Course schedule

Following is the tentative schedule. It is subject to change. The date listed is the Monday of the week. The lecture and tutorial material may be watched on your own time (links will be provided as that content is recorded).

Every Wednesday at 1 pm PST, we will have a discussion on "Why we do the things we do." The idea here is that we discuss ideas about experimentation and why certain choices are made. We have specific questions we will discuss each time, but we are intentionally not sharing them ahead of time. We want the discussions to be free form, featuring on-the-fly thinking and discussion. These discussions will be recorded and made available in the event that you miss one of the Wednesday sessions or want to review the discussion (or even share with your family).

Every Monday, we will have a discussion, either about a paper we have read ahead of time, or about the particulars of one of the experiments we will be working with. For discussions involving a paper, you should read the paper ahead of time. The discussion times are (all Pacific Standard Time):

9-10 am
1-2 pm
3-4 pm
7:30-8:30 pm.

You will sign up for one discussion time, and that will be your discussion time for the term. In the event that you have a one-off conflict, you may join another discussion. These discussions are not recorded.

Note that access to videos by clicking the links on the course schedule, you need to enter credentials twice. First, you will need to enter the username and password for the Bi 1x class, which was sent to you via email. Then, you will need to enter your Caltech credentials (those you use for access.caltech.edu) to have access to the videos via Google Drive. You may have trouble streaming videos using Safari. I found that Firefox and Chrome work.

Before class starts, you should get a working Python environment for scientific computing set up on your computer. To do so, follow the instructions in the Setting up a Python environment tutorial.