Pendula, Simple, Compound, and Damped

This writeup is to give you some guidance about writing up the pendulum lab. Here are a few helpful (I hope) points.

1. The writeup should be fairly short, no more than about 6 pages, double spaced, with figures. You can exclude the Figures from you page count, particularly since the LP figures ahve really small type and so have to be made large. If you see your report going more than 6 pages, talk to me!
2. Be sure that you include relevant images in your writeup (several images from the your movies and graphs from loggerpro - you can use screen shots from loggerpro). You should also turn in your loggerpro file (just email it to me). All Figures and tables should have captions and be referenced in your text. All movies should be posted to the facebook page.
3. It will consist of 4 parts:
   • Background: What is the pendulum, why is it important, what are some biological applications (for example, google pendulum walking). What is your model for the pendulum (equations, assumptions, e.g. small angle)
   The next three elements are common to each of the three parts. You can organize your report by listing all three experimental protocols, then results from all three parts, then a discussion of all three parts. Alternately, you could for each of the three parts, write the experiment, result, and the do an overall discussion for all three together. The latter might flow better.
   • Experimental description: materials, protocol - enough detail for someone to repeat your experiment.
   • Results: Show your images, describe calculations, fits to the data, plots from loggerpro. Be explicit about errors here. Show data and fits to the data on the same graph. (See for example, Fig. 14.23 in the text). What are standard deviations? We will do some work on this in class on Tuesday.
     For the physical pendulum (part 2) you will not do a graphical analysis of the data, since you only have two points. On this part, you should assume a value of g and calculate the effective lengtrh of the pedulum.
     
   • Discussion. Here you want to link your data analysis to the model. How well did the model describe the data.? What were the errors? Calculate g and the damping constant. The discussion should end with a conclusion/summary of the lab.