Hi -

This was inspired by a conversation I had with Jeremy Manier, a Chicago Tribune journalist who was wondering what it is that motivates people to participate. I told him what I thought, but then I realized that it would be much better to hear from you directly!

Part of this is also about people\'s backgrounds. I guess the stereotypical distributed computing contributor is someone who is already involved with technology in their life in one way or other. But people here at C@H really seem to come from all age groups, fields of interest, and walks of life.

From a cursory inspection of the profile pages we have teens as well as pensioners; scientists, liberal arts majors and train drivers; people running C@H on their laptop and people running it on their server farms. Needless to say all are equally welcome!

Just for fun, I thought we\'d have a little friendly bragging contest on who is the the most surprising Cosmology@Home participant here. If you think you qualify and you\'d like to share your story we\'d love to see your post!

So please feel free to post on

• why you participate in C@H, and/or
  
• why you think you defy the stereotype - maybe by signing up you surprised yourself?
  

All the best,

Ben

---

Creator of Cosmology@Home

Well, a few thoughts:
- The subject of this project is THE subject of humanity. Who we are, from where we are coming from, ... you know ;-)
- As a BOINC addict, I am (as many others) also addicted to new project.
- This project is very well managed. Very interesting subject, nice website, a very good communication with the crunchers. Really, a top project!

I think that above the subject, the communication (as always) is the key. By mixing those two points, you get this good result :-)

Thierry

• why you participate in C@H, and/or

I crunch all (and only) the astronomy related projects - for the science and because it\'s cool.

• why you think you defy the stereotype - maybe by signing up you surprised yourself?
  

I\'m surprised the project was up and running so quickly. But no stereotype here. I\'m just a really cool guy. ;)

---

me@rescam.org

* why you participate in C@H, and/or

I\'m participating in quite a lot of BOINC projects, but I tell \'em a bit apart by personal taste and perceived validity and \"use for mankind\".

Your project is a bit higher in the list, for one because you interact with the users quite good.

* why you think you defy the stereotype - maybe by signing up you surprised yourself?

I don\'t defy stereotypes imho ;)
I\'m male (probably 90% of the crunchers)
I\'m an engineer, that\'s technically not quite challenged (\'though mechanical, not IT profession)
I\'m from one of the industrialised nations.
I\'m crunching in a big national team.

---

Grüße vom Sänger

I have always been interested in answering the fundamental questions.And the universe is something that really inspires me.I have had numeour sleeepless nights just woundering about how it all began.
I would be really happy ,if I knew the answers.So this hunt for knowedge motivates my contributions to this project

After xxx (Integer overflow :p ) years of software development experience, I like to help out making new Boinc projects stable and ripe for production. That was the original motivation for getting involved. As for many of the crew that informally go by the name \"ATA members\" (Alpha Testers Anonymous), it\'s easy to get our attention, but it\'s just as easy to lose it again. Projects that can capture my interest in the long term are rare. The subject must interest me (sorry, but pure math projects just don\'t make my pulse rate rise). I must have the feeling that my contribution makes a difference. The project team must communicate with the participants, and not act as they are above us and treat us as voiceless extensions of their server hardware. Cosmology qualifies for all these factors. I hope it remains that way once the project leaves beta and goes into full production.

Some people may claim that\'s all just a load of nonsense. That I\'m just in my midlife crisis, which causes me to buy fancy computer equipment I can show off in these projects. But these are really evil-minded people :p

---

BOINC.BE: For Belgians who love the smell of glowing red cpu's in the morning
Tutta55's Lair

I guess I participate because I have fun with it. Like most I started with SETI. Maybe it is because I have always like sci-fi like the various shows like Star Trek and Babylon 5. I have since tried many projects. As others have said, the feedback and updates to our questions and issues as well as about the project make it enjoyable. We are not treated as some kind of drones like I see with a few other projects.

As for sterotypes, I\'m sure a lot of people would expect crunchers to be computer geeks or such. But I know that isn\'t true. Like you mentioned, crunchers come from all walks of life.

It can also be addicting for some of us. BOINCitis I believe it has been called. Not sure exactly why but we seem to keep thinking \"If my wife would only let me buy the new quad-core...\"

Anyway keep up the good work!

