From MariachiWiki

Stephanie Vos is a freshman at Stony Brook who is majoring in Marine Vertebrate Biology. She’s trying to take advantage of all the opportunities that surround her at the University but finds it hard to fit everything in. During the weeks when she’s not spending her time with her nose shoved in her very expensive textbooks, she can usually be found in the Sports Complex with her teammates practicing the hurdles for the outdoor track season. On the weekends, she loves spending time with her awesome roommate and suitemate watching movies and just having fun. Steph dreams of traveling all over the country and has already been as far as Guyana South America and the island of Jamaica. She loves seeing new places and trying new things (she’s already working on trying to set up going sky diving and swimming with live sandtiger sharks). Probably the best way to sum her up is to yet again emphasizes just how much she wants to see the world beyond the United States. Besides traveling, Stephanie also loves pleasure reading, watching live sporting events, and spending time with her favorite person on the face of the earth; her older brother Chris. In her opinion, SCUBA diving is one of the coolest experiences there is and she has made it a goal to dive at the Great Barrier Reef in Australia before she dies. She is also proud to be a Christian and is a faithful follower of the Lord Jesus Christ. She absolutely loves going to the little church called True North and hopes to continue embarking on mission trips to spread God’s Word. She believes that life is too short so we need to live what little time there is to the fullest.

My WISE Class

Contents 1 Journal 1 2 Journal 2 3 Journal 3 4 Journal 4 5 Journal 5 6 Journal 6 7 Our Final Report 8 The WISE Session in General-> My Reaction

Journal 1

I never claimed to know anything about cosmic rays but now I have a little bit of backround to get me by. I can now tell anyone who asks that cosmic rays are highly charged particles form outer space that can travel at the speed of light and are constantly hitting the earth in all directions. Probably the coolest aspect of cosmic rays is that most of them travel millions of miles following the spectacular phenomenon known as supernovaes, or the explosion of a star. It was really cool to see the cloud chamber. I had never seen one so it was pretty awesome to actually be able to see the particles path. I also had the honor of meeting Cosmic Chris where he showed off his talent of counting cosmic rays. I also found out that he's probably traveled to more places than me but I'm still young, I've got time to beat him. The rest of the time we examined the scintillator detector. I even tried to hook up some wires but unfortunately it didn't work right away. It wasn't my fault though so I'm looking forward to playing around with it some more. But I guess that'll have to wait until next class.

Journal 2

Hands on experience!! In my opinion, always a highlight. At first I looked at the scintillator detector, scratched my head, and thought "this looks technical; there is no way I can do this." But as always the best way to learn is to try it. Step one was figuring out how to turn everything on and figure out what everything was. At first I was afraid this would be difficult but to my great delight I not only turned everything on, but I also discovered that everything is labeled. For the first time, I found myself connecting wires and hooking up equiptment and amazingly, I actually knew what I was doing. I discovered the importance of the discriminator and figured out how to connect it to the amplifier and then in turn hooking those up to the screeen so we could actually see the pulse. We also experimented with the counters and discussed why the readings of both the signals together was significantly less than the counters of each individually. We believe the reason for this is that cosmic rays are hitting each chamber from different angles. This means the number of rays that go directly through both are not abundent as all the counted rays that go through each seperate chamber. The science behind the set up is interesting but, as always, what made it fun was the hands on experience. You honestly learn a lot more that way and I walked away from that session feeling pretty proud of my limited (but developing) technical skills. I'm positive that I don't know everything there is to know about the equipment and the science behind what we were, but I believe I learned what I was meant to learn since I don't have any specific questions. Figuring out how to hook everything up was not terribly obvious and it gave us some trouble at first but in the end I think our group had a pretty good grasp on what was going on. Now the real test lies in seeing if I can remember everything next class. I guess we'll see!

Journal 3

Alrighty more hands on experience mixed with lots of technilogical things. This is awesome because I feel like its possible that I can understand not only hooking things up, but also computer programs and putting data into the computer. I think I like the computer program that calculates all the rates for you. Computers have that tendency to take most of the work out of any activity (granted you know how to use the program). I know its pathetic but up until the last assignment where we had to graph the data we found, I really had no clue how to work excel. But with some help from Sophie I've decided it's not that hard. Of course when I tried to do it on my own with the graph below I found myself stuck once again. But as we said in class, it's important to ask questions. So I did, I got my answer, and now I know what on earth I'm doing. In class, it took a little bit of struggling but we also figured out how to correctly set up that information properly. I would not say that this course is easy. Sice I'm not technilogically oriented I actually find it quite difficult. But I still manage to have a bit of fun and I am familiarizing myself with the type of equipment and computer programs. Actually because of this course I started thinking about taking a computer class over the summer at Binghamton so I can learn more about how to use computer programs. We'll see what happens next but I think I am getting some good benefits out of this.

