jantonelli's blog

How can you not like this tool? It’s one of my favorites from a workshop offered by the Kaneb Center: Teaching Well Using Technology . Jamie Antonelli and I attended the workshop today. Perhaps unlike my favorite tool linked above, many of the tools and tips we received were quite useful.

The workshop uses a wikispace site, on which Jamie and I created a project page, advancing a project (also hosted on a wiki) begun last year.

Without any pretense of coherence, below is a list of highlights from the workshop.

One very interesting tool to which I”ve just now been introduced is EtherPag (or in this case, a free version called TitanPad. This tool allows anyone to set up a “backchannel” during a workshop…something like a chat room where notes can be gathered and responded to as the workshop advances. Everyone can type into it at the same time. Lots of online presentations use a backchannel of this sort, and I find them helpful. But this is the first time I’d run across a free version which can be integrated into almost any other technology (such as a wiki home page for the workshop.) If I had just employed the correct rule of thumb–”if you can think of it, it exists online, and is free”–I’d have found it earlier:)

Another new tool for me is grooveshark (mentioned only incidentally in the workshop, but of great interest to me.) Grooveshark enables you to share music, even in a widget; my first experiment with it is here.

Jamie Antonelli found the “insert invisible frame” solution to navigating through a single slide in Prezi. (I’ll hyperlink his solution from here when I gain access to it.)

McKeechie’s Teaching Tips was recommended as a great useful text for folks teaching in higher ed.

Here’s a Google slideshow illustrating 66 ways to use Google Forms in a classroom context.

More resources used and/or recommended in the workshop can be found here. Enjoy.

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This Saturday, January 22, Notre Dame is hosting the Collaborating for Education & Research Forum.

You can check out the agenda for the forum here:

http://events.michianastem.org/Collaborating+for+Education+%26+Research+Forum+IV

Ken and I are doing the 20 minute Particle Physics parallel session, and then chatting with teachers at a table over the lunch hour.  Here’s the poster I made to identify our table.  I wanted to start with the big picture (aerial photo of the LHC) and then zoom in on more detailed pieces of the LHC and CMS.

http://erc.nd.edu/blogs/jantonelli/files/2011/01/forum-poster.png

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The Fermilab Tevatron – the American counterpart to the CERN LHC – will not be running after 2011 as had been hoped.  They requested additional funding to extend the running of the Tevatron for three extra years, but the word came down earlier this week that the US government would not be granting their request.

The scientists working at Fermilab are of two minds about this development.  On one hand, it is unfortunate for the graduate students and other researchers who would have benefited from an extra three years of data being collected.  But many are happy to see the funding agency make a decisive move in a new and possibly more productive direction.  It’s not that the government is neglecting science, they’re just funneling their resources into areas of particle physics other than large, high energy colliders.  Fermilab will now focus on developing higher particle beam intensities instead of higher energies.  And there are several experiments working on things like neutrinos and dark matter that will receive more funding and manpower once the Tevatron shuts down.

For me, it will be interesting to see how this development affects research at the LHC.  The Tevatron was its only real competition, and an extra three years would have put significant pressure on CERN to produce results quickly.  Without that external motivation, the schedule for the LHC may become more relaxed, which is bad for me because my graduation is somewhat dependent on how fast the LHC can take enough data for me to write my thesis.  So hurry up Mr. LHC!  I’d like to finish school before I’m 40!

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Quantum mechanics, our best theory for describing the universe at very small scales (about the size of an atom or smaller), is the foundation of modern particle physics.  At its heart, quantum mechanics is based on probabilities.  This means we can’t make predictions with the same certainty as we can for normal, everyday things.  Imagine a world where every time you let go of something, it had the same chance of floating upwards as it did falling downwards:  welcome to the world of quantum mechanics.

So, in order to learn about physical systems that are very small, we need to make many measurements and average their results.  Imagine you didn’t know anything about coins, and you want to study what happens when you flip one.  So you flip it, and let’s say it comes up heads.  You might think, “OK, problem solved, when you flip a coin, it always comes up heads!” (Remember, you don’t know anything about coins.)  Let’s say you flip it again and get heads.  You’d be even more sure you were right!  But, on your third flip, it comes up tails…  Now you’d have to rethink your solution.  At this point, you would conclude that a coin comes up heads two thirds of the time and tails one third of the time.  You still wouldn’t be right, but you’d be closer to the real answer.  And the more times you flipped your coin, the more you’d close in on the correct answer of 50% heads and 50% tails.

Here is an illustration of the idea that with probabilities, the more data you collect, the better you understand what’s going on.  I rolled a die 10,000 times, and make graphs of how many times i rolled each number, at different points in the data-taking.

Questions to the reader: How do the plots change going from left to right?  What shape would we expect if we rolled the die like a bajillion times and what would that tell us about what happens when you roll a die?

Ok, so I didn’t actually roll a die 10,000 times… I used a computer to do it for me.  That’s what I’ll talk about in my next post – simulating probabilities with random number generators.

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to blog or not to blog, that is the question.

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