Use those processors!

Since a few weeks, my computer isn’t idling anymore whenever I am idling. (This in itself is bad – it encourages me to just sit back and do nothing). Instead, it is putting its Core Duo whatever gigahertz processor and 3 GB of RAM to good use via the computing grid projects of

BOINC

Without going into details, it means that whenever I do nothing for a bit, the computer either does Malaria research, does a search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, or runs a climate prediction.

BOINC - find those alien signals! SETI@home

The weather forecast, but different - Climate prediction

So I can feel all smug about myself whenever ET calls, malaria is eradicated off the face of the Earth, or when the Earth heats up a few degrees – with all these computers running BOINC, using electricity, emitting CO₂ surely global warming becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy ?!

I promise this is the last technical post for a few more days. I do not intend to alienate readers who aren’t versed with technical stuff and computers — in which case I’d be curious as to how you access this blog.

In what I think is one of the first firings related to installation of SETI@home, a system administrator was forced to resign for running SETI@home processes on around 5000 computers of the school district.

Brad Niesluchowski has resigned from the Higley Unified School District in Gilbert after allegedly downloading software that seeks out alien life forms.

“We support educational research and certainly would have supported cancer research,” said Higley superintendent Denise Birdwell. “However, as an educational institution we do not support the search for E.T.”

Birdwell held a news conference Monday, where she stated that the former technology supervisor downloaded a University of California Berkeley program known as SETI@home onto more than 5000 district computers.

The program seeks out people around the world to volunteer their home computers to scan data in the search for extra terrestrial intelligence.

Birdwell said the massive software slowed down educational programs in every classroom and cost the district more than $1 million in added utility fees and computer replacement parts. Apparently, the alien-seeking software had been running since Niesluchowski was hired nearly 10 years ago.

“Basically our processors were hooked up and running 24 hours a day, 12 months a year, every day of the school year,” Birdwell said.

For readers without a technical background, SETI stands for Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, a massive project that performs computations on signals received from space. Since these computations are humongous, they are sent as small packets of calculations to users who install the SETI@home software. This is done automatically when the computer is idle, usually at night or when the user isn’t using his computer. So there is certain merit when the authorities said that the processors were being extensively used.

There is a huge community of users who actively let the software run on all the PCs they have access to. An added turn on is the ranking of users based on how many packets have been processed by their PCs.

But that’s not why I was amused by the news.

A former coworker of mine was a SETI@home fanatic. He was infamous for having installed the software on all machines of his department at the University of Pune. When at the company, he had quite sneakily installed it on all machines. We mostly had Linux-gurus who would promptly kill the process as soon as they sighted it. Some novices like yours truly weren’t aware of it, and unknowingly contributed to his world-wide rankings, which was in the top 50 those days.

But once we knew about the process, we decided to shoot-at-sight. He followed it up with assurances that it would run only at night after we left, so some of us allowed him to install it again. The night thing never really happened — it was just a way to con us noobs.

So a cat-and-mouse game started and continued for long — with him trying to install the process, and we trying to kill it whenever we spotted it on any PC. Months later, the company cracked down on SETI@home and the war was finally over.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Life (SETI) was originally launched in 1999 by David Gedye. With the advancement of communication technologies and social media, the SETI@home project has become a prime example of Crowdsourcing.

Find out what the SETI@home project is all about by clicking here.

Connect with the SETI@home project via Facebook by clicking here.

Follow the SETI@home project on Twitter by clicking here.

Colaboração conjunta na internet atinge novos níveis estruturais

Por Natally Gama

Um projeto desenvolvido pelo pesquisador científico David P. Anderson, juntamente com seus colegas da Universidade da Berkeley, tem permitido há alguns anos usuários da internet de todo o mundo de contribuírem com pesquisas científicas sem mover um dedo sequer.

O responsável por promover este ineditismo é o programa BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastucture For Network Computing) que consiste em aproveitar a capacidade de processamento de computadores conectados à internet, quando estes não estão sendo utilizados, para a análise de projetos científicos sem fins lucrativos. A plataforma é de uso gratuito e pode ser instalada em qualquer sistema operacional.

Em relação aos projetos que utilizam o BOINC, seus segmentos são dos mais variados. Atualmente existem  o Climateprediction.net, que visa produzir modelos climáticos para o nosso século, até iniciativas de cunho mais sensível e humano como o World Community Grid, que estuda avanços na área de combate ao câncer e a AIDS.  Mas, até o momento a criação de maior particpação por parte dos internautas  é o SETI@HOME.