Journal 4

I missed the last class because of the "Stony Brook Day in Albany" event, but from what I could gather, the other girls just brainstormed questions that they could research. Thus once I got back to class on thursday, we we're all ready to go ahead and start collecting data. It was actually really quite fun and the beauty of technology is that there was very little work required. We put Cosmic Chris on wheels and brought him to different places in the building to see if we obtained variations in the number of cosmic rays he can record. We decided it would be best to record the counts on 60 second intervals, taking five measurements. We conducted our little experiment in our "classroom" in the basement first, taking measurements while he was upright as well as when he was laid down. We brought him to a room where there was about 4ft of concrete between Chris and the open atmosphere. We also dragged him to the top floor of the physics building, the middle floor, and the bottom floor next to the elevator before returning him to his home in the "classroom." During the course of our experiment we kept discovering new questions about what would effect the number of cosmic rays that collide with Chris's plastic form per minute. We decided to do another count back in lab so we could make sure that it was repeatable and Cosmic Chris wasn't wimping out on us. But so far it's looking good and we've managed to gather some data. The link below has more information about our project.

The Kelly Steph & Sophie Project

Journal 5

This class was very interesting because the person who is most challenged when it comes to computer programs and excel (aka me) was placed in front of the computer monitor and told to not only create a graph, but also include precise error bars. Needless to say I tried to pass the buck but it was already decided that I should do it. I think our group realized real quick that it was not terribly efficient having me work the computer but I have to admit that I ended up learning a lot about excel and having some fun doing it. We organized our collected data, calculated the averages of the rates and the absolute error, and attempted to plot the graph. Our graph actually turned out quite nice and the error bars were small enough that we could clearly see a distinct pattern. We arranged our points in order of how much material was between the cosmic ray counter and the atmosphere from which the rays were coming from. Our data indicated that as you reduced the amount of materials above the counter and you get closer to the atmosphere, the number of cosmic rays hitting thecounter increase. From this observation, we can assume that the rays are coming from the atmosphere instead of coming up from the ground. This data also compliments the idea of going deep within the ground will help you exclude yourself (or a sensative experiment) from being bombarded with cosmic rays. So I'd say thats another good class; expanded what used to be a very limited understanding of excel as well as discovering that we may be on to a very interesting and worthwhile experiment. Yeah Kelly, Steph & Sophie Project!!

The Kelly Steph and Sophie Project Update

Journal 6

More Measurements today! We decided that we had gathered some good data last time so we thought it would be worthwhile to continue expanding on our current experiment instead of moving on to a new one. We first sat down and considered from which direction the cosmic rays were coming from and predicted where we could set up our next location so we could get more counts per second for our rays. We realized that the rays we were measuring before had to come through the building in order to come into contact with Cosmic Chris so we began to wonder, what if we brought Chris outside? We should get more counts because most of the rays would be coming directly from the atmosphere. So we made Chris brave the elements, covering him with a very high quality raincoat to protect him from the biting cold and the chilling rain. Armed with his garbage bag, Chris was dragged outside where two measurements were taken; one with him right next to the building and one with him away from the building surrounded only by the open atmosphere. We also counted the cosmic rays inside the building on the ground floor so we could compare it with the other levels and the data we obtained from outdoors. We made sure to take a measurement in the NSL Lab before and after we did the other trials to ensure that the weather was not damaging or effecting our equipment. Afterwards we took our data to the excel spreadsheet to organize and analyze our data. The results from our experiment and our brainstorming are under the link to The Kelly Steph and Sophie Project Update.

Our Final Report

Experiments with scintillators, cosmic rays, rates, altitude, densities, and of course Cosmic Chris. Enter if you dare!

Final Report

The WISE Session in General-> My Reaction

One the second day I must admit I was intimidated. Not only did I discover I would be spending most of my time working with a strange looking technological contraption, but the rest of my time would be spent working with computers; by far my two biggest weaknesses. The crash course on how the scintillators worked was a little hard to handle. We were being overloaded with information and there was no way to retain all the crucial things we would need to know to operate the machine. I realize that it is necessary to inform us about how everything works and I know that there is so little time already that it is not something that anyone wants to take a long time. However, I think there is probably a better way to do it. I know when I was sitting in front of an excel spreadsheet and was told how to do everything I actually remembered most of the commands because I was doing it as I was being taught. Perhaps something more interactive could be worked in or even a simple slideshow that just has a picture, a name and one sentence about what it does. That was the main thing that I would suggest as a change to the course. Other than that it was interesting and kind of fun conducting our research projects. I also became a lot more confident about my abilities with computers and technical contraptions. I had never really used excel that much and I know that it will be a critical tool that I will need to know how to use later on in my research career. So as painful and annoying as all the graphs were, I honestly am glad I was forced to learn it now when my professors are aware and understanding of my limited ability. But now I'm happy to say I have more than just a clue about how to do it so, even though this sounds tacky, thanks. Overall, I'd have to say it was a pretty good and rewarding experience, and I really liked seeing the cloud chamber. That was cool!