[PorscheBunny]

…and I noticed that Nordlichter, JRAD@Clubic.com, and bladawce got spanked pretty hard, down 96k, 144k, and *577k* respectively. Additionally Nordlichter is down about 1000 WU/d and bladawce is down from 3500 WU/d to less than 100 and completely out of the Top 200!

LittleWhiteDog (remember them?) had one person caught in the scandal, to the tune of about 420k WUs. SETI Team Germany lost almost 500k.

I wonder if teams will start interrogating those cranking more than 100 or so WU/d to see if they're cheating?

[reader50]

Some teams claim to have tried. One problem is a lot of members on any team never post to the forum - when the team has a forum.

Another hitch is the emails. If you cannot reach a suspicious member any other way, the team's founder can reach the member emails. But the team founder has to still be around and still have either the pass, or the original email box. We lost track of our own founder/pass for a couple of years.

Finally, there is little that a team can do about a problem member except bring it to Berkeley's attention. The team founder can kick people off a team, but only if they have been inactive (no results returned during the last two weeks). A heavy cheater would be hard to nab that way, and nothing would stop them from rejoining immediately.

Berkeley has a more effective answer. Bad accounts have a way of being zeroed out, or deleted entirely.

Be a little careful about judging teams that move around oddly in the ranks. Most are doubtless cheaters getting caught, but Berkeley has often had a stats glitch or two. There are days when the Club or All teams list is "missing" (no teams listed), or when a team gets listed twice (MacAddict seems prone to this). Also, some teams do not read right on some days. I have yet to track down the stats URL for the LEVIS team, the translated URL to reach a dynamic page yields a "no such team" error. Most such stats errors go away within a week at max, but they complicate our stats code with error traps.

If a team stays down at least a week, some cheaters probably got stomped. Good riddance.

[proux]

We still don't look very good in those stats. The % of active people is quite dramatic. If only there was an altivec version people would come back to
seti.

[Microns]

Originally posted by proux:
We still don't look very good in those stats. The % of active people is quite dramatic. If only there was an altivec version people would come back to
seti.

I read some things suggesting that the new BOINC update will be open to enhancements like altivec.

[proux]

That means nothing before another 2 years then

[Microns]

Originally posted by proux:
That means nothing before another 2 years then

Hmmm...

Check out this link at Berkeley.

The first project to use BOINC is AstroPulse which is beta now and scheduled to be public in Feb 03.

Just 3 months from now!

[Shaktai]

BOINC and Astro Pulse will revitalize SETI. One of the advantages will be that it will do more than just search for ET. It will also provide valuable scientific knowledge by also searching for Pulsars and collapsing black holes. This alone may hold the interest of people who aren't interested in SETI per say, but do want to contribute to science, and for those who are "on the fence" may be enought to bring them into SETI. More importantly it will reanalyze the previous data in new ways that may reveal more information or find different types of signals, and if they are successful in getting sufficient funding for the Southern Hemisphere search, well that will open up a whole new frontier of possibilities.

BOINC and Astro Pulse will probably bring me back into the SETI project. I am a member of the Planetary Society to support all of their projects including SETI@home. SETI@home is far from dead, but it needs funding and to be able to move to the next level of exploration. BOINC is a step in the right direction.