Volunteers sought @ P.U., & Dyson

Article-University searching for alien answers - by Elizabeth Landau
(Nov. 29,'03)

http://www.nj.com/news/times/index.s...0353150420.xml

Re Dyson's "pit-lamping" idea and Princeton's OSETI Project.

An interesting snippett: "To volunteer with OSETI, e-mail
. No experience or scientific background required."

(And to think that I was looking for a house every weekend for months
near there back in the '90's. If you live near Central N.J, please
consider volunteering, I wish I could.)

Regards,Jason H.

_______________________
O.T.- Yay, I'm finally getting the rest of my network up tonight,
including this machine with thousands of SETI@home Spring '03
re-observation WU coordinates sent to me by some of you here; this
machine has been off-line since August when I had a big move to the
new house (I'd gotten the kids, business and Mom's P.C.'s networked
ages ago; boy are my priorities wacky or what? ;^) and this hard
drive is starting to make scary noises, so I'd better get back to what
I've been looking forward to for awhile.

Ciao, again, Jason H.

Jason H. wrote:
[...]
_______________________
O.T.- Yay, I'm finally getting the rest of my network up tonight,
including this machine with thousands of SETI@home Spring '03
re-observation WU coordinates sent to me by some of you here; this
machine has been off-line since August when I had a big move to the
[...]


The results for the reobservation units is mentioned in this interview
with David Anderson:
http://seti.astroseti.org/setiathome/davideng.php


1 .- Recently there was a "reobservation campaign" of the most
interesting signals at Arecibo. Have we found something interesting in
the candidate signals ?

Not so far. We recorded data at both 2 bits/sample and 8 bits/sample,
and recently finished analizing the 2-bit data. We found no signals
matching the original "candidate". The 8-bit data gives about 50% better
sensitivity; we will analize it using BOINC. Also, the reobservation was
based on the first 50% of Seti@home data- We still have to finish back
end analysis of the second half, and then we'll do another reobservation
run.



And, are you still interested in a few more reobs RAs? (Or have you more
than enough already??) I got a few more from those that were later
reprocessed further.

Regards,
Martin


--
---------- Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today.
- Martin - Teach him how to fish and he won't bother you for weeks!
- 53N 1W - - Anon
----------

Jason H. wrote:
[...]
_______________________
O.T.- Yay, I'm finally getting the rest of my network up tonight,
including this machine with thousands of SETI@home Spring '03
re-observation WU coordinates sent to me by some of you here; this
machine has been off-line since August when I had a big move to the
[...]


The results for the reobservation units is mentioned in this interview
with David Anderson:
http://seti.astroseti.org/setiathome/davideng.php


1 .- Recently there was a "reobservation campaign" of the most
interesting signals at Arecibo. Have we found something interesting in
the candidate signals ?

Not so far. We recorded data at both 2 bits/sample and 8 bits/sample,
and recently finished analizing the 2-bit data. We found no signals
matching the original "candidate". The 8-bit data gives about 50% better
sensitivity; we will analize it using BOINC. Also, the reobservation was
based on the first 50% of Seti@home data- We still have to finish back
end analysis of the second half, and then we'll do another reobservation
run.



And, are you still interested in a few more reobs RAs? (Or have you more
than enough already??) I got a few more from those that were later
reprocessed further.

Regards,
Martin


--
---------- Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today.
- Martin - Teach him how to fish and he won't bother you for weeks!
- 53N 1W - - Anon
----------

Martin wrote in message ...
Jason H. wrote:
[...]
_______________________
O.T.- Yay, I'm finally getting the rest of my network up tonight,
including this machine with thousands of SETI@home Spring '03
re-observation WU coordinates sent to me by some of you here; this
machine has been off-line since August when I had a big move to the
[...]


The results for the reobservation units is mentioned in this interview
with David Anderson:
http://seti.astroseti.org/setiathome/davideng.php


1 .- Recently there was a "reobservation campaign" of the most
interesting signals at Arecibo. Have we found something interesting in
the candidate signals ?

Not so far. We recorded data at both 2 bits/sample and 8 bits/sample,
and recently finished analizing the 2-bit data. We found no signals
matching the original "candidate". The 8-bit data gives about 50% better
sensitivity; we will analize it using BOINC. Also, the reobservation was
based on the first 50% of Seti@home data- We still have to finish back
end analysis of the second half, and then we'll do another reobservation
run.



And, are you still interested in a few more reobs RAs? (Or have you more
than enough already??) I got a few more from those that were later
reprocessed further.

