Chronology Current Month Current Thread Current Date
[Year List] [Month List (current year)] [Date Index] [Thread Index] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Prev] [Date Next]

Re: websites



This site illustrates a problem that needs addressing *soon* in
undergraduate education, and maybe physicists can take the lead. We
need to teach students how to judge the likelihood that information they
get from the web is correct. For that matter, we need to educate them
on how to judge the likelihood that information they get from printed
sources is correct. The web problem is more severe because of the lack
of editors doing some of the checking for the readers, but it is
certainly easy enough to get misinformation from books, newspapers, and
magazines. Perhaps discussing the validation of web information would
have some effect on people's tendancy to believe anything in print as
well.

Is anyone's school doing anything on how to use the web, expecially on
how to weed out unreliable information? If so, how well is it working?

Nick Steph wrote:

PHYS-L Colleagues,

I have been following the thread on websites and want to add a word
of caution. Here is an excerpt from the site:
<http://library.advanced.org/11902/physics/momentum.html>
The discussion is about a bat hitting a baseball and concludes:

"Now, you may have noticed that I said momentum is "almost"
conserved. Why isn't it if the equations say it should be? Well,
momentum is only conserved if the materials involved in the
collision are inelastic or inflexible (perfectly solid). Although you
might assume that bat and the ball are inelastic materials, they
are not. When the ball hits the bat, the ball will be squished to a
certain degree. After few milli-seconds, it rebounds back. This
contraction action will use up some energy, making conservation
of momentum false. There are also factors that can use up
energy, however, the concept of conservation of momentum is still
relevant in predicting the range of a baseball."

This is about as wrong as an explanation can be and yet it lives on a
site that has won *many* awards. This is just one example and it is
impossible to edit the web; so we must be cautious in directing our
students to avail themselves of web resources.

**********************
* Nick C. Steph *
* Franklin College *
* Department of Physics *
* Franklin, IN 46131 *
* Phone: 317-738-8308 *
* Fax: 317-738-8310 *
********************

--
Maurice Barnhill, mvb@udel.edu
http://www.physics.udel.edu/~barnhill/
Physics Dept., University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716