InfoGroupB

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Education, information and outreach

Tim Snow Leading


What is lacking & what is feasible

  • An overview, a single resource providing a 'scattering 101' where users can go from no knowledge to some degree of competency
  • Expectation handling, going from institution instruments, i.e. AFM, SEM, TEM, where results are visual and easily forthcoming to SAS
  • Sample preparation best practices
  • What's not possible!


Creating new instructional material

  • No-one reads manuals!
  • Videos (YouTube, etc.) are currently the favoured visual mechanism
  • Podcasts? Presence at student / general conferences


Aggregating existing instructional materials

  • There's a whole treasure trove of resources from a variety of backgrounds/specialisations, i.e. * gisaxs.org or the NIST tutorials
  • Perhaps on cansas.org we should aggregate these together
  • Anticipating user requirements, perhaps a drill-down list would hone their literature/knowledge search, i.e.
 Is your sample solid / liquid: [liquid]
   Do you anticipate spheres or cylinders: [spheres]
     What kind of size range do you anticipate for your samples: [100 nm]
       Result: After acquiring data you should be looking into shape fitting using x, y, z piece of software using a sphere model, here's a list of resources to help: ...


Generating scientific case studies

  • Pulling in previous point with drill-down list generate a number of common studies, i.e. 100 nm latex spheres, from 2D data to reduced data to result (almost, if not a complete, working example)
  • Case studies incorporating multi-modal data analysis, using AFM/SEM/TEM results as inputs or constraints for fitting


NXcanSAS dissemination

  • Users don't really care about the file format, as long as it works
  • Make common software work with NXcanSAS
  • If required, make software available to convert NXcanSAS to text


Development and maintenance of sasportal

  • Should link to existing material
  • New material, if not created elsewhere, should be hosted here
  • Maintenance is difficult as people are reluctant to volunteer time...


Final thoughts

  • Users will likely have other information, use this to inform experimental, data reduction and analytical constraints to work in harmony with this data, not SAXS gives size x, SANS size y and AFM size z.
  • Use our websites to link to existing resources, identify holes in knowledge and either outsource or create the material needed
  • Move away from reliance on written word/formula and embrace videos and interactive applications
  • Drop-down list to aid sample data acquisition/analysis routes
  • An enforced, first time scattering users 'safety' video to aid understanding of what scattering experiments are capable of/can provide