Related papers: A student experiment on error analysis and uncerta…
During lab studies of text entry methods it is typical to observer very few errors in participants' typing - users tend to type very carefully in labs. This is a problem when investigating methods to support error awareness or correction as…
This Resource Letter provides a guide to the literature on teaching experimental physics using sensors in tablets, smartphones, and some specialized devices. After a general discussion of the hardware (sensors) and the software (apps), we…
Smartphones equipped with sensors such as accelerometers, gyroscopes, and magnetometers offer valuable opportunities for physics education, allowing students to measure motion using their own devices. However, commonly used applications…
Students entering engineering in universities of applied sciences were tested to see whether they understood easy Science problems within the first week of the first semester. The test comprised of mathematics and physics questions in both…
Tracking physical activity reliably is becoming central to many research efforts. In the last years specialized hardware has been proposed to measure movement. However, asking study participants to carry additional devices has drawbacks. We…
Research on mobile phone use often starts with a question of "How much time users spend on using their phones?". The question involves an equal-length measure that captures the duration of mobile phone use but does not tackle the other…
One of the oft-cited qualities sought after in a potential future engineering employee is an analytical mind that is "continually examining things." In one sense this examination is discouraged in an instructional laboratory employing…
Acceleration sensors built into smartphones, i-pads or tablets can conveniently be used in the Physics laboratory. By virtue of the equivalence principle, a sensor fixed in a non-inertial reference frame cannot discern between a…
The problem of characterising the accuracy of, and disturbance caused by a joint measurement of position and momentum is investigated. In a previous paper the problem was discussed in the context of the unbiased measurements considered by…
We provide methods to validate and compare sensor outputs, or inference algorithms applied to sensor data, by adapting statistical scoring rules. The reported output should either be in the form of a prediction interval or of a parameter…
A new class of statistical deformable models is introduced to study high-dimensional curves or images. In addition to the standard measurement error term, these deformable models include an extra error term modeling the individual…
The application of machine learning to physics problems is widely found in the scientific literature. Both regression and classification problems are addressed by a large array of techniques that involve learning algorithms. Unfortunately,…
A freely available educational application (a mobile website) is presented. This provides access to educational material and drilling on selected topics within mathematics and statistics with an emphasis on tablets and mobile phones. The…
One of the key skills of a researcher is noticing what's going on. Both in the experiment one's performing and in one's data: is there something interesting, reason to doubt one's data or suspect that one's theoretical description is…
Various strategies for active learning have been proposed in the machine learning literature. In uncertainty sampling, which is among the most popular approaches, the active learner sequentially queries the label of those instances for…
Uncertainty is an important concept in physics laboratory instruction. However, little work has examined how students reason about uncertainty beyond the introductory (intro) level. In this work we aimed to compare intro and beyond-intro…
Judging the significance and reproducibility of quantitative research requires a good understanding of relevant uncertainties, but it is often unclear how well these have been evaluated and what they imply. Reported scientific uncertainties…
In this article we present very intuitive, easy to follow, yet mathematically rigorous, approach to the so called data fitting process. Rather than minimizing the distance between measured and simulated data points, we prefer to find such…
Sampling distribution, a foundational concept in statistics, is difficult to understand, since we usually have only one realization of the estimator of interest. In this work, we present an innovative method for helping university students…
Cellular phones are now offering an ubiquitous means for scientists to observe life: how people act, move and respond to external influences. They can be utilized as measurement devices of individual persons and for groups of people of the…