News
Old news is now at the bottom of the page.- 9/4: Need only one volunteer for Friday
Need a volunteer for only 09_05_b. - 9/2: Need two volunteers for Wednesday
Let's have presentations for both a and b.
Course Information
When, Where
MWF 10am NWC 1350
Textbook
None! Lecture notes will be distributed. (The syllabus is similar to last year. )
Grading
There will be NO graded problem sets this year. The final letter grade is computed from the total score t with:
- A: t≥80.
- B: 65.≤t< 80.
- C: 50.≤t< 65.
- D: 35.≤t< 50.
- F: t< 35.
The total score is determined by the highest score of the following two methods:
Conventional Method
The total score for the course is a weighted average of these scores:
- 60%: 3 quiz scores, with the JiTT score replacing the lowest quiz score, if it is greater.
- 35%: Final Exam
- 5%: Extra Points: (Presenting JiTT Solutions, Stand and Deliver, Dynamics Carols)
Alternative Method
The total score is based 100% on the Final Exam.
Important Dates for Graded Items
- Monday 9/29: Quiz #1
- Monday 10/27: Quiz #2
- Monday 11/24: Quiz #3
- Wednesday 12/18: Final Exam, 8am-10am
Office Hours
Office hours will be 9:30am to 10:00am MWF in our lecture room NWC 1350. Or you may just drop by my office, NWC 5636. Or you may e-mail me to schedule an appointment.
Other office hours are online, the night before class: Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday at 9:30 pm. The subject of the online office hours is usually the JiTT questions, the answers to which are due by 8:00 AM the following morning. The "office hours" are in the chat room available for this course at learn.ou.edu, (use the password given to you by OU).
Answering JiTT Questions
Students may answer JiTT questions and check their grades at the secure student record page for this course, but they will need both the class password to view the page, and their personal password to interact with it. (Also, more details about the grading policy can be viewed in the above link). These passwords will be distributed by August 18. Your personal password is NOT your OU password.
You may find this useful: JiTT questions, answers and solutions for 2008. That page is usually updated within hours after the JiTT is graded.
Similar JiTT summaries are available for years: 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004. Those should be helpful to you as you attempt to answer this years questions.
Students are NOT required to work alone on the JiTT problems. It is not realistic to enforce that; only the honest people would suffer. So share the joy of your scientific and analytic inquiry with your peers! Obviously, quizzes and exams must be solely your own work, and they are proctored rather carefully. No calculators are allowed in quizzes or exams.
Goal Statement
The goal of METR 3113 is to develop the student's abilities in using knowledge of the fundamental forces in the atmosphere: the pressure gradient force, gravity and the Coriolis force. Analysis of atmospheric motion caused by these forces is done without recourse to the analysis of continuous vector fields. This means vector calculus is minimally employed. Aspects of fluid mechanics, for example changes in the pressure field resulting from "colliding parcels", is reserved for later courses.
Course Content
- Units, dimensional homogeneity and dimensional analysis.
- Vectors and rotational invariance. Vector products.
- Elementary functions and elementary differential equations.
- Newton's law of gravity.
- Newton's laws of motion.
- The equation of motion in one-dimension and its solution. Conservation of energy.
- Pressure. The pressure gradient force. The buoyancy force.
- The vector equation of motion. Coordinate systems, Cartesian and polar.
- Centripetal acceleration. Conservation of angular momentum. Cyclostrophic wind balance. Tornadoes.
- Inertial forces in accelerating reference frames.
- An equation of motion for meteorology. The Coriolis force.
- The tidal force.
- The gradient wind.
- Conservation of angular momentum with the Coriolis force.
- An introduction to continuum mechanics. Simple forms of the continuity equation. More about pressure and buoyancy. Bernoulli equation. Vorticity.
- The thermal wind.
Physlets
Java-animated demonstrations of some physics is found at my physlets page. (Some of these are used in problem sets or JiTTs).
