PHY2404S

Hi everyone,

I hope that each of you has already taken the opportunity to eyeball the questions for our second homework assignment, HW2. It would be very helpful if you could take time to offer feedback about the HW2 questions. Why? As I have mentioned in class more than once, I have no other way of knowing whether the questions are well-matched to students – other than waiting to grade your answers. See, I am not telepathic…

Please note the following experience-based guidelines about handing in homework assignments for grading.

• Please write on good quality paper. Cruddy thin paper won’t go through the automatic document feeder on scanners unscrunched, which is a big problem as I physically cannot carry paper home. I have to scan all documents into electronic form first, before I can transport them. Paper suitable for use with a laser printer would be a good standard.
• Please write in blue or black pen, not in pencil. Pencil is hard to read under artificial light, and it doesn’t scan well. If you already wrote your solutions in pencil, then please photocopy them with significant darkening so that the contrast ratio is improved – and hand in the photocopy to me. Crossouts are fine: just delineate clearly what is crossed-out and what isn’t. Ambiguous crossouts and unreadable work will not be marked.
• Please put your assignment under my door only if you first protect it with a sturdy letter-sized envelope. I can’t see what’s behind my door before I open it, so if your assignment is in the way of the door (which it typically is, as my office is carpeted) then it will rip. This happened just today; it was a fiddly pain to have to tape the ripped pages back together again.
• Please scan/photocopy your work before you hand it in, especially if you don’t back up your work in any other way. For example, use one of the fancy new Physics department photocopiers, which will happily email the resulting PDF document to your address. NB: this scanning/photocopying requirement is for your protection – last year, one student in PHY2404S had an entire assignment go missing somehow in between him and me, and since he hadn’t kept even rough notes he had no proof he had ever done the work. We had to create a customized solution for him. You don’t want a similar hassle to happen to you.
• You scanning in your document saves me the extremely laborious work of having to scan in M pages per assignment multiplied by N students. Trust me – I’ve done four assignments already, and it’s a heckuva lot of boring scanning for one person to do!

Thanks very much for your consideration.

Cheers,

Prof. Peet.

Here is your second HW2 assignment.

If you find typos, report them immediately and I will post an updated version.

Please hand in on the due date. Assignments handed in a week beyond deadline will not even be considered for grading.