Regards,
Martin

Hi Martin,

If you could hold onto those WU's indefinitely that would be
great. After reading the above and also I believe that the people who
sent me the WU's were able to automate the process of matching the
RA/DECS to catalogued objects (and I believe they were able to make
some interesting correlations, I hope they post something here about
it here, anyway...), my manual searching seems inadequate (to say the
least.) Here are links to two tables I threw together which are made
of most of the WU info sent to me (warning, one file is over 2 megs
and the other over 1 meg in size and they were created/sorted in MS
WORD):

http://www.geocities.com/exosearch/w...izedrasort.doc

http://www.geocities.com/exosearch/w...nd11rasort.doc

(the second table above I've just now thrown together and the RA/DEC's
of the last few WU's have to be corrected, but the wife's in bed and
asking me to wind it up.)

As you can see, there's alot there (and that's not all of it either,
my e-mail account overflowed from the Spam attacks last Sept. and I
haven't cleaned them out until today, and I am certain that I lost
WU's that were sent to me after Sept., they were bounced back to the
senders (they know who they are ;^) Also, I put a fix in on that
Spam-bucket account that hopefully will permanently prevent
overflows.) Also, In the first listed table I cleaned out alot of the
catalog object names I originally listed (and it was quite a few)
because it became obvious that so many uncatalogued objects are in
each field of view (for example, look at a candidate position with
Starry Night Pro, and you may not find anything (even though it has
millions of catalogued objects in its database), but when you look at
a piece of sky that is empty on Starry Night and then look at the same
piece of sky with NASA's Skyview, you find jillions of uncatalogued
stars, it becomes an exercise in futility, so I started just looking
for large-scale 'famous' objects, and so far I've only seen one
definite extra-solar planet, M-1 (the Crab Nebula) and M-33 (the
Triangulum Galaxy).

Since I've only just started looking again (after a hiatus since last
Summer), and I'm painfully slowly looking at what was sent (and I know
that many may think I'm wasting my time, but I'm just curious after so
many years to know what they were looking at), so I'm posting the
lists here in case somebody here is curious about them (and if I lose
the data, at least I'll know that somebody else had a chance to look
at it.)

Regards, Jason H.

Martin wrote in message ...
Jason H. wrote:
[...]
_______________________
O.T.- Yay, I'm finally getting the rest of my network up tonight,
including this machine with thousands of SETI@home Spring '03
re-observation WU coordinates sent to me by some of you here; this
machine has been off-line since August when I had a big move to the
[...]


The results for the reobservation units is mentioned in this interview
with David Anderson:
http://seti.astroseti.org/setiathome/davideng.php


1 .- Recently there was a "reobservation campaign" of the most
interesting signals at Arecibo. Have we found something interesting in
the candidate signals ?

Not so far. We recorded data at both 2 bits/sample and 8 bits/sample,
and recently finished analizing the 2-bit data. We found no signals
matching the original "candidate". The 8-bit data gives about 50% better
sensitivity; we will analize it using BOINC. Also, the reobservation was
based on the first 50% of Seti@home data- We still have to finish back
end analysis of the second half, and then we'll do another reobservation
run.



And, are you still interested in a few more reobs RAs? (Or have you more
than enough already??) I got a few more from those that were later
reprocessed further.

Regards,
Martin

Hi Martin,

If you could hold onto those WU's indefinitely that would be
great. After reading the above and also I believe that the people who
sent me the WU's were able to automate the process of matching the
RA/DECS to catalogued objects (and I believe they were able to make
some interesting correlations, I hope they post something here about
it here, anyway...), my manual searching seems inadequate (to say the
least.) Here are links to two tables I threw together which are made
of most of the WU info sent to me (warning, one file is over 2 megs
and the other over 1 meg in size and they were created/sorted in MS
WORD):

http://www.geocities.com/exosearch/w...izedrasort.doc

http://www.geocities.com/exosearch/w...nd11rasort.doc

(the second table above I've just now thrown together and the RA/DEC's
of the last few WU's have to be corrected, but the wife's in bed and
asking me to wind it up.)

As you can see, there's alot there (and that's not all of it either,
my e-mail account overflowed from the Spam attacks last Sept. and I
haven't cleaned them out until today, and I am certain that I lost
WU's that were sent to me after Sept., they were bounced back to the
senders (they know who they are ;^) Also, I put a fix in on that
Spam-bucket account that hopefully will permanently prevent
overflows.) Also, In the first listed table I cleaned out alot of the
catalog object names I originally listed (and it was quite a few)
because it became obvious that so many uncatalogued objects are in
each field of view (for example, look at a candidate position with
Starry Night Pro, and you may not find anything (even though it has
millions of catalogued objects in its database), but when you look at
a piece of sky that is empty on Starry Night and then look at the same
piece of sky with NASA's Skyview, you find jillions of uncatalogued
stars, it becomes an exercise in futility, so I started just looking
for large-scale 'famous' objects, and so far I've only seen one
definite extra-solar planet, M-1 (the Crab Nebula) and M-33 (the
Triangulum Galaxy).