Lecture Summaries
Summaries of lectures (in pdf files) will be linked here. A draft may appear before the lecture is presented. A final version will appear after the lecture is presented.
| date presented | file | subject | date uploaded |
| Monday, August 25 | 08_25.pdf | Equations, Units and Dimensions | August 25 19:51 Z |
| Wednesday, August 27 | 08_27.pdf | The Dimension Extractor | August 27 16:27 Z |
| Friday, August 29 | 08_29.pdf | Dimensional Inhomogeneity: Filtering Out Nonsensical Equations | August 29 16:11 Z |
| Wednesday, September 3 | 09_03.pdf | Why Vectors are Useful | September 03 16:34 Z |
| Friday, September 5 | 09_05.pdf | Draft: The Dot Product and Cross Product | September 04 23:14 Z |
| Monday, September 8 | 09_08.pdf | Draft: Vector Identities | September 04 23:16 Z |
Archive of problem sets, quizzes, solutions, etc.
- 3113syl.pdf, the paper syllabus (redundant with this page)
- numval.pdf, useful numerical values and unit conversions
- METR 3113 home page from: 2007 2006 2005 2004. JiTTs, Problem sets and quizzes are relevant to year 2008.
Useful external links
Main source of links for Fall 2008: An older link list:- Knowledge Expectations for Undergrad Courses (we stray from this a bit)
- What is JiTT? Learn about "Just-in-Time Teaching".
- Conversion of Units from the Wikipedia.
- units of measure, conversion table
- Engineering Conversion Factors
- dimensional analysis some elementary aspects of dimensional analysis.
- cleonis.nl A site with excellent pedagogy about the Coriolis effect.
Old news
- 8/28: Need a volunteer for Friday
I need a volunteer to present the solution for Jitt 08_29_b tomorrow. Don't worry about not eventually scoring your 5 Extra Points for the semester. You can always sing a dynamics carol, like this one from 2007, duing the last week of class. - 8/26: Need a volunteer for Wednesday
I need a volunteer to present the solution for Jitt 08_27_b tomorrow. Check your Jitt answer online after 8 am to be sure you have the correct answer. In the case of multiple volunteers, the winner will be the volunteer with the last digit in their 4+4 closest to the last digit in the date (in this case, 7). You may register your intent to volunteer, by speaking with me before class, up to 5 minutes before the start of lecture, at which time the winner will be determined. Digits are compared cyclically. For example, 1 is 4 digits away from 7. In case of a tie, the second to last digit on the 4+4 is compared to the last digit in the date. A successful presentation earns your entire 5 Extra Points for the semester. - 8/24: Class begins tomorrow
"Innocence, properly conceived, is a positive attribute. It is the ignorance that comes from a voluntary decision not to engage (or not to engage yet) with a particular area of complex knowledge. Innocence in that sense is essential for all genuine learning. Compulsory teaching is the destruction of innocence, forcing the victims to waste the opportunity, which comes only once in each lifetime, to encounter that knowledge for the first time. It is no wonder, then, that pumping information prematurely into people's minds simply triggers emergency procedures that do everything in their power to shield the recipient from engaging with that information, and that the usual result is the permanent destruction of the recipient's ability to engage with information of that type. How many people have a feeling that there is something rich and wonderful in science, or in mathematics, or in Shakespeare, but that it is somehow inaccessible to them? Is that not a tragedy? If they could have acted on that same impulse innocently, at the moment when they were ready, what then could possibly have spoiled those rich and wonderful areas of knowledge for them?"
-David Deutsch - 8/14: Students enrolled for Fall 2008
Today, you should be receiving an email with a password for answering JiTT questions, which you may test immediately. If you have difficulty with it, contact me at bfiedler@ou.edu .
Some of you have asked about what you can do to prepare for METR 3113. I recommend that you first learn about how humans learn science:
- Go to learner.org and register for an account. The registration process is simple. The account is free.
- Watch A Private Universe. (20 minutes).
- Watch at least the first two of the three videos at Minds of Our Own. (55 minutes each).
You may also find this lengthy video series helpful: The mechanical universe...and beyond.
Some of you may be expecting advice about the math methods that you should learn, or practice problems that you should attempt. But my experience is that many students have their success in METR 3113 limited by misconceptions about the physical world, and the difficulty in letting go of misconceptions.
A classic example of being unable to let go of misconceptions is the Monty Hall Paradox. Read the original learned opposition to the truth.