Your minutes are very timely and complete.
May I suggest two changes. Whereas the regassing of the water with nitrogen has
greatly diminished the breakdown problems, and we will start running with the
full detector this week, what we will be doing for the first while will be
studying the detector properties, including the stability of data rates. I
suggest that your words "start full supernova studies" should be replaced with
"begin to study the detector properties in preparation for supernova detection
work."
Secondly, it is Clarence Virtue who knows the atomic clock expert and will be
investigating the timing synchronization questions with him.
I thought that the phone call was very well organized and informative. Thanks to
you and all others responsible for pushing forward on this initiative.
Art
On Wed, 28 Apr 1999, Kate Scholberg wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Thanks for calling in to the meeting. Here are some minutes
> (from my memory; I hope I haven't missed anything.)
>
> Kate.
>
> ============================================================
>
> -- 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.
>
>