User:Candice
From MariachiWiki
Name: Candice Humpherys
Age: 20
Birthdate: Sept. 14
Hometown: See below
School: Brigham Young University - Idaho (private religious school)
Major: B.S. in Physics Education
Year in school: juniorish
Contents |
ABOUT ME
MY LIFE STORY IN A FEW SHORT SENTENCES:
I grew up in Morristown, TN. It's an hour east of Knoxville if you know where that is. I played soccer on rec. and school teams. I mostly played midfield, and then I was trained as goalie. I moved to Logan, UT my freshman year in high school. I hated science and history until my sophomore and junior year in high school, respectively. Great teachers made me love the subjects. In high school I took 4 AP classes: chemistry, history, physics, and calculus and my scores were 3;4;5;5 respectively. I also took 5 classes concurrently through Utah State University (BISE 1400, English 1010, English 1030, Math 1050, and Math 1060). I was the captain of our Academic Olympiad team and we placed 1st in science and 3rd in math. I had (and still have) a 4.0 GPA and was also the Valedictorian (singular, meaning, I was the only one!) for the 2004 graduating class of Sky View High School. I was the 2nd youngest in the class (17), with the younger person having skipped a grade. I took piano lessons for 2 months. People tell me I play quite well. Anything past note reading is self-taught. I started playing drums and percussion in 5th grade. As the only girl on the drumline my freshman year, I played the quints - the 5 drums all hooked together and hence, the heaviest drums. I developed a love for ultimate frisbee. Even after getting a concussion from blocking a "hail Mary" type pass, I still love the game. Now that I'm in college, I'm studying to be a high school physics teacher. Not too many people have that aspiration... But hey, that means less competition for me! I am minoring in history and I'll graduate with a certification in math as well. That should make me more marketable... I hope to help my students come to love physics, history, and math. Or at least appreciate it. I am a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. In other words, I'm a Mormon. In addition to my schooling, I am preparing to serve a mission for my church. I am eligible to go as soon as I turn 21 in September.
RANDOM PICTURES
 awesome summer tan line |
 yes I'm in the fridge. I've always wanted to do that |
 this is how stressed I get at school sometimes |
 awesome college friends |
 wicked awesome roommates from Spring '06 |
 hiking BAREFOOT for 3 hours in St. George, UT - simply because we could |
 camping illegally in Arizona - again, simply because we could |
 I clean up quite nicely, don't you think? |
 senior prom |
 my family a few years back (minus the brothers-in-law and niece and nephews) |
 heel clicks are awesome! |
 me and Kori on her wedding day |
 kristi, me, and breanna at their graduation |
 me & dorothy at her graduation |
 me & 2 friends from high school that I saw at a Mets game! |
 smurfs are green |
SUMMER '06 STUFF
Right now I've been working on some data analysis of some scintillator data and creating lesson plans that will teach teachers and students how to do what I'm doing. The lesson plans are meant to be followed in the hierarchical order that they are listed below and the order the links are given on the pages.
Here's a synopsis of what each of the lesson plans/tutorials does:
Number of Events per delta time- Calculates the time intervals between detected events and then creates a histogram that displays how many times each time interval occured.
- Events per delta time per week - Compiles all the histograms from each day of the week (from the activity above) into one histogram.
- Cummulative Events per delta time- Compiles the histograms for each week into one cummulative histogram
Events per Hour - Creates a histogram that displays the number of events detected per hour.
- Events/Hour per week - Compiles all the histogram from each day of the week (from the activity above) into one histogram. Performs a t-test on the data to set if it's "good" data.
- Frequency of Events per Hour - Takes the events per hour and creates a histogram of how many times a each number of events per hour occured.
- Cummulative Frequency of Events per Hour- Compiles the histograms from each week into one cummulative histogram
- Cummulative Events per Hour - Compiles the histograms from each week into one cummulative histogram
- Frequency of Events per Hour - Takes the events per hour and creates a histogram of how many times a each number of events per hour occured.
Correlation with Pressure - Create a scatter plot to correlate number of events with pressure conditions.
- Cummulative Pressure vs. Counts - Compiles all the pressure files into one scatter plot so you have enough data to see a correlation.
QUARKNET '06
Since Helio is my advisor for the PST program at BNL and is the instructor for this course, I got to participate. Lucky me. I forgot to bring my camera, so if you want pictures, you'll have to go to QuarkNet2006 and click on other participants' pages. Sorry.
