Lab Reports

I am operating under the increasingly difficult to maintain supposition that you don't do this just to drive me nuts.  That it really is due to your lack of facility with graphs, not perverse senses of humor.

I have just gone through 9 resubmittals of the a=F/M labs. Lots of errors were cleared up, but SIX of them still failed to compare the numerical value of the slope for the 100 g series to .98N or the slope for the 50 gram series to .49N. Several did make reference to individual points and how they showed a/(1/M) was close to F, some did mention that the acceleration did decrease as Mcart went up, some did calculate the slope somewhere, but you all mentioned that the slope should equal the force and then  6 of you failed to find out if it did. Some scientists you are; weren't you even curious?

The reason for using the slope is because a best fit line represents data from several trials so  this best fit line, which averages out random errors of individual runs, tends to give more indicative results. Also using the slope can remove some constant systematic errors like those caused by friction in the pulley.

In any case I believe I told most of you what you should do in my comments or orally, so next time make sure your read the relevant notes, try to remember what I tell you and check the blog posts as well.