The final project and presentation will count for 25% of the final grade. It will enable you to explore a chosen topic in a bit more detail and gain some extra experience with scientific writing and expressing your ideas in front of a group. The idea is to delve into a topic that's relevant to this course -- and also goes well beyond the material discussed in class -- and write a paper that reviews that topic. The general "rubric" is for the grade to be broken down as follows:
- 10%: Paper (content and background): conveys motivation for studying this topic; goes beyond what was presented in class (i.e., shows evidence of wider reading than just the textbooks); material presented clearly.
- 5%: Paper (format): adequate length; proper grammar and spelling; appropriately serious tone; consistent formats for citations, figures, equations.
- 10%: Presentation: clarity; clarity; clarity (see below).
Recall that there are slides that provide lists of example topics for both individual and group projects, but you're certainly not limited to them.
More About the Paper:
These kinds of review papers usually involve conveying the background (i.e., how did we come to understand the topic) and motivation (i.e., why is it relevant) to non-experts, as well as searching the literature to get a good sense of chronological progress.
- For those who do individual projects, you will have to decide how much of your paper will be a traditional "literature review" and how much will be devoted to you performing new calculations, data analysis, and/or making new plots. Ideally, I think the most interesting review papers do a bit of both. For example, it's often possible to gain fresh new insights by remaking very old figures (i.e., from the era of hand-drawn plots) using modern tools and colormaps. However, it's still okay to go the route of "all literature review," but in that case your review should bring some new synthesis to the table; i.e., it shouldn't be just a re-hash of reviews that already exist.
- For those who do decide to play a role in our group project, the distribution of lit-reviewing and making new calculations/plots will likely be more constrained by the needs of our desired end-product. I'll post a Canvas Discussion Board where this planning can take place.
The written component of the project should end up around 2500 words (i.e., about 5 single-spaced pages or 10 double-spaced pages), not including the (required) bibliography. If you haven't worked much with LaTeX, this can be a good opportunity to get acquainted with it.
The paper is due on Friday, May 3, 2024. There will be an assignment on Canvas that will allow you to upload a document (preferrably PDF, but other formats are okay).
Other resources for scientific writing include:
- Astonomer Lynn Hillenbrand teaches a course titled Writing in Astronomy, whose web page contains many links to helpful resources (scroll down in the above link).
- Each journal has its own "author instructions" for preparing papers. The one for the Astrophysical Journal is close to being a community standard for astronomers; find it HERE. The AIP also has a good online Author Resource Center HERE.
- Other possibly useful articles include The Science of Scientific Writing (Gopen & Swan 1990; American Scientist) and English Communication for Scientists (Doumont et al. 2014; Nature ebook) and The Art of Writing Science (Plaxco 2010; Protein Science).
- A brief and fun editorial on how to properly include equations in scientific text.
The Presentation:
During the week of April 29, you will also give short presentations on what you have learned about your topic. With 9 students (plus 1 auditor who may participate in the group project) and two 50-minute classes, it breaks down to about 10 minutes per presentation. That may not seem like much, but it's important to build the skill of fitting what you want to say into arbitrary time-chunks. Maybe aim for 6 or 7 minutes for the primary "talking time" and save the rest for questions and informal back-and-forth.
Students can decide on whether their presentations will be high-tech (Powerpoint or Keynote) or low-tech (whiteboard only). Note that our classroom has whiteboard space to the left of the projector screen, so we can switch back and forth between the two easily. The rest of the class will be encouraged to ask questions, request more in-depth derivations, and so on. Even if you have already taken your Comps exam, this kind of experience is valuable.
There are many good online resources for giving scientific presentations. See, for example,
- Ten Secrets to Giving a Good Scientific Talk, by Mark Schoeberl and Brian Toon, from the AGU's Atmospheric Science Division.
- Suggestions for Giving Talks, notes by Robert Geroch from 1973 that are still valid today.
- Another older article is James Garland's Advice to Beginning Physics Speakers. It's got some outdated content, but some useful parts, too.
- Oral Presentation Advice, by Mark Hill, Computer Sciences Dept., University of Wisconsin-Madison.
- A Seminar on Seminars, by Kenneth Suslick, a humorous presentation on what to do and what not to do.
- Some interesting tips from Will Ratcliff on giving a presentation in the form of an engaging story (i.e., "David Attenborough style") are described in a 2023 paper by Ratcliff.
- Patrick Winston's one-hour lecture "How to Speak," on MIT's Open CourseWare YouTube page, comes very highly recommended.
If you have any questions about any aspect of the final project or presentation, please let me know.