Lecture 26

For today

1. Read Lecture 25 notes

2. Do Notebook 12

   1. Read someone else's draft report and provide feedback

   2. Keep working on your project

Today

• 1. Evolution of cooperation

  2. Project check in

  3. Wrap up

For next time:

1. Do Notebook 12

   1. Fill out this end of semester survey

   2. Turn in your final report!

   3. Come to our final event on Wed 11 December at 9am (not 8am as scheduled).

Final report

Audience and goal

The audience for the report is other students in the class and external readers who know a little bit about complexity science.

The goal of the report is to present enough background and information about your experiments that the reader can understand what your experiments are intended to do and what we can learn from the results.

In the draft final report, and the final report:

1) The presentation should be organized around the experiments, not a narrative description of what you did.

2) Presentation of each experiment should follow the QMRI structure (see below), implicitly or explicitly.

3) You should write in the active voice and primarily in the present tense. Avoid using the future tense for things coming later in the paper. You can use the past tense for things you did, but prefer the present tense when possible.

4) As much as possible, show your results in a way that allows the reader to reach the conclusion you are trying to reach (as opposed to describing results and asserting conclusions).

The logical flow of the report should generally follow QMRI structure:

Q: motivating question; what is the purpose of the experiment?

M: methodology; how did you implement the experiment (at an appropriate level of detail)?

R: results; what happened when you ran the experiment?

I: interpretation; how do you interpret the result as an answer to the question?

Content

The draft final report should contain the following elements:

1) A meaningful title (not "Draft Final Report") and the full names of the authors.

2) An abstract that identifies the topics you investigate and the tools you use.

3) An annotated bibliography of 1-3 papers that relate to your topic and/or tools. Explain what the papers are about, what experiments they report, and what their primary conclusions are.

4) For each experiment you performed, present your question, methodology, results, and interpretation.

Before you turn in your report, please spell check it.

Also, please read my style guide and correct any violations.

Final event

Wed 11 December at 9am (not 8am as scheduled).

I'll bring snacks, you should bring a beverage.

Prepare a short presentation (a few slides, about 5 minutes) that explain what your project was about, how it went, and what we learned.

Semester summary