Dispatch from the front!

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Morgan
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Dispatch from the front!

Post by Morgan » 03-12-2003 01:18 AM

I guess it's the front. Anyway, I assume everyone got the most recent news bulletin from SAH, but I'll post it just in case. If all of this is old stuff, why, we can all get together and ignore this thread.

This is, by the way, the first one of these I've ever gotten...

Dear Bill:

This is an exciting time for SETI@home.
On March 18-20 2003 we travel to the Arecibo radio telescope
to re-observe the most promising "candidates" produced by our search so far.
There is a chance that these new observations will yield
the first real evidence of extraterrestrial life.
Thanks for being part of this history-making effort!
According to our records, you have processed 3156 work units,
the most recent on March 12, 2003.
Your contribution of computer time to SETI@home is greatly appreciated.


Support SETI@home - Join The Planetary Society
----------------------------------------------
Without the unwavering support of The Planetary Society,
we would not be embarking on this round of re-observations.
We strongly urge all SETI@home users to join The Planetary Society
and help keep our project alive. If you join now, you'll receive a
free poster titled "Is Anybody Out There?" featuring an evocative
image of the millions of stars near the center of our galaxy. Go to:
http://planetary.org/html/member/SETIoffer.html

The Planetary Society supports several different searches for
extraterrestrial intelligence, as well as extra-solar planet research
and many other worthwhile projects. For a look at the full range of
their activities, visit http://planetary.org

Thanks also to our other major sponsors: the University of California,
Sun Microsystems, Network Appliance, Fujifilm Computer Products, and Quantum;
and to individuals around the world who have generously donated to SETI@home:
see http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/donor.html


Scientific News
---------------
With the help of participants like you, SETI@home has analyzed
about 10,000 hours of data from the Arecibo radio observatory,
producing a database of several billion events
(spikes, Gaussians, pulses, and triplets).
>From this database, we have extracted the "candidates" that,
in our judgement, have the greatest likelihood
of coming from an extraterrestrial synthetic source.
The factors in this evaluation include:
- Signal power
- Goodness of fit
- Detection several different times
- Proximity to a nearby star, especially one similar to our Sun.
Our next step is to re-observe the top candidates
by pointing a radio telescope at that location in the sky
and checking for a similar signal.
We applied for telescope time at Arecibo and were granted 24 hours,
in three 8-hour chunks on March 18-20, 2003.
If everything goes well, this will be enough time to re-observe
about 150 candidates.

The re-observations will be done using the main receiver at Arecibo,
which has a smaller beam and greater sensitivity than
the antenna we normally use.
We'll record the re-observations on magnetic tape,
both in our usual format of 2 bits per sample,
and in a higher-resolution format with 8 bits per sample.
Then we'll analyze the recorded data in three ways:

- We'll do a fast analysis using computers at Arecibo;
this will guide us in choosing candidates on which to spend more time.

- We'll analyze the 2-bit data using the current SETI@home client;
this will take place during the week or two after the Arecibo visit.

- We'll analyze the 8-bit data using a new client program
based on BOINC (see below), yielding better sensitivity.
This will take place a month or two after the Arecibo visit.

More information on the re-observation project is here:
http://planetary.org/stellarcountdown/


Project News
------------
The re-observation is just one of the things keeping us busy.
We have built a new data recorder capable of handling
the 13-channel multibeam receiver at Parkes in Australia.
This will produce data for our new "Southern SETI@home" project,
which we hope to start later this year if we can raise the necessary funds.
In addition, we are preparing a new distributed computing project,
Astropulse, that will analyze our current SETI@home data,
looking for evidence of evaporating black holes,
fast pulsars, and new types of ET signals.
See http://www.planetary.org/astropulses.html

Our upcoming distributed computing projects will use the
Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC),
which we are developing with support from the National Science Foundation.
See http://boinc.berkeley.edu.
BOINC will also be used by science research projects in other areas,
such as molecular biology and climate prediction.
BOINC lets you choose how much computer time to devote to each project.
The transition from SETI@home to BOINC will be gradual.
We'll continue to record new data at Arecibo even while BOINC ramps up;
for now you can help us most by continuing to run SETI@home.

Whether or not the re-observations find an ET signal,
SETI@home has been a tremendous success and a lot of fun.
We are very grateful for the participation and enthusiasm
of our users all over the world,
and we look forward to continuing working together
to investigate the mysteries of the universe.


Dr. David P. Anderson
Project Director, SETI@home
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu

----------------------------------------------------
If you wish to remove your name from the SETI@home email list,
please go to the URL:

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/ ... b=16121709


------------------
Morgan the Primate
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Morgan the Primate
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lrs
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Post by lrs » 03-12-2003 08:08 PM

Morgan, if you can bring yourself to go to the C2C website (for me, personally, it is a bit difficult Image), this story about narrowing it down to the top candidates is in the national press (go to "Big Stories for March 12, 2003"). Hopefully, it's worth a read.