Since I've only just started looking again (after a hiatus since last
Summer), and I'm painfully slowly looking at what was sent (and I know
that many may think I'm wasting my time, but I'm just curious after so
many years to know what they were looking at), so I'm posting the
lists here in case somebody here is curious about them (and if I lose
the data, at least I'll know that somebody else had a chance to look
at it.)

Regards, Jason H.

Aside:

Latest s@h reob-WUs notes:
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/reobs_summary.html


Jason H. wrote:
[...]
Hi Martin,

If you could hold onto those WU's indefinitely that would be
great.

The WU details are logged by SetiQueue and by SetiSpy. I'll be keeping
the logs in anycase, and I can easily recreate a ".csv" of whatever WUs
whenever.


After reading the above and also I believe that the people who
sent me the WU's were able to automate the process of matching the
RA/DECS to catalogued objects...

Automating the RA/DECS should be easy enough with a bit of scripting or
programming. This is a much better idea to compare and pre-filter the
numbers so as to let you have more time to concentrate on the
intelligent comparisons rather than going blind over thousands of raw
numbers.

There must be programming types in your astro club?


(and I believe they were able to make
some interesting correlations, I hope they post something here about
it here, anyway...), ...

Should make for an interesting thread...


http://www.geocities.com/exosearch/w...izedrasort.doc
http://www.geocities.com/exosearch/w...nd11rasort.doc

http://www.geocities.com/ seems to be dead for me at the moment. (Other
sites resolve and load ok.) I'll try again later.


(the second table above I've just now thrown together and the RA/DEC's
of the last few WU's have to be corrected, but the wife's in bed and
asking me to wind it up.)

I can sympathise on both sides (;-))



... I'm just curious after so
many years to know what they were looking at), so I'm posting the
lists here in case somebody here is curious about them (and if I lose
the data, at least I'll know that somebody else had a chance to look
at it.)

Good idea. Hopefully, someone will have the programming and time to work
through the details for some interesting snippets...


Equally curious,
Martin


--
---------- Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today.
- Martin - Teach him how to fish and he won't bother you for weeks!
- 53N 1W - - Anon
----------

Aside:

Latest s@h reob-WUs notes:
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/reobs_summary.html


Jason H. wrote:
[...]
Hi Martin,

If you could hold onto those WU's indefinitely that would be
great.

The WU details are logged by SetiQueue and by SetiSpy. I'll be keeping
the logs in anycase, and I can easily recreate a ".csv" of whatever WUs
whenever.


After reading the above and also I believe that the people who
sent me the WU's were able to automate the process of matching the
RA/DECS to catalogued objects...

Automating the RA/DECS should be easy enough with a bit of scripting or
programming. This is a much better idea to compare and pre-filter the
numbers so as to let you have more time to concentrate on the
intelligent comparisons rather than going blind over thousands of raw
numbers.

There must be programming types in your astro club?


(and I believe they were able to make
some interesting correlations, I hope they post something here about
it here, anyway...), ...

Should make for an interesting thread...


http://www.geocities.com/exosearch/w...izedrasort.doc
http://www.geocities.com/exosearch/w...nd11rasort.doc

http://www.geocities.com/ seems to be dead for me at the moment. (Other
sites resolve and load ok.) I'll try again later.


(the second table above I've just now thrown together and the RA/DEC's
of the last few WU's have to be corrected, but the wife's in bed and
asking me to wind it up.)

I can sympathise on both sides (;-))



... I'm just curious after so
many years to know what they were looking at), so I'm posting the
lists here in case somebody here is curious about them (and if I lose
the data, at least I'll know that somebody else had a chance to look
at it.)

Good idea. Hopefully, someone will have the programming and time to work
through the details for some interesting snippets...


Equally curious,
Martin


--
---------- Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today.
- Martin - Teach him how to fish and he won't bother you for weeks!
- 53N 1W - - Anon
----------

(Jason H.) wrote in message . com...
....snip...

Here are links to two tables I threw together which are made
of most of the WU info sent to me (warning, one file is over 2 megs
and the other over 1 meg in size and they were created/sorted in MS
WORD):

http://www.geocities.com/exosearch/w...izedrasort.doc

http://www.geocities.com/exosearch/w...nd11rasort.doc


Do not click on the links but cut and paste them to your browser, I
just found out that y*hoo considers it a TOS violation for posting a
link from a NG (but how do they know I posted it? anyway...) I just
tried to click to it from the google's NG reader, and I guess the
y*hoo server figured that out, but when I cut and pasted the URL to
the browser it worked.

