Saturday, I attended TED^x Berkeley-2010, organized by graduating senior Jessica Mah. The talks were great! The UC Berkeley campus is a special place for me – it’s where I first got interested in SETI as a graduate student, and it’s where I met my husband Jack Welch (he had a radio telescope at Hat Creek Observatory that the original SERENDIP project wanted to use for SETI). Thirty years later, Hat Creek is still radio-quiet, and it’s where we are building the new Allen Telescope Array!  Sitting in Wheeler Auditorium along with 700 students and guests felt really good.  Avinash Agrawal was there too, and we talked to a lot of people who said they’d be interested to help with setiQuest – let’s hope they follow through. There are so many things we’d like to make happen, so many solutions we don’t yet have in hand --- but I’m pretty sure some people in that audience can help us figure it out.

 

At the SETI Institute, we’ve been taking data each week to upload to the Amazon cloud, and in the process we’ve detected a low level artifact in the data that has crept in since last year. It doesn’t impact our SETI observations with the ATA (it just means additional signals our system has to deal with, a little more work that’s not really necessary). But we want to track down the source and remove it before we post these data – there’s no sense to cause grief for the folks who want to help us build new signal detection algorithms.  That’s one of the good things about trying something new – sometimes you discover things about your system that you hadn’t seen before, because you weren’t looking in the appropriate way.