RNA World

[Michael H.W. Weber]

I am Sorry I think I misspoke I think I only asked in your forum and I did get a responseIt was another project I confused your's with

Well, then everything seems just fine, I guess.

You have always in the past given good project support.for the projects you worked on

Oh yes, I like DC a lot, so I try to put in my time whenever possible. Thank you for that nice remark.

@Angus: Just a few things for clarification (I always try to take comments serious although, sadly, sometimes people make it really very hard by the style they do communicate). RNA World is a bioinformatics project, so we do not need a lab at all. A few computers and a good webserver is sufficient. Still, as you can see from our cooperation partner list, we do clearly have the capabilities of performing lab experiments to validate our computational results. In fact, I work in an RNA lab every day with more than 10 years of practical experience in a diverse set of scientific fields. And yes, we do outsource server hosting to professionals while we keep server administration in house. This, to our experience, is the best and most economic way to do it. And we do indeed have at least some experience since we operate in DC for more than 10 years now. First we "only" participated in DC projects. Then we started the Yoyo@home project to help scientists not too firm with BOINC to acquire more volunteer support for their projects. We achieved that by wrapping a set of clients of non-BOINC projects we liked into the BOINC infrastructure and, apart from your crediting concerns, I think we did a nice job (and Yoyo is the driving force here). This scenario allowed us to gain a lot of practical experience over many years in this "business" (yeah, I hate that word in this context); also in terms of user requirements and support. And now, we are implementing our own scientific project in which we use established software plus own software developments to put into practice our own research ideas. You can say that we have evolved from a DC community to DC project developers. So, what is bad about that?

Finally, concerning myself (since you addressed this issue), maybe you have overlooked that I am not a Ph.D. student; I am holding a doc degree in natural sciences (Dr. rer. nat., chemistry) for quite some time now and I am the principal investigator at Rechenkraft.net you were seemingly looking for (and yes, I do not get paid for doing that like nobody at Rechenkraft.net gets paid for anything; it is just our spare-time interest but that has lasted in a sustained manner over a decade). That said, I would like to say that - as we witness in DC every day - volunteers can contribute significant efforts towards achieving meaningful scientific results. Hence, I do not give much on degrees (although from your writing it appeared to me that it seems important to you). Rather, a nice style of cooperative working together is what I have in mind where everybody can input small ideas. That, taken together, will ultimately give a nice overall picture. I believe, DC is not at all about competition as always claimed. If you look a bit beyond competition in terms of who has the fastest machine, you will find that a bigger goal is achieved COOPERATIVELY. And that, to date, to my opinion, is the most powerful principle in nature - not competition. But maybe let us better keep that aside for now. So to say as a philosophical side remark...

Michael.

[gopher_yarrowzoo]

Micheal I do believe you've hit the protein on the amino acid (if you'll forgive the bad pun), yes I do know about Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine and Urasil (sp) notice I didn't say Thymine since well that's DNA..

Yes many do it for the "I'm bigger than you" but it's all about the science in the end, the more power gets thrown at it the quicker we get to prove / disprove the theory behind the project or prove / disprove that particular drug / protein.

[Angus]

@MHWW thanks for clarifying some of the issues.

I spent a LOT of time yesterday moving through your web sites and pasting bits and pieces into Google Translate trying to get answers for myself. With almost all of the content in German, it's very difficult for a non-German speaker to get any kind of picture of your organization. Do you a plan to provide all the content in English?

This is further compounded by having stuff scattered around through multiple sites. There is no BOINC message board, however there appears to be a rechenkraft message board that I'm not sure is for the team or the organization, but it requires a separate login. There is also some sort of wiki, but it's almost entirely in German too.

One of the more interesting pieces might have been an "RKN roadmap" post that seems to be at the top of many areas of the message boards, but I couldn't find that in English anywhere.

Even the English home page for the RNA project still has at least some German on it, and today the server status pages are coming up in German where they were in English previously.

I think your organization is a victim of self-imposed obscurity by not providing other language content, particularly English.

Just an observation.

[Saenger]

It is a German team, a German "Verein", and of course through that tradition a German HP. I don't expect the projects to have their Sites in German, French or any other main language from the beginning as well, English only if they are in some English speaking country is fine first, Spanish for Ibercivis, Dutch for Almere, Japanese for Tanpaku, whatever. It's fine to put some main content in English as well, and with RNA World there is too much English, far too little German now, but English does definitely not have to be the main language of all websites.

Concerning the off-site forum: RNA World and Yoyo@Home are not the only ones with this setup: WCG, Simap, Spinhenge, CPDN, FreeHal, Ibercivis ahve it, and even Folding@Home outside BOINC has the forum completely outsourced. The BOINC forum software is fine for Projects, that don't already have some software running or don't want to bother with a real forum software. But it definitely isn't as good as a real one, and I prefer only one forum per project, I don't like the CPDN setup, with two different fora.

[Michael H.W. Weber]

@Angus: Well, that is a good point. Indeed, our organization, board and everything has always focused on the German language. That is because we are Germans and there are people out there that do not understand english. We initially represented a message board where a lot of the DC-related, mostly english, stuff was translated for those that do not understand it. What you see today - I mean the english parts of the wiki for example - is the result of the efforts of just a few months to translate it piece by piece - again on a voluntary basis. It will take quite some time to complete, I fear, but we are on it.

By contrast, for the RNA World project we setup dual language forums from the very beginning and I try to put important messages right into the BOINC built-in news feeder - mainly in english.

Michael.

P.S.: Concerning Rechenkraft.net e.V. status, since approx. 5 years we are an officially registered NGO, allowing donations made to us to be tax-deductible. We focus on supporting education, research and science by using networked computers.

[Angus]

Now yoyo is fiddling with the stats:

From a post on the RKN message board in the RNA section

I increased your rac, so you can create a profile and check the pages.
yoyo

[yoyo]

I don't changed the stats, the credits are not touched!
He is checking the russian translation. Therefore he want's to check if everything translated well, also for creating profiles. But profile creation is only possible with a rac>100 (to avoid spamming). Therefore I inceased his rac above it. I didn't change his credits or anything ones else. The rac will go down automatic in the next days if he doesn't crunch.

If you quote something, than please do not quote it without the context. This falsifies it.

And do not see in everything a complot.

What I can learn from you is to stop open communication, because you interpret everything as a conspiracy and you are falsifying the content as you need it.

yoyo

[Angus]

I don't changed the stats, the credits are not touched!
He is checking the russian translation. Therefore he want's to check if everything translated well, also for creating profiles. But profile creation is only possible with a rac>100 (to avoid spamming). Therefore I inceased his rac above it. I didn't change his credits or anything ones else. The rac will go down automatic in the next days if he doesn't crunch.

If you quote something, than please do not quote it without the context. This falsifies it.

And do not see in everything a complot.

What I can learn from you is to stop open communication, because you interpret everything as a conspiracy and you are falsifying the content as you need it.

yoyo

The invalid RAC value is exported to every external stats site.

I don't care what the reason is - one players stats should not be increased on your whim - credit totals or RAC.