---

Nothing suprising here as I\'m an old tech type that has been around since rotating magnetic drums were used for memory....We like science projects and this project has great communication from project scientists and admins. We really appreciate this above all else. It creates a sense of team spirit and involvement that will take the project\'s impressive start to new heights. The fact that your project has already published its first scientific result and given some credit the your \'Crunchers\' is outstanding!! Consequently, we have decided to support C@H exclusively. Cheers, Rog.

Would like to add to the last 2 posts acknowledgement of this project....as a moderator thus far my job has been fairly simple...but we only now have 3000 participants.

I think the forum has been slow because of the outstanding response by the project administrators,no \'hanging chads\' here :) But hope in the months and years ahead I get really \"busy\" because project participation becomes on par with Seti,CPDN,etc etc.

Bringing a project into Boinc with no prior experience is a daunting challenge...as seen by how so many projects falter. Cosmo is a shining example of how to do it right by enthusiastic committment and gets an A+ in my book.

---

I\'m an ESL teacher with a psychology background, but I\'m really a scientist at heart. I enjoy most areas of science. I have an intrinsic thirst for knowledge. I\'ve always looked up at the stars and wondered where we came from and where we\'re going.

I enjoy a good challenge. Alpha testing both at the project and the client level give me all sorts of interesting challenges.

I love this project because of the responsiveness of the administrators and scientists involved. Communication can keep even the most demanding crunchers happy. It\'s a friendly community here. And the science really is interesting.

Oh yeah... I was pretty much technologically clueless when I started with BOINC. Now I\'m confident enough to try new things, including Linux and writing little scripts.

---

Kathryn :o)
The BOINC FAQ Service
The Unofficial BOINC Wiki
The Trac System
More BOINC information than you can shake a stick of RAM at.

What can I say that hasn\'t been said already? Communication is key. A project lives and dies by the amount of communication between the admin and the volunteers.
No communication and the project will falter, it might survive but it will not blossom into a great project.
Censored communication will falter the project as other projects have done and lost their volunteers.
Great communication will make the project grow. New users coming into the BOINC community will learn from all of the banter and old timers get to share their knowledge and experience. Of course the admin benefits from all of the shared knowledge and processing power.

I am a Biomedical Site Manager – CBET as my profile states. Basically, I maintain the operating functionality of all medical equipment within a hospital. I do consider myself unique in the fact that I am the only one at this hospital that performs this duty. Please Google Biomedical for more info.
“The Biomed is the unseen help for the physician and the unknown hope for the patient.”

I started participating in BOINC from the SETI days then moved on to the other projects when they started up. I am a silent member of ATA but do point out a few faults every once in awhile. I enjoy the work that is being done and plan on crunching for Cosmo for a long time.

If these personal notes from the volunteers inspire somebody to start a new project then the ATA group will find it. If these personal notes are used for a publication that gets more users to join BOINC then it will all be worth it. Every little bit counts and will be used for the greater good.

---

I always wanted to be a scientists. But sadly, it turned out that i\'m not bright enough, or maybe (i hope) too lazy to be one; i become a technician. So now, as Penn&Teller put it, i\'m \"cheerleading for science\". Boinc seems like the best and most accessible way to help and feel involved.

I\'m just an astronomy fan ever since I first saw Lost in Space back in the 60s (I know, I know - bad, laughable science there) and moved onto the Star Treks and Sci Fi in general. I wanted to be an astronaut but my eyesight wasn\'t good enough :^)

But seriously, ever since I was a kid, I have just been astounded by all of the illogic and irrational behaviors of our societies (hmmm... sound familiar?).

My feeling is that the more we learn about the cosmos, the more we understand the realities of existence and ourselves, and hopefully we\'ll lose some of the frightening, self-absorbed fantasies that we maintain that cause so much hardship in our world.

I started crunching SETI years ago, and find that cosmology@home\'s mission and golas are just as exciting.

I was in Chicago for the Winter Solstice festivals, and saw the article in the Tribune. (My wife said, \"Did you see the SETI thing in the paper?\")

When I got home, I fired up Safari, pointed it at the Cosmology@home site, registered, went back to my running BOINC and added the project, and waited. And waited. ...and waited.

