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
Your TIMER data from 20 fast clicks
1 40.19531 40.19531
2 40.59375 .3984375
3 40.92188 .328125
4 41.10156 .1796875
5 41.26563 .1640625
6 41.4375 .171875
7 41.61719 .1796875
8 41.77344 .15625
9 41.94531 .171875
10 42.11719 .171875
11 42.29688 .1796875
12 42.49219 .1953125
13 42.63281 .140625
14 42.8125 .1796875
15 42.98438 .171875
16 43.16406 .1796875
17 43.36719 .203125
18 43.54688 .1796875
19 43.72656 .1796875
20 43.92969 .203125
21 44.11719 .1875
Your average time interval for 20 time intervals
0.196094
I copied the data into excel and then just highlighted the final column with the intervals and selected Average from the summation tab at the top and it averaged all the numbers for me.
Your frequency distribution for the 20 time intervals (interval, number of times it was observed)
0.140625, 1
0.15625, 1
0.1640625, 1
0.171875, 4
0.179688, 7
0.1875, 1
0.195313, 1
0.203125, 2
0.328125, 1
0.398438, 1
Your general comment to this point
Why did you observe only certain time intervals?
I think it does mean that there is some type of flaw that occurs when it has to time the clicks at a very fast pace, but I cannot think of a good reason for why the timer program would do this.
What did you see when you looked at the differences between time successive time intervals?
The last column has the same type of frequency as the time interval column which is to be expected since it is just the differences in the intervals. There are onlu really 4 different numbers here, so the same problem that there was in the intervals carries over into other calculations.
Your time intervals for 7 complete breaths:
10.08594
5.070313
6.5
6.695313
6.492188
7.804688
8.125
12.72656
12.38281
Your general comment to this point:
Why did you rarely, if ever, observe that same time interval twice?
Since there was a lot more time between the clicks there was a better chance of getting a more accurate result because the program had time to perform whatever operation it has to perform in order to report the data.
Do you think this program is accurate to .1 or .01 ...
a. because the timer repeated a lot of the same times on the fast clicks and those times probably differed more in the .01 place and most of the times started with .1 anyway.
Copy of a few lines of your spreadsheet from the TIMER program.
event number clock time time interval
1 979.8125 979.8125
2 989.8984 10.08594
3 994.9688 5.070313
4 1001.469 6.5
5 1008.164 6.695313
6 1014.656 6.492188
20 minutes
Everything looks great. You made a lot of good observations.
We'll be discussing the results in class.