The PHENIX Experiment at RHIC

The physics emphases of the PHENIX collaboration and the design and current status of the PHENIX detector are discussed. The plan of the collaboration for making the most effective use of the available luminosity in the first years of RHIC operation is also presented.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure. Further details of the PHENIX physics program available at http://www.rhic.bnl.gov/phenix

Assessment of Reading Speed and Comprehension in STEM Students at Georgia Gwinnett College

Faculty colleagues frequently assert that students have difficulty reading; students fail to read exam questions or lab instructions correctly. Additionally, students frequently report to faculty that college level texts are too hard to read. To investigate the scope of this problem, reading comprehension across the biology program was assessed. Students were asked to read a passage and mark their position when the time limit was called; students were then asked to answer a few questions and summarize the reading passage. These student reading comprehension scores are analyzed with regard to academic (e.g. GPA, college hours completed) and social metrics (e.g. English as a second language, first generation college student) to determine if correlations exist with student success and persistence. Data indicating the progress of reading comprehension through the degree program and data documenting the insufficiencies of student reading comprehension and speed will be presented. Since successful science students must understand and interpret literature that uses technical language appropriate to the field, we hope to document correlations between reading speed and comprehension and student success to better understand difficulties GGC STEM students encounter. Future studies may address remediation however this study is limited to assessing the problem

PHENIX detector overview

The PHENIX detector is designed to perform a broad study of A-A, p-A, and p-p collisions to investigate nuclear matter under extreme conditions. A wide variety of probes, sensitive to all timescales, are used to study systematic variations with species and energy as well as to measure the spin structure of the nucleon. Designing for the needs of the heavy-ion and polarized-proton programs has produced a detector with unparalleled capabilities. PHENIX measures electron and muon pairs, photons, and hadrons with excellent energy and momentum resolution. The detector consists of a large number of subsystems that are discussed in other papers in this volume. The overall design parameters of the detector are presented. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved