The first version of the NTPCkr page Matt has been working on was put up to the public. People online have been really excited about it, and there has been a lot of activity in the forum. The next phase will be to integrate the human element, making the webpage and the whole SETI@Home process even more interactive. We hope to add a feature where users can scan plots with their own eyes and point out candidates that might be interesting and distinguish them from signals that are obviously RFI.

Dan is out of the office this week, so the weekly meeting will be pretty quick and the updates will be short. Nonetheless, here is what is going on this week at the UC Berkeley Space Sciences Lab:

In the Radar blanking project that Matt has been working on, there has been yet another snag. He is working on ways of blocking out Radar and other signals that originate Earth from SETI@Home data. The problem is that when he correlates the observed Radar with the fake Radar he created, they are out of phase.

Jeff’s work is progressing on the NTPCkr project, which will pick out the most interesting candidates from the raw data for analysis. It looks for signals that are persistent in frequency and sky. We’re going to get the first data report in a few days now, within the next week or so, we hope to put out an early version of the NTPCKr public results page. We’re getting close to being out of SETI@Home data, unless we get RADAR blanking software working. We could pull up some old files from astropulse, we still have plenty of astropulse data.

There was a power outage at Arecibo this week, so SERENDIP Spectrometer was offline for 24 hours. Andrew has restarted the collection code and now the spectrometer is back up and running. Also, he reconfigured the settings so that the power failure resumption condition is to return to the pre-power loss state. So now SERENDIP 5 will automatically start up again after the power is restored. Whenever the power goes out at Arecibo, Luis sends an email to Dan, and to Dan only. We need to think of a way for him to send out notifications to the whole SETI team, so we can avoid future confusions.