Monthly Archives: November 2017

Fall quarter Mandatory Lab Clean-up

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Each student is required to participate in mandatory lab clean-up at the end of each quarter. The session is scheduled in week 9 Tuesday November 28 from 4:30 – 5:00 in either Lab 2 1241 or Lab 2 2238. If you miss this session, you will need to schedule a separate clean-up task with an SIT before you can have an evaluation conference.  Make-up clean-ups are on your own time and generally more onerous. You can’t sign up for a conference until this obligation is met.

Last Chemistry Assignments

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As mentioned in a previous post, the Chemistry quiz will be on Tuesday in Week 9. However, chemistry quiz revisions are not due until the usual time on Thursday. Please also remember that you have the following chemistry assignments due in Week 9:

(1) Lab write-up for the ionic compound lab following the guidelines in your lab manual. This should be written individually and is due at the start of lab on Tuesday morning.

(2) Powerpoint presentation on the ionic compound lab. You and your group will put together the slides and present before the class during your normal lab time. The Powerpoint presentation on putting together a good Powerpoint presentation is in the file share under the Chemistry Handouts, Lab folder. A copy of the rubric we will be using to evaluate the presentations will be uploaded to the file share later (I am having server problems right now) and is also attached below.

Please email Robin a copy of your group’s Powerpoint before you arrive in class so all of the presentations can be loaded on the computer and ready to go in a timely fashion.

(3) Mastering Chemistry Homework. Since I would like you to spend extra time preparing for your presentation, I have given you an extra day to finish the last homework assignment. It is now due on Wednesday, November 30.

Download (DOC, 239KB)

 

Physics Quiz 7 Corrections and Revisions

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Posted below is Quiz 7. You may, as always, submit corrections to any questions on the quiz. In addition, the question for revision using the IDEA format is #2.

A very popular incorrect answer to #2 involved treating the problem as if it were in one dimension. It is crucial to remember that momentum is a vector quantity, and that your equations must treat the conservation of x and y components of momentum independently. You cannot write a single equation like m_A v_A + m_B v_B = (m_A + m_B) v_f and expect to obtain a correct answer. It should also concern you that nothing about such an analysis tells you in what direction the cars will be moving after the collision. If, by contrast, you have the x and y components of velocity, you have fully specified the velocity vector, and could obtain a speed and direction by applying right triangle trigonometry using the components.

 

Download (DOCX, 19KB)

Week 9 Seminar Readings and Writing Prompts

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Our final seminar of fall quarter will be from 9 – 11am on Thursday November 30. Schedule changes due to this are noted in your Replacement Reading Schedule.

The readings for the seminar (from the peer-reviewed scientific literature) focus on overt and subtle issues of bias related to gender and race in STEM environments:

We will hand out paper copies of these articles in class Monday so that you can mark those with your annotations and questions, and have them available during Seminar (without people using electronic devices during the discussion).

Pre-Seminar Writing Assignment. Beyond reading the Quality of Evidence paper and skimming the Double Jeopardy paper, we would like for you to respond in writing to the following prompts.

  • Please type up your responses and bring them with you, along with the articles, to Seminar.
  • Your typed responses will serve as your Seminar Entrance Ticket.
  • Faculty will collect these at the end of Seminar and check for evidence of attempting to complete.

The readings for the last seminar of the quarter may be some students’ first introduction to looking at a scientific paper. We do not expect students to be able to read a peer-reviewed article in its entirety and completely understand it after one (or even five) readings. Even experienced scientists skim papers for necessary information and, for the most part, this is what we are asking you to do.

The articles in question we have given you were both published in highly regarded journals. The Proceedings of the National Academies of Science (PNAS) is a journal that publishes high-quality research across many areas of science, while the Journal of Geophysical Research (JGR) is one of the most highly respected journals in the geosciences.

Before you read for content, first scan the heading titles of the subsections of the two papers to get an overview of what goes where. The order of the sections in the JGR paper (Double Jeopardy) should look familiar to those taking chemistry. The PNAS paper (Quality of Evidence) has a slightly different order and the introductory section does not have a heading title.

The PNAS (Quality of Evidence) is shorter. (Many papers published in broad-interest journals such as PNAS, Science, and Nature move a lot of the nitty-gritty details to “Supplemental Information”/SI sections that you can access online; link above.) The questions in the writing assignment below refer to the PNAS paper unless otherwise noted.

  1. The first part of the PNAS article is an abstract (summary) printed in bold face. Following this is an unlabeled introduction section that discusses the importance of the topic and summarizes the scientific literature on which the current research was built.  Figure out how many papers (or other references) are cited in this section and record this number. Then go to the end of the paper, locate the citations for these references, and, based on the names of the journals, make a list of the fields of study being drawn together in this section. 
  2. Based on the “Current Research” and “Materials and Methods” sections of the PNAS paper, write a one- or two-sentence summary of your understanding of each of the three experiments reported in this paper.
  3. The “Results” section of the PNAS paper is chock full of statistics! If you don’t have a background in statistics, use the guideline that anything with a P-value less than 0.05 represents a significant statistical correlation. Right now the results section is a hard-to understand jumble of numbers. Take your best shot at creating a table that summarizes the results of the three experiments. If you’re not sure how to do this, examine the JGR paper, particularly Table 3 and/or Table 6.
  4. Skim the “Limitations and Future Directions” section for limitations of the PNAS study and compare to section 2.5 of the JGR paper. What sorts of limitations seem to be inherent in this sort of study? What limitations might be avoided with better experimental design?
  5. Compare the “Discussion” section of the PNAS paper with section 4.4 of the JGR paper. Both sections discuss actions that might be taken to counter bias in STEM fields. Pick one action from either paper that you think might be effective, and one action that you think might be hard to implement.

Physics Lab: Wrapping up the quarter

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As we approach the end of the quarter I’d like to share my plans for wrapping up the work in physics lab. We have just one more regular lab remaining in Week 9 when we come back from break, with part of the week 9 lab set aside for cleanup.

The Week 9 lab is essentially a series of activities without any prolonged data analysis, and my plan is to collect lab notebooks at the end of lab that Tuesday. Remember that your lab notebook is your primary record (and evidence of) your work in Physics lab, and will be an important element in demonstrating your learning in this component of the program. If you have significant work missing from your notebook, please try to remedy those omissions before the next lab session.

I plan to return your notebooks by the end of Week 10.