost massive distributed computing.
  

We're also amassing results awaiting processing whenever a grant or sponsorship can be gained to fund someone to look through all the results and aim the next targeted search.


Welcome to the experiment, you are part of all that!

Happy crunchin',
Martin


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Glad to be part of that experiment:)
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+1