Physics Outreach

What makes traditional themal cyclers so expensive (and what is Otyp doing differently)? from otyp on Vimeo.

Meet James Peyer of Peyer Labs. When I met James and his brother David at HASTI last January, these guys acted as if nearly everybody ought to understand molecular and computational biology, and it was their job to provide them all with the materials they need to join the party. I was hooked in 15 seconds and sold in about 5 minutes. This summer, NDeRC is partnering with Peyer Labs, bringing their Cloning a Fluorescent Gene laboratory experience to our BioEYES workshop participants (with invitations extended also to high school teachers from the past two cohorts, and any AP bio teachers we can find.) Peyer labs provides the lab write-up online, open-source, and ships all the equipment and supplies needed directly to the school. The lab takes a week, and teachers have two weeks to ship the materials back.

But why ship teachers expensive sophisticated equipment when you can manufacture that equipment yourself, and much more economically? So Otype is born. This is STEM entrepreneurship, and we need a lot more of it. Watch the video. You can say you knew them when.

This suite of tools is amazing and free. Try ’em.

My distraction test results, originally uploaded by NDeRC2.

Click on the image to visit the source.

The Technology section in yesterday’s online New York Times Business Day featured an interesting article on gadgets, multitasking and distractibility. (Did I spell that right?) The article was featured in today’s Google Certified Teachers listserve, which is where I saw it. (It’s the CTC, not the NYTBD, btw, that’s on my daily reading list.) The article caught my attention, since I would have thought that if there were dangers in the area of gadgets and distraction, I’d be afflicted with them like Job.

Inserted into the text of the article was a distracting but really cool test of distractibility. I had to try it. My score is posted above…honestly, I didn’t much get the “distraction” part. The distractors were in BLUE, after all. The test takes less than 5 minutes, warmup-to-scored, so give it a try.

What do you think…are gadgets too distracting, or can they be woven into a rich and flowing pattern of life? Try the test, and remember to come back to comment.

2010-06-06_2336, originally uploaded by NDeRC2.

Hi, all. Kate Rueff mentioned that it might be nice to know how many folks are visiting our blogs. I’ve installed this ad-free counter from Statcounter. Visit their site, tell them yours, create the counter, and grab the code. To insert it, find the design tab in your wordpress blog’s edit menu, select “widgets”, and then a “text” widget. Drop the code in as text.

Drawing readers to count is another story. From my small start, you can see I’m no expert on this point. But reading and commenting on the blogs of others seems a good way to make it likely that they’ll read yours. (Do unto others…communications advice for the 21st Century.)

Fun to see. Thanks to James Peyer of Peyer Labs (and NDeRC-Peyer Labs Cloning a fluorescent gene workshop in June!) who buzzed this.

Being up all night doing astronomy seems a lot more interesting than proposal writing on that same schedule.  Just saying.

On the other hand, you learn a great deal about what you’re doing, what you want to do, what you should be doing, what you could be doing, and a lot of other doings when you write proposals.  A different kind of constellation, but sometimes as wonderful.

Back to the proposal.

This is a Wordle graphic showing the top words–where font size is used to show how frequently each word occurs–in the 2010 Indiana State Science Standards. There’s a great deal to like about these standards: they are more concise in content, and the process standards include both science and engineering principles. The occasion for my looking at them today, though, was to find the extent to which “computing” or “computational thinking” were mentioned or used. As you can see (if you’re really patient, since n=500 words) they do not occur. If you do a word search on the document, you’ll find that neither word nor any of their cognates (“computing”, …) occur at all in the document. Neither does “simulation”. Although “data” occurs quite frequently, “data mining” does not, nor does “informatics”. Given the prominent role that computing, simulation and data mining/informatics plays in science and engineering, this omission is noteworthy.

NDeRC Forum III survey results, originally uploaded by NDeRC2.

Today I listened as NDeRC graduate fellows presented graphical representations of various sorts from their research. It seemed only fair to reciprocate. This graphic was downloaded from Surveymonkey.com, which we often use (along with Google Forms) to gather information from program participants. There is a lot of information packed in this one image. At a glance you can see that over 150 survey respondents thought the forum accomplished its purpose, and that most of its individual components did as well, the small group discussions least among these. Colors, numbers, words, columns, rows, legend…the stuff of graphics.

CDstamper9microns, originally uploaded by NDeRC2.

This is an image of a CD stamper (which does what you might imagine it does) taken with an NanoSurf Easyscan AFM. The scale is ~9 microns (9 thousandths of a millimeter) across the image.

AFM is a cool technology: imagine a mirror taped to the back of your hand, a laser focused on the mirror, and a detector on a wall where the laser beam’s reflection moves around as your finger drags across a bumpy surface. With apologies for the rough analogy, that’s atomic force microscopy.

This image was taken while a new crowd of high school students and their parents visited the Notre Dame QuarkNet Center to preview the range of QuarkNet and NDeRC projects available for student activity this coming summer.

To see AFM at work in the context of a research project, work through the following voicethread presentation by Saint Joseph’s High School student Leslie Mark:

AllSigMu+Mu-, originally uploaded by NDeRC2.

Following Kate Rueff’s example, I’m spending the last few minutes of my day providing others with some glimpse into the rest of it. I work with I2U2, a virtual organization building online learning environments for K-12 students and teachers. One of our environments (called “e-Labs”) is for the CMS detector. This plot, with three noteworthy features over background, shows peaks for J-Psi (a bound state of charm/anticharm quarks) at 3 GeV; Upsilon (bottom/antibottom quarks) at 9 GeV, and the Z zero (a fundamental particle) at 91 GeV. These are the parent particles which decay into muon pairs (actually, a muon and an antimuon) whose total energy (called “mass” by particle physicists) reflects the rest mass of the short-lived parent particles whose decays produced them. Interesting stuff, and enough for a late night glimpse into the events of the day.