“”Unfortunately it says a lot about people who are theoretically educating our children.”
Dave Farber, Professor of computer science and public policy in the school of computer science at Carnegie Mellon

A story out of Arizona has SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) experts “up in arms” over a school district superintendent’s comments. The story: a former worker fired after the school district discovered he’d been running SETI’s Home program on the school’s 5,000 computers for the past ten years, at a cost to the school of over $1 million.

The story began with a small AP article Space alien search costs school worker his job. In the article the AP reporter stated a “former Arizona school district employee” was accused of using school computers “in an experiment to find space aliens”, costing the worker his job and the school district “more than $1 million”.

Schools officials say Brad Niesluchowski, who was Higley Unified School District’s information technology director, downloaded free software on district computers in 2000.

The program, known as SETI(at)home, uses Internet-connected computers worldwide to analyze radio telescope data in an experiment to find extraterrestrial intelligence.

But Superintendent Denise Birdwell said that the program bogged down the district’s system and interfered with technology use in classrooms.

This story was intriguing, as in how could “free software” wind up costing a school district “more than $1 million” especially in lieu of the fact that school districts have faced huge money crunches for quite some time. Searching for more info I discovered an article published by PC World two days before the rather curt AP piece.

PC World’s article had more information, while its headline, Uproar Over E.T. Hunter Misplaced, SETI@home Founder Says, was intriguing.

According to PC World journalist Nancy Gohring, experts in the field of SETI research, David Gedye of Microsoft Live Labs and founder of SETI, David Anderson, director of the SETI@home project, and Dave Farber, professor of computer science and public policy in the school of computer science at Carnegie Mellon were upset at the comments made by school superintendent investigating Niesluchowski. Comments including the amount of money Niesluchowski’s unauthorized SETI work purportedly cost the school district, and, Birdwell’s “We support educational research and we certainly would have supported cancer research; however, as an educational institution we cannot support the search of E.T.” comment.

According to the experts, Birdwell’s comments show Birdwell “doesn’t understand how SETI technology works”, that the project is “well-respected”, and, that Birdwell’s “estimates” on the amount of money Niesluchowski “cost” the school district are “over-inflated”.

According to a Las Vegas FOX News report, Niesluchowski, a former technology supervisor, lost his job after he “hijacked” the districts 5,000 computers using the University of California-Berkeley SETI Home Program to to hunt for “extraterrestrials”. FOX News showed part of Birdwell’s press conference where Birdwell made the “cancer research” quote and reported that Birdwell claimed the software program bogged down computers, added to utility fees, and cost the district money for computer “replacement parts” to the tune of over a $1 million and that Niesluchowski’s E.T. search had been running on school computers since he was hired ten years ago.

While Birdwell didn’t respond to Gohring’s request for a comment Gorhing did report on how “much” the experts estimated the “true cost” of running the SETI programs on the school district’s computers:

-”If the school district had 2,000 computers left on — with or without the SETI@home software — for 10 years all day every day, the cost of electricity could come out to close to $1 million”,

-”If you configure the software to compute in the background while you’re using the computer, and configure your computer to go into a low-power mode when you’re not using it, the cost is something like $1/month,” Anderson said.”

-”One news report said that the district had to replace the computer processors due to their 24-hour use, but experts say that using a computer all day is actually easier on the processor.”

-”If the district can remotely remove the program, it could take one minute to uninstall the software on all the computers at once, Anderson said. However, if a worker must visit each machine to uninstall the software and that process takes a minute or two for each machine, the process could take some time.”

Gohring has more on the battle between the “educator” Birdwell and the experts, and, people who have run unauthorized SETI Home programs at work.

By LBG

Image – ET Phone Home