Not sure I want to drag this thread back on topic but....

Rather than plucking figures like 10% out of nowhere, I probably should have used wikipedia as an example. They have 800,000 members and the last 3 week fund drive over Christmas raised 350,000 USD. I think they had 3 fund drives in the past year. They have quite a nice slogan: \'Give the gift of knowledge\' which you do whether you spend some time creating or editting articles to improve them or give money.


Anyway, the lack of pledges here has convinced me it was a bad idea. You have to persuade people to pledge, then there is the possibility that the needed amount is not reached and then there is the possibility that the person never realises it is time to pay up on the pledge. That is 3 possibilities of failing to get the money. It is better to just persuade people to give so that there is only one chance of failing to get the money.

I intend to pay my £100 despite the £10,000 in pledges not having been reached. I will now probably write a letter enclosing the cheque and hope to do so in such a way that the letter could be attached to a grant claim to show something like that there are lots of participants who are eager for the science outreach work and if a funder want to fund science outreach it is sensible for them to want to push on an open door rather than try to force science into closed minds.

(Not sure if that would be useful.)

My own inclination is that participants already contribute mightily via their volunteered flops - hitting them for money as well would feel slightly extortionate. [Though I\'m willing to be persuaded regarding the merits of the idea. :-)]

That is a nice gesture. (But I am not sure you are in a position to be able to afford such a nice gesture.)

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OU course ... my guess is that I would need to come to Oxford to attend? A big problem for those of us that have, ahem, issues with airplanes ... :)

Er no. The OU course is all distance learning - no centre to attend, no exam other than a home completed assessment. (I have forgotten whether the US is covered.)

Edit M Dzbor wrote:

..yeah, that\'s right:
1. this is a short course, and therefore cannot have too much balast created by things such as reliance on BBC...

2. as far as I know, there is no video planned, only the model and a selection of visualization packages introduced in this forum = most of the stuff direct from the Internet

3. OU\'s policy is to include everyone; this is certainly not limited to the UK students. As Alastair wrote, students from other countries often study with the OU - in case of S199 (this course) it should be even easier since there should not be a typical one-on-one tutorial support.

4. The envisaged modus operandi is to run it as a virtual tutorial group where people would have access to their tutor and could discuss their project etc.

5. Exactly from the same reason the course team opted for a single CMA (yet another marvelous OU acronym meaning \"computer marked assignment) at the end of the course.

6. Final exams are never delivered by snail mail, only intermediate assignment - and even those are slowly but surely moving to the electronic world.

Finally, whether the course will be available in Canada/US/rest of the world, depends partly on the partners the OU already has (or is able to acquire) in that specific region. Some places (e.g. Singapore or Sri Lanka) have closer links with many courses, others focus on a small subset (usually business courses).

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SOrt of the idea of what I had in mind is something along the order of this: An Introduction To The Science Behind Climateprediction.net.

Most of the material currently \"jumps\" right into the models and how they all are calculating the salinity of the water ...

The proposed article is obviously NOT COMPLETE!

But, it illustrates what I meant I think. I stuck it into the top of the template of the models so it will show up wherever the template is used and that also may not be what you guys would like.

Most importantly, I do not know if the stuff I said is even close to being right. But, it is more or less what *I* gather. But, a simple, non-technical start, with a gradual increase in the technical content.

What else should be there would include a \"work flow\" showing a model issue, the participants returns, how they are aggregated and evaluated, and then followed by the creation and issue of new models in the series. Followed by the modification to the model structure, like slab to sulfur, and so on ...

Can you see what I mean?

The articles being written are nice, but they are all about the in-depth science of the infividual test cycle, but not what the heck the project is DOING ... :)

Once we get past the introduction, THEN we lead into the details of each of the expiriments. Which writeups by the way are still missing what the heck we learned from the models and how we learned it. For example, the Slab models are done. Ok, cool, what did we learn? How did we learn it. If this is in published papers, then the cool thing would be to list the papers, AND to extract salient points in the Wiki as a summary.

For example, I remember seeing a graph with lines that curved up and to the right showing the basic divergeence of the models. Where that chart is I could not tell you, but, i recall that the explanation did not help me to understand the connection of what *I* did to that chart ...

I looked at the cost of the OC school and it looks to be over $200 US the only way I can find out for sure is to sign up and pay for it I guess ... but, again, all I want to do is to read the material, I don\'t want to get a degree (I already have enough for now, most disabled people don\'t need more than a masters ... :)).

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Most importantly, I do not know if the stuff I said is even close to being right. But, it is more or less what *I* gather.

Sorry Paul but I don\'t think it is close. What you have written is more appropriate for what the Hadley Centre that developed the model does.

My take on it is: CPDN is using the model (which is rather different from developing the model) to try to be able to produce a probability distribution function of future climate.

Have you read the <a href=\"http://boinc-doc.net/boinc-wiki/index.php?title=Ensemble\">Ensemble</a> page recently? If that is too technical perhaps the CPDN home page.

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A better link that I should have provided is
<a href=\"http://www.climateprediction.net/project.php\">Project - About</a>

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I\'ve had a go at a quick fix to Paul\'s <a href=\"http://boinc-doc.net/boinc-wiki/index.php?title=An_Introduction_To_The_Science_Behind_Climateprediction.net\">Introduction_To_The_Science page</a>.

As always, suggestions, improvements welcome. :)

I am a bit nervous when trying to write something like that because I may not be expert enough and may get some things subtly wrong.

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See my notes in the other Forum ...

But, I like what you did. A clean start and simple explanation... Ensemble is good to expand on the term as we should. Now we need to link into the other pieces ...

Also, for those looking on ... I am restructuring the glossaries ... so we will have the one big one, plus smaller ones ... will it make things easier to find? I don\'t know, but, all I can do is to provide as many ways to \"slice\" the pie as I can and hope it helps ...

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In case anyone is interested, for my donation I used the following forms (and I am sure that the money got through)

For UK donors:
http://www.development.ox.ac.uk/webimages/uk.pdf
and for UK taxpayers:
http://www.development.ox.ac.uk/webimages/giftdecl.pdf

For US donors:
http://www.development.ox.ac.uk/webimages/us.pdf
For Canadian donors:
http://www.development.ox.ac.uk/webimages/canad.pdf
For the rest of the world, please contact our Accountant, Genieve Boon on +44 (0) 1865 278111.

make sure you fill in climateprediction.net as the project you want to support.

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Went to the US link (thanks, Chris). Unlike the UK and Canadian forns, it is generic, for gifts to the University in general or a particular college. Nothing for a specific Department or project. (For that sort of thing, I donate to the two Universities from which I hold degrees. [Steered toward Scholarships, some part always goes for alumni parties...])

Even if one wrote something in the margins, the check still goes into one big pot.

I\'ll happily pledge the US$ equivalent of 100 Pounds -- and renew it annually. But only to support CPDN.

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There are contact details on the forms to ask any questions you want.

(The reason I am sure the money got through is because I received an email from Myles Allen. That applies to the UK development office - can\'t be sure about the US office.)

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Among hundreds of thousands (millions?), little doubt, I received an email from Arthur C. Clarke and Dan Werthimer soliciting funds to support SETI lest it go belly-up while on the cusp of bigger-n-better things.

One wonders, what with corporate sponsors... Nonetheless, cheeky, compared the the CPDN project.


Edit: For money, I\'ll get an asterisk next to my name on their list!

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"We have met the enemy and he is us." -- Pogo
Greetings from coastal Washington state, the scenic US Pacific Northwest.