Ay 141 abc: Research Conference in Astronomy, a.k.a. "Journal Club"

Policies and procedures

From the Catalog: "... This course fulfills the option oral communication
requirement and is required of all astronomy graduate students who have
passed their preliminary exams. It is also recommended for astronomy
seniors.  Graded pass/fail."

In order to pass this class you must:

- attend

- ask questions or make comments as a member of the audience

- present one or more quality talks according to the rules outlined below.

Every astronomy graduate student beyond the first year is expected to
give two journal club presentations over the academic year. Undergraduates
signed up for the course are expected to do the same, or if signed up
for less than all three terms, one presentation per term enrolled.
On occasion there may be talks by postdocs, staff, or faculty.
Attendance and participation by all interested parties is encouraged.

Talks (ideally more like discussions) are on Fridays from 4:00-5:00 pm
in 370 Cahill, and are generally followed by refreshments out-of-doors
or indoors during the middle of winter term.

The first journal club talk should be based on a paper chosen from the
literature (including preprints).  Papers must be approved in advance.
The paper may be chosen from the journals or preprint servers over the
past several months, or from list assembled by the faculty instructors
(if there is sufficient interest this; please let us know).
Acceptable papers must meet the following two conditions:

(1) refereeing must already have occurred

(2) no authors amongst the first five can be affiliated at present with
Caltech.

The goal of this presentation is to have the student speak on a topic
outside of his/her main research area.

The second of the talks can be either on a paper or on a single topic
of the presenter's own research.  Senior graduate students close to
completion of the PhD are encouraged to give a talk summarizing the
thesis.

A good speaker will:

- give sufficient (but not too much) background material

- motivate the new work and indicate why the paper was deemed
interesting

- describe techniques/methods and results

- evaluate rigorousness of conclusions

- put the present paper into the context of other work.

You should have your paper chosen by Friday of the *week before* the
presentation date so that you can discuss it with the class organizers
for approval. In order to sufficiently publicize each week's journal
club, we ask that each presenter email the talk title *and* an html-
formatted link to the work being presented to the faculty instructors.

Students should discuss their paper choice with their advisors, and
get some constructive feedback while preparing their talk.  The advisors
(as well as the j.c. organizers) will provide a constructive, critical
feedback after the talks.