Stardust@home Suggestion Thread

Discuss your experiences with and ideas about Stardust@home here.

Moderators: Stardust@home Team, DustMods

pointyhat
Posts: 41
Joined: Sun Aug 06, 2006 11:15 am
Location: UK

Post by pointyhat »

I'd like to suggest splitting the 'I found something cute, funny or interesting thread into to two threads:

1. 'I found something cute or funny'

2. 'I found something unexpected and I don't know what it is'

At the moment the thread seems to be getting both kinds of posts and it would be nice to have a cleaner thread for unknowns encountered in the movies as well as a separate thread for amusing features found.

All the best
Gavin
cmsouza
Posts: 6
Joined: Tue Aug 22, 2006 6:50 am

Post by cmsouza »

How about changing the score from being based on the results of calibration movies to the number of tracks that pass level 1 evaluation? Sure, it'd take longer for the scores to be updated, but it would eliminate the possibility of cheating entirely...And it'd also be much more interesting...:)
ToSeek
Posts: 48
Joined: Thu Aug 03, 2006 8:40 am
Contact:

Post by ToSeek »

Dorsal wrote:Could the Starduster team "turn" or "flip" the calibration movies so they didn't look exactly the same every time? They are calibration movies, so the true orientation doesn't matter, right?
I have the impression that they've done that, since some of the movies look the same, just with the features in different places.
If you're going to be just like everyone else, what's the point in existing?
legs2041
Posts: 6
Joined: Thu Aug 17, 2006 6:19 am
Location: Sydney, Australia

Scoring bad focus

Post by legs2041 »

At the moment a 'bad focus' answer is not scored. If you select 'bad focus' then your number of 'movies reviewed' stays the same. You may find that this useful selection is used more often if it counts as a movie reviewed.
Michael
fuzzylintman
Posts: 2
Joined: Mon May 22, 2006 10:51 am

Possible VM improvement

Post by fuzzylintman »

Since we are supposed to find the surface, and then scan down, wouldn't it make more sense to load the individual frames of each movie in the opposite order that they currently load? In other words, load the most "down" focused frame first, and then go up? I get a bit frustrated waiting, watching a movie load up, and as I watch I continually scan but can't really see anything because the top 2/3 of the movie is above the surface. If we load from the bottom up, I can fully (and correctly) analyze each of these types of movies while the remaining 2/3 continues to load.

-mdb
-mdb
farpung
Posts: 22
Joined: Fri Aug 04, 2006 9:01 am
Location: Quebec

Post by farpung »

I agree entirely, the most interesting features are going to be appear from below, the time waiting for the movie to arrive would be much better spent looking at the movie reveal itself from the deepest to the shallowest.

A related point. Most of the out-of-focus movies don't go deep enough, and many others go aonly marginally deep enough, very few start too deep. Can't the microscope be reprogrammed to start and finish deeper than it has been doing. All the shots above the surface are basically a waste of time!
TimStrange
DustMod
Posts: 94
Joined: Thu May 18, 2006 7:12 am
Location: Third stone from the Sun

Post by TimStrange »

Not too sure how easy it would be for them to reprogram the site, but I do know a little about the focus problem. The camara looks at four places (I believe it's four places) on a particular cell and uses the average of the four as its point of reference for scanning the whole cell. Check out Dr. Butterworth's last report on their progress in dealing with this process.
farpung
Posts: 22
Joined: Fri Aug 04, 2006 9:01 am
Location: Quebec

Post by farpung »

TimStrange wrote:The camara looks at four places (I believe it's four places) on a particular cell and uses the average of the four as its point of reference for scanning the whole cell. Check out Dr. Butterworth's last report on their progress in dealing with this process.
OK, no doubt it is being improved. What I am saying is that whatever process *was* being used for estimating the focus, a constant could have been added to the result of the focussing program to give a bit more depth.

Another thing, the diagrams of aerogel cells showing which parts are in, above, and below focus must have been analysed automatically, could that analysis (and any necessary refocussing) not be done as the microscope is working?
spokelig
Posts: 1
Joined: Fri Aug 25, 2006 3:51 pm

Feedback to focus movies

Post by spokelig »

I don't know if this was suggested already, and I don't know if the necessary data is available - but wouldn't a short feedback for the focus movies be nice?

If Stardust keeps a record for each focus movie of how many users selected track, no track or bad focus, you could create a response like "95 % of all users agree with your last decision".

This way you could go back and see very quickly if you missed an obvious spot in the focus movies, and not only in the calibration movies.
Orion_0169
Posts: 153
Joined: Wed Aug 02, 2006 8:17 pm

Post by Orion_0169 »

I was tempted to ask people how many events they have, to get an idea of how much is 'being seen'.

Then I thought, it might be telling, or interesting anyway to see #ofmovies plotted against #events.

The graphical relationship between the two might be worth a look.
Je ne peux pas regarder la Mer sans me demander qui vit au-delà de cela.
semenovel
Posts: 3
Joined: Sat Aug 26, 2006 7:36 pm
Location: Bethesda, MD, US

select perspective movies based on % agreements

Post by semenovel »

Dear StarDust team,

Probably it would be more reliable if you would choose perspective movies not based on overall score (more than 100, especially in light of recently "non scientific" behaviuor) but based on % of agreements/total viewing. Like Movie 4850933V1 ( agreements 14/ total 81) - I'm pretty sure that something on 6 o'clock is really interesting but probably it would never rich 100 score.

With my best wishes,

Elena
Matt3223
Posts: 1
Joined: Mon Aug 21, 2006 4:39 pm

Post by Matt3223 »

Hi all.......I'm relatively new here, and was wondering about a possibility, or asking if i'm just missing something obvious.

But, is it possible for Stardust@home to all us to join "teams"? Like most of the other DC projects do? Stats speaking........helps the competitive nature of us, and will get us viewing more movies!!!!!
DustBuster
DustMod
Posts: 694
Joined: Wed May 17, 2006 8:12 pm
Location: Horsetown, USA

Post by DustBuster »

Matt3223 wrote:Hi all.......I'm relatively new here, and was wondering about a possibility, or asking if i'm just missing something obvious.

But, is it possible for Stardust@home to all us to join "teams"? Like most of the other DC projects do? Stats speaking........helps the competitive nature of us, and will get us viewing more movies!!!!!
Hi Matt.

There is no specific setup for teams. If you all use the same login id you will all be contributing to the same account though.

Hope that helps.
YOMAR_II
Posts: 18
Joined: Sat Aug 05, 2006 4:27 pm
Location: Spain / Lugo / Becerreá

A couple of suggestions...

Post by YOMAR_II »

1) You might create a map of the world to see the locations of the volunteers, like in the project Climatteprediction.net. It would not use as anything, but it would be interesting
2) to avoid frauds, every movie should be visualized during at least 5 seconds, using for it a chronometer placed next to every movie.
Wolter
DustMod
Posts: 457
Joined: Mon May 22, 2006 2:23 am
Location: Enkhuizen, the Netherlands

Post by Wolter »

For a user supported world map look in this thread: http://stardustathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/ ... .php?t=825

Please repost the suggestion into the sugestion thread

locked this thread
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