The second week of winter quarter, January 5-10 (Saturday through Wednesday)
the American Astronomical Society will be coming to the Seattle Convention Center (see
http://www.aas.org/meetings/program.html).  Since many of you are physics and
astronomy majors, I would encourage you to try to attend at least one day of the AAS
meeting - look at the schedule to see which talks are related to cosmology.  Next
Wednesday's class (Jan 10th) will be canceled since I will be chairing a session at
AAS at that time.  I have negotiated a special rate with the AAS of only $30 for
attending a single day (the usual fee for undergrads to attend the conference is $95).
It is not required to attend AAS, so if you cannot attend, you will not be penalized.
If you would like to attend AAS, but it would be a financial hardship, please come
talk to me.

First assignment:  Find a poster/talk on cosmology at the AAS meeting (or, if you
prefer, you could cover 2-3 talks/posters on a similar topic), and write a brief
(1-page) summary of

0) The title, authors, and abstract of the poster (these can be found at
http://www.aas.org/meetings/program.html)

1) the background of the problem being addressed by the presentation;

2)  the techniques being used to address the problem (observations - which telescope,
what kind of observations; theory - what computational techniques; numerical
simulations - what type of code, how large of a calculation, etc.)

3) the results of the study, and your evalution of how conclusive and believable the
results are (note:  some theory papers presenting a new theory may not yet be
testable, but you should give your opinion about the merits of the
calculations/theory).

4) of course, since we haven't started the course yet, much of the above may be
difficult to carry out, so I would like you to end by mentioning which topics you
would like to see covered in the course so that you can better understand.

The presentation/poster must address a topic in cosmology, i.e., which has bearing on
the study of the entire universe as a whole.  The primary goal of this assignment is
to whet your appetite for studying cosmology - feel free to look ahead in your
textbook at the sections relevant to the presentation you cover!  Many of the talks at
AAS are only 5 minutes long, so I would recommend choosing a longer talk since 5
minutes goes by quickly...

If you do not attend the AAS, then I would like you to carry out this exercise with a
recent paper from the Astrophysical Journal Letters, Nature, or Science magazine.
Choose a paper that relates to cosmology, as discussed above.  You will not be
penalized for not attending AAS.