Hi Bruno,

Thank you very much for posting this letter.
I appreciate that, since Werthimer himself apparently did not think that
the seti newsgroups were worth posting a message on about
this so far 'most promising' signal since the start of the project that
detected it.

Now, I trust that Dr. Werthimer is telling the truth that this 'signal' is
nothing more than noise. But I feel that it is at least unthoughtful
that he seems to be the only one with enough information to draw
that conclusion.

In a previous posting, I vented my frustration in 5 reasons, that besides
the news postings available to anyone, there is no technical
information available about this signal (and its repetitions).

No info on what it's start frequency is, its drift rate, its duration, its
bandwidth, its strength, and how close its repetitions matched
the original pattern, how much time elapsed between the
repetitions, how strongly repetitions were correlated, how
often we did not find any signal in that part of the sky, and
not even info on when and where in the sky the signals were
detected (a basic piece of info displayed on every WU in seti@home).

At the very least, we, as active seti@home crunchers, as seti
enthousiasts, and also just as curious people, should at least
be allowed to form our own opinion about this signal and its
repetitions.

At the very least, we need the applicable work-units to become
available to the public. So we can listen to, or analyse ourselves,
the noise that Werthimer so profoundly believes is the only thing there.

You seem to be more directly involved in the close circles of the
seti community, so I call upon you to use your influence to open
up the work units and any other info which is/was available
(to Werthimer), and convince everybody in that way, that we still did not
detect "The Signal".

I think that everyone active on seti@home deserves at least
full openness after years and years of cranking work units.

Thanks

Rob

"SETI ITALIA Bruno IK2WQA" <brmoret@tin.it> wrote in message
news:e244d691.0409031210.330eeb1f@posting.google.com...

from Dan Werthimer in Arecibo

Da: "Dr. H. Paul Shuch"
Inviato: Venerd� 03/09/2004 00:41:07 -0400
Oggetto: SETI public: False SETI@home alarm, courtesy of the press


SETIzens,
Today, I've received nearly a hundred emails about a three-time
SETI@home hit, reported in today's New Scientist. Sorry to throw a wet
blanket on this otherwise exciting announcement, but I have to tell you
the press attaches more significance to this observation than do the
astronomers themselves.
Here is the text of an email received today
from SETI@home director Dan Werthimer of U.C. Berkeley
(and now in Arecibo):

it's a zero on the rio scale.

none of our candidates are very interesting - they are all

consisitent with noise. we will continue to observe many
of the candidates over the next few years, but there's
nothing on the candidate lists we are particularly excited about.

a reporter from new scientist read the seti@home web pages:

in particular there's a section on "candidate signals" where
we discuss how we score signals and we show the data from
the 220 candidates we re-observed at arecibo 1.5 years ago.
these web pages are old, but the reporter made an exciting
story about them, by exagerating their content and mis-quoting
us and quoting us out of context, and making a press release
about one of the candidates that has a bit higher score than
the others.

i talked to a couple of reporters today, explaining we've seen

stuff like this for the last 30 years, and it's always turned
out to be rfi or noise, and that there's nothing to get excited
about, and that when you look at 50 trillion bytes of data,
occasionally you'll find patterns that look unusual just from
noise...

i wish we had something in our data to get excited about.

tomorrow we'll start using the multibeam receiver you guys made

to map HI in the galaxy. the HI survey will take about five years.
we begin in 12 hours.

best wishes from arecibo,

dan

The Rio Scale to which Dan refers is a one-to-ten tool SETI scientists
use for quantifying the importance of a candidate detection. For
details, see
http://www.setileague.org/iaaseti/rioscale.htm

Sorry this one wasn't The Signal, but as you can see from Dan's last
comment, that won't stop us from continuing the search!

Yours for SETI success,
Paul

--
H. Paul Shuch, Ph.D. Executive Director, The SETI League, Inc.
433 Liberty Street, PO Box 555, Little Ferry NJ 07643 USA
voice (201) 641-1770; fax (201) 641-1771; URL http://www.setileague.org
email work: n6tx@setileague.org; home: drseti@cal.berkeley.edu

"We Know We're Not Alone!"
=======================================

Bruno Moretti
member
TeamSETI of SETI Institute http://www.seti.org/
SETI ITALIA Team G. Cocconi
http://setiweb.ssl.berkeley.edu/team_display.php?teamid=30233
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/stats/team/team_7422.html