ASTR 5720 Web Projects

Overview

This course will have no final. Instead, you will each do a web project. The project is divided into two parts:

a presentation in class half way through the semester;
a set of web pages, due before the end of the semester.

The presentation will count for 10% of your grade, and the web pages for 25%. Thus the web project counts in all for 35% of your grade.

You may do your project alone, or in pairs. If you want to work in a larger group, consult with me. Whatever the case, there should be a clear division of responsibility both in the presentation and for the final set of pages.

Deadlines

You will choose your topic, and tell me what it is, by Thur 4 Sept.
You will give a 10 minute presentation (+ 5 minutes for questions), not necessarily on the web, on your chosen project, at mid semester. Presentations will be made on Tues 14 Oct and Thur 16 Oct.
You should provide me with a link to your finished web pages no later than Tues 2 Dec. You are encouraged to provide a link at an earlier stage, while you are still constructing your pages. All links will be published on this page.
No additional presentation is required on your part. However, there will be an Exhibition Day at the Fiske Planetarium on Tues 9 Dec, which is the last class of the semester. If you wish to present a tour of your site to the class on Exhibition Day, please advise me in advance. There is no extra credit for making a presentation, and no penalty for not making one. Whether or not you choose to make a presentation, I will not do so myself.

Suggested Topics

The Age of the Universe
Cosmological Models
Dark Matter
N-body simulations of Large Scale Structure
The Cosmic Microwave Background
Primordial Nucleosynthesis
Inflation
Peculiar Velocity Flows
Gravitational Lensing (weak or strong)
Clusters of Galaxies
The Intergalactic Medium
Galaxy Formation
The Cosmological Constant
Your choice? Please discuss with me.

Titles of Chosen Projects

Matt Beasely - ``White Dwarf Cooling and the Age of the Universe''
David Olaya - ``Quantum Cosmology Origin of the Universe''. See
David Fillmore - ``Supersymmetric Models of Inflation''
Rémy Indebetouw - ``Chaotic Inflation''
Chet Nieter - ``Particle Physics and Inflation''
Itay Sharon - ``Inflation''
Alex Flournoy - ``Baryon Asymmetry''
Andreas Able - ``Cosmic Microwave Background''
Massimo Ricotti - ``Theoretical Aspects of Galaxy Formation''
Jason Tumlinson - ``Observational Aspects of Galaxy Formation''
Eli Michael - ``Cosmological Constant''
Rachel Osten - ``Gravitational Lensing''
Aaron Lewis - ``Galaxy Clusters''
Aaron Hoff - ``N-body Simulations''
Jim Boyd - ``Dark Matter''
Jason Lisle - ``Cosmological Implications of Hipparcos''

Guidelines

I expect you to put a fair amount of effort into your pages.

Your project will probably not contain your own original research, but it should have educational value. Ideally, your pages should have broad appeal; but in the first instance, imagine that your audience consists of graduate students like yourself.

The pages should be organized clearly. It should be possible to click forward or backward, and from any page to any other page.

There should be a `home' or `index' page which states succinctly what the pages are all about, and which motivates the reader to click onward. There should be a reference/link page which is a guide to further reading/surfing. As a rough guide, there could be two to five pages in addition to the index and link pages, but there is no hard and fast rule.

Do not attempt to do too much. It is better to focus on a narrow subject and to do it well than to try to cover everything half-heartedly.

The web is a superb graphic medium. I imagine that a good way to design your project is to think: what would be a good way to illustrate the subject graphically? Animations and java scripts are definitely in. Then organize your text around the graphics. However, avoid `cute' irrelevant graphics.

Do not plagiarize. If you download stuff from elsewhere, provide a link to the source.

Keep wording concise.

Do not make any one page too long. Each page should constitute a digestible chunk.

Spare a thought for the folks who try to download your pages through a choked net and a glacial modem. Keep your main pages small (in computer memory requirement). Make large graphics separately clickable, with an indication of how much memory they take.

The pages you make will be yours, not mine. A possible option is to publish them to the APS education page, which I hope will be created at some point.

I hope that the final product will be a source of pride to you, which outlives its origin as a class project.

The perfect project? Wayne Hu's Physics of Microwave Background Anisotropies.

ASTR 5720 Homepage

Updated 10/31/97