Law of the Conservation of Energy

Summary: The law of the conservation of energy states that energy cannot be created or destroyed.. Similar to the law of the conservation of mass, it states that energy can only be transformed. Meaning that when a ball rolls down a hill, the potential energy of the ball isn't destroyed, and then replaced with newly made kinetic energy, but rather the potential energy is transforming into kinetic energy, but some of the energy is transferred to the air, meaning that the ball would not land in a completely proportionate place to how much potential energy it had.

SP2: Developing and using models:
We made small models of roller coasters in class to demonstrate Newton's laws of motion, and other points where parts of physics come into play, such as where on the roller coaster is the kinetic energy the lowest, or where is it the highest. It also allowed us to demonstrate various relationships, like the steepness of a hill to the acceleration, or the friction and the velocity.

XCC: Energy and Matter
The law of the conservation of energy shows how energy cannot be created or destroyed, creating the backbone for a system that doesn't rely of creating or destroying energy, but rather transforming it. Because energy is transformed rather than created or destroyed, it opens up a lot of options on how we can use energy to help us in everyday life. Like turning the mechanical energy of a motor into kinetic energy from the revolutions of a car's wheel.

Energy

Summary: Energy is how we measure the work that has to be placed on an object to do various things, such as move, or heat something up. There are many different types of energy, one of which is kinetic energy. Kinetic energy is the energy of motion, meaning when something is moving, the type of energy used is kinetic. But before kinetic energy can be put into use, it will be stored as potential energy, which is the energy something could possibly have in its position. Due to the law of the conservation of energy, it cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed.

SP4: Analyzing and interpreting data

This week in class we took a look a various different graphs, of how things like acceleration and energy change over time in specific situations. Like how the kinetic energy of a ball would stay the same until it started to slow down. after we put the data on the graphs, we came to the conclusion that the kinetic energy was being converted into another type of energy. We also saw that at the begging of the situation the potential energy was high, but got lower and lower as the ball moved, it was the exact inverse of the kinetic energy, meaning that it was being transformed into kinetic energy.

 

XCC:Energy and Matter

Due to the law of the conservation of energy, it cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed, meaning that if a ball started on the top of a ramp and rolled down, then the potential energy that the ball had on the top of the ramp was being transformed. Because the rolling the ball would be considered a form of movement, the potential energy of the ball is being turned into kinetic energy. This is true when converting all types of energy into one another.

 

Forces

Forces 2 carts connected by string By: Guy Vandegrift

Summary: A force is a push or a pull, on an object that makes it move in various different ways. Forces are one of the main parts of Isaac Newton's three laws of motion, which include the law of inertia, F=MA, and for every action there is an equal or opposite reaction. The law of inertia is that if something is in motion, it will want to stay in motion, and if something is at rest it will want to stay at rest. F=MA, is a law that says the more mass something has the larger the force must be. Newton's third law states that if an action occurs there are two reactions, one that is equal, and one is opposite.

SP4: Analyzing and interpreting data
While studying how forces work and interact with each other, we used models on an online service, while we were studying the online service we used the data that we got to make various inferences on how force can effect a single object. We put the data that we gathered into a small graph showing the forces and how far movement was.

XCC Energy and Matter:
When force is applied to a piece of matter, a certain amount of energy must be exerted. The more amount of energy that is put behind a force, there will be a larger amount of newtons in the force. Depending on the mass of the object and the acceleration it is at, the more or less energy a person would have to more or less energy into the force.

Self-Driving Cars, are they the Future?

MWilkinson1004
Mrs. Garcia
Science 8B
01/11/19

Self Driving Cars, are they the Future?

Technology has been advancing rapidly for the past century, with the invention of the first computer to rockets going to the moon, what is next on the agenda for humanity to invent? The next step is self driving cars, a piece of technology that allows transportation without the error of human judgement and various impediments of sight. It allows people to multitask on the road, which could overall improved attitude, and efficiency in the workplace. Self-Driving cars have a lot of benefits to them,  how do all of the features in the cars work, and how are they made?

Human errors are the main cause for car crashes, 1.25 million people die from car crashes every year, with the average driver getting in an accident about every 500,000 miles. Self-driving cars could eliminate human error from the equation, limiting the amount of crashes that happen every year. In the article How Driver less Cars Will Work by Jamie Page Deaton & Kristen Hall-Geisler for How Stuff Works it was said that “Google has had a fleet of driver less cars since 2009, and they've driven over a half a million miles (804,672 kilometers) without a crash.”  Meaning that the cars that google made have driven for a longer distance without getting into a crash, than a human would have. Human Error is usually within the calculations they have to make when driving, because computers are great at  making calculations quickly, it makes them much less likely to get into a car crash than a human would be. Self-driving cars not only make it so that the road is safer for those who can drive, but also for those who cannot.

People who have trouble reacting to different situations and people who never learned how to drive, can use self-driving cars to be able to get to places faster than before, furthermore people who don’t have good eyesight, and various other disabilities can get to the places they need to without having get behind the wheel. When people use self driving cars, they are not looking at the road themselves, that’s the cars job, and the car’s sensors is not impeded by things like a disability or environment condition like when it is night time. In the article PUNY HUMANS STILL SEE THE WORLD BETTER THAN SELF-DRIVING CARS by Aarian Marshall said that “Vehicle-to-vehicle communications could help autonomous vehicles do even better. Technologies like dedicated short-range radio or 5G cellular networks (that one's on the way) could help networks of cars talk about what’s happening on the road.” which means that people who have trouble communicating to others, which is harder on the road, don’t have to do that making the drive safer. Even if it will help people with disabilities, the technology is not perfect, and human eyesight is still better than most driver less cars that are on the road at this point in time.

