Tag: video

Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer

The BBC has an excellent article on the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) launched on the second to last shuttle flight to investigate the origins of the universe. NASA’s page is giving regular updates.

What’s nice is that the basic physics of magnetic spectrometers, where magnets are used to deflect the motion of charged particles, should be accessible to middle school students once they get into electricity and magnetism.

How the AMS works. Image from CERN via the BBC.

Transition Radiation Detector determines highest-energy particle velocities
Silicon Trackers follow particle paths; how they bend reveals their charge
Permanent Magnet is core component of AMS and makes particles curve
Time-of-flight Counters determine lowest-energy particle velocities
Star Trackers scan star fields to establish AMS’s orientation in space
Cerenkov Detector makes accurate velocity measurements of fast particles
Electromagnetic Calorimeter measures energy of impacting particles
Anti-coincidence Counter filters signal from unwanted side particles

— Amos (2011): Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer to go on Endeavour shuttle on the BBC.

For additional information, that really gets into the nuts and bolts, you can go CERN’s technical site or get more general info at their public site, which has a wonderful set of videos and animations.

Multi-modal IRP’s

If I present information to you orally, you’ll probably only remember about 10% 72 hours after exposure, but if I add a picture, recall soars to 65%.

–Alex Lundry (2009): Chart Wars: The Political Power of Data Visualization

How you present visual information is important. And my students are discovering this as they work up their Independent Research Projects (IRP’s) this week.

In the spring they are fairly free to pick their topic and style of IRP. Some choose research projects, others term papers, and a few do things that strike their fancy, like writing fiction or programming games.

In the end, they submit a written report and give a presentation.

For research projects, I have one student who did a great job of coming up with a hypothesis and testing it. He even compiled a nice table of his data for his results section, but was reluctant to go through the effort of making a graph. After all, he claimed, anyone reading his report (or watching his PowerPoint presentation) could just look at the table and read the data off there themselves.

My response was that people absorb the data much more effectively when it’s presented graphically. Fortunately, Alex Lundry has a nice little presentation that reinforces this point. It also gives a few tips about what to look out for in graphics, because they can be used to mislead.

The key quote (via The Dish) is this:

Vision is our most dominant sense. It takes up 50% of our brain’s resources. And despite the visual nature of text, pictures are actually a superior and more efficient delivery mechanism for information. In neurology, this is called the ‘pictorial superiority effect’ […] If I present information to you orally, you’ll probably only remember about 10% 72 hours after exposure, but if I add a picture, recall soars to 65%. So we are hard-wired to find visualization more compelling than a spreadsheet, a speech of a memo.

–Alex Lundry (2009): Chart Wars: The Political Power of Data Visualization

Here’s Lundry’s five minute presentation.

Courage

Watch the full episode. See more FRONTLINE.

With the different outcomes of the protests in Tunisia and Egypt compared to Libya and Syria (and Bahrain), it’s important to recognize the courage of the protesters out there on the streets. It’s not really courage if there is nothing to risk. These men and women are risking everything.

Just like the lonely man who stood in front of a line of tanks during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. No one knows what happened to him.

About midday, as a column of tanks slowly moves along Chang’an Boulevard toward Tiananmen Square, an unarmed young man carrying shopping bags suddenly steps out in front of the tanks. Instead of running over him, the first tank tries to go around, but the young man steps in front of it again. They repeat this maneuver several more times before the tank stops and turns off its motor. The young man climbs on top of the tank and speaks to the driver before jumping back down again. Soon, the young man is whisked to the side of the road by an unidentified group of people and disappears into the crowd.

To this day, who he was and what became of him remains a mystery.

— FRONTLINE, 2006: The Tank Man: The Memory of Tiananmen June 4-5, 1989.

What does it take to show such courage? We’ve talked about how your situation in life, like poverty, can affect the ethical choices you make. We’ve also seen how different social and demographic conditions can force countries toward revolutions.

So it’s worth taking a moment to think about the protesters. And about ourselves. What do we value so much that it would overcome our fear to risk our lives?

Panyee F.C.: Soccer on the Lake

This cute, little, true story of how a bunch of kids (they look like adolescents) living on rafts in a lake built their own soccer field (on rafts), and eventually created the Panyee Football Club, is actually an advertisement for the Thai Military Bank (TMB), but it’s quite inspirational nonetheless. The setting and videography are also superb.