Hi everyone -

First of all, I would like to thank all of you for your continued contributions and interest.

Cosmology@Home is still working for the same purpose it was originally designed to fulfill - to enable high precision parameter estimation from current and upcoming cosmological data sets, such as the WMAP data and Planck.

I agree that our communication with users has been sorely lacking. This is due to unavoidable personnel developments - this is a university project and the two main contributors to the day-to-day running of cosmology@home have graduated and moved on in their professional lives. I should explain that while I created the concept of cosmology@home, the implementation was done by Scott Kruger and Chad Fendt and graphics design was contributed by Laura Chu and Nikita Sorokin both while they were students at Illinois.

I am currently engaged in a job search for 2 positions, one of which is entirely dedicated to communication with users, and the other a system administrator to maintain and develop the technical aspects of C@H. So far these jobs have not been filled.

I am happy to be able to report that I have begun training a new collaborator in the use of Pico, one of the key components of cosmology@home (for an explanation of this role see the C@H wikipedia page, or the material on my home page, linked from C@H).

We are currently adapting an updated cosmological simulation code which includes a more accurate calculation of recombination (again, see cosmos.astro.illinois.edu for an explanation). As soon as we are able to find a sys admin for C@H this code will be released as a new kernel for C@H.

In other news, we are discussing ways for the Planck team to become more involved in communicating with cosmology@home and to provide you with more access and new ways to learn about cosmology and the Planck mission.

The basic concept behind cosmology@home continues to be valid and powerful: to enable tens of thousands of cosmology enthusiasts to contribute to high precision cosmology and enable high precision cosmology based on these contributions.


Best regards,
Ben Wandelt

(edit: fixed typos)

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Creator of Cosmology@Home

Greetings, C@H Community:

This is Jatila van der Veen, at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I'm the Education and Outreach coordinator for the NASA component of the Planck Mission. I want you to know that the Planck science team really and truly appreciates the work of the C@H community in providing CPU time to crunch out models. You are providing an extremely valuable service to the Planck Mission.

I want to let you know that members of the Planck science and education teams will be joining this message board in the near future to help answer your questions.

I will also be sending out a request for your input to a survey to find out how you are using this website, and what more you would like to get from it. I am also looking into creating an in-world community for C@H on Second Life, where we can meet, chat, and discuss cosmology. What do you think of the idea of meeting in-world?

Hopefully, these efforts will make you feel more appreciated, and less isolated.

Meanwhile, please know that we very much appreciate your donations of CPU time.

Thank you very much,
Jatila

Dr. Jatila van der Veen
E/PO Lead for the NASA collaborators on the International Planck Mission
jatila@physics.ucsb.edu

Thank you for the updates :)
Glad to see the project being alive and well :)

Same here happy to see the project alive.

We of DPC are happy to provide cpu time :-)

Hi, Ben! Thanks for the update! Even though I have not been crunching for a long time, I have been patiently waiting for more news about what is happening. This has revived my interest in returning to this project.

I hope you will post more frequent updates in the future. I am eager to see this project resume more volunteers joining and particaping as well as greater public attention.

Dear C@H Participants:

This is Jatila, from the Planck Mission Education group. I'm trying to gather some feedback in a somewhat organized fashion, so that we can help address the needs of this community. If you don't mind sparing a few minutes of your time, would you please fill out a short (anonymous) survey which you can find at
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/KNRKVXS ? This link will be active from today (mid-August) through mid-November, 2011.

This survey has been approved by Ben.

Thank you very much in advance for your feedback.

Best regards,
Jatila van der Veen

Education and Public Outreach Lead for the Planck Mission, NASA.

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Thanks for an update. I am the 4th top contributor from Overclock.net (OCN). I am happy that this is not a dead project. In all honestly I was almost ready to quit C@H, until I seen this thread. Please keep us up to date, even if it is not anything important. It lets us know all our hard work is not going to waste.

Done the survey :)

Thanks very much!
-Jatila :)

Thank you very much. We truly appreciate the work that the C@H community is doing for us. We don't want to lose you, our valuable community! So the US team is jumping in to help.
All the best,
Jatila
(you can find me at http://web.physics.ucsb.edu/~jatila )

If you would dare to be bothered to answer to people who got their accounts here deleted without having done anything wrong, and have complained to you for over a year, I would take your words as a good sign.

But as you still refuse to care about your crunchers, I take it as a piece of crap posted to sedate the crunchers.

Post something valuable in this threads:
URGENT PROBLEMS THREAD (2009 and after)
deleted Account

The problem is known to the project at least since 28 Jan 2010 13:50:20 UTC, but they arrogantly refuse to answer to it's participants, to which they have done harm.
They messed it up, they slapped some of their participants in their face with all might, and they refuse to act on their deeds.

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Grüße vom Sänger

I answered this elsewhere on the forums. Briefly, what happened in 2009: those accounts got hacked, and spammed. They then included material that violated the proper use rules of the university against profanity etc. If we hadn't shut them down immediately we would have had to take down the whole site, ie all of C@H. We did not have the resources to go through all these accounts individually, re-open them and "re-imburse" the participant's lost credit. On the whole I think we have been extremely fair with credit, but this was a case where criminal activity took us to a situation where we did not have full control and we had to act quickly.

Do with it what you will, but it's done, it's in the past and I hope we can close this topic and move on now to focus on the future, the science and what C@H is about for the majority of the participants.

Best,
Ben

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Creator of Cosmology@Home

topic: C@H participant survey on Survey Monkey

Thank you to everyone who provided answers to our survey and gave us your feedback. We have sufficient responses now, and I have closed the survey.

Thanks very much,
Jatila

I answered this elsewhere on the forums. Briefly, what happened in 2009: those accounts got hacked, and spammed. They then included material that violated the proper use rules of the university against profanity etc. If we hadn't shut them down immediately we would have had to take down the whole site, ie all of C@H. We did not have the resources to go through all these accounts individually, re-open them and "re-imburse" the participant's lost credit. On the whole I think we have been extremely fair with credit, but this was a case where criminal activity took us to a situation where we did not have full control and we had to act quickly.

Do with it what you will, but it's done, it's in the past and I hope we can close this topic and move on now to focus on the future, the science and what C@H is about for the majority of the participants.

Best,
Ben

Why didn't you bother to answer any questions about this for far over a year (Message 8851 - Posted 28 Jan 2010 13:50:20 UTC ), but instead left this forum and your volunteers for such a long time?

I simply don't believe you, you've treat your crunchers with utter contempt and then fabricate this fairy tale about hacking of accounts and profanity. If they were indeed hacked, they would have been hacked in all BOINC projects, as the participants usually use the same password in all projects. As this didn't happen, you were just extremely trigger happy in deleting unsuspecting accounts.

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Grüße vom Sänger