The final report should be in pdf, correspond to the format of an article in a respectable journal, and occupy around 20-25 pages of text. There is no penalty for longer documents. Where teams are collaborating on a project, each member must write up her/his own report. It is permissible to share artifacts such as figures with captions, but the Introduction, Materials, and Methods, Results, and Discussion/Conclusions must be independently written. Further, quantitative granular attribution must be made to the level of effort provided by each team member. For example…

Conceptualization: X 55%, Y 45%; Code X 25% Y 75%, Generation of Results….

Further, if external advice was sought, it must be acknowledged.

The report is due Dec 7 and should be emailed to George Chacko. A grace period of two days is offered. Thus the final report will be accepted, without penalty, if received (not sent) by midnight US Central on Friday, Dec 9th. Any submissions received after the deadline and before midnight US Central on Dec 11 will lose 50% of points awarded. Any submissions received after the deadline on Dec 11 will not be evaluated.

The report will be evaluated for adequacy of information and quality of communication.

With respect to the adequacy of information, the standard being applied is that another scientist(s) should (i) understand what was done, (ii) be able to reproduce what was done. Thus, please provide links to raw data (input and results), description of methods and how they were run, code (Github or other), detailed figure and table captions, and a plausible list of reference material. References should be complete. For example, “Popov (2019), Science, pgs 22-24″ will be considered incomplete.

With respect to quality of communication, please communicate clearly: (i) the question being asked, (ii) the motivation for the question, (iii) a description of the results obtained, (iv) an interpretation of said results with consideration of alternative explanations, (iv) the future- what questions remain unanswered or new ones that arose during the study.