At some point in the last few weeks, you may have received the SETI@Home yearly donation letter. The mailing process for the donation letter wrapped up this week. We’ve raised about $35,000 this month, and the number is still growing. This on top of the about $30,000 that came in a couple of months ago to support the purchase of the new servers, and we’ve reached about the same donation level as last year. Thanks to all of you who donated, your support is much appreciated!

On the server side of life:

As you all have probably noticed, the project is back online after the long server migration outage! The new server is up and running smoothly, so smoothly that the RFI and the NITPCKr programs are running all the time now. While this week we’re still going to have our usual three-day outage [Tuesday-Thursday], we might begin to transition to a process where stop having weekly outages (that is, if the hardware can handle it).

Now that the server migration is complete we can look forward to our next major progress: Crowd-sourcing visual RFI rejection. We’ve been working on and talking about this for quite some time now, but the basic idea is that SETI@Home volunteer will be able to look at potential candidates and help decide whether or not a signal is RFI.

Dan and Eric looked at the prototype waterfall plots that Matt and Jeff have made for this project, and they’ve deduced that the plots are clean enough to send out to the public. The plots in general display pretty strong events that are easy to see. What volunteers will be looking for is potential RFI around these candidates. This can actually help us determine if the signal itself is RFI. Often, if the signal isn’t known to be RFI, but if there’s RFI around it then it is very likely that the signal itself is also RFI.

This raises the question of how should the ranking of the plots be done be done. Our first thought was to allow users to classify plots into RFI and non-RFI through a simple yes or no button. Dave brought up the point that if we have people look at the plots over and over again and simply click ‘yes’ or ‘no’, they might begin to get bored. Rather, we should work towards creating more interesting tasks that ‘give people more knobs to turn’ than just a yes or no button. As it is now, people viewing the plots can zoom around and categorize them with a yes or no. The general consensus seems to be that a couple of options would be better: for example, maybe four buttons: ‘Definitely RFI,' ‘Possibly RFI,' ‘Maybe not RFI’ and ‘Definitely not RFI.’

The next thing we need then is for some database work to be done, as well as develop also the training and example cases to teach at home volunteers to correctly identify RFI. We are envisioning simple active training packages, which shows examples of waterfall plots to volunteers and then give them a little quiz at the end to assure that they can correctly identify RFI before setting them loose on some real plots. Not to mention that we need to get the code to be supported by more browsers than just Firefox. But the project is coming along!

That’s all for today, thanks for tuning in!