They also have a blog. Some nice links posted there. (Both sections are covering the same material on the same schedule, fyi.)
Thing the first: I really think the electric potential stuff will 'gel' for you quite a bit after the next lecture. We've just touched on it so far, in the next lecture we'll look at some practical problems and how to really use potential for calculations. We'll also be moving into more concrete subjects - the energy of crystals, circuits, etc. - and you'll have a little more intuition for what's going on. So, it is a lot of information at once, but be patient. There is a plan of sorts, and by exam time you'll be vastly less confused ...
Thing the second: check out the right sidebar. The 'course notes' are very extensive (nearly a complete textbook), and very close to what I follow in lecture. Following both the notes and the book is not a bad idea - if a section in the book doesn't make sense, try the notes & vice versa. They treat the same subjects slightly differently, you might find one explanation more to your liking than the other.
Thing the third: there are also many, many solved HW and exam problems you can access from the right sidebar. If you want example problems, or want to see what I've asked before on exams (the presumption that I will ask similar things is a good one), there you go ...
Thing the fourth: if you are in Dipanjan's section, we are going to have the same exam, same format. Details to follow soon ...
A nice post on how we know they exist. A great blog if you want to learn a bit more about physics.
I now finally have the system set up so you can log in and see your grades.
1) go here: http://faculty.mint.ua.edu/~pleclair/moodle/
2) Click on "PH102 Summer 2010" (for both sections)
3) Then, to log in to the system:
The dc circuits and magnetism slides are now up. Including many slides I didn't use on related topics.
Here you can find the powerpoint slides I used in class, along with a few extras I didn't. I have the slides from relativity, electrostatics, and electrical energy up at the moment.
(If you are in the pm class, I didn't use as many slides due to the room being inconvenient, but you might find the slides useful anyway.)
In past courses, I've tried off and on to have students use a problem-solving template that my colleague Prof. Mankey developed. The basic idea is to give you a general structure for solving problems by compartmentalizing the problem-solving process. Break it down into fairly general steps that most problems have (though not always in the same order) so you have a guide for how to start and finish problems.
The template is not something you will be required to use when solving problems, but if you're having trouble with the homework, it might help. Details below the fold ...
Here are the slides from today's lecture, which includes the course overview, all the figures I used in explaining relativity, and a few extras.
Welcome to PH102! At the bottom of this page, or here, you will find our course calendar, which you should review carefully. A small spreadsheet with the schedule and each day's reading can be found here. We will stick to our schedule rigidly, as our time is quite short over the summer semester.
You may also want to look over the course syllabus and other information, which you can find here. The slides I'll present in lecture will also show up online shortly, I will post separately here to let you know.
Finally, I have written some fairly lengthy notes for this course, and my lectures will follow these notes for the most part.
This site is generally a good electronics resource, and it has a nice set of pages on filters.
That circuit from the quiz today is often called a diode snubber, or a flyback diode. Very handy protection circuits; one can do similar things with an RC circuit (or low-pass filter) to buffer out rapid changes in current/voltage in a circuit.
Anyway: I didn't just make it up.
Here are videos of many of last summer's ph102 lectures, taken with the camera on my macbook.* Here's what I said about them last summer.
The quality is not awesome, and you cannot see the slides/demos due to the limited field of view. I haven't changed anything radically this time around, so the content is basically the same. On the other hand, I might have been more cogent last summer; this seems like a long shot.
Anyway: they are there waiting on the intertubes if you feel like you missed something or spaced out during part of a lecture ... I am not doing video again this summer because not many people actually watched them anyway, and the content has not changed.
* For the curious, I sat the laptop in the first row and recorded with the built-in iSight, a bluetooth headset, and quicktime pro. Works better than you might think.
Handy. Solves systems of equations and calculates determinants, among many other things.
