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I've taken the liberty of setting up an official folding@home team for Soylent News. In case you aren't familiar with folding@home, it's a distributed computing project that simulates protein folding in an attempt to better understand diseases such as Alzheimer's and Huntington's.
There is more information on the project here, which explains it much better than I could.
Clients are available for Linux, OSX, and even Windows (if you swing that way), so come join our botnet!
That Other Site's team is ranked at 1817, so we've got some catching up to do.
On a personal note, my Dad carries the gene markers for Huntington's disease, and will eventually succumb to it. Research like this is very helpful for understanding, and hopefully developing treatments for it.
tl;dr Our Soylent News team ID is 230319
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Friday February 12 2016, @05:59PM
that's not how it works, because scientific software can be compared with multiple data sources.
They exploit the fluffy "screensaver supercomputer" meme, to lower their research costs.
Perhaps, the funding agencies should pro-rate their grants for all the free computer time they are getting?
Pros:
Raising the profile of the use of biophysics to solve complex clinical problems
Cons:
Not raising the actual intellectual level by keeping the "how" secret and focusing on the "how much time can YOU donate?".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 12 2016, @07:26PM
Unfortunately in this case it is about 'cred'. So people would cheat with points. I have seen people cheat over less.
Once the project is done they should release the source so it can be checked and replicated though.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 12 2016, @07:45PM
If people can "cheat" merely because they can see and modify the source code, either your software is poorly designed or having it be proprietary is not going to help one bit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 14 2016, @08:51PM
all software is poorly designed
probably something to do with humans being involved in the process, or something
there might be some 'hello world' implementation that could be considered well designed, but then it probably runs on an operating system that's poorly designed