O SETI – que em inglês significa Busca por Inteligência Extra-Terrestre – foi também fundado por David Anderson e tem desde 1999 analisado frequências de rádio captadas por radiotelescópios, na tentativa de encontrar algum sinal de comunicação viável de algum ser vivo do espaço. Para que isso se torne possível, cidadãos comuns se voluntariam para participar do programa e recebem um pequeno pacote de dados da instituição pelo computador, que também os analisa por meio do processador.

Independente da origem, deve-se considerar positiva qualquer influência de cooperativismo virtual que incentive a integração dos mais diferentes tipos de pessoas em prol de uma causa comum e benéfica às demais.

]]> http://needq.wordpress.com/2009/10/24/taskresult/ Fri, 23 Oct 2009 16:44:29 +0000 needq http://needq.wordpress.com/2009/10/24/taskresult/ http://needq.wordpress.com/2009/10/24/double_mb/ Fri, 23 Oct 2009 15:38:18 +0000 needq http://needq.wordpress.com/2009/10/24/double_mb/ http://socialpsychologyeye.wordpress.com/2009/10/12/quis-custodiet-ipsos-custodes/ Mon, 12 Oct 2009 00:00:28 +0000 kilodeltamike http://socialpsychologyeye.wordpress.com/2009/10/12/quis-custodiet-ipsos-custodes/

Neatly combining the topics of a number of my previous posts, namely the surveillance society, computer games, and Foucault, a new Internet ‘game’ is about to be launched that enables members of the public to win cash prizes by spotting criminals in ‘real-life’ video surveillance footage.

Although the United Kingdom has one of the highest proportion of video surveillance cameras in the world, the sheer amount of footage generated currently means that any criminals filmed are unlikely to be observed by any human camera operator, thereby escaping detection.

As described in Foucault’s book ‘Discipline and Punish’, this new scheme mirrors the design of Bentham’s ‘Panopticon’, a proposed prison in which inmates are potentially under constant observation, yet are unaware whether they are actually being observed at any particular moment. Consequently, those under surveillance must behave as if their every action is observed, thereby subjecting themselves to discipline instead of having it forced upon them, and so becoming the instruments of their own control.

The widespread connectivity provided by the Internet similarly enables numerous members of the public to co-operate in tackling somewhat more altruistic large-scale projects, exemplified by the collaboratively produced encyclopedia Wikipedia. Likewise, the open-source software movement is able to work together to develop free alternatives to commercial products, despite being geographically distributed. These include operating systems, office productivity suites, web-browsers, and for those of you currently involved in academic writing, reference managers.

This use of human ‘distributed processing’ mirrors the design of super-computers, in which a large number of relatively low-powered processors concurrently tackle small sub-parts of a much larger and more complex task. Once again, the Internet can be key in facilitating the necessary interconnections, as illustrated by the SETI@home project, where members of the public donate the spare computing power of their home PC to help the search for extra-terrestrial life.

Story from the Daily Mail

Sunar, D. (2009). Suggestions for a New Integration in the Psychology of Morality

…kinda!

So if you have got a computer just sitting around doing nothing you should have it join my SETI@home team and get searching  for Extraterrestrial Intelligence! Hahahaha, I know that sounds insane, but that is really what we are doing in my computer architecture class! It’s a test to see which group in the class can get the most people running the program.  When you run the program you do ‘projects’ every completed project earns my team more points. Whichever team gets the most points….wins! So yeah, I like winning and stuff….:D

Here’s how you join:

1. Go to http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/

2. Click on ‘your account’ then ‘create account’

3. Create an account!

4. Once you have your account search for a team call ‘Fontaine Futuristics’ and join it. (You may have to refresh the page until the ‘join team’ option shows up…)

5.  Once you have your account and have joined the team download and install BOINC

6. Now umm…I can’t rememeber, LOL! I think you go to New Project to start a project.  (Make sure you attach your account and team to the project, there will be prompts helping you thru this part)

7. Now just run BOINC whenever you are not on your computer! That’s it! YAY!

SETI@home runs the same as FOLDING@home, just instead of folding proteins it is searching for  Extraterrestrial Intelligence! It uses your computers’ processor…yadda yadda yadda.

