In lieu of a sit-down final exam, there will be a project or term paper that will enable you to explore a chosen topic in a bit more detail, and gain some extra experience with either scientific writing or computing. This page goes a bit beyond the syllabus to give some additional detail about this assignment.
The project can involve either of the two following components (or, if you're ambitious, both):
- Review Paper: This is a written review of a topic relevant to the course, that goes beyond the material discussed in class. The paper must convey some background (i.e., how did we come to understand the topic), motivation (i.e., why is it relevant), and some quantitative exploration of the physics (i.e., some relevant equations).
For the review paper, the length to aim for is about 10 double-spaced pages - i.e., about 2500 words - not counting the (required) bibliography. When researching your topic, please use multiple sources (not just Cravens, and definitely not Wikipedia!) to get a broad, but also detailed, view of the science.
- Computational Project: Some kind of mathematical or computational calculation that explores some topic relevant to the course. The types of things you could do include:
- exploring a wider "parameter space" of a textbook model,
- numerically solving an equation (that was presented in class) that has no analytic solution,
- constructing your own model or simulation,
- downloading and analyzing some publicly available data, or
- testing (or debunking?) the claims made in a recent paper.
As opposed to the review paper option, for the computational project you don't need to write a lot to justify why your topic is interesting or important. You can take the equations and observational data as "given" and spend your time working with them. However, you must also provide a brief written summary of what you did (at least 1 page), which provides me with some kind of coherent "navigation guide" through the other figures and files that you are submitting. Please put your final results into formats that are relatively easy to view (e.g., PDF figures, or a Mathematica notebook).
Feel free to use whatever tools you want (i.e., computing languages, software packages, output formats), but the whole thing - including source code and data - must be submitted.
Some suggested topics are listed here.
Deadline and lateness:
Submit all files BY EMAIL to your instructor (steven.cranmer@colorado.edu) by the deadline of Wednesday, April 29, 2015. Additional hardcopy submission is okay, but the electronic version is required/primary. Please use PDF format for written material and figures. If you have a lot of data to submit in multiple files, please (a) try to let me know beforehand, and (b) use tar or zip to combine them into a single file.
Because this is due at the end of the semester, and grades must be submitted during finals week, there cannot be much leeway with regard to lateness. Your instructor is going to need the weekend of May 2-3 to grade these. Thus, the lateness penalties are:
- Wednesday, April 29: no penalty
- Thursday, April 30: 10% grade reduction
- Friday, May 1: 20% grade reduction
- Saturday or Sunday, May 2-3: 30% grade reduction
- Monday, May 4: absolute last day; 50% grade reduction
This assignment is worth 20% of your grade, so it's to your benefit to submit it on time.
Obligatory boilerplate (repeated from Homework 3):
As you already know from the syllabus, the CU Boulder academic integrity policy needs to be obeyed at all times, and this includes plagiarism. Some other local online guides that go into more detail about plagiarism include those at CU Denver and Colorado State. It's definitely not worth the risk to your academic career to go down that road.
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