CPS for today and Friday's bonus are UP.

I just uploaded your CPS points

1. from today's lecture, L6, the sixth of the semester:
   1. how many you answered and
   2. how many you got correct
2. early CPS bonus point from Friday's lecture.

Look in your My Grades page.

Homework ready now! GO GO GO

The first real homework inside Webcourses is now ready. It works like a quiz:

1. You have 4 attempts.


2. Webcourses keeps your highest of your four attempts.


3. You have 33 minutes per attempt.


4. Many students actually use their first attempt as a reading guide:
   1. take it
   2. go study the chapter
   3. come back and crush a later attempt for max pointage.

Make sure to study through Ch.3 to Newton's 3rd Law before trying this out!!

Look for the Monsters, Inc. icon.

Office hours for fall semester

Here are my official office hours for students in PSC1121 section 0002:

1. Mondays, 2:30 - 3:15 PM, MAP412


2. Wednesdays, 8:00 - 9:00 AM, MAP412


3. Extended Wednesday Δt to be announced when appropriate.

Remember: when you come to see me in office hours, YOU bring the agenda, even if it just to shoot the breeze!

The Linsky Files, from our CPS session today

The PDF of Ed Linsky's session is now available for download in Webcourses. I will be placing Ed's work on Webcourses in PDF every time we have a CPS session. They are great for study tools.

Look for the X-Files icon. That identifies the top secret location of THE LINSKY FILES.

Billion dollar question: what we do.

Right now the prediction has changed: instead of "somewhere in South Carolina" it now looks like NHC is predicting North Carolina... somewhere!

As you might imagine, it is a BILLION dollar question for the people of the Carolinas.

This shows what we talked about in lecture about the scientific enterprise: we want to predict what Nature does. When our principles generate predictions that verify, then we consider the principles more solid. Right now, the hurricane prediction principles are not so solid.... BUT we keep working at it.

Bonus points up; CPS due date, Sept. 8

We will start taking regular CPS points "for real" on Monday, Sept. 8, so try to get your clicker registered by then.

For those of you who get registered before that and bring your clicker to class, we will take one bonus point per day. This is my normal practice whilst you all get used to clicking.

AND: I just posted the Friday bonus point for about 34 of you who were clicking away on Friday. SWEEEEEET.

Widget for Mac OS 10.5 Leopard users

I just created a Dashboard widget for Mac OS 10.5 Leopard users. It works like a simple RSS viewer that lets you keep an eye on the top few posting in this Announcements Blogspot. It is very efficient for checking. Clicking one of the

Unzip it and click on it to start it up and install in Dashboard. When you look on your Dashboard, the PSC1121 Announcements widget looks like this



Look for it on the home page in Webcourses. It is a zip file, 191 Kb.

CPS technical support

The eInstruction company that makes our CPS units, they have excellent technical support:

1. http://www.einstruction.com/Support/ for online chat and FAQ
2. Telephone hotline, 888-333-4988

They are on the Texas time zone.

Their tech support is top notch. If there is something hinky with your registration process, they can get it straightened out on the phone or chat.

I was just in chat with them about registration fees, and they answered my question quickly. Your registration fee is $13 per semester no matter how many courses use CPS, and then $13 per semester until you hit $39, at which point you get free service for life. So that is potentially 3 semesters in a row before the fee goes to zero.

Ten in CPS so far

OK, we have ten of youse guys so far in the CPS database. Excellent.

We will give it a go tomorrow in class, a test flight. get your clicker registered up by lecture and you'll be able to participate.

Syllabus and CPS signups are UP

You can now go to Webcourses and

1. snag a syllabus PDF if you did not get one in lecture, and
2. register your blue-and-white CPS clicker.

Note: in the "step 2" of CPS registration, we do not have an enrollment code or anything like that, so skip to the third step.