Hmmm, I need some sort of incentive to make you join and run the program. I’ll think of something…

Completely off-topic (but hey, this is my blog!): today I celebrate my tenth anniversary as a participant of Seti@home. In case you’ve never heard of it: in this scientific program, about five million desktop computers around the world – like the one you are using right now – are connected to analyze data from radio telescopes searching for signals of extraterrestrial intelligence.

If you want to participate, you must download the basic software, BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing), and once you’ve installed that, you can chose the program you want to support. For me, that’s Seti@home, because I like the idea to make contact with an alien civilization, and ClimatePrediction, for obvious reasons. Every time I switch on my computer, these programs start themselves up, and there’s nothing I have to do. It’s so simple – and yet, I am contributing to science.

So, if you want to be the first human to make contact with E.T.: go here and download the software.

If you own a Mac, you need Snow Leopard.

If you’re out of the loop and don’t pray five times a day toward Macca, Snow Leopard is the newest version of the Mac OS. (It only costs $25, so we’re not talking a major investment here.)

Because it’s been covered to death elsewhere, I’ll offer only a few general feelings and a couple of warnings.

The installation could not be easier. Insert DVD. Click “Install.” Wait. Done. (I recalibrated my external display upon completion, though this is mostly habit, and possibly the sign of a deranged mind. [It can be found at: System Preferences / Display / Color / Calibrate])

Prior to installation, I had 81.73GB free on my hard drive. After installation, I had an astonishing 96.33GB free. This is because Snow Leopard strips away vast swaths of legacy code. I’ve been installing operating systems both mainstream and obscure for twenty years; this is the first time I’ve seen one narrow the footprint. It’s a remarkable achievement that should be trumpeted at every opportunity.

The operating system itself runs faster. The experience echoes the first time I used the iPhone. It flows and ripples and springs and sparks. It’s very impressive.

Expose is fixed! (I have it hot-cornered to the top right of my screen.) Unlike before, where Expose displayed all open programs but only sporadically accepted a selected window, it now works 100% of the time. That’s worth $25 right there.

The dock is more organized, now offering scrollable stacks to reduce clutter, and additional features upon right-click.

Safari now blazes–even the “Top Sites” screen. Stupidly, they continue to ignore the mousewheel-click auto-scroll feature present in every single Microsoft Windows application and most good Mac programs. As a result, I remain devoted to Firefox. Sadly, Firefox appears to have taken a performance hit. I cannot qualify this with hard data, but I’m telling you: it’s less snappy.

Finder is way, way faster.

All of my critical programs work well, to include:

• Microsoft Office 2008
• Adobe Photoshop CS3 (Power users report minor issues, but I’ve yet to run across a problem.)
• Picasa
• Transmission
• Burn
• Toast Titanium
• Evernote
• MacTheRipper
• Espresso (Note: everything offered by this year’s MacHeist seems to work without issue.)
• Google Notifier
• Dropbox
• Jing

That’s the good.

The bad:

My printer is currently unsupported. I use a dirt-cheap HP LaserJet P1006 connected via my Time Capsule. HP is supposedly working on a fix. Wide printer support isn’t so much a feature as a categorical imperative. I cannot for the life of me figure out how Apple could make such a stupid, arrogant mistake. The P1006 isn’t even a sophisticated printer! Lesson learned: before upgrading, verify that your printer is supported.

Some of my minor software does not work, to include:

• iStat (Update in the works.) Update: Fixed with 2.0.
  
• Cyberduck (Update expected any minute now.) Update: Working beta now available.
• Flip4Mac (The current beta DOES work.)
• Growl (Technically it works, except for the System Preferences element. But this is a pass/fail test. Growl fails.) Update: Working beta now available.
• Disc Inventory X (Requires Rosetta, which I’m not willing to do.)
• Xscreensaver (Jamie Zawinski, Xscreensaver’s programmer, vents his fury at Apple in this thread.) Update: Fixed.
  
• Boinc / SETI@home (Again, this is a screen saver issue, though the administrators are acting willfully clueless. In every discussion forum I’ve visited, the powers that be seem to stick their heads in the sand and say “Everything is working fine!” I’m here to tell you it does NOT work.) Update: Fixed with beta release.
  

Aside from the Boinc team’s general obstinate stupidity, I expect all of these software issues to be resolved in the coming days. In the mean time, here is a beautifully comprehensive Snow Leopard compatibility list that will assuage your deepest concerns. Don’t be dissuaded, though. Snow Leopard is well worth the upgrade, and a tremendous value by every conceivable measure. It can be purchased here.

