[ale] [OT] Help with Significant Figures Explaination

[tom]

Useful discussion, yes. Much of derivation, no. Nor in the reference 
links that I noticed on an insanely brief look.

I do appreciate the comment that sigfigs are over promoted by
high school and chemistry instructors. Guilty as charged I'm afraid.
Unfortunately, most of the texts I seen so far really want to
hit sigfigs, and my students are neither interested nor ready
for a full out statistical presentation. 8-( Nor am I ready to
present one - got a _bunch_ of review to do before I even
consider such a thing.



On Thu, 16 Oct 2008, James Sumners wrote:

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significant_figures
>
> On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 4:52 PM, tom <tfreeman at intel.digichem.net> wrote:
>>
>> OK.  __WAY__ off topic for here, but there are bright souls around who
>> have the training and background that they might have a clue and or an
>> answer.
>>
>> Background. I got a gig teaching chemistry at a neaby community college.
>> One of the students asked the always popular "Why?" question this time
>> regarding significant figures. Now one of my books thirty plus years ago
>> had a nice, high school level justification for the rules of significant
>> figures, showing that the rules mostly conserved the relative amounts of
>> error from the raw data to the end result. Of course, I can not find that
>> book right now. Nor am I finding anything on the web.
>>
>> Well, that last crack isn't quite true. I have found one site which gives
>> some justification of significant figures using standard deviation and
>> replications. My students aren't quite ready for that level of work. I
>> need something a tad bit simpler, preferably with demonstrations. I would
>> also enjoy showing the limitations of significant figures assuming I can
>> find a nice simple justification.
>>
>> My thanks in advance.
>>
>> Back to Google et all to try a different approach
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