Thanks for posting this, btw. I know I didn't get the message (but, then again, I only have 4 pathetic WUs). Yet I do wonder how many others didn't get it, either. Thanks again.

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Post by Doug » 03-12-2003 08:13 PM

I got mine about 4pm this afternoon, lrs. And 4 WU's is 4 more than one whole heck of a lot of people. There is no insignificant number in this endeavor. Image
ï'm ®ïgh‡ ߀hïÑÐ ¥Øµ!
~Doug~

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Post by lrs » 03-12-2003 09:09 PM

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by DougBupstateNY:
I got mine about 4pm this afternoon, lrs. And 4 WU's is 4 more than one whole heck of a lot of people. There is no insignificant number in this endeavor. Image</font>
Love ya, Doug. Thank you.

Please read that article though (if you can withstand the new C2C site ("coasttocoastam.com")). They laud the ideas of the "Phoenix Project", but I still think SAH has the right idea (IMHO).

Great progress, huh???!!! Imagine the day when it finally happens.

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Post by Morgan » 03-12-2003 09:40 PM

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by lrs:
Morgan, if you can bring yourself to go to the C2C website (for me, personally, it is a bit difficult Image), this story about narrowing it down to the top candidates is in the national press (go to "Big Stories for March 12, 2003"). Hopefully, it's worth a read.

Thanks for posting this, btw. I know I didn't get the message (but, then again, I only have 4 pathetic WUs). Yet I do wonder how many others didn't get it, either. Thanks again.
</font>
I think it's more a matter of signing up for newsletters than the number of WU's... but I'm off to see that story on C2C.... thanks.

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lrs
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Post by lrs » 03-13-2003 09:13 PM

Got my message on 3/13/03, 12:11 pm (civilian time!!). You guys, this thing is all over the national press now. Paul Harvey called us the "greatest supercomputer in the world".

Life on other planets. And Seti@Home found them. I know you try to be encouraging to ALL members of the team, but YOU guys did this. Be proud tonight. Be very proud. And btw, Thank You.



[This message has been edited by lrs (edited 13 March 2003).]

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Post by TABwebmaster » 03-14-2003 08:27 AM

Morgan is correct...you have to have signed up to receive the periodic e-mails that SAH sends out when you signed up for your account. You can also go into your account info and change your option if it's set to "no mail"

I look forward to hearing the outcome of the reobservations!

Cheers!
Mark Image

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Post by TABwebmaster » 03-15-2003 07:39 AM

I recorded the David Anderson interview, which was on C2C for the first hour last night, and it's available via my website, News page for anyone who missed it or wants to listen again. It's in wma format so everyone should be able to listen. I could only get it down to 9MB and it took forever to upload to the server so you're welcome in advance Image

Mark



[This message has been edited by TABwebmaster (edited 15 March 2003).]

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Post by Linnea » 03-16-2003 01:27 PM

Thanks, Mark, Morgan and Irs. I got the seti email too. I was rather surprized to hear some enthusiasm out of them. lol! A nice surprize. They - seti at home - have not been the best communicators.

On another note - a new 40 gig hard drive has now arrived for my pc. However - it will take me yet another week or so to transfer all my files to backup - so I can 'retire' my current hard drive. Maybe deleting some of them may be the better course of action.

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Post by Linnea » 03-16-2003 01:28 PM

Oh - and hi Doug!

Morgan
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Post by Morgan » 03-16-2003 05:34 PM

Click!

Don't this just beat all get-out? (I love that phrase... no idea what the hell it means, though)

Regardless of anything else SETI@Home does, the thing they have undoubtedly accomplished doesn't seem to be getting the notice it deserves. They have turned the Internet into a monster super-duper computer at very little cost. They have done a data processing thing that can't be duplicated by anything else in the world.

Howcome every knotty problem in the world ... protein folding, cures for diseases, global warming questions, cryptography... all that kind of stuff... howcome isn't being done this way? Howcome there isn't a tsunami-like wave of geeks demanding participation in this stuff?

This method might be able to even come up with a solution for Spam! Think of it!

For all of us that are part of this grand experiment, MOST internet users are still looking at screen savers that don't even do anything... they don't even save the screen!

The guys who dreamed this system up and wrote the software and stuff ought to get the Nobel Prize for something...

Whether or not it finds anything, it has done a better job of looking than anyone has ever done for anything! And they're giving US certificates of appreciation. The mind boggles, don't it?

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Morgan the Primate
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