Note: your participation pointage from mini-quiz O are bonus points. That deadline is tomorrow, Nov. 27!
Your big grade ahead is the final exam, on Saturday, Dec. 7. It is 96 points, double the size of a midterm, but you get almost three hours to complete it. Check the syllabus handout page. It is cumulative.
THe final exam is mandatory, and no one may take it early or late, only during the free period on Saturday, Dec. 7, 10:05 AM - 10:00 PM. Be sure to schedule your Saturday carefully to leave a three-hour block of time between 10 AM and 10 PM. Clear everything NOW with your boss at work: academics has priority!
Excellent.
| Estimated grade | Points as of 11/3 | Percentage |
|---|---|---|
| A | 123 or more | 0.90 |
| B | 102 | 0.75 |
| C | 82 | 0.60 |
| D | 68 | 0.50 |
| F | fewer than 68 | < 0.50 |
On a side note, expect to see a few bonus points opportunities set up in Webcourses, for your grade-earning possibilities. Keep alert.
New: I have included a bit of extra reading, through the UCF Library network's Credo database.
SO... there is now a total of 64 points possible to have earned:
I normally do not give out letter grades on exams, but if I were to give out semester grades this week, that is how you'd estimate it.
Specs:
Important: You must be sure that your computer and your ISP are functioning perfectly, because the instructor cannot troubleshoot anything for you in that line. It is 100% the student's responsibility. If your computer or ISP flakes out in the middle of the exam, your exam is going to be toast. So be paranoid about computer and ISP. If in doubt, slide over to main campus and take the exam in the library.
Excellent.
Those of you who have not done so...
I am hoping it will be squared away and available to you all sometime today.
But even if Webcourses/Canvas is not our friend, we will persevere and use all of our skills to defeat it this semester.
No homework this week beyond the "Week 1, getting started" activity, but do try to get the textbook squared away.
Welcome aboard, everybody!
Galileo Galilei, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences by Galileo Galilei.And first of all it seems desirable to find and explain a definition best fitting natural phenomena.
Translated from the Italian and Latin into English by Henry Crew and Alfonso de Salvio. With an Introduction by Antonio Favaro
(New York: Macmillan, 1914). Accessed from http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/753 on 2013-08-07
So I have to go through and grade it by hand. Your grade will not go down, but it might stay the same or go up by 1 point.
Get your exam 3 done, and I will get those participation points squared away either tonight or tomorrow.
Good night! See you in the morning for Exam 3!!!
Good night!
Nice.
So get ready to push, finish the last lap with power and crush Exam 3 on Friday!
By the way: To view the artwork track of audio files in iTunes 11, you must Command-click the small square icon left of the progress bar. That will pop out the diagrams, formulas and notes embedded in the artwork track. You can make it full screen, very nice.
TONS of students getting B, almost as many looking at a C, but just a few are taking down an A.
All this is preliminary, and will change in the next two weeks, as we complete five more learning modules and Exam 3.
To estimate your grade status as of today, add up (i) and (ii), divide that sum by 128 to get your current percentage, then use this table
| A | 0.90 or more |
| B | 0.75 |
| C | 0.60 |
| D | 0.50 |
| F | below 0.50 |
Right now it looks like the avg. score was 34.07 out of 48, which is about a 71%, about 5% higher than the Exam 1 avg. Good!
The transcript and recording are now available. Look for the "Office hours: recordings, transcripts" page on Webcourses2.
Use the regular mini-quiz F for leisurely studying. Use the battlefield version for testing your computer and ISP, to make sure that everything works well. Please be super paranoid about this: If it loads slowly, find another computer or internet service that runs fast and smooth.
For those of you who contributed but did not get bonus pointage,
Complete it before 11:59 PM tonight.
Next modules will be activated Saturday morning.
Look in our iTunes U area.
I just posted the participation points for this week's modules, A and B. (Oceans 1 was just a practice mini-quiz.)
We will have online office hours on Monday next week, 8:00 - 9:30 AM.
The recordings and transcripts page is in the right sidebar of Webcourses2.
My ordinary procedure is to open the exam availability at 10:05 AM, before which I always deactivate the mini-quizzes.
