Your 'timer program' report has been received. Scroll down through the document to see any comments I might have inserted, and my final comment at the end.
** Your General Comment **
** Describe what you see on your first 10 clicks **
There are three columns. The first column has the numbers 1-10. The second column has the total time that has elapsed while using the timer. The third column has the time between each click of the time.
** Your TIMER data from 20 fast clicks **
1 258.0781 258.0781
2 258.2969 .21875
3 258.4063 .109375
4 258.5938 .1875
5 258.7188 .125
6 258.8906 .171875
7 259.0469 .15625
8 259.2031 .15625
9 259.375 .171875
10 259.5313 .15625
11 259.7031 .171875
12 259.8438 .140625
13 260.0313 .1875
14 260.1875 .15625
15 260.375 .1875
16 260.5313 .15625
17 260.7188 .1875
18 260.875 .15625
19 261.0469 .171875
20 261.2344 .1875
21 261.3906 .15625
22 261.5469 .15625
23 261.7188 .171875
24 261.8906 .171875
** Your average time interval for 20 time intervals **
0.157815
I took the number in the second column for click number 20 (the end time: 261.2344) and subtracted the number in the second column for click number one (the beginning time: 258.0781)and got the total time that elapsed from beginning to end (3.1563). I then divided this by 20 to get the average interval of 0.1578815
** Your frequency distribution for the 20 time intervals (interval, number of times it was observed) **
.109375, 1
.125, 1
.140625, 1
.15625, 5
.171875, 4
.1875, 5
.21875, 1
** Your general comment to this point **
** Why did you observe only certain time intervals? **
I am not sure why; however, the difference between all of my intervals is either 0.015625 or 2*0.015625. I would deduce then that the smallest unit of time that this timer can measure is 0.015625 seconds. While this is a flaw it is insignificant for most cases because it is measuring a very small unit of time. In other words it is much more accurate than a timer that measures only seconds or even 10ths or 100s of a second.
Very good. That interval is in fact 1/64 second.
** What did you see when you looked at the differences between time successive time intervals? **
Well, I promise I did not look ahead, but that is the same information I came up with and based my previous answer on, so see my answer above.
** Your time intervals for 7 complete breaths: **
6.4375
8.046875
8.75
9.5625
9.53125
9.328125
9.6875
9.515625
9.65625
** Your general comment to this point: **
Only 9 pieces of data because we were timing between the breaths?
** Why did you rarely, if ever, observe that same time interval twice? **
Because the first time we were going fast so we were almost keeping up with the timer, but the second time we were going slow. There was a relatively large amount of time between breaths that was being measured with VERY small increments of time.
** Do you think this program is accurate to .1 or .01 ... **
b. Because the increment that it is measuring appears to be 0.015625 and that would be rounded off to 0.012 which is closer to 0.01 than 0.001.
** Copy of a few lines of your spreadsheet from the TIMER program. **
time between a series of deep breaths
event number clock time time interval
1 2058.672 2058.672
2 2065.109 6.4375
** **
50 mins
** **
Your work is very good and insightful.