Technical advice on lab reports

1. Handwritten labs are fine, as long as everything is neat and legible.

2. Although not required, we like typed labs. These can be written and printed using a computer at home or in any public lab on campus. Pictures may be drawn in by hand, but please put a little effort into them -- you have the output from Mathematica as a guide. (If the pictures are so crude that I can't tell what they are, they won't help illustrate your reasoning very well.)

3. If you wish, you can write your lab reports using Mathematica. This can be done in our lab (during office hours) or in any IT Lab on campus. (You have to have an active IT Lab account to use IT Labs, of course.) Once you have your final lab report, save it (including any pictures) as a notebook file. I'll assume you're calling it lab.nb. At the $ prompt, type "ls -l lab.nb" and make sure the file length is less than 1400000. (The file length is the number just before the date.) If the file length is larger than this, it won't fit on a floppy drive, and you'll have to rewrite your lab not to include so many pictures. Warning: be sure not to log out until you've checked that you haven't exceeded your disk quota!

   Now put a floppy disk with enough free space on it in the disk drive, and type "mcopy lab.nb a:" to copy the lab report to the disk.

   Take the disk home and open the file with Math Reader, which you can download at http://www.wolfram.com/products/mathreader. You can print the report using Math Reader.

4. If you have an IT account and a print card, you can also take the disk to an IT lab, login, and run the command "mcopy a:lab.nb lab.nb" to copy the file into your IT account. Then you can print it using Mathematica. If you're in a Unix lab, remember to follow the "online printing" hint on the Homework help page. (It's in the Labs section.)

   (Note that you can also use programs like FTP, SCP, or email attachments to transfer files between IT computers and Math Dept computers, but this is not a "supported" method of working on labs. If you know how to use programs such as these, you are welcome to do so, but not all TAs will be able to answer related questions.)

   - Jon (rogness@math.umn.edu)