PHY132-H1S |
Measurement Project due March 31 |
Jason Harlow Winter 2009 |
Overview and Motivation
If you took
the pre-requisite for this course, PHY131, you completed the Error Analysis
Assignment, which is still available for your review at: http://www.upscale.utoronto.ca/PVB/Harrison/ErrorAnalysis/
. We hope that as part of PHY131 and
PHY132, you have been taught how to
These are
skills that will last you the rest of your life as you continue in any
scientific, medical or other discipline in which measurements are important.
Another
important skill is writing. You should
be able to write a clear, readable report in English that informs the reader of
your findings and conclusions. To this
end, I am assigning this Measurement Project, due March 31. Your report should be about 2 pages,
type-written, and should be submitted both electronically and in paper format.
Winter 2009 Topics
I would
like you to answer exactly ONE of the following five general questions:
As part of
your Motivation section, you should re-state the question so that it is more
specific. Make sure that your final
answer matches the question you are
asking. [For example, if you are measuring the height of Convocation Hall, do
you include the thickness of the roof, and where do you define zero
height? ie, at the base of the steps at
Report Format
Your report
should include the following sections:
The
Measurement Project will, in part, be marked on writing style and on the
organization and presentation of the material.
Good English structure, spelling and grammar are expected, and graphs
and diagrams should be clearly labelled.
Resources
The
technologists for PHY132 are Larry Avramidis, Lilian Leung, Phil Scolieri and
Rob Smidrovskis. They all share an
office in MP127. With their permission you
may borrow metre sticks, stopwatches, measuring tape, Vernier callipers,
thermometers, and the like from the Resource Centre in MP126. They can also make a digital scale available
to you. If MP126 is not open you can
knock on the door of MP127 during regular business hours M-F 9-12, 1-5.
Due Date, Procedures for
Turning in Report.
The Measurement
Project in electronic format is due to www.turnitin.com by 11:59 PM on Tuesday,
March 31, 2009. It must be submitted in electronic format
(Word, PDF and several other formats are acceptable) to www.turnitin.com by the
deadline, and an identical paper copy must also be submitted to your
demonstrator either during your 9th Practical session Mar.25-31, or, at the
very latest, into your TA’s drop-box before noon on April 1. The paper copy may be turned in early if you
wish, as can the electronic version.
Your name, Student Number, Practical Section and Group code must appear
clearly on the front of your Measurement Project. Note that the paper and electronic versions
must be identical.
Late
Measurement Projects will be penalized at the rate of 10% per day of
lateness. The number of days of lateness
will be the maximum of the electronic submission lateness, as based on the
turnitin.com time-stamp, and the paper-copy lateness. A fractional number of
days will always be rounded up to the
nearest integer, and the penalty will be applied as a percentage of the
unpenalized mark. Measurement Projects
with an electronic or paper lateness of more than 10 days will receive a zero.
To submit
your assignment electronically you should follow these steps:
·
From your turnitin
homepage click the Enroll in a class button.
·
For this class the Turnitin class I.D. is 2619843 and
the Turnitin enrollment password is conhall . The name of the class should be “PHY132 Winter
2009”.
·
From your Turnitin
homepage select this class
·
Click on the Submit
button and select File Upload from the pulldown menu.
·
Enter a submission
title for your paper, which should include your name. You may use spaces in the title, but not
commas or other special characters. Use
the Browse button to select the file that you would like to submit.
Click Submit.
NOTE: Turnitin automatically
will generate a text-only version of your paper. This is what it uses to search for textual
similarity with other documents in its database. This text-only version will NOT be used in
the marking; please ignore it! If we
wish to mark your electronic version, we will download the exact same file you
uploaded, which will be complete with figures, tables, special characters,
fonts, etc.
If you
prefer, you may choose to submit only a hard-copy of your project, but in this
case you must also provide a photocopy of the relevant notes you took
while performing your measurements with dates and times, with numbered references linking the text in
your formal report to the original measurement notes. Please speak
with the lab coordinator at least one week before the project deadline if you
prefer to submit a hard-copy only.
Length Limit
The typed
report should be approximately 2 pages long, corresponding to about 500 words.
The
absolute maximum word limit for your report is 800 words (including title,
abstract, table and figure captions), and the absolute maximum number of pages,
including figures, tables, etc is 5 letter-sized page sides total. Marks will
be deducted if either of these length limits is exceeded. Note that www.turnitin.com sometimes
overcounts the number of words, mostly depending on how you submitted your
tables; in any case the turnitin.com word count should not exceed 1000 words.
Poster Option
The most
common way to prepare the report is by using a word-processing program (such as
Word) with a 12-pt Times New Roman font, into which you may insert figures,
tables, etc. As an alternative, you may
instead submit your Measurement Project as a poster. The poster should be 28” tall and 36” wide,
and should not have any text on it smaller than 24-pt. There are several good
programs for making posters, including Powerpoint, Macromedia Freehand, Adobe
Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe PageMaker. In any case, you should make a PDF of your
poster and submit it to turnitin.com following the instructions above.
You should
NOT submit a poster in paper format.
Instead, please attach the PDF file in an email to Jason Harlow by the
electronic deadline. You will receive a
confirmation that your report has been received. The very best posters submitted will be
printed by the graphics department in Physics, and, with the author’s
permission, posted in the hall on the first floor of the North Wing of
McLennan. Posters should include all the
necessary information about your measurements and analysis, but should also be
eye-catching, colourful and succinct.
Notes on “Originality”
While your
Procedure may include work you do with your friends (who should be listed as
collaborators in your report), your Measurement Project should be primarily
your individual work. You must perform
the analysis and write the entire report yourself. For
information on “how not to plagiarize”, please see http://www.utoronto.ca/writing/plagsep.html.
The
turnitin.com version will be treated as your official submission, and the
marker may download your report from the turnitin.com web site. The marker will also have access to an
“originality report”, which is a comparison of the text-portion of your report
to millions of other documents, including all the online material for this
course, all the other reports submitted to turnitin.com, and many documents
which were available at some time on the world-wide-web. The originality report will probably not be
used in the marking unless there is some evidence that an unusually large
amount of your unquoted text is identical to some other source. If you do wish to quote a source, be careful
to reference it and include the copied words in quotation marks, so it is clear
to the reader that you did not write them.
Students
agree that by taking this course your measurement project may be subject to
submission for textual similarity review to Turnitin.com for the detection of
plagiarism. All submitted papers will be included as source documents in the
Turnitin.com reference database solely for the purpose of detecting plagiarism
of such papers. The terms that apply to the University’s use of the
Turnitin.com service are described on the Turnitin.com web site.