Due: the paper is due Friday, March 27 at class time. Submit a hard copy of your paper.
Your group should prepare a report and presentation on the topic you've claimed and described in assignment 4. Your report should summarize the topic and current research on the topic succinctly and precisely. It should indicate that you have done the research necessary to understand the topic. The formatting requirements for this paper are described below.
Beginning Monday (3/30), your group should be prepared to give a presentation on your paper and answer any questions that may arise relating to your topic. I would suggest preparing PowerPoint (or equivalent) for the presentation. The presentation order will be decided by a lottery which will be posted as soon as assignment 4 is complete.
Due to the number of groups and limited time, prepare for a 20 minute presentation. Your group must not go over 25 minutes. I'll cut you off if you do. The goal is to have two presentations each day, so the limit is very firm. It is much better if you prepare to highlight your findings, and not try to cover everything. Also, designate one or two folks to present. Don't have all members of your group present.
Your paper should contain 2 pages of text for each group member. E.g., if your group contains 5 members, you need to produce a 10 page paper, independent of graphs, pictures, figures, etc. The paper must be formatted using LaTeX. The following documents illustrate the format requirements: Formatting guidelines input, Formatting guidelines output (postscript), Formatting guidelines output (pdf), Sample bibliography file.
You must have this file in the directory where you are creating your paper: style file. It is the LaTeX style file that defines the format. Don't modify it to adjust margins or spacing, fonts, etc. If you need to make other modification, you can.
Use either latex (and dvips) to generate a postscript version of the paper, or pdflatex to generate a pdf version. Either should work, though the input format for figures may be slightly different in the two cases. Use bibtex to generate the bibliography. Ask for help with any of these things.
Some writing guidelines are here: Writing Guidelines. You are strongly advised to follow these. The most important proviso is to make sure that you don't plagarize. If you get lazy and try to copy all or a portion of your report from the Internet, you will suffer.
I will be reading your papers and returning them to you with comments. My plan is to have all of them read and returned by the end of the presentations. You will then revise your paper in response to the comments and submit a revised version by May 1.
Due: the day after we finish the presentations.
Prepare two "quiz" questions for each of the presentations (including your own). Imagine that you were preparing a quiz to test your classmates' attentiveness during the presentation. Write two questions to see if they were paying attention. Make them about the substantive issues of the presentations, not about trivial matters. They should be questions that would be answered by a short essay, not short answer questions.
If it happens that you miss a presentation day, you must indicate that on your assignment. I.e., don't prepare questions for any presentations you missed. Each individual is expected to do this assignment, no matter how many are in your group. Do not copy someone else's questions.
You don't have to prepare questions for your own presentation.