Kenya: des traducteurs improvisés gagnent des minutes gratuites pour leur téléphone portable

(Agence Science-Presse)

Vous connaissez le travail «collaboratif», où les intelligences de millions de personnes sont réunies grâce aux nouveaux outils d’Internet? Voilà qu’il atteint de nouveaux sommets… au Kenya. Des milliers de personnes, dans les campagnes, augmentent ainsi leurs revenus, grâce à leur téléphone cellulaire.

Collaboration de masse à l’ère Internet

Scène étrange. Un gardien de bétail de Kisumu, au Kenya, répond à son téléphone. Après avoir écouté le message, il répète la phrase, mais dans son dialecte, le massaï. Puis, il écoute une autre phrase, et le «travail» se poursuit ainsi pendant une trentaine de minutes. À la fin, il a gagné assez d’argent pour payer une semaine d’utilisation de son téléphone.

Son employeur, situé dans la capitale, s’appelle txteagle. Il permet à des personnes comme lui de gagner du temps d’utilisation de cellulaire en effectuant de telles tâches — traduction ou transcription, en utilisant leurs téléphones.

Le principe n’étonne plus quand on en entend parler en Amérique du Nord et en Europe: la collaboration de masse, qui relie par Internet des milliers de personnes, chacune effectuant une minuscule portion du travail d’ensemble. Mais il étonne un peu plus quand on voit combien il a été facile de l’implanter dans des portions du globe qui ont plus difficilement accès à Internet.

Des contributeurs irremplaçables

Seti@Home, ce logiciel qui, installé sur des millions d’ordinateurs personnels, analyse des montagnes de données, était le pionnier de cette forme de collaboration de masse. Mais il y a des choses que les ordinateurs ne peuvent pas faire à la place des humains, et la traduction est l’une d’elles.

Le New Scientist donne en exemple le cas de la compagnie Nokia, qui veut créer des interfaces pour ces téléphones dans la soixantaine de langues parlées au Kenya, mais ne dispose pas des connaissances linguistiques nécessaires. D’où txteagle: les contributeurs, comme ce gardien de bétail massaï, reçoivent des messages textes en anglais, et les traduisent. Le même mot est envoyé à plusieurs collaborateurs, et si suffisamment d’entre eux renvoient la même réponse, «celle-ci est acceptée par le système», explique Nathan Eagle, le fondateur de txteagle, et chercheur en téléphonie mobile au Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Troc version 2009

Sont également en développement: des applications de reconnaissance vocale, qui permettraient au logiciel de distinguer les différents accents d’un dialecte (on demande à différents utilisateurs d’écouter une phrase, puis de la répéter, ce qui fournit au logiciel différentes prononciations).

Même le paiement était un défi au Kenya, où l’infrastructure bancaire est couci-couça. D’où ce concept, créé en 2008 par la compagnie kenyane de téléphonie mobile Safaricom, qui permet de donner du temps d’utilisation au lieu d’argent, et qui pourrait s’étendre à d’autres pays.

PUBLICITÉ

Après la pluie… Le beau temps. Recueil de textes à méditer. Chaque texte révèle un message, une émotion. Un même texte peut prendre un couleur différente selon notre état d’âme.

Le livre, au coût de 9,95$ est disponible

Par téléphone: (514) 256-9000, en région: 1-877-256-9009
Par Internet: www.refletdesociete.com
Par la poste: Reflet de Société 4233 Ste-Catherine Est Montréal, Qc. H1V 1X4

Mnozí jistě už slyšeli o projektu SETI@home, který má za cíl využít potenciál osobních počítačů zapojených do sítě pro hledání mimozemských civilizací. Celá věc spočívá v jednoduchém nápadu, totiž že v době, kdy je PC méně zatíženo, může se místo lelkování zabývat něčím užitečným.  Projektů využívajících volný výkon osobních počítačů je však víc. A najde se i projekt, který využívá volný výkon lidských mozků!

Systém BOINC

Když si stáhnete aplikaci SETI@home, tak při spuštění spořiče obrazovky vaše PC stáhne ze serveru balík dat a začne v něm vyhledávat pravidelnosti, které mohou svědčit pro modulaci signálu nějakou rozumnou civilizací. Každé PC sice odvádí jen trošku práce, v souhrnu to ale může vydat za obrovský výkon. Záleží jen na tom, kolik počítačů se podaří zapojit.

