Now equipped with broader participant samples and more diverse stimuli, we can create Big Data experiments. This chapter reviews research methods involved in running Big Data surveys and experiments. The chapter discusses overt and covert measurements that we can collect via online experiments. The chapter then discusses practical logistics to keep in mind when running a Big Data experiment, including experimental design decisions, and a behind-the-scenes look at how data is saved online via server-side coding. Next, once you have the data from an experiment, how do you clean the data and how do you visualize it? The chapter ends with discussion on the ethical implications of collecting covert measures and the useful applications of web-coding skills to create public-facing websites.

Strong interactions are, well, strong. You have hadrons interacting and breaking up into a huge number of other hadrons. It is hard to understand what is going on. Physicists stumbled along during the 1960s trying out many ideas (the key words here are current algebra, analytic S-matrix, Regge trajectories and string theory) without much real understanding.

The term periglacial describes areas subject to repeated freezing and thawing and the processes associated with the growth of ice within soil and rock. Although originally referring to processes and climates adjacent to glaciers, “periglacial” now applies more broadly to cold-climate processes where frost action predominates. Earth’s cold, periglacial landscapes span both polar regions and many high elevation and mountainous areas. These landscapes are unlike any others, with ice-formed landforms such as pingos (Fig. 20.0) ice-wedge polygons, sorted circles, and rock glaciers found only in these cold landscapes.

In Chapter 1, we invited you to consider the critical potential of social work: the potential for us as individual workers, and collectively as a profession, to question the social conditions and discourses that give rise to human suffering and what we might do about these. The critical standpoint is one that sensitises us to social injustice and the need for transformation. Being a critical practitioner is challenging: while we may decide that this is the path we wish to take, it is an ongoing process, borne out in day-to-day and week-to-week activities. Becoming a critical practitioner is not a single act of commitment, but an often-arduous journey of revelation and struggle. There are many potential setbacks along this journey. As the words of a great twentieth-century social reformer Martin Luther King remind us, ‘Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable … Every step towards the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concerns of dedicated individuals.’ Critical social workers are among those dedicated individuals with passionate concerns.

The Lagrangian for the charge and neutral currents of the Standard Model contains fermion fields, what we call matter – leptons and quarks – and their interaction with spin-1 fields. These spin-1 fields are the W-, Z- and γ-bosons. As will become clear as I proceed, these fields are at the very center of the definition of the Standard Model as a gauge theory.

“Marvelous is the working of our world!” N. Gogol, Nevsky Prospect, 1835 Should this have been the first chapter? Where to start from in teaching the Standard Model? The data painfully collected by experiments are the basis of everything – but they would be mute were it not for our models and theories. On the other hand, it seems that our brain is not very good at working all by itself. It needs the gentle prodding of experimental data, of finding out how (real) things are. Without external inputs, our mind is easily led astray, going round in circles (often of narrower and narrower radius).

From the Blue Ridge overlook in Shenandoah National Park, Virginia, USA, one can see the broad Shenandoah Valley, split by Massanutten Mountain, with more ridges and valleys in the distance (Fig. 9.1). This view of the Appalachian ridges and valleys provides a classic example of an eroded fold and thrust belt, where parallel ridges of hard, resistant rocks are separated by valleys underlain by comparatively softer rocks. Fold and thrust belt topography develops on folded bedrock structures called anticlines and synclines (Fig. 9.2). But this type of geologic structure is not without a long back-story. Most of the folded rocks underlying these mountains were originally deposited as flat-lying sediments, hundreds of millions of years ago. The folding occurred much later, driven by compressive forces associated with continental collision. Millions of years of subsequent erosion on these rocks were then required to give us the landscapes we see today.

What else? The Standard Model answers all our questions about high-energy physics. At the time of writing of this book, there was no evidence of physics beyond the Standard Model. The predicted values of all observables are in reasonable agreement with the experimental data; only few of them show some tension (that is, a discrepancy of more than three standard deviations) in the global fit.

This chapter focuses on how to create Big Datasets by thinking like a data scientist. It begins by discussing examples of impactful open access datasets. It then teaches the reader the basics of data scraping to allow them to create their own datasets, including an introduction to client-side web coding. The chapter concludes with discussion on the ethical questions around data scraping, and current practices in Open Science to make your datasets publicly available.