2009-02-03_0922, originally uploaded by TomLoughran. Sketched in black is a plot of the total energy absorbed in either the hadron or the electron calorimeter subdetector sections from the CMS Test Beam (2004 data). Underneath the faint black line, in red, is the energy absorbed by the electron calorimeter (Ecal) alone. The close overlap between these …

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MicihianaSTEM, originally uploaded by TomLoughran. Here’s the home page of the MichianaSTEM wikispace. The site was launched to foster continued conversation of the sort begun at the Partnering for Education and Research Forum II. All those who registered for the forum have been (or soon will be) invited to join, and any STEM professional in …

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Add 175 teachers, 25 parents, dozens of University faculty and administrators, a dozen teacher professional development programs and a world class facility, and you’ve got the makings of a good day for STEM education in Michiana. Images below were taken by photographers Jeff Marchant and Joe Ribaudo. You can see the agenda, etc, at MichianaSTEM.wikispaces.com.

Optical Decoder Unit for CMS Hadron Calorimeter, originally uploaded by NDeRC2. High School students at the Notre Dame QuarkNet Center assembled some 500 of these Optical Decoder Units for Hadron Calorimeter of the CMS detector. High school teachers helped design the units, which are currently installed at ready for LHC startup at CERN. The ODUs …

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Picknic’d Adler Milkly Way, originally uploaded by NDeRC2. …Couldn’t resist trying Flickr’s’ new Picnik add-in with the full Adler visualization. A very cool toolset: easy to use, reasonably powerful. For those who want to take a run at producing their own astroimages (as I’ve done with cell phone from Adler’s somewhat nicer images:), go to …

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downsized_0107091327.jpg, originally uploaded by NDeRC2. This visualization of the center of the Milky Way is just a small subsection of the large visualization of our home galaxy at the Adler Planetarium, captured and uploaded via cell phone camera. Visualization is amazing. It’s worth asking: is this a REAL picture of the milky way? Does it …

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downsized_0105091723.jpg, originally uploaded by NDeRC2. This image of a voltage control box for a QuarkNet cosmic ray detector was taken for inclusion in a student logbook. We had just worked out the details…well, that’s their story to tell. Mine is just that you can take an image using your cell phone, email it to Flickr, …

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The light is still dim, but it is dawning on me that blogs are about acting in public. In this age of collaboration, acting in public is pretty complex: it is possible to do a great deal, with a great many partners, and thus have a great many stories to tell. Blogging, as far as …

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Watching cosmic rays is at least as much fun as watching it rain. [Now that the live feed is down, all that’s left are videos, such as the one below.]

The community of science educators who started NDeRC have been working together at the Notre Dame QuarkNet Center for about 10 years.  During that much time, we’ve picked up a lot of collaborators.  For the past four years, we’ve sent a number of members to the Supercomputing Education Program series.  This year was the first …

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