A Message From The Director
7/9/2006
I would like to begin by thanking all of you for your continuing
support of Craig Research Labs!
2005 was a turbulent year for the Lab and for myself. As many
of you know, I was scheduled to leave in the last week of July
2005 to walk across the USA to raise money for cancer research
at The
Sloan-Kettering Institute. Unfortunately, the "Cancer
Walk USA" project was put on hold due to unforeseen differences
between Craig Research Labs and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.
I had spent the previous three years fundraising for Sloan-Kettering,
and I had also spent two years training for the project, walking
up to 12 miles a day. I was definitely ready to go and I did
not abort the project willingly...however, complex endeavors
involving multiple partners require a great deal of planning
and mutual trust, and in the end I was forced to accept the fact
that Sloan-Kettering simply did not believe in the project's
goals as much as I did and that they were unwilling to provide
the support that I felt the project deserved. Therefore I could
not in good conscience commit myself and all of my personal resources
(as well as put my friends and family through unnecessary worry
and hardship) to undertake this highly demanding two year long
project on Sloan-Kettering's behalf. However, our disagreements
were entirely organizational in nature; I still believe that
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center is a first rate cancer
hospital and scientific research organization and that it is
very deserving of your donation dollars, should you choose to
give them. If I were to be diagnosed with cancer it would be
the first place I would go to seek treatment. You can donate
to MSKCC by clicking here.
Is the Cancer Walk USA story over? Not quite. The loss of
the project was a great disappointment to me, and the walk still
feels very much like unfinished business -- so in the future
I will seek to revive the idea with a new charity partner. In
the meantime, the Craig Research Labs "Click to Cure Cancer" webpage continues
to raise money to fund cancer research. Please stop by daily
and click. :)
Now on to other business. Over the past year or two, the core
research activity of Craig Research Labs (distributed computing
on the web) has changed and evolved. Distributed computing is
at the heart of this organization; it's what I founded the company
to do. Here's our latest news:
Stanford University's Folding@home project is up to version
5, and UC Berkeley's SETI@home has migrated to the BOINC platform
(Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing). BOINC allows
users to participate in many other valuable science projects
besides SETI, and I am currently looking into what this means
for the Lab and our future research activities (there may be
new opportunities for us here). In the meantime, I am VERY PLEASED
to announce that as of this writing, our SETI@home team has crunched
20,700.43 work units, and our Folding@home team has achieved
a whopping score of 171,328! (I never even thought we would make
it past 50,000 LOL!) Our team of volunteers now numbers more
than thirty individuals around the globe who are working diligently
to help push these projects forward. A big congratulation and
round of applause to everyone!!! If you are not yet a member
of one of our teams, please click here.
Hopefully I will have more good news for you soon.
Douglas Craig
Director
Craig Research Labs
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