Stardust@home

Other than the funky make-over of the web site appearance, what has materially changed? I could find no mention of further progress with tile examination, extraction and analysis techniques, new calibrations, manner of scoring, or anything else to excite me (other than news that some papers have bee...

Great to read the team's latest announcement about the science, 12 papers and phase VII.
I'm really looking forward to reading the papers, and to see what the next phase brings.

John

Some of you will have visited CERN near Geneva before, but I’ve recently come back from my first time. The 27-kilometer-circumference LHC (Large Hadron Collider, of recent Higgs boson fame) happens to be off-line at the moment while they double the proton-proton beam collision energy to a huge 13-14...

Mike, a weighted filter has no relevance to the expected drops on missing a PM track which you understandably find 'fun' to claw back. Keeps the mind alive! It’s merely a well-known statistical method to reduce the number and size of unexpected skill score changes when instead the opposite happens, ...

OK, the skill 'jitter' simulation is now back up & running.
My results covering the whole skill range are here, confirming that use of a weighted filter at the beginning of the moving average window would considerably reduce the impact of this inevitable but annoying phenomenon.

John

In response to the parallel discussion here , the skill score ‘jitter’ simulation has now been extended to allow choice of initial skill level between 0 & 1.0, rather than being set only at 0.5 for an ‘average’ duster, and should be back up & running correctly. The result is that there are n...

Dan - good to know something is happening on the skill score front; it seems to have caused nothing but vexation so far! Meanwhile, the 'jitter' simulation has now been adapted to also allow choice of initial skill level between 0 & 1.0 in 'custom' mode, rather than the previous set 0.5 level (t...

O my! So sorry Evelyn :oops: . I think there is an overactive neurone in my brain labelled 'Elaine' downstream from the one that responds to any name beginning with 'E', since we exchanged private messages for some time where she shared quite personal issues. With luck it will soon die off like many...

Elaine - please don't despair; we need you! The current skill assessment methods are of course a compromise between addressing previously-raised issues, but I'm sure open to improvement. I hope my upcoming adaptations to the 'Skill score simulation' including initial skill level will reassure you an...

Hi Evelyn & Mike. In fact I'm an idiot for forgetting my own caveat that the sim assumes an 'average' duster who gets as many PMs wrong as right . Since both your skills are markedly better than that, you will naturally be encountering significantly fewer unexpected rises than falls, and it's fo...

Oh dear, sorry to have offended you Evelyn. You may remember I’ve confused your name with Elaine (Keefe) at least once before; I’ve always been hopeless with names, and as I get older it only gets worse. Further in my defence, your present excellent power score of 17690, if divided by an average PM ...

Well, there you go Elaine! You make the point for me, that unexpected increases in skill score will occur despite having missed a PM track which happens to coincide with a previously-missed PM of lower value dropping out of the window. This will actually happen as often over time as unwelcome drops,...

Hi Evelyn (& Jason). Believe me, I share your annoyance with drops in skill score on correctly identifying a PM track when this happens to coincide with a higher-valued PM dropping out of the moving average window. But you’ll recall that dusters were already expressing frustration with the ‘spec...

Congratulations to the Rosetta team today (20th Jan 2014) on a successful crucial stage in this ambitious and already 10-year-long space venture:

http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space ... ibernation

Thanks Dan, and to all others who have responded. So, what is my theory as to how some manage to attain and maintain perfect skill? Well, Mike has pointed out that it isn’t necessarily maintained all the time, needing up to 100 consecutively correct PM track identifications after even a single miss;...