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World Community Grid Forums
Category: Completed Research
Forum: Help Conquer Cancer
Thread: Really upset with HCC |
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 61
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johncmacalister2010@gmail.com
Veteran Cruncher Canada Joined: Nov 16, 2010 Post Count: 799 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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As an extremely active member of HCC, it's time for me to vent. After years of working on HCC, it seems HCC is shutting down. While I am happy that HCC seemed to have reached their mission, HCC didn't even have the common decency to send out an email 30-60 days prior stating so...or stating in LAYMEN'S terms, how the HCC worked, what's next, and when. Instead, I wake up to find numerous machines with nothing to do and entries in the Messages area of BOINC that there are no more work units. After visiting the HCC News area of the website, I'm littered with garbledy gook phrases and sentences that only people with a PhD in Biology can understand. I'm also told that "at a later date" a new project will come about to continue to find a cure. When the heck is "at a later date"?! 2014? 2018?! Seriously! I'm mad. Really mad! Why do projects like HCC treat their volunteers this way?! They (such as Christina in another thread) post very quick and bland messages every few months on the forum, give us laymen-folk 0 information on the progress, and then just shut down after receiving millions of dollars' worth of computing power. It adds up to nothing more than a "Thanks! Cya!" I want to find a cure for cancer. But the way HCC handled their shutdown/next wave of research is exactly the biggest reason why WCG only has a few hundred thousand active computers after almost 10 years of existence. Think about it...850 million users on Facebook in only a few years, yet WCG can't even get .01% of Facebook's volume...and I would argue that EVERYONE wants to find a cure for cancer. So now what do I do in my quest to solve cancer? WCG offers only an intermittent project. Any of you know of cancer projects elsewhere? Try GPUGrid for cancer research....  crunching, crunching, crunching. AMD Ryzen 5 2600 6-core Processor with Windows 11 64 Pro. AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 8-Core Processor with Windows 11 64 Pro (part time)  |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
HCC should have been leveraging email every Quarter or so. Whenever someone uses the word leverage as a verb, 10 kittens die. Why not just say "sending"? I get enough of this corporate nonsense at work!  In other respects though, I think the ericinboston raises some good points. Emailing out updates is cheap and easy to do (although there is a risk of spamming your members with updates), and in a project for which many went out and bought new GPUs so they could contribute, maybe the end of the work could have been handled a bit better. And despite being a scientist by trade (physicist), I get lost within my own field of study, let alone biology... So yes, non-technical summaries are always nice. [Edit 3 times, last edit by Former Member at May 8, 2013 7:44:19 AM] |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
I certainly appreciate reading what Fraz said, in particular regarding the non-technical summaries to give one a good overview of where things are and where they are going.
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twilyth
Master Cruncher US Joined: Mar 30, 2007 Post Count: 2130 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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I think quite a few people here are still missing my points: 1)I'm not upset at a single scientist or someone on HCC. I'm upset with the PROJECT in how they update us (or lack) with information/news. I was pretty clear on some methods they could use to improve that communication...as well as finding a staff member to create non-mumbo jumbo news updates. 2)Let's compare the "mumbo jumbo" vs. laymen in an example. I sell enterprise software for a career. When I am in a sales cycle, I am not preaching to CEOs, VPs, Department Managers, and Business Analysts about Xeon chips and multi-cores and J2EE and web servers and AIX vs. Windows and Java plugins and fiber channel disk, and firewalls and ipv6 and load balancers and .NET and open ports and Windows Services and security models, etc. I *MAY* and will speak that language to an IT staff at the prospect/customer I am trying to sell my software to. I read the project summary that is linked from the WCG Reasearch tab for Active Projects. It goes like this: Project Status and Findings: Information about this project is provided on the web pages below and by the project scientists on the Help Conquer Cancer website. For the latest status report, please go to the Help Conquer Cancer status report. To comment or ask questions about this project, please submit a post in the Help Conquer Cancer forum. MissionThe mission of Help Conquer Cancer is to improve the results of protein X-ray crystallography, which helps researchers not only annotate unknown parts of the human proteome, but importantly improves their understanding of cancer initiation, progression and treatment. SignificanceIn order to significantly impact the understanding of cancer and its treatment, novel therapeutic approaches capable of targeting metastatic disease (or cancers spreading to other parts of the body) must not only be discovered, but also diagnostic markers (or indicators of the disease), which can detect early stage disease, must be identified. Researchers have been able to make important discoveries when studying multiple human cancers, even when they have limited or no information at all about the involved proteins. However, to better understand and treat cancer, it is important for scientists to discover novel proteins involved in cancer, and their structure and function. Scientists are especially interested in proteins that may have a functional relationship with cancer. These are proteins that are either over-expressed or repressed in cancers, or proteins that have been modified or mutated in ways that result in structural changes to them. Improving X-ray crystallography will enable researchers to determine the structure of many cancer-related proteins faster. This will lead to improving our understanding of the function of these proteins and enable potential pharmaceutical interventions to treat this deadly disease. I also followed the links which gave nothing in additional explanation. As it happens, I have some understanding of what X-ray crystallography is. It allows you to determine the 3d topology or shape of a protein. This is critical since proteins often act as receptors and ligands - essentially locks and keys. So the ligand has to fit into and bind with the receptor in order to function. There are other factors as well such as electrical charge, but shape is generally critical - hence the need for things like x-ray crystallography. But nowhere is that explained. Neither is any effort made to explain why certain proteins being over or under expressed is an issue - and on and on. It's not a difficult thing to do as I've just demonstrated. Yes, some oversimplification may be required and some perhaps overly cutesy analogies, but I seriously doubt anyone is going to hold that against you.   |
