Bingo thanks to Wikipedia - JJ Thompson awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics on 15th August 1906 for his discovery of the electron.

I'll add more by edits to this one if I find them and anyone shows any interest in this suggestion.

Some good ideas here, both for personal recruitment and mass recruitment.

The thing with the results we get is they don't lend themselves to mass media. The papers are hard to get hold of, and harder to understand. I think we'll have to let the project scientists do most of the media presentation - they deserve the fame, after all :-D

World AIDS Day was a big hit last December. We missed out on World Cancer Day. It would have been a stretch, anyway, without a "single cause" cancer project.

Turns out that most diseases have a "day". We can benefit from that, particularly by angling for exposure with people close to these diseases for one reason or another.

I couldn't agree more - but how about mainstream TV news too? Might have to squeeze it into the 30-seconds of "other news" at the end ofthe bulletin "50,000 years of computing time has been donated by people all over the world to help fight AIDS. Bill Smith reports how you can help double that in 2 years..... It costs you nothing, but might just save ...."

As the rest of your mail suggests: we 're looking for a big institutional retailer to pay for a campaign (backed by a celebrity name?) to get people to load it onto their home PCs. (I hate to think what their liability insurer's advice might be. This fear is not confined to the general public, and has a rational basis given the scale of the virus problem)

Another target would be large companies to install it on all their in-house PCs. I work for a very large company that must have thousands of networked PCs. However .. many of you in a similar position will know the problem that we need to overcome: to convince the IT heads of these companies to accept that there is no security risk or bandwidth-clogger. (non-indigenous screensavers are banned for this very reason)

(So we're back to the geeks..) Does anyone know where the technical specs/ guarantees are that will convince such a constituency? Its not that these same people wouldn't be prepared to risk running it at home -they might be less willing to stake their career on it!

(My company still running windows 2000, but will be upgrading to .. I think its called Vista when it comes out)

That's another GREAT angle. As soon as I read your idea I called our local TV station's news desk and pitched the idea. Probably the person I talked to doesn't make the decisions but it sounded somewhat positive. He asked if I would be willing to let a cam crew and reporter come to my home and do a story!! Little stories like that sell ideas too... like... "here's your average Joe, he's no computer expert but he's contributing and so can you, here's the URL that tells you how, etc."



Big names and big money can move mountains. If I was WCG I would DEFINITELY be calling big celebrity names because those people can influence millions and set trends with just a few words spoken at the right time. Imagine... Shakira does 1 set with the WCG URL pasted just above her belly button. Sean Penn hires a boat and ... nah, don't call Sean.




I ran into that problem at my job too. It's that old "if nobody moves then nobody gets hurt" attitude. So I went around the problem and talked directly to the guy that tells the IT guys what to do. He had never heard of grid computing but after I pitched it to him he wants it and it's going to happen. I don't know what the scene is like in your area these days but here, when you take your customers for lunch, it's nice if you can tell them you're contributing back to the community in a meaningful way and doing something innovative rather than just signing a cheque to some charity.



People I have turned on to WCG always ask about the risks. Frequently, the first picture newbies get is that the grid means thousands of computers talking directly to each other. When I explain to them that their computer talks only to servers in the custody of knowledgeable professionals they relax a bit and open up a little to the concept. Then I tell them that if they surf the net a lot then their computer talks with hundreds of servers run by people whose credentials and intentions are at best uncertain. Then I ask them how often they've actually been infected with a virus and the response from those who use virus protection is usually like, "well, I got one once but my virus protection caught it right away and no damage was done". Then they relax a little more.

Another fear newbies have is that WCG will send them thousands of executables, any one of which could be a virus. I counter that with the fact that they'll get only a few executables from WCG and that the download files will be data for the executables to crunch. Then they see they're in pretty safe hands with WCG.

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