Saturday November 17

This is another fairly lengthy but important announcement, so please read
it carefully.

After a good deal of thought on the matter, I have decided to cancel
the "presentation of final term projects" component of the course.
The presentations were to have been held during the final week of classes,
i.e. on Nov 27 and Nov 29.

My chief rationale for this change is that I get the sense that many if not
most of you could better use the time to put more work into the projects
themselves than to prepare and present a talk.  In terms of the overall
goals of this course, although gaining experience with presentations is
important, I would certainly rather see projects advanced further that they
might otherwise be.

In terms of impact on your final mark, the grading scheme will be modified so
that everyone gets a full 5/5 for the marks allocated for the presentation.
This will ensure that your grade will only go up relative to what it would
have been had we maintained the talks.

For maximum fairness, any of you who have begun work on final presentations
should IMMEDIATELY cease work on it and IMMEDIATELY e-mail me (not Arman) a PDF
copy of what you have. I will then take your extra effort into consideration in
grading your project per se. IMPORTANT: Please send me your presentation ONLY
if you truly have put work into its preparation; i.e. it must be significantly
different than what you presented as a proposal the week of Oct 22.

In addition, I have extended the due date for project submission (including
your writeup) to

   Monday, December 3, 11:59 PM

This will give you an extra weekend to finish things up as needed.

Finally note that the lab hours on the 27th and 29th will be the same as they
were last week (and will be this week), i.e. regular hours, plus 12:30-1:30
on Tue for the first section (L1A) and 12:30-1:30 on Thu for the second (L1B).

So, to summarize: you will not have to prepare and present talks on your
projects, and the deadline for project submission has been extended to
midnight on Dec 3.