Thanks for calling in to the meeting. Here are some minutes
(from my memory; I hope I haven't missed anything.)
Kate.
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-- Art McDonald reported on the status of SNO: the news sounds extremely
good. The connector breakdown problem was identified as having to do
with too-highly-degassed water and flushing with nitrogen has greatly
diminished it. Water fill is very nearly completed, and within a week
they'll be able to start full supernova studies. They expect to be able
to contribute real alarms within some months.
-- LVD, MACRO and Super-K are all online now (status more or less the
same as previously reported), sending automated alarms. There's not yet
any actual alert to astronomers.
-- Also, there's no direction information as yet (either individual
experiment or triangulation). It's not yet decided whether the
experiments will eventually send their individual direction information
via the network.
-- Alex Murphy reported on a possible collaboration between MINOS and
OMNIS, to use the MINOS far detector as the active mass for neutron
detection. They're going to have meeting in early May. Stay tuned.
-- We discussed the privacy agreement. Everyone more or less agrees
with the general format. Art M. suggested that we refine the wording to
make people more comfortable, emphasizing the reasons for wanting
privacy (people don't want their data analyzed), and making more
explicit prohibitions. We should make it into a document (some kind of
memorandum of understanding) that we can present to our collaborations
to be blessed. Mark V. suggested that subgroup members should sign a
physical piece of paper stating that they agree to the privacy
conditions.
-- We discussed the new organization on kaboom: working, repository and
real alarm areas, and passwords for the working and web areas were
dispensed. Passwords will be changed regularly. Everybody is OK with
using cvs as a code development sharing tool. I'll be posting info on
the working group page about working with cvs later today (along with
more code docs).
-- We went through the job list on the web pages. Several people expressed
interest in helping out. Some notes on the individual items (and issues
that came up while discussing them):
* Secure sockets: should be straightforward.
* PGP signing of alarm messages: straightforward to implement.
Art M brought up: we ought to make sure that astronomers will be happy
with the credibility of our alarms; this includes security (which is
important), but goes beyond that to include general reliability.
Perhaps we should seek some kind of formal acceptance by the
astronomical community, after a series of tests and perhaps some kind of
review procedure? The AAS meeting may be a good venue (organization
for sessions for the January meeting is happening now.)
* Alarm retraction: straightforward to implement. May need some work
on the part of the individual experiments to incorporate into the
individual alarm systems. Art M. pointed out that this means that we
have a second level of human-checked alarm; astronomers may opt to wait
for confirmation. This is probably inevitable.
* Multiple servers: straightforward to implement. We can have multiple
servers either for 1. extra security check for alarms, or 2. redundancy
in case a server is down (but not both? Should it be an AND or an OR?).
* Anti-coincidence and consistency check: slightly tricky to implement,
but do-able. An important question is: how do we define our coincidence
criterion? Right now, the configuration is simple: 3 experiments, no
consistency check, 2/3 coincidence for alarms. But what about, say, 4
experiments, which get pinged for alive-or-dead. Do we require all
experiments which say they are live to have a consistent signal? 3/4?
To refine our coincidence criteria, we may need a lot more
inter-experiment discussion. But, this is really a second-order
problem; to first order all experiments (LVD, SNO, MACRO and Super-K)
have the same sensitivity in terms of numbers of supernova candidate
stars. In any case, there's no reason not to go ahead and do the
technical implementation of the post-coincidence experiment query.
Another point: for any individual experiment the "I am alive" criterion
must mean "I would have been sensitive to a signal in the Galaxy during
the time period". This is the responsibility of the individual
experiments, and may be some work (but then so is an online monitor).
* We need to think about how to do the timing tests; it's not
completely obvious how to proceed. In principle, if experiments have
GPS or equivalent it should "just work". But it's not clear how to test
the whole system, starting from light in the detectors. Art M. knows an
atomic clock expert who may be able to lend experience; others may also
have thought about this problem.
* Art M. suggested that we need a generally well-defined test plan.
* Mark V. will implement some preliminary triangulation code.
* We also ought to think about keeping track of how good network
connections are, over the next year or so, to decide if we need to
upgrade the system to dedicated phone lines.
-- We all agree that SNEWS is OK for our name. Let's make it official.
-- Preliminary time of next working group meeting: May 26, 10 am EDT.
SNO and Super-K both have collaboration meetings in early June and it
would be a good thing to have a formal privacy agreement by then. Since
teleconference is a difficult format for non-native-English speakers, let's
make the effort to have a videoconference next time.