If anybody still has problems seeing the files, let me know here and
I'll upload it to my rented server.

Regards, Jason H.

(Jason H.) wrote in message . com...
....snip...

Here are links to two tables I threw together which are made
of most of the WU info sent to me (warning, one file is over 2 megs
and the other over 1 meg in size and they were created/sorted in MS
WORD):

http://www.geocities.com/exosearch/w...izedrasort.doc

http://www.geocities.com/exosearch/w...nd11rasort.doc


Do not click on the links but cut and paste them to your browser, I
just found out that y*hoo considers it a TOS violation for posting a
link from a NG (but how do they know I posted it? anyway...) I just
tried to click to it from the google's NG reader, and I guess the
y*hoo server figured that out, but when I cut and pasted the URL to
the browser it worked.

If anybody still has problems seeing the files, let me know here and
I'll upload it to my rented server.

Regards, Jason H.

Martin wrote in message ...
Aside:

Latest s@h reob-WUs notes:
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/reobs_summary.html

....snip...

I noticed in that article, re the 'Current Status of the March 2003
SETI@home Candidate Reobservations', at the above link says

'...So now the procedure is this: For each of these points in the sky
we scan these verified results to see if we found similar signals
during these observations (or in the case of the non-SETI@home
candidates, seeing if we found any signals at all).'

This seems like a rather strict filtering rule for the SETI@home
candidates. What exactly are they saying here? Are they saying that
only signals with similar characteristics are worthy? The un-said
thing here seems to be that they indeed have signals at this
locations, but they are dis-similar to the originals. How are they
dis-similar, by power, doppler shift, periodicity? Is it that the RFI
situation is such a horrible mess of data overload that radio SETI is
hopeless? What are the rejection criteria? Are they throwing the
baby out with the bath water? Could this be a critical flaw in this
experiment? (and that's easy for me to say on this end, totally
removed from the daunting task.) I can't help but get the irksome
feeling that ET's signal is already in the can, but the editors are so
overwhelmed with data/noise and building BOINC that they might miss
it. But what the hell, they've done a great job so far, and what
other choice do we have? I hope that before they die or our
civilization collapses, that they let qualified others (obviously not
me) take a peek at the best candidate data.

'...At the time of writing we are waiting for these database queries
to finish. Once complete, we are going to rescore the candidates. For
most of these candidates, the lack of matching signals during
reobservations will cause their score to go down...

It would be interesting to know (and have it deciphered/translated to
me :^) what the form of the 'database queries' was (i.e. what
questions were asked of the data.) Did they ask all the possible
questions? (unlikely) Are there other ways of mining the data that
could ferret out something interesting? (maybe) Also, does this mean
that most of the best candidate signals are doomed to dissappear into
mediocrity with the thousands of other interesting 'candidate'
signals, never to be followed-up on? Can't they post the locations
for others to take a gander at the best of the best? (what's the risk
of posting them?) Also, there are many possible reasons for signal
intermittency, which we've discussed before; why does the candidate
location have to be lit up EVERY SINGLE TIME we look at it? And aside
from the physical reasons why there might be a pause in transmission
(like planet or star obscuration, dust disk obscuration etc.) we
(alledgedly intelligent) humans pause for breaks in every medium of
communication, and if a civilization were trying to communicate with
the entire galaxy, could it sustain the un-imaginable power
requirements of an 'always-on' transmission to billions of stars
without toasting the neighborhood and bankrupting the transmitters?
Certainly there could be a periodicity that isn't on the order of
seconds (or fractions of seconds.)

'...However, a few scores should go up. This does not mean we found
E.T.! Random noise will ring the bell a few times, as will radio
frequency interference coming from our own planet.

We will present these new scores once we have them, and then inspect
the candidates with increased scores with much more scrutiny, trying
our best to find reasons why they are not interesting. If any continue
to raise eyebrows, we will publish all our data and ask other SETI
projects to see if they find anything there as well..."

Too bad there is a conditional 'if' for publishing all their data?
That would be a very interesting read even without raised eyebrows.
But thanks again to Berkeley, aside from all the Earth-side benefits
(the revolution in distributed computing, proving that quasi-free
cooperative computation is possible for so many fields of Science) and
the possible Astronomical discoveries to come (pulsars, black hole
evaporation, hydrogen maps etc.) we may just be moments away from
knowing the answer to the greatest question of all time.

Regards, Jason H.