The technology is used to help driver less cars drive is not perfect in any way shape or form, human eyesight is much more reliable at this point in time for people to drive on the road. While driver less cars are not affected by impairments like the darkness of night, they cannot see various signs and other specific details and react to them, they also have to get the timing perfect when driving so when on a busy crossroads, a person in a self driving car will be waiting for a while. In the article Puny Humans Still See The World Better Than Self-Driving Cars by Aarian Marshall it was said “Indeed, competent drivers are still better than rolling computers in key areas. This is partly because of the limitations of these cars' sensors.” While the technology is not able to keep up with the eyes of competent drivers, they will able able to soon. The technology used to make self-driving cars is still relatively new. Meaning that in the future self-driving cars will be able to keep of with human drivers.

One of the most important things that people will be able to get out of self-driving cars, is that they won’t have to pay attention to the road, meaning they could divert their attention to things like work, or relaxation. In the article Pros and Cons of a Driver less Future by Tony Borroz, the author made a statement: “While being taken from here to there in a driver less car, you can do anything you want. Eat, sleep, work, chat with relatives – commute time is no longer downtime.” When people have more time to relax before work, it allows them to feel more energized, and have better work ethic. Students and younger children that need a lot more sleep can get more, which improves their health. How does the case for self-driving cars stand, even with all of the current opposition to the idea of them ruling the streets instead of humans.

Self-driving cars would be great in the future from now, there are many pros to not having to drive yourself anywhere, while also not having to pay every single time you go to a place. Not only do self driving cars remove the possibility of crashes through human error, they also allow people who have disabilities to get to various places without help from other people. Some people say that human eyes are better than the sensors of the self-driving car, but that is only right now; in the future self-driving cars will have the capability to see better than a well-trained driver. It will also improve the mood of people who drive a lot because they won’t have to be focusing on the road, and on the wheel. Self-driving cars will improve exponentially in the future, just how long will it be before they take the road instead of human drivers?

Charity Fair 2018

Summary: There are lots of problems in the world, from poverty to a lack of education, the people in these situations can't get them selves out of the situation. A few individuals with kind hearts and a passion for helping other form different groups called charities. These groups specialize in aid people that have severe problems that affect the way that they live everyday. They couldn't do it alone, because a few people to don't have the money to take on an issue like world hunger, but instead they enlist the help of the people to allow them to solve to problems of those in need.

Backward-Looking
Every year we do the charity fair, it's considered to be the biggest event we hold each year. In the past charity fair has been incredibly hard for me. Most of the time I was in a smaller group, which meant that everyone had to do a boatload of work. The hardest part being all of the calculations that we had to do in math, where we and to look through all of our charities fiscal records and see how much they made in one year.

Inward-Looking
When I was working on charity fair I learned that as I grew as a person the work that once seemed hard to me feels much less stressful. Now that I am one year away from high school,  all of the things that used to take me days to complete take much less time to do than before. While in previous years I felt incredibly stressed out by all of the work that we had to do for charity fair, but this year I didn't fell that way.

Outward-Looking
If I were a teacher looking at all of the work that we did for charity fair this year, then I would give the project a B+, because some of the work that had been done was not formatted in the correct way, and we didn't bring our business cards to the event. The rest of the things in the project were phenomenal, and looked incredible.

Forward-Looking
One thing I would like to improve upon is my work ethic, because during the project I didn't do as much for the team as I would have liked to. During the project I slacked off some of the time and looking forward I would like to have been less of a dead weight for the team. I helped out only some of the time rather than all of the time.

Speed and Velocity

Distance-time graph example By: Sjlegg

Summary: Speed and velocity are a classic example of scalars and vectors, because speed is only the magnitude of how fast something is going, while velocity is not only the speed but also the direction the object is going. To find the speed of an object, you have to put the distance over the time of an object, and to find the velocity of an object you must put: distance former minus distance latter over time former minus time latter.

SP4: Analyzing and interpreting data
In order to find the speed of various cars, we put them on a ramp and let go, we recorded the time and distance of all of the cars. After we put them in a data table and found the average speed and time of every car. We then plotted the points on a graph and drew a straight line to the origin. Afterwards we found the slope of the line, which was the speed of the cars. We then used that information to order the cars from fastest to slowest.

XCC: Scale, Proportion, and Quantity

There are multiple ways to measure speed, these ways are various unit rates. The unit rate that is for the standard scale is meters per second, or m/s. For smaller scales it is centimeters per second or cm/s, and larger scales it's kilometers per hour, or km/hr. Seeing how different scales function allows one to notice how various objects move and what outside forces affect somethings velocity changes.

Saclars and Vectors

Coord planes color vector By: Michaelnelson

Summary: In physics, there are two types of ways that people measure quantities in, scalars and vectors. A scalar quantity is when the only thing that is measured is the magnitude, like speed or power. A vector not only measures a magnitude, but it also measures direction, like up or down, north, south, east, and west. When a vector is changed, acceleration happens; if a car is going at a constant speed and turns a corner, it's accelerating because a change in the direction is happening. If a change in the direction is happening that means that a vector is being changed, so acceleration is happening.

SP4: Analyzing and interpreting data
To test our knowledge on scalars and vectors we were given a variety of small situations in which we had to decide whether something was a scalar or a vector. The various situations that we were given had a speed, and the ones that were vector quantities had an associated direction as well. Some of the problems that we were given were images, which made it harder to decide whether something was a scalar or a vector.

XCC:
When talking about scalars and vectors it is impossible to ignore the fact that they largely have to do with scale and quantity. The magnitude is the part where seeing scales and quantities is the easiest. Things like speed and power can be easily scaled compared to other forces of similar qualities. Using a scale, you can also quantify how fast something is, how strong something is, and various other units of measurement.