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branjo
Master Cruncher Slovakia Joined: Jun 29, 2012 Post Count: 1892 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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HCC should have been leveraging email every Quarter or so. Whenever someone uses the word leverage as a verb, 10 kittens die. Why not just say "sending"? I get enough of this corporate nonsense at work! In other respects though, I think the ericinboston raises some good points. Emailing out updates is cheap and easy to do (although there is a risk of spamming your members with updates), and in a project for which many went out and bought new GPUs so they could contribute, maybe the end of the work could have been handled a bit better. And despite being a scientist by trade (physicist), I get lost within my own field of study, let alone biology... So yes, non-technical summaries are always nice. I still believe there are (were) enough information for people who care about the project(s). For people like ericinboston any info will not be sufficient and they will just come everywhere around just to complain about others...  Crunching@Home since January 13 2000. Shrubbing@Home since January 5 2006  [Edit 1 times, last edit by branjo at May 8, 2013 7:58:34 PM] |
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Movieman
Veteran Cruncher Joined: Sep 9, 2006 Post Count: 1042 Status: Offline |
ericinboston;
----------------------------------------I, like you, have always concentrated on the Cancer apps. I follow the forums, not daily, but at least weekly and I was also surprised when the cpu wu finished but lets not see the glass as half empty but as half full. I've been on this since 2006 and it brought a smile to my heart to see the huge effect that GPU work had. I've switched to the AIDS project and let is bring to that the enthusiam we brought to the HCC project. Think of this as chipping away at a huge wall in front of us piece by piece with the goal of knocking that wall down flat.. All my best to you.  [Edit 1 times, last edit by Movieman at May 8, 2013 7:21:57 PM] |
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fablefox
Senior Cruncher Joined: May 31, 2010 Post Count: 168 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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- I agree with what Eric Boston said.
----------------------------------------- WCG need to use database capabilities and emails more often. - WCG need to 'business intelligence' friendly. If not real time, at least by weekly basis. They should look at kiva.org for example (which able to do this real time). - WCG need a customer facing portal (maybe wcgnews.org) that is gamers (those with beef up pc) and normal users (social) friendly. It is sad if overall picture is served with a picture (ha ha pun!) on a picture sharing site. This is what I save as a link to on my PIM and check on weekend basis. - While there is no problem scientist releasing science paper (since research on WCG have to be open) there should also version for the everyday people, in the viewpoint of or framing of WCG/grip computing instead of chemicals and proteins. The technical info to CIO/CTO and problem solving to CEO was a nice example done by ericboston. My 2 cent. |
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fablefox
Senior Cruncher Joined: May 31, 2010 Post Count: 168 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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jhindo
Former World Community Grid Admin Joined: Aug 25, 2009 Post Count: 250 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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ericinboston you raise good and interesting points and I'd to address a few of these if I may..
(1) Notification method We've have a high threshold of what we communicate over email as we don't want to litter people's inboxes. Therefore an announcement that a project is ending is typically contained within the forums. But maybe we need to rethink that. You feel that such information is buried in the forums and you shouldn't be expected to sift through the forums on a regular basis. That's a fair comment. We're starting to think about our communication strategy: what to notify members about and how to communicate those notifications. So I'll certainly take your feedback into account. I'm curious though as to why you it's so important for you to hear that a project is ending. Is it to make sure you get to the next badge level, or do you feel like in this case, the project is wrapping up without you understanding why it's finishing, what it's achieved and hopes to achieve? If it's the latter, rest assured this isn't the last you've heard of the HCC team! (2) Hard to understand project updates I take your comment about technical project updates seriously. We heard that several times in the volunteer study we recently conducted. The challenge is how to explain a complex and lengthy scientific process in terms that you and I can understand. We are thinking about how we can improve this and we're challenging our researchers to provide laymen summaries along with what you call 'mumbo jumbo' :) I'll be honest though, this is no easy task and may take some time and a lot of trial and error to get it right, so please bear with us! As always, appreciate everyone's honest input. |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
To me the option of providing information by using the 'Notice' facility in BOINC Manager is by far the best solution. I am one of those who does not like being inundated with e-mails and there is always the danger of them being filtered out as being spam, whereas the Notice stays 'available' until it has been read.......
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