Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS April Meeting 2021
Volume 66, Number 5
Saturday–Tuesday, April 17–20, 2021; Virtual; Time Zone: Central Daylight Time, USA
Session B03: Connecting to the PublicEducation Invited Live Outreach Undergrad Friendly
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Sponsoring Units: FOEP FED Chair: Becky Thompson, Fermilab; Heide Doss, Point Loma Nazarene University |
Saturday, April 17, 2021 10:45AM - 11:21AM Live |
B03.00001: Dwight Nicholson Medal for Outreach (2020) Invited Speaker: Michael Barnett In 1986 a conference was held at Fermilab called the Conference on Teaching of Modern Physics. In attendance was an inspiring high school teacher, Fred Priebe, who was determined to have materials for teaching contemporary physics. They were not teaching what modern physicists were actually doing. Priebe made contact with Helen Quinn at SLAC. She in turn contacted me, because I worked in the international Particle Data Group, which summarizes particle physics. Fred and Helen inspired me to join them in projects that would allow us to share our excitement about physics with generations of students. My most recent (and successful) project has been the creation of a planetarium show called: Phantom of the Universe - The Hunt for Dark Matter. Multiple scenes could only work in a planetarium, and it is more dramatic than IMAX (it surrounds you). None of the many people involved had ever made a planetarium show before (involving a spherical screen). Because of the novelty of this for our team, we had to go to planetariums (in several countries) to see the work in progress. It also great fun to work for a day with Academy Award-winning actor Tilda Swinton while recording the narration. Another two days was working on sound with an Academy Award-winning team at Skywalker Sound. Our target audiences were students and the public. For most planetariums, school visits account for about half their audiences. We found that many planetariums had an interest in a dark matter show. They present our show for months at a time (unlike feature films). Planetariums have the perfect science-interested audience for us in the general public and K-12. Our show has now been seen in 22 languages in 67 countries in 550 planetariums. We never imagined such success as we developed the show. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, April 17, 2021 11:21AM - 11:57AM Live |
B03.00002: The Impact of World War I on the Sciences Invited Speaker: Virginia Trimble Many, perhaps most, maybe even all great technological advances have come out of wars. WWI is no exception. Everyone remembers poison gases (though even they have more peaceful applications in pest control). But medicine also benefitted - reconstructive surgery, X-ray techniques, blood transfusion, and the interpretation and treatment of shell shock. Archaeology benefitted from airborne reconnaissance; astronomy from the development of infrared sensitive photographic emulsions; physics from acoustic studies and the bare beginnings of radar; meteorology from better sharing of long-range (in time and space) data; and many others. The war surely contributed to the outbreak of influenza in 1918-19 ("Spanish" only because their data were not censored) and to interventions now in use. Stepping back further, we see that literature, (my favorite is the poem "Naming of Parts"), music, representational and non-representational art, the role of women in society, were changed; indeed nothing emerged unchanged. And, of course, WWI was the primary cause of World War II. Officers' caps, on the other hand, looks just the same today as they did in 1917, but airplanes and tanks are very different. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, April 17, 2021 11:57AM - 12:33PM Live |
B03.00003: Dwight Nicholson Medal for Outreach (2019): A Brief Tour of the Zooniverse: How Crowdsourcing Science is Solving Big Data Problems in Research Invited Speaker: Lucy Fortson Citizen science - the involvement of hundreds of thousands of people in the research process - provides a radical solution to the challenge of dealing with the greatly increased size of modern data sets. Zooniverse.org is the most successful collection of online citizen science projects which have enabled over two and a quarter million online volunteers to contribute to over 300 research projects spanning disciplines from astronomy to zoology. Starting from the original Galaxy Zoo project, I will briefly describe the Zooniverse platform and some of the results to date from the Zooniverse collection of online projects in the context of new approaches to combining machine learning with human classifications. I will then discuss future developments of the Zooniverse platform with the ultimate goal of producing a system that most efficiently balances human and machine classifications. Such efforts are critical in coping with data from the next generation of large-scale experiments, including the Vera Rubin Observatory. [Preview Abstract] |
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