Meeting Notes for 22 March

Present: Sudha, Mark, Marge, Ken, Kevin, Liz, Joel

Drupal

Kevin presented a beta homepage with theme and content: Staging Home Page. Lots of productive discussion ensued:

• Sudha and Joel have (or are close to having) edit access to the site; they and any other developers should start filling in content on the home page.
• XM wants to experiment with the logo more and add more views
• Choice of "splash" images at the top is still problematic. We want to showcase teachers and students as much as physics.
  • Images need to be high-definition, professional quality, and 1200x450px (height is important) with a 90px "margin" at the top that the navigation bar might obscure
  • Ken suggests we can look for good photos from the ND College of Science archive and from QuarkNet centers like BNL (Helio) and Riverside. Liz suggests Reidar Hahn might have some good ones from Fermilab. Some of the teachers might also have some, and we can take some at ND over the summer when teachers and students are in.
  • The images might also be too big. Sudha suggests using two images per "slide" to give ourselves more options for usable photos and potentially more visual interest.
  • Now that we can make edits, Kevin encourages us to experiment with images and sizing, though he recommends not reducing the size too much more.
• We identified a few problems with the video; Marge will ask Jim to rework a few things
  • The introductory frame shows the Lederman Science Center, which has nothing to do with QuarkNet. Marge identified a few frames later in the video that might make better "postcard" frames.
  • It shouldn't provide "Fermilab Education" as a display title.
  • We're not sure about the "You may also like..." videos at the end, which is something YouTube does automatically.
• We should also look for images for the Opportunity/Players/Questions tiles
• Liz points out that current news items, like the things we discuss during these teleconferences (the Cosmic eclipse project, Masterclasses, etc.), would be a great thing to add to the site. Keeping things updated is always a problem, however. Tom McCauley did create a Twitter handle for QuarkNet - it's largely unused at the moment but could be embedded in the page.

Cosmic

• Mark reports a successful International Muon Week last week (March 13-17). We had 47 registered sites across 13 countries, with 12 datasets already analyzed and posted. He has 4 follow-up video conferences scheduled this week.
• Nathan Unterman at Glenbrook North High School is coordinating efforts to measure muon flux during August's upcoming solar eclipse. This will involve tracking the eclipse as it happens and measuring flux from both the direction of the sun and away from the sun simultaneously. They'll need a specialized software tool for analyzing rates and combinations of detectors as a function of time. Mark thinks the best way is to adapt Shower Analysis output. Longer-term, there are flux and detector logic tasks for Joel. A dataset like this has never been taken before, so the results are potentially publishable.
• Pressure correction: Mark and Sudha are working on using data from blessing plots exported to Excel.
• Joel is working with the Cracow group to deliver CR data. They have a sample .thresh file; we should make sure that they're able to recreate the necessary shower analysis using it before attempting a large-scale transfer of data.

CIMA/iSpy

Ken wants to get started on a feature request/design document for the next upgrade to CIMA and iSpy, with input from users and fellows. There's a good starting point on the CIMA page.

-- Main.JoelG - 2017-03-22

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