A really interesting TED talk given by Luis von Ahn von Ahn Massive Collaboration piqued my interest while watching it the other day. He talked about some exciting projects that can be done through massive collaboration on the net. I recommend that you watch but even so I'll say that he talked specifically about two such projects: helping to digitize older manuscripts through those jumbled words we have to input to establish on-line security and using free on-line language instruction to translate, for example, all of Wikipedia into Spanish. Very cool stuff!
The thing about those projects that left me wanting something more was that they are simply recasting the past--in a cool and useful way, but it's all still the past. What can be done for free on a massive collaboration basis that benefits our future? BOINC.
More after the fleur de Kos
No doubt many of you know of BOINC. For those who don't here goes from the opening paragraph on Wikipedia about the site:
The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) is an open source middleware system for volunteer and grid computing. It was originally developed to support the SETI@home project before it became useful as a platform for other distributed applications in areas as diverse as mathematics, medicine, molecular biology, climatology, and astrophysics. The intent of BOINC is to make it possible for researchers to tap into the enormous processing power of personal computers around the world
From that site you can pick from a long list of projects that will run on your computer without interfering with its operations and continuously, as long as your computer is turned on. The project recommences automatically after a shut-down.
The Kos community is large and no doubt many of us have a personal computer that can be added to this massive collaboration effort. I'm asking you to sign up. You can help cure cancer, AIDS, ALS, Alzheimers, decrypt Enigma messages from WWII, work on quantum mechanics, prime number theory etc etc etc. The beauty is that you don't have to know anything about the project for which you sign up, you don't have to do anything more and the cost is insignificant (the cost of electricity used by keeping your computer on) compared to the benefit that could be achieved (I'm passing on defending the benefits to be derived from the Sudoku project). Consider if one thousand Kos members sign up and cancer treatments are advanced by even a few months how many people will live for how much longer. Consider if ten thousand Kos members sign up....
Everyone here can help everyone in the world. No politics, no differing opinions just plugging into that part of ourselves that wants to help.