Subject: Re: New to S.E.T.I.
From: david@djwhome.demon.co.uk (David Woolley)
Date: 09/02/2004, 22:36
Newsgroups: alt.sci.seti

In article <c071od$hsg$1@news8.svr.pol.co.uk>,
"Warlock of Eire" <shaggy_ks@hotmail.com> wrote:

Is there any programs out there that could decrypt the data SETI@home

Assuming SETI@Home means Berkeley, rather than the client.

The data is not encrypted and is reasonably meaningful to anyone who 
would have the technical knowledge to make judgements about what it
means (the exact scale factors on numbers may not be immediately
obvious).  There are some subtleties in data going to the client, but
anyone with the knowledge to independently process it should not take
long to discover those details.

There are programs that will interpret the raw data part of work
unit, but one, WU2WAV, was really created for people who insisted on
listening to work units (you won't hear anything except a hiss
for signals in the range that S@H is designed to detect), and another,
Baudline, doesn't seem to dechirp the FFTs, only the overall integration,
and doesn't look for gaussians or pulses when integrating.

recieves so that I (the user) could view personally if the results indicate
ET's?

That's not possible.  No WU in isolation is sufficient to indicate that.
Two or three different work units from the same direction must produce
similar results.  These must be confirmed by dedicated observations,
and probably re-confirmed by further dedicated observations.  Resources
only exist to do the first dedicated observation on a few hundred cases.