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Re: Sign Conventions

Ludwik Kowalski wrote:
As a student (and also when I started teaching) I accepted the
convention that acceleration is positive while deceleration is
negative. It prevented me from solving some kinematics
problems in one step. The vertical throw problem, for example,

And ... we should lose the word "decelerate" from our vocabularies. It's
imprecise at best, redundant at worst, and unnecessary at any rate.
Acceleration is a vector quantity, after all!

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"Colleges and universities are places where those
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revering the ancestors -- come together in a single effort.."
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George Spagna
Department of Physics
Randolph-Macon College
P.O. Box 5005
Ashland, VA 23005-5505
phone: (804) 752-7344 FAX (804) 752-4724
e-mail: gspagna@rmc.edu
http://www.rmc.edu/~gspagna/