Sparing Time for Helping Humanity

PC time, that is. As I posted earlier, I've downloaded software from BOINC that allows distributed computing projects to use computer users spare time to do work on various projects for science. It all really got rolling with SETI at Home, the search for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, and blossomed into the medical field with projects on smallpox vaccines, and human protein folding which applies to many illnesses from cancer to AIDS. Collectively, the thousands of home computers add up to a super computer for each of these projects, often doing thousands of days of computer time in hundreds of days.

Out of gratitude for getting BOINC rolling, I give SETI about 1% of my spare computing time and devote most of it between two other projects. Both Rosetta@home and World Community Grid serve as coordinators for various simulations for medical researchers. While I'm never sure exactly what I'm working on from Rosetta, they have been involved in AIDS treatment research as well as trying to map out how proteins in the brain work for patients who have Alzheimers Disease. World Community Grid is something IBM started and hosts multiple projects that you can pick and choose from by setting up your profile. Not all are available to BOINC users, as they are also using a different platform from Grid.org. Currently, WCG has Help Defeat Cancer, FightAIDS@Home, Genome Comparison, Human Proteome Folding Phase 2, and are starting up Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy. I've concentrated my time on Cancer and Genome Comparison while occasionally beta testing the new software for the various programs. Right now HPF2 isn't out for BOINC and I'm eager to crunch data for that.

The most important one to me is the cancer program, it requires quite a bit of PC power to do and is a project to automate the diagnosis of lethal fast moving cancers by running slides of biopsies through scanners. Eventually, the algorithyms being perfected for this will allow diagnoses in days rather than weeks, which is critical with fast moving cancers.

I also give time to two other projects at a much lower priority. One is Spinhenge@home which is a nanotech research project into how different nanocarbon molecules react magnetically under a wide range of temperatures. Getting switching to work in nanoparticles will be a big achievement and open the doors to ever smaller electronics. The other project is SIMAP, which is a project to database protein simularities for researchers to access. Instead of having to reinvent the wheel every time they want to do molecular medicine comparisons, it will be in a pre-existing database. This project is intermittent and just finished a limited batch of data this past week. Blink and you miss out on this one.

There are many other projects out there, including one's aimed at finding pulsars, breaking cryptography, predicting climate shifts, even rendering 3D computer animations. Check out this site for a full listing of them.

These are my current BOINC based stats, back in the past I also crunched numbers for the SETI@home Classic and for Grid.org's cancer and HPF1 programs.

Testing BOINC stats

Being ill right now, hence the lack of posting. Trying out something meant for message board signatures to see if it will work here at all. I've found a decent distributed computing app called BOINC and have my dual core AMD PC crunching data for a variety of projects...

Tax Reform and the Fairtax

Last night, my dad and I rolled into the driveway at a quarter of midnight after a round trip of over 250 miles. Now why would anyone be out on a Monday night on that kind of trip?

The answer is we were giving a presentation to a Farm Bureau board in a distant county on the Fairtax. Or I should say, I was assisting my father as he gave the presentation. Yes, it is more volunteer work that I'm writing about. There are important causes that need volunteers and they are the ones people don't think about first. These are civic minded causes, not charities, and are very important because they are about things that affect most of us, not just some of us. In this case, it is one of the two things you can't escape in life and it isn't death. It's the other one, taxes.

We are being taxed to death in this country, mainly because of non-compliance that adds up to the hundreds of billions of dollars and the federal taxes inflicted in every step of production of products. That's one of the big reasons all our factories are being moved overseas, other countries give massive tax breaks as well as have cheaper labor. Most of the taxes we pay are hidden from us, as companies pass their tax burdens to us in the retail price of products but even with that it is still too expensive to manufacture in the USA. Well, unless you are the Japanese, who have it even worse and are building more and more automotive plants in the Midwest. Anyway, we need to do something to simplify taxes and take the burdens off of the middle class and poor, but most of all make taxation completely transparent to the American people.

The best solution to this and the only one that really guarantees fairness is the national sales tax proposal called the Fairtax. Please check out Fairtax.org and especially their FAQ here. It will take some studying to understand it totally, but once you do you will most likely approve of it. Right now, 50% of the lobbyists in Washington, D.C. are there lobbying for tax exemptions and legislation to for companies or organizations who want tax breaks. This is how our Senators and Congressmen dispense favors and is a source of great power in the Legislative branch. Pork in earmarks and riders attached to bills often includes specially worded exemptions for specific corporations without actually naming the company. We get the Fairtax in and the 16th Amendment repealed and we'll see the biggest transfer of power from the federal government back to the people since the Bill of Rights was passed.

Musings on Volunteer Work

For some time now, I've been pondering how to get people more involved in helping others out through volunteer work. So far I've come up with nothing that actually works. Guilt, pressure, enthusiasm, begging -- none of them work. A wise man made a comment that caught my attention recently, "Two percent of the people do ninety percent of the work." That's a disturbing thing to think about, especially since it is very true from what I've seen. No wonder so many burn out after doing everything short of bleeding for a cause.

The problem is aggravated by the fact that the two percent in the area I live in are getting too old to do as much as they used to. There are very few, if any, younger people volunteering these days. By younger, I mean the under 60 crowd, not teenagers. The excuses I hear from that age group is that they don't have time, both spouses have to work just to make a living, etc. Some of these same people have no trouble finding time to golf, go to concerts, take multiple vacations a year, or spend time on other recreational activities. Most volunteer work wouldn't take that much time up a week, especially if we had enough volunteers.

I blame the rampant materialism of our time, this keeping up with the Jones is simply out of control. There is also a lot of money spent on expensive toys we really don't need, but hey they kill a lot of time, don't they? Selfishness is a way of life now, which is a worrisome sign of the times. How to overcome that, I wonder?

Looking back at past generations, I see the big break from charitable work beginning with one generation -- the Baby Boomers. It is no coincidence that they were spoiled rotten by parents who went without during the Great Depression, for it is the spoiled who tend to be the least altruistic. They were the first generation to be marketed heavily to from cradle onward, besieged by TV commercials at their most impressionable age but without the jaded cynicism of later generations to offset the influence. They are still the most voracious consumer generation known and soon will be hitting retirement age. But I don't see them helping others out then, the obsession with staying young and affluent runs too strong there.

Of course, there is a possibility they won't retire permanently, as Social Security will not be able to handle entitlements for the entire generation. Those at the end of the Boom will be in the same boat with all of us who came after, a boat with no Social Security lifesavers.

Perhaps I'm sounding too pessimistic about it all, but I suspect there will be some serious hardship for the USA in the not too distant future and that will change the equation. It is hardship that brings forth the best in us humans, not times of prosperity. As things such as regular long distance travel becomes expensive again, we'll see a rebirth of the concept of community. Often, very good things come out of very bad things and I think the pendulum will swing that way.

Of course, I may be too optimistic about that! But I've been a pessimist and I can say being an optimistic realist is a lot more fun.