Summer Science Season 2007

By:Josh Seidman

In addition to the MARIACHI Workshop and the Quarknet Workshop, many of the MARIACHI members have been very active during the summer of 2007.

- Rich Gearns and Mahyar Nikpour are currently attending a High School Teacher's program. The program is taking place in Switzerland at the CERN laboratory from July 1-21, and is called the CERN HST program.

- Helio Takai spent the week of July 1-8 in Brazil at a teacher's workshop.

- Tom Tomaszewski and David Lewine are participating in the Fermilab.

- Rich Gearns and Jeff Spahn will be attending a teacher's workshop in Prague during the month of August.

- Tania Entwistle is going to be running a one week workshop for summer students at BNL.

To learn more about what the MARIACHI's are doing this summer click here.

By:Josh Seidman

In the recent past, there have been several notable unions between major corporate giants. Two of the more notable events were the fusing of AT&T with Cingular, and the combining of Exxon with Mobile. For the MARIACHI project a union of this sort was proposed on June 21, 2007. On this day MARIACHI took a major step in forming a collaboration with the American Meteor Society (AMS ltd.).

This fireball trail was photographed at a Czech Republic station of the European Fireball Network on January 21, 1999. Link

To iron out the details of this arrangement the executive director and head of AMS ltd. and a former professor at SUNY Geneseo, David Meisel, paid a visit to BNL where he met with MARIACHI leader, Helio Takai. The two individuals discussed several topics, some of which were general facts about Meteors and meteor detection, and possible improvements that could be made to the MARIACHI radar setup.

"MARIACHI will supply the array of various antennaes to gather the data," said Takai. "And, AMS will take care of the computer analysis. It's a perfect marriage."

Meisel and his associates are conducting a plethora of experiments that are examining the various aspects of meteors. The AMS ltd. use optical meteor tracking, backwards scattering, forward scattering, and many other processes for analyzing meteor activity.

To read the full length article click here: MARIACHI and AMS ltd. Tie the Knot...

By:Josh Seidman

Workshop Information

Background

To cap off the start of the summer season, MARIACHI hosted a Summer Workshop for physics teachers and high school students. The workshop ran from June 25, 2007 through June 29, 2007 in the Nuclear Structure Laboratory control room of the physics building at Stony Brook University.

Every particpant, regardless of his or her experience level with Cosmic Rays and physics in general, came into the workshop eager to learn. And learn they did.

The workshop consisted of various sessions that included a unique combination of training sessions, informative lectures, brainstorming, and hands-on experiments.

Ribbon Cutting Ceremony

Professor Michael Marx, Ph. D,(at the microphone) and Dr. Helio Takai, Ph. D (seated), at the MARIACHI ribbon cutting ceremony.

The highlight of the week long event was the ribbon cutting ceremony that took place on Wednesday June 27. This ceremony took place to honor the opening of the first-ever MARIACHI lab on the Stony Brook campus.

Over 100 MARIACHI particpants and supporters attended the ribbon cutting ceremony and the subsequent barbeque that took place directly after the ceremony. The President of Stony Brook University, the Director of Brookhaven National Laboratory, several New York State assembly members, and a plethora of other prominent individuals were in attendance.

The theme of the barbeque was MARIACHI (for obvious reasons). In honor of the special day, the project leaders hired a Mariachi band to play, while the attendees enjoyed a spread of Mexican dishes.

Wiki Work

One of the primary focuses of this workshop was to integrate the participants with the MARIACHI Wiki and the WikiMedia software in general. This was accomplished in several ways. For instance, on Monday afternoon Rich Gearns, one of the workshop's administrators, gave a presentation on how to use the project's Wiki. From there the students took part in an exercise devoted to teching them how to successfully add and edit information on the website. This was accomplished through an exercise called The 50 State Activity.

"As more people learn how to use the Wiki, things will begin to iron themselves out," said Gearns. "The more people we have contributing to the website, the more reliable it will become."

Additionally, to further promote the enhancement of the student's ability to navigate through and use the Wiki, the workshop administrators required that each of the students create their own personal page on the website. To add some incentive to this assignment, the administrators offered the prize of an I-Pod to the student who created the best all-around personal page as decided on by the administrators. The winner of the IPod was Patrick Montalto.