That being the case, the mini-quizzes are due at different times:
I finished this interesting biography of Rosalind Franklin.Her famous x-ray image of the DNA molecule is one of the most famous scientific images ever. But she died young and was not given the Nobel Prize with the others, Wilkins, Crick, Watson, even though her images were they key information for them in building the double helix model of DNA!
Very sad in the end, but she lived lived a good life.
Any PSC1121 student who got this book and read it would really learn about life and even a bit of physics!
This interesting biography of Rosalind Franklin is very hard to put down.Lots of physics concepts set in the drama of a one woman's life. Her famous x-ray image of the DNA molecule is one of the most famous scientific images ever. But she died young and was not given the Nobel Prize with the others, Wilkins, Crick, Watson.
Back in the early 1960s, the United States launched a few satellites, the Vela satellites, to detect secret nuclear weapons testing by the Soviet Union. By treaty between the US and USSR, no one was to test nuclear weapons above ground; underground testing was permitted. To monitor the Russians, US scientists at Los Alamos developed the Vela platform.
Nobody ever saw the Russkies nuking off any above ground tests, but while the detectors were not over Siberia, they could definitely see bursts of high energy gamma rays from sources outside the solar system.
Excellent.
In the 1970s, they began publishing scientific studies of these gamma ray bursters. The image below is an animation of the April 27 burst. Click the image to see the animation.
There is still a lot of study going on as to why these GRBs happen all over the universe. We do not know for sure, and neither do the Russians. This GRB was so close and so well-imaged, that maybe someone will now crack the puzzle, using F = ma, quantum physics and all the concepts we study in PSC1121.
80 points, 76 questions
I just activated a bonus points activity in Discussions, creating a question for the final exam on Saturday. Go for it!
I just updated all points from mini-quiz participation, making 52 possible based on 13 mini-quizzes, 4 points each.
You now have all regular points for the semester other than the final examination.
You can now estimate can now estimate your grade going into the final:
Learning module O for Oceans is now ready. It requires some online journal reading, which is linked to the concept guide. There will be questions on the mini-quiz about this reading, and on the final exam!
This allows me to post up 4 points for you from taking mini-quiz K by the deadline last night.
You can now work through learning module K, concerning plate tectonics, volcanoes etc.The mini-quiz is just a pair of calculations, so study well.
It is not a problem, because I can see you have gotten in there and answered at least one question correctly, so you will get your 4 points today.
But if you feel like getting 29 points on the mini-quiz, take it one more time because I went back in this morning and set it to 1 point per question.
Module I is ready but I will release the mini-quiz I after the exam.
| Letter grade estimate | Percentage |
|---|---|
| A | 90% or higher |
| B | 75% |
| C | 60% |
| D | 50% |
| F | less than 50% |
Make sure to review the hydrogen ground state podcast.
This week's learning module is E2, which completes the section on waves and oscillations.
Get studying, and be sure to take the mini-quiz at least once before the deadline Friday!
So work on your other classes until maybe later tonight.
Mercator projections of free-air gravity, topography, and Bouguer gravity. Frames in (A) highlight the area surrounding the Korolev impact basin, at center. Frames in (B) show the western limb of Oceanus Procellarum. Details of free-air and Bouguer gravity are the same as in Fig. 1. Topography is from a LOLA 1/64° grid.
Cf., Zuber et al., Science 8 February 2013: Vol. 339 no. 6120 pp. 668-671.Free-air gravity adjusts the value of g for altitude above sea level; Bouguer gravity also corrects for the mass of the rock piled up to that altitude.
1000 mGal = 1000 milliGalileos = 1 cm/sec2. So the variations are small but telling.
Enjoy.
Also: Sorry that your Grades page looks such a hodgepodge. No one seems to know how to control the rows on the Grades page, but I hope to figure out a method soon, so that it looks more like our grading scheme and is easy to understand.
Good night, gotta catch up on ZZZZ.
How about looking at it like a car driver?
That can be a life and death proposition. You definitely like long stopping time when driving.
This is the last module that we will cover on Examination 1, although I will activate learning module D next week.
Remember to keep your mental composure at an even keel as we fight back against the machines, including the new Terminator known as Webcourses2. :D
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