Applied Statistics - Project 1

Project description:
It is the year 1679, and Hooke is (following a suggestion from Newton) trying to prove the rotation of Earth by the Coriolis force on falling bodies. Your team has an other (better?) idea, namely to measure the gravitational pull on Earth at different latitudes.
However, to obtain the necessary funding to travel south and repeat a measurement of g, you have to prove that you can do it with the necessary precision. The size of the effect is somewhere around 0.5%, and you want to prove the difference with 5 sigma certainty.

Your mission - and you have little choice, but to accept it - is to take up the challenge of getting these measurements and proving their precision...

Experiments:

Experiment 1: Ball rolling down an incline

Experiment 2: Spring with a mass at the end

Experiment 3: Pendulum with a mass at the end

Suggestions for initial macros:
The following two macros are suggestions for a place to start data analysis. They run on the datasets provided, which should look a bit what you have!

Rolling Ball: RollingBall_Fys2Lab_FitData.c, data_RollingBall_V1.txt

Harmonic oscillator (mass on spring): HarmonicOscillator_Fys2Lab_FitData.c, data_HarmonicOscillator_V1.txt

For the pendulum experiment, I suggest copying one of these (remember also to change the name of the macro in the top accordingly!), and "empty" it. You can then use it for the third data analysis.

Writing up results:
The project should be written in Physical Review Letter style (or something close to it, if you don't like Latex) thus not more than 3-4 pages, and below you can find the files needed (works with pdftex as well, except for the figures, which needs to be converted into .pdf or .png):

PRL Latex template.

Test figure 1.

Test figure 2 (wide).

Result using current template.

Comments:
Enjoy, have fun, and throw yourself without worries at the data.

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Last updated: 9th of September 2012.