Projekt SETI@home byl u nás před pár lety populární, dnes mám pocit, že se na něj trochu zapomíná.

Projekt SETI@home funguje díky systému distribuovaných výpočtů BOINC, který provozuje univerzita v Bekeley. Není to ale zdaleka jediný projekt, který se snaží využít nadbytečnou výpočetní kapacitu počítačů zapojených do sítě. Dnes si můžete v rámci systému BOINC vybrat z několika dalších projektů a své PC a jeho výkon dát do služeb nejrůznějších cílů. V současnosti je registrováno 50 projektů, z nichž u osmadvaceti univerzita v Berkeley garantuje, že se skutečně zabývají tím, co deklarují.

Schéma práce systému BOINC. core client komunikuje prostřednictvím sítě se serverem, který posílá data a stará se o rozdělování úkolů. Klient pak si předává data s aplikací, která provádí výpočty. Kromě toho může spouštět spořič obrazovky. Segment GUI je grafické prostředí, v němž je možné nastavovat parametry klienta.

Jako uživatel PC nemáte tušení, jaká data k vám proudí, co se s nimi děje a především jakému cíli celý proces slouží. Garance od provozovatele systému má proto svůj význam.

Garantované projekty se zabývají modelováním klimatu, problémy z matematiky a počítačových věd,  výzkumem proteinů, molekulárních magnetů, dynamiky mléčné dráhy atd. SETI@home je jedním ze seznamu garantovaných témat.

Necháváte svoje PC zapnuté když jdete na oběd? Podívali jste se někdy, jak je vytížen procesor, když píšete nějaký text? Výkon vašeho počítače je zpravidla o několik řádů vyšší, než je aktuálně třeba (samozřejmě ne vždy). Zapojení do programu BOINC vás tak nebude stát nic, může vám ale přinést dobrý pocit, že alepoň malým dílem přispíváte dobré věci.

Základní informace o systému BOINC najdete na adrese http://boinc.berkeley.edu/. Úplný seznam projektů využívajících uvedený systém je zde a seznam garantovaných pojektů zde.

Co děláte, když nic neděláte – aneb složte si bílkovinu

Bílkoviny se vyznačují složitou prostorovou strukturou. Tato struktura (tedy vlastně to, jak je řetězec “poskládaný”) přitom rozhoduje o vlastnostech molekuly. Nalezení skutečné prostorové struktury je i při znalosti složení bílkoviny vemi obtížný úkol. A tady přichází počítačová hra, ve které je vaším úkolem poskládat daný protein co nejlépe.  I v době odpočinku nebo zábavy se tak můžete podílet na biologickém výzkumu!

Detaily najdete na adrese http://fold.it/portal/.

~*~

SETI@home is the oldest distributed computing project using the BOINC infrastructure. The goal of the SETI@home project is to find extraterrestrial intelligence.

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/

Leo en menéame que el proyecto SETI por fin ha encontrado una señal (concretamente un pulso láser) que podría no ser un fenómeno aleatorio. De llegar a confirmarse que fue generado por vida inteligente, sería realmente muy interesante, pues sería la primera forma de vida de su tipo en el Universo. Bueno, la segunda, si contamos cuando los perros “parece que te entienden“.

Y vosotros, ¿pensáis que estamos solos? <Inserte aquí música de expediente X>

PD: Friker Jiménez debe estar ahora mismo totalmente palote…

Edición posterior: como bien comenta mi buen amigo Jaime, parece que se nos ha ido la olla con los marcianitos…

I’ve added another section to the right; Projects.

Join the search now!

The only project added at the moment is SETI@home, “a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).” It’s a project run by the University of Berkeley and I’ve been involved in since September 1999. What you do is download a small client, BOINC, which runs in the background. The client downloads and analyzes small packets of data from the telescope in Arecibo before sending the results back.

Seems feeble and nerdish, you say, that can’t mount to anything. It does. One computer won’t make much of a difference, but with thousands upon thousands of computers worldwide analyzing small packets, they together become a supercomputer able to compute faster than any one computer made to date. Working together never was this easy.

The clients are available for Mac, Windows, Linux and most other known platforms. It runs nicely on my MacBook and doesn’t hog system resources. If you like the idea to participate with some of your computer’s power, when idle or not, read more at the SETI@home page.