Hi,

UCT : malariacontrol.net is a test project based in Cape Town which is run in collaboration with MalariaControl.net in Switzerland. The project is issuing work again after a long period of inactivity.

Unfortunately the sys admin for this project has not provided any further information on whether this will be short lived or not ... and they don't have a great history of communicating with their volunteers.

There was talk last year that they planned to release a new application called AfricaMap which would map human settlements, structures and roads using UNOSAT satellite imagery.

Anyone interested can look here ... http://boinc.cs.uct.ac.za/malaria/

Cheers,
Neil.

Hi Folks,

After another long period of inactivity there is work flowing at this project again. Not sure for how long, as the project admins still remain strangely quite or absent.

Cheers,
Neil.

Hi Neil

Thanks for the heads-up. I went used the "Attach to Project" in BOINC Manager and ended up attached to:
http://www.malariacontrol.net/

I read the message http://www.malariacontrol.net/forum_thread.php?id=1007 and realised that this did not gel with your note about lack of info from the admins.

I also noted that the orange theme colour is not the blue I saw in your link.

Lo and behold, I found that they are actually different projects. It seems they run in collaboration with each other but the distinction between the two is still somewhat unclear. I have in fact ended up joining both. I note you also crunch for both. The Team South Africa membership in the Swiss project is quite good at 43 members, whilst only 5 members have joined the team in the UCT project.

I'll be doing some searching to try and find out why there are two projects doing what seems to be exactly the same work.

It seems that the UCT project is to test the applications for use by the Swiss project. To quote from the UCT site:

"As for the work being done here - it is testing, however, we are going to be doing validation for the real project in Switzerland. So the results are not simply discarded - think of them as a sort of triple check"

See this post:
http://boinc.cs.uct.ac.za/malaria/forum_thread.php?id=12&nowrap=true#71

It seems that the UCT site has gone down.

In the meantime, I've managed to asertain here that the recent burst of work was probably a waste of time!

Oh well, let's hope the AfricaMap project is launched soon.