Friday Flyer - March 13, 2015

Spotlight on Tom McCauley:

You are at your QuarkNet center for a CMS masterclass. As the students busily pour through electrons and muons, W's, Z's, and more, perhaps you wonder who prepared such a rich dataset for them to use. The answer is Tom McCauley, our QuarkNet colleague at CERN. Tom, a particle physicist with his Ph.D. from Northeastern University, went from being a researcher and software developer at Fermilab to working at CERN for both CMS and QuarkNet. A big focus for Tom has been event displays; he is currently working on a new, more powerful version of the iSpy-online event display that we use for masterclasses and the CMS e-Lab. Two other of Tom's important projects are CMS Open Data and improvements to the CMS e-Lab. Tom lives in Geneva and enjoys cycling, hiking, software (of course!), and reading. Contact Tom for questions about CMS, ideas about software to engage people in LHC data and computing, and, of course, to report bugs.

News from QuarkNet Central: Virtual atom smasher is an educational activity that has been developed by Ioannis Charalampidis, Peter Skands, and Francois Grey. The team is now looking for high-school students who have been in masterclasses and would enjoy being alpha testers of the game. Encouraging your students would be appreciated! The project can be introduced to students by using a one-slide summary or a short presentation. Please guide your students to the signup page: They can register there and be contacted by the team as soon as the game is ready for testing.

Resources: LHC Basics from Don Lincoln

Just for Fun: Higgs Cartoon from xkcd webcomic

This Saturday, 3-14-15, 9:26:53 will be Pi Time. Or is it at 9:26:54?

QuarkNet Staff Teachers:
Ken Cecire: kcecire@nd.edu
Tom Jordan: jordant@fnal.gov
Bob Peterson: rspete@fnal.gov