2007WorkshopGWinters
From MariachiWiki
Welcome to my take on the 2007 MARIACHI Summer Workshop. For other perspectives, see Patrick's, Jie's or Jessica's blogs (look at Jessica's "Daily Blogs").
Contents |
Friday July 29, 2007
- There was an interesting set of presentations from students who had already done some real research relating to MARIACHI, or at least to cosmic rays in some way.
- We talked about the various questions that had been posted as possible research topics. Some look very feasible. We were reminded that good questions are often very simple, while good answers can be very difficult.
- For lunch we went to Jasmine, a very nice cafeteria in the Wang Center in Stony Brook U.
- After lunch we worked with our groups fleshing out our topic. Each group then made a little presentation. Some of the ideas were well thought out, and some of the questions asked could become very good research topics. Impressive.
 Dan, with Michael watching |
 Russell, with David LeWine supervising |
Thursday July 28, 2007
We had lectures in the morning.
- Everything you wanted to know about black holes but were afraid to ask, by Mike Inglis
- Observing the sun (outdoors) - the sun came out from behind scattered clouds for a short while
Lunch was at the SAC again. They have great soups and salads, and others had pizza which looked good too.
I was in the group that hadn't yet taken part of the Videoconferencing presentation so we spent some time videoconferencing. Actually, we videoconferenced across the room (for practice) and told bad jokes.
- "Reason #0011 (binary 3) you know that you are a MARIACHI is that you have videoconferenced with somebody sitting across from you."
This set of jokes from earlier in the week was fairly typical (pictures courtesy of Jie Min - thanks Jie!).
We did some more group work, trying to find information and possible research questions for our topic. My group, with Dan, Jessica and Michael did lightning, and our Wiki page started to come together. For homework, Helio asked us all to brainstorm ideas of questions that we could ask. The idea was to come up with a compendium of possible research questions, but since we were brainstorming we were not too concerned whether our ideas would work - these were just ideas. The brainstorm page, compiled by many of us, can be found here.
Wednesday July 27, 2007
This was a very unusual day. We had a high-profile ribbon-cutting event, celebrating the opening of the MARIACHI work area in the SUNY Stony Brook Physics building. Just so you understand, high-profile ribbon cutting ceremonies don't happed every day in your standard university physics building. This was special because
- MARIACHI represents a new project that is funded by NSF (the National Science Foundation). Funding is very important in a university setting.
- MARIACHI is a collaborative project between SUNY Stony Brook and BNL (Brookhaven National Lab). Collaboration is good.
- MARIACHI is designed to educate high school physics teachers and students about cyberinfrastructure, bringing us into the modern age.
So we started the day with some group work and making sure that everything was in good shape for the event.
People started to arrive.
Then more people.
Then more people.
Pretty soon there were on the order of 102 people in the MARIACHI room.
 Some people arrive. |
 More people ... |
 Bill, our designated photographer, takes pictures. |
 Helio, wearing a tie, prepares for the event. |
And then there were speeches.
 Mike Marx, MC, with introductions |
 Shirley Strum Kenny, President of SUNY SB, strongly endorsing technical education at the pre-college level. |
 Robert McGrath, Provost and Executive VP for Academic Affairs at SUNY SB. |
More speeches, including BNL and local assemblymen adding their support. I didn't get pictures of the NSF people who were there too (most impressive!).
 Sam Aronson, Director of BNL |
 Marc Alessi, assemblyman for BNL |
 Steve Englebright, assemblyman for SUNY Stony Brook |
There were more speeches. The overall message was one of endorsing the MARIACHI project: endorsing technical education for pre-college teachers and students. Clearly, the people who attended strongly supported the MARIACHI project.
Then there was food. The following pictures are courtesy of Patrick (thanks Patrick!).
 The Mariachi band! |
 The food available at lunch |
 Students relaxing and eating |
 Teachers enjoying the food |
After the festivities we were treated to John Hover and an overview of MARIACHI computing - Grid Computing, Certificates and Data Acquisition Report on first data being collected
Tuesday July 26, 2007
This was an active day. We divided into three groups. Each group went to one of three stations to learn about one aspect of the technology. I went first to learn about radar with Zejie Zhang and Monica, and then to learn about scintillators with Mike Marx and Dima Vavilov.
Lunch was at the SAC. Personally, I go for one of the soups and a salad. They have the best salad bar, with different specialties every day.
We were supposed to have our third talk after lunch, but instead worked on our group project. My group is still working on lightning.
We also got a tour of the Van de Graff accelerator, courtesy of Rich Lefferts.
Monday July 25, 2007
We started with introductions, etc. There are a lot of people in this group. About 10-15 teachers and 30 students or so. The teachers are split between Physics teachers and Research teachers, and most are here because they have students at the workshop. The students are here because they have an interest in Cosmic Rays (or physics or math) and the want a research project to work on (and submit to research competitions for rewards of fame and fortune).
Mike Marx gave a talk on Cosmic Ray detector array, and Zejie Zhang gave an introduction to Mariachi radar.
Lunch is a big part of any MARIACHI event. We had lunch at the Stony Brook SAC.
After lunch, Rich introduced us to Wikis with a frustrating exercise in which we were asked to find the population of US states, arrange them in descending order of population, attach a picture epitomizing the state, and write a paragraph advertising the finest points of our given state. The frustrating part was that, with 40-50 people editing the Wiki simultaneously, our edits were overwritten if we weren't quick enough.
After lunch we divided into groups, were given a topic to research, and started writing Wiki pages about our topic. I was in the lightning group with Dan, Jessica and a couple of other people. We started a page on lightning, with links to information (some of it was real hard research). We also included a number of questions that follow when you put lightning and cosmic rays in the same sentence/question. We'll update the page with more information, and hopefully with more questions.
