US-CMS tutorials prepare collaborators for taking data

Anyone from a graduate student to a senior physicist can feel overwhelmed when starting on an experiment as large as CMS. To help ease that feeling, the LHC Physics Center recently created a CMS starter kit. After beta testing within the LPC, the starter kit went live earlier this month at the second JTerm workshop at Fermilab.

The JTerm, or January Term, workshop took place in between school semesters when graduate students and postdocs had their winter break. The LPC asked US CMS members to send their graduate students and postdocs to the three-day workshop, and many senior scientists on CMS also participated. "We hope that the tutorials will get you up to speed quickly and help you get started on your analysis," Fermilab's Dan Green, LPC co-coordinator told attendees.

The workshop started with a general overview of the detector, progressed to software tutorials and then culminated with the release of the CMS starter kit. Essentially a physics tool kit, the starter kit provides collaborators with a set of clean code that lets them get started right away. "Our goal is to reduce frustration," said Sal Rappoccio, a postdoc at Johns Hopkins University who helped create the starter kit. "We want someone with zero experience to be able to use the kit and generate a reasonable plot in a couple of hours."

Without a starter kit, it could take a new user several weeks to generate a single plot. "You get this vast flux of information when you are first getting started," Rappoccio said. "It is very frustrating to not know what to do with it."

So far, the kit has received positive reviews. "The starter kit is really necessary," said Malina Kim, a graduate student at the University of Maryland. "It gets you started with things that you need and then lets you add to it."

--Elizabeth Clements

Wide-eyed looks at Fermilab

From Daily Herald,
Jan. 28, 2008

Batavia accelerator laboratory opens doors to families

When Mike Hickey of Geneva decided he would take his 9-year-old daughter and her friends to Fermilab for an afternoon of educational science demonstrations, the reaction was less than stellar.

"They weren't real enthusiastic right off the bat, now that we're here they're really enjoying it," Hickey said. "The games have captured their attention and imagination."

Like Hickey, many of the people who attended Sunday's annual family open house were visiting Fermilab for the first time, as they learned about magnets, gravity, light and all things science with the laboratory's staff members.

In the sunlight-filled atrium of Fermilab's towering Wilson Hall, parents watched as their wide-eyed children performed simple science experiments.

Read more

Putting science in young hands

From Kane County Chronicle,
Jan. 28, 2008

A tangle of plastic filaments floated over the piece of PVC pipe held by Mary Hawthorne. The demonstration was one of the activities that children could participate in Sunday at Fermilab's annual Family Open House. The Fermilab Family Open House has been held for four years at the Wilson Hall building, coordinator Karen Bass said.

"The idea is for kids to experience some of the science principals, to explore," Bass said.

The event featured tours, hands-on activities, such as magnets, and a cryogenics show by Mr. Freeze, Jerry Zimmerman.

Batavia resident Sandy Baker brought her two grandchildren, Rachel Maldonado, 4, and Hunter Hecklinger, 3, to the event. Baker had never been to Fermilab.

"I didn't know what Fermilab was," Baker said. "They've never experienced this."

Read more