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.

Currently, most of the RFI we are looking at on the NTPCkr site is more time-dependant than sky-location dependant. But it seems like it would be a good idea to look at location-based RFI (or Zone RFI), which are the certain frequencies that we know are always getting blasted. If we can identify these, we can just mark them as RFI and database them automatically.

So far there is no public scoring for candidates yet in the forums, only public commentary—which has nonetheless led to some interesting discussion online. In the future, we’d like to set up a sort of ranking system, where users can rank the candidates that they think are the most promising. But before we bother with setting this up, we need to develop that initial Zone RFI rejection round, because all that is on there right now is very obviously RFI.

So, our priorities for working on this project are to first of all develop the iterative framework, and then develop the Zone RFI rejection as the first algorithm. Jeff is going to shoot for building the framework without the algorithms before he leaves on his trip to Nepal, so that Eric can later get to work on creating the algorithms.

Matt has continued work on the Radar-Blanking project (see last week’s notes). The problem last week was that it was correlating out of phase. He cleaned up some of the math, and has been folding the bins of data on top of each other over 25 seconds intervals (or two radar periods). This makes it much clearer to see the spikes in the data where the radar is. But even with these adjustments, the correlation is still out of phase. We’ll have to set up some graphs and meet later to discuss this problem in greater detail.

Once our server mork is back online, Jeff will turn on the automatic email system that sends out an email blast to users who have not logged any SETI@Home results in a while (over a year), just to check up and see if they are still participating in the project.

Also, our annual Fall pledge drive is fast approaching, so expect to hear more about that in the near future.

Eric had been trying to another release of working Linux versions of Astropulse. They run fine from the command line, and then run fine from BOINC, but BOINC reports that the system has crashed, even though the text output says that it is still working. It seems that the de-bug code isn’t working. Maybe there is something in the BOINC finish that has changed? He’ll continue to work on this and hopefully there will be a new Linux version of Astropulse soon.

Josh is working on an Astropulse paper to submit for the proceedings from the San Juan Bioastronomy Conference, 2007. Eric and Andrew are also working together on a paper on Berkeley SETI and SETI at home to submit.

In other news, this month marks Matt’s 15-year anniversary as part of the SETI team. Chancellor Birgeneau, the Chancellor of UC Berkeley, sent him a signed (?) certificate and a nice pen in recognition. Congratulations!

That’s all for this week from the Space Sciences Lab.