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Record W2078092475 · doi:10.1119/1.2834532

Using a Meniscus to Teach Uncertainty in Measurement

2008· article· en· W2078092475 on OpenAlexaff
Philip Backman

Bibliographic record

VenueThe Physics Teacher · 2008
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldPhysics and Astronomy
TopicExperimental and Theoretical Physics Studies
Canadian institutionsUniversity of New Brunswick
Fundersnot available
KeywordsTask (project management)Measurement uncertaintyContainer (type theory)Magnitude (astronomy)Value (mathematics)Connection (principal bundle)Physics educationMeniscusComputer scienceMathematicsSimulationStatisticsMathematics educationMechanical engineeringEngineeringPhysicsGeometry

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

I have found that students easily understand that a measurement cannot be exact, but they often seem to lack an understanding of why it is important to know something about the magnitude of the uncertainty. This tends to promote an attitude that almost any uncertainty value will do. Such indifference may exist because once an uncertainty is determined or calculated, it remains as only a number without a concrete physical connection back to the experiment. For the activity described here—presented as a challenge—groups of students are given a container and asked to make certain measurements and to estimate the uncertainty in each of those measurements. They are then challenged to complete a particular task involving the container and a volume of water. Whether the assigned task is actually achievable, however, slowly comes into question once the magnitude of the uncertainties in the original measurements is compared to the specific requirements of the challenge.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.003
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.011
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: Methods
Teacher disagreement score0.017
Threshold uncertainty score0.057

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0030.011
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0010.000
Science and technology studies0.0030.007
Scholarly communication0.0030.007
Open science0.0010.004
Research integrity0.0020.006
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0170.004

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.075
GPT teacher head0.299
Teacher spread0.224 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreMethods

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2008
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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