Review Session 2

Review Session, Physics 2900, April 20, 1999

Quiz will emphasize your understanding of

Science covered in class, guest lectures, labs and in reading in Mapping, including geophysics, seismic tomography, visualization of weather and climate data, computer models (simulation) of climate, global warming, concepts from chaos, the prey-predator rabbit population model, scanning tunneling microscopes and the images they create, X-ray crystallography, DNA, interaction of DNA with proteins.
Computer science and Web concepts covered in class, in lab and in reading in Internet book and Numbers by Color, including Web pages and Websites, clients, servers, browsers, URLs, html , hyperlinks, image maps, index color, color tables, false color and pseudocolor, representation of arrays of numbers as color surfaces, grids for computer visualization, scientific animations.
How can you tell pseudoscience from science on the Web?

Details of material to be covered
- Mapping reading and guest lectures by Prof. Mike Ritzwoller (Physics Dept.) on geophysics, Prof. Jim Meiss (Math Dept.) on chaos, Prof. Noel Clark (Physics Dept.) on the scanning tunneling microscope (STM), and Dr. Jeff Boote (NCAR) on computer visualization of climate and weather simulations.. Mapping: Chapters 4, 5, 11, 12, 14. What are the key points??
  - Seismic tomography (Chapter 4)
    - How is the interior of the Earth organized? What are the core, mantle and crust?
    - What is seismic tomography? What is the role of earthquakes and seismic stations? How does seismic tomography differ from medical tomography?
    - What does seismic tomography tell us about the interior of Earth? Does the interior of Earth move? How fast? Do hot regions move up or down? (Prof. Mike Ritzwoller) Can you understand the color plate images in Hall showing mantle and core movement?
  - Chaos (Chapter 14)
    - What is the fox-rabbit-clover model of a chaotic system? In this model, what determines future rabbit populations? What is meant by period-doubling? Why are chaos experts needed in cardiac units of hospitals?
    - What was the chaos machine demonstrated by Prof. Jim Meiss? What kinds of motion did it execute and what determined the type of motion?
    - What is meant by sensitivity to initial conditions? What is the butterly effect?
    - What is an example of a mathematical rule in chaos theory? What is meant by iteration of a rule? What kinds of rules give rise to 2-D images (such as strange attractors) by building them up point by point?
  - Climate (Chapter 5)
    - What is the difference between weather and climate?
    - What is meant by a computer model of climate? How do the simulations carried out using this model differ from computer visualizaztions of a database of climate measurements?
    - What kind of physics goes into the general circulation model of the National Center for Atmospheric Research? What are the three different ways that heat energy can get transferred from one place to another?
    - What is a Paleoclimate Model and how is paleontological climate data collected?
    - What are the steps necessary to construct a computer visualization of a database, whether it be the Colorado temperature database you collected for a class project, the display of a collected database of climate based on evidence from paleontology, or a database produced by a computer model.
    - What is Doppler radar?
  - STM (Chapter 12)
    - What is a scanning tunneling microscope and how does it work? Why does the microscope have to be hung from a bungee cord (Prof. Noel Clark)?
    - What are examples of images produced by such microscopes? How can they be enhanced by image processing?
    - What does the surface of graphite look like? Can individual atoms be seen? What do other surfaces look like?
    - In the IBM Almaden Website image of an STM picture called Quantum Corrall, what is the visual evidence for quantum mechanics.
  - DNA (Chapter 11)
    - What is the structure of a DNA molecule and what does DNA do? How are G, C, T, and A arranged to form the genetic code? What does the code make happen? What is a gene?
    - What is a restriction enzyme? Give an example of one and say what it does. Image in book. Why is cutting DNA molecules important in genetic engineering?
    - How do we obtain images of a protein strangling a DNA molecule? X-ray crytallography works on the principle of interference. Understand what interference patterns are and how they hold information about the object being interrogated.
- Reading in Internet Book on how the Web works (Pgs. 139-179) and in Number by Colors on using color to visualize data (Pgs. 275 ö293). Lectures on animations and color surface visualization of mathematical rules (such as multiplication) and of data (such as weather, etc in the weather movie project). Use of index color and color tables to introduce color into scientific images. Discussion of pseudoscience. Lectures by Steve Pierce on html and Website construction.
  - Web Review:
    - What is the World Wide Web? What is a server? What is a client? What is a browser? What is the meaning of the parts of a Web address such as http://www.colorado.edu/physics/2000? What is http?
    - What is the hypertext markup language (html) and how is it used to create a formatted Web page? Make sure you know what the tags mean.
    - What is a hyperlink? What is an image map? What is FTP software? How can you tell science from pseudoscience on the Web?
  - Color visualization
    - How can an array of numbers be generated mathematically? How can it be visualzied?
    - How can an array of numbers be generated from natural data (such as measurments of temperature)? How can it be visualized?
    - How can animations be generated from sequences of arrays of numbers?
    - What is index color and how does it differ from RGB color? What is a colortable and how can you use it to generate custom made colors in scientific images?
    - Why is the use of color in scientific images better than grayscale? What is the technical definition of pseudocolor and how how does it differ from false color? Note, this semantic distinction is not always followed.
  - Animation
    - What are positive afterimages? What is persistence of vision? How many image frames must be shown each second in order for the afterimage from one to overlap the afterimage from the previous one?
    - What kind of information did the scientific animations of material described in Hall contain which was missing from the still color pictures?

How can an array of numbers be generated from natural data (such as measurments of temperature)? How can it be visualized? + How can animations be generated from sequences of arrays of numbers? + What is index color and how does it differ from RGB color? What is a colortable and how can you use it to generate custom made colors in scientific images? + Why is the use of color in scientific images better than grayscale? What is the technical definition of pseudocolor and how how does it differ from false color? Note, this semantic distinction is not always followed. + Animation + What are positive afterimages? What is persistence of vision? How many image frames must be shown each second in order for the afterimage from one to overlap the afterimage from the previous one? + What kind of information did the scientific animations of material described in Hall contain which was missing from the still color pictures?

Review Session, Physics 2900, April 20, 1999

Quiz will emphasize your understanding of

Not on test