Place:         PSF 226
Instructor: Rolf Jansen
Website:     http://www.public.asu.edu/~rjansen/seminar/

Rolf Jansen:	office:	PSF 230
	office hours:	by appointment
	e-mail:	Rolf.Jansen@asu.edu
	telephone:	(480) 727-7119

Course Objectives:
The aim of this course is to introduce you, the students, to a series of short seminal papers and on more recently published work in the general area of this semester's broad topic. The emphasis should lie on the development of scientific theory and method, rather than on just the latest discovery or measurement or incremental improvement in a particular technique.
Oral reports on the papers selected will be presented in class at the rate of two ~25 minute presentations per week. Each student will be responsible for two short reports. Oral reports by senior graduate students and postdocs would be on a voluntary and as-time-permits basis only, but there are still several times slots available. Each report should consist of a general introduction covering the scope of the paper and where it fits within the larger field of research of which the paper is part, followed by a more detailed summary of the paper and a discussion of its impact. Each presentation is followed by time for questions and answers, and discussion.
Dates for the presentations(s) by each student will be assigned within the first week of the first class — first come, first serve. The choice of paper to discuss will be up to the student, but certain restrictions and requirements will apply (see also Tips.., below). I'll be happy to discuss that choice and offer suggestions.

Presentations:
The majority of the work for this class will revolve around computer-based presentations (i.e., HTML, PDF, Power Point, etc..). A laptop computer running Redhat 9 Linux (with Mozilla 1.4.2 browser, Acrobat Reader 5.0 [PDF], and OpenOffice 1.0.2 [PPT]) will be available in the classroom to give the presentation, but students are free to bring and use their own Windows, Linux or Macintosh laptop should they have one. If you use a Macintosh, remember to bring a DVI to VGA adaptor.
One week before their scheduled presentation, each student should provide me with the reference to a paper of their choice. I will place a link on the class web-page to an electronic version of this paper (PDF/Postscript), so all other students can download and read it, formulate questions, and thus participate in the discussion of that paper during class.
If you prepare a PowerPoint presentation and do not plan to use your own laptop, send your presentation no later than the afternoon preceding class to me by e-mail as an attachment so I can check that it displays properly (Windows' proprietary fonts, e.g., math symbols, often don't!). In all cases, after you finish your talk, send the electronic presentation to me so I can create a link into the following table (see Seminar Schedule below) to it, so it can be viewed and consulted later.

Tips for finding a suitable paper:
Papers that had/have a large impact will be cited by many other authors. Papers with few or no citations, or mostly self-citations by the authors, are not suitable for discussion. Papers are required to (1) have been published in a peer reviewed journal and (2) have at least 3 citations by researchers other than the authors of that paper. I.e., discussion of a paper that recently appeared on 'astro-ph' is strongly discouraged unless the "Comments" give a specific volume/issue of the peer-reviewed journal where such paper is scheduled to appear and the citation requirement is satisfied.
For a 25 min presentation, single 4 or 5-page Letters are not suitable (but two related ones might well be). Typically, papers should be the equivalent of 8–10 pages in a main journal (multi-page tables or atlasses of figures, and the list of references don't count).
Although not a complete depository of all scientific literature in astronomy and astrophysics, none the less, astronomy as a science is blessed in having a very large, full-text digital library: the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) (http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abstract_service.html). For example, a search for a paper that I discussed last semester returned:

A full text, printable version of this paper may be obtained by clicking on the "F" link (or by clicking on the full reference link or "A" link, and following the links on the abstract page that it opens). Often, there is also a "G" that points to GIF-format scans of each page of the paper or an "E" that points to an HTML version (both may come handy to extract/retrieve a digital version of a figure, table or equation to insert in your presentation). To check whether a paper has a sufficient number of citations, one can click the link marked "C".

The following is the schedule of presentations: