On Sunday 25 June 2006 23:06, Jos van Kan wrote:
Kevin Donnelly wrote:
My son is doing physics coursework, and has a set of figures plotting voltage against resistance. He's used Qtiplot to draw a graph of the resulting curve, but does anybody know of any software which would allow this line to be extrapolated to show likely resistance for a given level of voltage - ie go beyond the actual data from the experiment to show what might happen if the experiment had been extended? It may be that Qtiplot can do this, but I can't find out how. If not, are there any other candidates out there?
It's way off topic, but least squares would be the standard method here and I think that's exactly what the physics coursework would be asking your son to do. That would be a lot more illuminating as how to go about such problems in general than putting it into a black box and watch the numbers come out. There is software to do least squares, but this is exactly the sort of problem you should do by hand by hand.
No, he's already done the coursework, which involved plotting actual results by hand - he's in year 4 secondary, so least squares would be a bit beyond them! The above is for the conclusions part, where he wants to say something like "if you change a, b might change as follows". He can just extrapolate the curve manually on the graph paper, but I thought there might be something that could do that more neatly. No matter. Thanks to all for the responses. -- Pob hwyl / Best wishes Kevin Donnelly www.kyfieithu.co.uk - KDE yn Gymraeg www.eurfa.org.uk - Geiriadur rhydd i'r Gymraeg www.rhedadur.org.uk - Rhedeg berfau Cymraeg www.cymrux.org.uk - Linux Cymraeg ar un CD -- Pob hwyl / Best wishes Kevin Donnelly www.kyfieithu.co.uk - KDE yn Gymraeg www.eurfa.org.uk - Geiriadur rhydd i'r Gymraeg www.rhedadur.org.uk - Rhedeg berfau Cymraeg www.cymrux.org.uk - Linux Cymraeg ar un CD -- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com