Group Work

One of the components of the workshop was the dividing of the participants into seven groups, with each group focusing on one aspect of MARIACHI's research. The seven groups were:

1) Lightning 2) Cosmic Rays and Global Weather 3) Meteors, meteors showers, etc... 4) Computing, grid computing, etc... 5) Is there any other way to detect a cosmic ray? Infrasound? 6) Radar, Very low Frequency, and Microwaves - are they useful for MARIACHI? 7) Chaos, long distance coincidences, etc in cosmic rays.

The workshop participants listening to a MARIACHI lecture.

"As the week progresses, the members can update the group pages," said Helio Takai. "This groups are good because there is a nice combination of teachers and students, and they can help each other understand the information."

Throughout the week, each of the groups gathered research and information on their designated topics. Some of the groups compiled new Wiki pages with ideas for future research, while other groups displayed pages that contained a deeper insight into their topic. Each group presented their findings to the rest of the particpants on the morning of Friday June 29.

"I think the general goal is to disseminate the information and get more students interested in physics," said Tom Tomaszewski, a particpating physics teacher from Shoreham-Wading River High School. "We want to spread the word about particle physics."

Additional Topics Discussed

Example.jpg

1) Antennaes, Radar, and Radios

2) Our GRID

3) The Science of Black Holes Example.jpg Example.jpg

Student Works

As stated earlier, the students were required to create their own personal pages in an attempt to teach them how to edit articles, add information, and navigate through the Wiki. Here are some of the personal pages that the students made over the course of the week long workshop. Each of the pages reflect the individuality of the participants. Additionally, these pages have student blogs about their experiences and opinions about what they learned about MARIACHI and all of the varying facets that it deals with.

• Patrick Montalto - Student, Rocky Point High School
• Jessica Gutierrez - Student, Sachem High School East
• Dan Grove - Student, Smithtown High School - Western Campus
• Jie Min - Student, Ward Melville High School

Background

This past summer, Josh Seidman constructed a website dedicated to the promotion of scientific education on Long Island. The site is called Scientific Long Islander (SLI).

SLI is a website dedicated to the promotion of science on Long Island. There are dozens of scientific institutions scattered all across the island that many people are unaware of. There are museums, observatories, universities, and even a government-run national laboratory. There is science everywhere, but many people are uncertain of what's going on and where to find it. Therefore, the goal of this website is to accumulate as much information as possible relating to these institutions and their scientific endeavors, and then spread this information to the general public.

For more information on SLI click here.

Information

Title

Using Cyberinfrastructure to Promote Science and Education

Abstract

The website, www.scientificlongislander.com, was created to promote a greater understanding about science and technology among the communities of Long Island, New York. This feat is being accomplished by compiling information about several Long Island-based scientific institutions into one easily accessible location, SLI. Initially, SLI was going to serve as a sister site to the MARIACHI project’s main website, Main Page. However, while reporting and editing the MARIACHI page under the heading, “Summer Science Season 2007,” the idea of SLI grew. At the MARIACHI Summer 2007 Workshop; multiple contacts were made with representatives from various scientific organizations including Friends of Science East, Montauk Observatory, Custer Institute, the Long Island Physics Teachers Association, and Physical Review. Once the support of these institutions had been established, it became critical to obtain a general knowledge of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and various other browser scripting applications. Using multiple tutorials from the website, www.w3schools.com, and a basic WordPad, SLI began to form. Over a dozen pages were built on local computers prior to signing SLI up with a server and becoming open to the public. After these pages were complete, SLI joined a server from the website, www.micfo.com. The server runs on a Linux operating system, and on the Unix 1.3.37 version of Apache. SLI employs HTML, Cascading Style Sheets, and JavaScript to update the aforementioned group’s news and events on the website. The next phase of SLI is two-fold. These phases are to continue developing the webpage using the SLI cPanel, and to have a plethora of the Long Island school districts link to SLI from their district websites to further promote scientific awareness and understanding on Long Island.