I began to suspect that this was an Intel x86-only project, and my Mac is 8 years old, so I decided to check. Imagine my surprise, and disappointment, when I learned that it\'s not that I have the wrong Mac, it\'s that I have the wrong processor *and* the wrong operating system.

My mother put me onto astronomy with her college textbook 50 years ago; to the extent possible to the amateur who works in other fields, I have kept up with developments in cosmology for more than 40. (I knew what the main sequence of stellar evolution was when I was 14.) So I was really excited at the prospect of helping out in any way I could with this project.

And I\'m really disappointed that no one on the project has made it available to the tens of thousands of Mac users who have been working on, for example, SETI since before BOINC. (I mentioned that my Mac is 8 years old. The first application I put on the machine after taking delivery was SETI@home.)

So for now, I DON\'T participate--but not because I don\'t want to.

---

I was in Chicago for the Winter Solstice festivals, and saw the article in the Tribune. (My wife said, \"Did you see the SETI thing in the paper?\")

When I got home, I fired up Safari, pointed it at the Cosmology@home site, registered, went back to my running BOINC and added the project, and waited. And waited. ...and waited.

I began to suspect that this was an Intel x86-only project, and my Mac is 8 years old, so I decided to check. Imagine my surprise, and disappointment, when I learned that it\'s not that I have the wrong Mac, it\'s that I have the wrong processor *and* the wrong operating system.

My mother put me onto astronomy with her college textbook 50 years ago; to the extent possible to the amateur who works in other fields, I have kept up with developments in cosmology for more than 40. (I knew what the main sequence of stellar evolution was when I was 14.) So I was really excited at the prospect of helping out in any way I could with this project.

And I\'m really disappointed that no one on the project has made it available to the tens of thousands of Mac users who have been working on, for example, SETI since before BOINC. (I mentioned that my Mac is 8 years old. The first application I put on the machine after taking delivery was SETI@home.)

So for now, I DON\'T participate--but not because I don\'t want to.

This attitude is SO wrong. You have basically a obsolete computer and OS yet you expect the team to write custom software for a computer that probably couldn\'t finish a WU in the time allotted with VERY few people with that old equipment. Personally, I would have been embarrassed to post what you did.

---

That\'s quite a harsh reply there B, especially as some projects still support older machines.

However, if it\'s not working now there probably isn\'t going to be a compatible version coming. There aren\'t that many people interested in participating with computers almost a decade old and they also tend to use quite a lot of electricity for little work. Computers have become too cheap for such an effort to make sense, as a reasonably fast computer with Vista can be had for about $600 nowadays.

As a child, I was fascinated by Sputnik, Telestar, Mercury, Gemini & Apollo. It was terrific listening to the radio broadcasts & using my imagination a la \"Dan Dare\". As I entered my teens, school & girls took my attention away.

What brought my attention back & maintained it since was the late Carl Sagan with his \"Cosmos\" television series. I often wish that he was one of my teachers!

I have only recently found out about this project from my team (Canada) & will now have it on all my rigs & future rigs.

---

Hello!

I like astronomy, physics, \"space discoveries\" and impressed with growth of power of modern computers. I am glad, that I can help a science.

I for one applaud your interest in contributing to something that is certainly larger than us all. Your hardware sense needs an overhaul. As comfortable as you are with your legacy rig, it\'s time to add some computing power to compliment your motivation. I have enough spare parts laying around to put together a 64bit Linux
rig. You can probably do it for under 300 bux. This assumes you are comfortable building your own machine. Thanks for your post.

Voltron

---

If you don't build them, you can't sweat them. Got Stock?

Your hardware sense needs an overhaul. As comfortable as you are with your legacy rig, it\'s time to add some computing power to compliment your motivation. I have enough spare parts laying around to put together a 64bit Linux rig. You can probably do it for under 300 bux.

Thank you for attention!

Interesting idea, but I worry for their delivery into Russia and potential amount of documents, which must be written. (I do not know how many - may be a zero, but I do not believe that small).

Today, main computer - C2D E6550@[(2.33 -> 3.15)GHz] crunch only Einstein WU\'s for increase CS/traffic relation. Cosmology@Home units processed on Athlon XP 2600+ with max speed about 1 WU / 5 hours (with PC3200 RAM). But quality of calculations on this computer is unstable. In first of all I want to solve a problem of computation stability.

Thank you!