Rob Dekker wrote:

"Martin 53N 1W" <ml_news@ddnospamddml1dd.co.uk.dd> wrote in message

[...]

Considering the bare desperation of some to find seti, or to be the
 first to find seti, s@h need to be very cautious about what
details can

[...]

Quite a balancing act between openness, the media, maintaining good
hard cold science, and avoiding being hijacked!

I tend to disagree with you Martin. I think that actually the
opposite is true : the fact that this signal, which apparently is a
Rio level 0, got to the media and got hiped is an indication that seti@home should be a lot more open. There should be hundreds of
these signals. Why not open all of them up, and let everyone analyse
them ? Then the media have no story.. "Seti@home program analyzes 100
potential ET signals !!". Naaa. I dont think that's news.

Mmmm... Didn't s@h go to considerable lengths to sift through their data for the 'top 200' signals and then gain funding to use the world's largest radio telescope for 24 hours or more to check them out?

They also checked out a few other 'targeted' searches, similar to what Project Phoenix has been doing over many _weeks_ of observing time.

I strongly suspect also that the s@h and Phoenix people talk to each other to chase any possible leads.

More than just s@h are chasing seti signals.

A lot better than this current fiasco where a nothing signal slips
out.

You are assuming that there must be something out there and that it must have been observed.

s@h estimated a 1-in-10 chance of getting a candidate score increase just from the random noise. Note that the threshold used on WU analysis is arbitrary and just tuned so as to give a manageable number of false hits.

They just happened to have struck lucky on the 1-in-10 or on some RFI coinciding with previous observations.


[...]

How many years will it take untile we find a level 7 signal ? 10^7 ? Why would we want to continue with business-as-usual, as Werthimer

[...]

Do you want to find phantoms and ghosts in the noise, or would you like to find something more real?

Take a plot of random dots and I'm sure you could soon find the face on Mars drawn in there. There is also the face on the Moon if you look at it at the right angle.

We have 4 million SETI users. I think it is time for another
screensaver..

And the beauty of Science and now with the support of Boinc, that can more easily be done.

State your theory and prove it.



Meanwhile, there is still the danger of an overenthusiastic ignorant media shouting wolf a few too many times and then discrediting all the seti projects.

Regards,
Martin