MONDAY, June 26th
In the morning we worked on the wiki. Those who didn't have pages already set up created them, and we all added to our pages.
After lunch at the marvelous cafeteria, Bill Leacock instructed us on making a magnetometer to measure magnetic fields. Then we used Helio's "step by step" procedure to calibrate our magnetometers and get a conversion equation. This was necessary because our magnetometer gave us a voltage reading, and we wanted a Gauss reading.
TUESDAY, June 27th
Tuesday morning we all watched in awe as the old cloud chamber was put together for a demonstration. We all sat around it and watched like little kids watching cartoons.
After lunch the construction began. We all made our own mini cloud chambers.
WEDNESDAY, June 28th
Wednesday morning we mapped our magnetic fields using our magnetometers and Excel. We took measurements on a 2cm x 2cm grid and made a surface plot of the data. The graph came out quite nicely.
We were supposed to have a barbecue at BNL for lunch, but the weather wasn't that great, so we ordered pizza instead. After lunch we got a tour of BNL's facilities.
THURSDAY, June 29th
Thursday was the day we were all waiting for. We set up our cloud chambers and made them work. Some took more effort than others to get them working. Mine produced a nice cloud for a while, but no tracks were seen, and the cloud slowly diminished. We realized that there was an air leak because one of the screws was not tight enough, and added to that, I probably didn't have enough alcohol or dry ice. So I took it apart and tightened the screw and added more dry ice and alcohol and wahlah! It worked! I saw lots of cool tracks - I saw 2 protons and 2 pair productions. Helio set up his video camera on my chamber while we were at lunch and I'm sure he found lots of cool tracks.
FRIDAY, June 30th
Friday morning we brainstormed ideas of how to use the cloud chamber in the classroom. We made a good list, and then we divided it amongst all of us and we each elaborated on the ideas and put them on the wiki. If you're interested in seeing what we came up with, go here.
We went to the Wang Center for lunch and had great Asian food. We should've gone there all week, rather than the cafeteria.
After lunch Helio talked about the Mariachi experiment and we added to our wiki pages.
SUMMER '07 STUFF
I've been working with some meteor data collected from an antenna at BNL. The goal is to automate the process of reading in and analyzing the data. To do this, we chose to use R. It's open-sourced and very powerful. Since I have almost no programming experience, it's been difficult for me to get things up and running. Finally though, I have a script that reads in each file (which contains an hour's worth of data) one right after another. Then it creates histograms of meteors per hour, plots average signal width, plots amplitude vs. signal width. More analysis is on the way after I work out some more bugs and enter in more data into the script.
Here's some of the graphs/plots I've created so far:
 Meteors per Hour |
 Meteors per Day |
 Daily Average Signal Width |
 Amp. vs. Width |
 Center Frequency |
QUARKNET '07
MONDAY, July 16th:
We built our own flashing LED device to measure the acceleration due to gravity. Next time, we should have more soldering irons... After lunch we took pictures of dropping the device (with an extended exposure of 2 seconds) and uploaded the pictures to the computer (find pictures here. We found a nice ruler here to use to measure the distance from the starting point to each flash of the LED on the computer screen so we wouldn't have to print it out. Downloading the normal version also downloads the Pro version which allows you to rotate the ruler, make it transparent, and measure distances at the click of a button. After many tries, I came up with a value of 9.9422 m/s^2 for g. Zooming in on the picture helps with accurate measurements.
TUESDAY, July 17th:
In the morning we did a Brownian motion experiment with milk fat and latex spheres using a microscope with video recording capabilities. Each person then followed 2 points for 4 seconds with a frame every 1/15th of a second. We compiled the data to calculate <r^2>. We didn't get very good results. The fit is supposed to be linear. It doesn't look very linear, but the R^2 value is high, and some paper said the slope should be about 2. Some people probably weren't very accurate in clicking the points because it was very tedious using the Data Point software.
After lunch we ate popcorn. We recorded the sound of the pops using Audacity. We then counted the popcorn (popped and unpopped) as we ate it and compared with the number of pops recorded by Audacity. The number recorded by Audacity was less than the number of kernels that popped, averaging about 87%. It was hard to determine exactly what was a "pop" and what wasn't on the sound file. It was also hard to tell broken off pieces from smaller pieces. Binning the number of counts in 10 second intervals, we came up with a pretty good normal distribution.
