SETI & Crunching news

The SETI@home back end is getting closer to completion.

• Our algorithms for removing RFI and finding repeated signals work fairly well.
  
• We can inject "birdies" (synthetic signals) to measure how well they're working.
  
• We've developed tools for browsing, drilling down, and visualizing signals and candidates.
  

At this point we need to manually scan lots of results, looking for cases where our algorithms don't seem to be working perfectly. If you like, you can help us with this.

At Berkeley SETI Research Center, we've long been friends and collaborators with Professor Michael Garrett and the team at Jodrell Bank. We're delighted to continue our collaboration as the Breakthrough Initiatives announce a formal partnership with Jodrell in the search for intelligent life beyond Earth: https://breakthroughinitiatives.org/News/11

Although this partnership doesn't involve data from telescopes at Jodrell flowing to SETI@home (at least at the present time), the sharing of data, algorithms, and strategies will benefit the science programs at Berkeley and Jodrell, as well as at other telescopes involved in Breakthrough Listen and in SETI in general. You can seen an interview with Mike, recorded a few weeks back, at https://youtu.be/ZRMiuCFACCw, and take a 3D tour of the Lovell telescope and control room at Jodrell at https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=B8UZb1joxsG.

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Engadget has published an article on SETI which includes discussion of Breakthrough Listen and SETI@home.

The Atlantic has published a new article entitled A Brief History of SETI@home featuring interviews of Dan Werthimer, David Anderson, and Eric Korpela.

Berkeley SETI's Steve Croft is joining other SETI and exoplanet researchers on Deep Astronomy right now (4 pm PDT, 2300 UTC). If you join live you can ask questions of these scientists.

Once again I need to explain our policies on free speech, as I've been getting lots of nastygrams both here and on twitter and facebook.

First, let me explain our relationship to the UC Berkeley administration. Despite the fact that I met with the Chancellor once for about 15 seconds, the UC administration neither knows nor cares that SETI@home exists. Threats of quitting SETI@home or withholding donations will be about as effective as kicking a stray dog because you don't like something the dog catcher did. They won't notice. They don't care. They get no direct benefit from SETI@home, so here will be no effect on them, or the on University. We could shut off our servers tomorrow, and nobody in Sproul Hall would notice a thing.

So here are our project commandments on free speech.

0. Thine speech is free as in freedom, not free as in beer.
1. Thou mayst speak thine mind.
2. Thou shalt do so in the appropriate forum.
3. Thou shalt recognize that speech has consequences to thine self and to others, some legal, some financial, some painful.
4. Thou shalt not force others to pay for the delivery of or the consequences of speech they may not agree with.
5. On public SETI@home forums, thou shalt use language a parent would not mind their 12 year old hearing.
6. Failure to obey the forum rules will result in moderator action. If thou dost not understand, see thou commandment 4.

In other words, if you want to be heard on the current controversy, try the Politics forum. Then use twitter, facebook, instagram and whatever social media you want. SETI@home in general and me in particular have no power to effect change of any sort.

It sounds like there's still going to be a riot in Berkeley tomorrow because a group of white supremacists and a group of left wing anarchists are ignoring commandments 2, 3, and 4. The people of Berkeley and the people of California will be picking up the tab for their "freedom of speech" whether they want to or not. And personally, I think that's what's been missing from the whole discussion.

Thanks for helping us analyze Breakthrough Listen data from the Green Bank Telescope! Berkeley SETI engineer Dave MacMahon takes us behind the scenes into the server room at Green Bank where the Listen instrument lives, and we also interview Green Bank director Karen O'Neil about keeping computers cool in our latest video: https://youtu.be/-gQocykdo1Y

Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram @BerkeleySETI

And with some incredible luck we didn't lose any entries in the pulse signal table at all.

Whew!

We've found some corruption in a part of our science database that holds the power vs time profiles of detected pulses. We're running some table checks to see if we can localize the problem and come up with a solution that minimizes the lost workunits that need to be redone.

We're moving closer to completing the analysis of our 18 years of Arecibo data. Recent work has given us a good handle on RFI removal. See the Nebula blog for details.