QN Postings

The AAPT Winter meeting this year is in Anchorage, Alaska...and here we are. Several QuarkNet teachers and staff are here and, yes, it's cold. Leave aside all the jokes that have been made about choosing a meeting in Alaska in the dead of winter: it has been and promises to continue to be simply fascinating.

As I type, it is 8:30 am (12:30 pm ET...a four hour difference from my neck of the woods) and nightime dark. The sun will start to rise in about an hour and stick around for about 8 hours before its early nap.

I haven't seen the northern lights yet but Bob Peterson saw them from the plane on the way in. I'm still hopeful.

Today we have several of our QuarkNet people giving talks in the 9:00 am session, which means I have to go very soon. Bob will lead a discussion on the cosmic ray eLab and others will talk about various issues related to the World Year of Physics. This afternoon, Beth Marchant, Marge Bardeen, Bob, and I will visit a student research and education project at a frozen lake and this evening we have a QuarkNet dinner outing.

Tomorrow...the Physics Education in Africa session and the documentary made by my daughter!

-- Ken

I'm at the QuarkNet Advisory Board meeting at Fermilab even as I type. The Ad Board is the group of scientists and teachers who come together with the QuarkNet staff and PIs to give us a fresh, outside look at where we are and where we might be going in the program. They are a neat group and working with them is helpful and enjoyable.

Right now, QuarkNet teachers Evelyn Restivo, Tom Loughran, and Rich DeCoster are giving a panel discussion of what it is like to be in the program. Evelyn and Rich have just been explaining how they have been impacting student learning through QuarkNet. Tom, a true teacher and philosopher, has spoken eloquently on how important building a learning and researching community of teaching professionals is to improving education.

We're looking forward to hearing what the Ad Board has to say.

-- Ken

We knew we had a good thing with the QuarkNet program of summer research for students and teachers...but Josh Seidman of Long Island and the Brookhaven/Stony Brook QuarkNet center has taken it to a new level as a semi-finalist in the Intel ISEF compretition. Here's the dispatch from mentor Helio Takai:



Josh Seidman, MARIACHI's first Intel Semi-Finalist

Joshua David Seidman from Wellington Mepham High School in Belmore, Long Island NY, built an electric field monitor to monitor the strength of terrestrial electric field. This device together with the MARIACHI scintillator cosmic ray air shower detector and prototype radar were used to search for coincidences between lightning and cosmic rays. The electric field monitor establishes how charged a storm cell is.

Data used in the analysis were collected during two storms. Josh carried out data analysis at the High School under the supervision of his physics teacher, Mr. William Leacock. A scintillator shower detector is now being installed at the HS and will be part of the MARIACHI experiment. In the near future we expect that analysis such as performed in this work will be greatly facilitated by the use of the Cyberinfrastructure.

MARIACHI (Mixed Apparatus for Radar Investigation of Atmospheric Cosmic-rays of High Ionization) is funded by NSF CI-TEAM and EPP funds. Josh was supported by a QuarkNet grant.