701 and 702 Graduate Seminars

1. 701 and 702 Graduate Seminars Evaluation Criteria

2. Outline • It’s not too harmful to ignore what I’ll say • How to satisfy yourself and your listeners • Fundamental difficulties • Do not be an egoist • Be an egotist • Technicalities • A new evaluation form (literature review, answering questions) • Literature review

3. You are a Graduate Student at McMaster University because you are a brainy individual • You are affected (influenced) by: • Supervisor • Supervisory committee meetings • Dominating viewpoints expressed in literature • Common sense • A fear to make a mistake Share with us your ideas

4. Why are you here? Why are they here? 69 Graduate Students 1 Speaker 14 Faculties You and they have rather different objectives

5. Will you read a book with no plot, no climax? Or a presumably interesting book written inAramaic or Amharic language? You are free in your choice at HPL or Chapters/Indigo

6. A painful truth “…a catalog of graphs, tables and microstructures may provide good evidence that a student has been hard at work and successful at research.Still, a large block of results is of little value to most of the audience who are unable to absorb it.” An excerpt from Professor Tony Petric’s email

7. Contradictive criteria A paper in apeer-reviewed journal A lecture for first yearundergraduate students Understandability Profoundness

8. Well, but what should I do in practice? • State the problem (a well formulated problem is almost a solved one). Why are you interested in it? • Explain why you gave preference to a particular approach, to a specific research methodology. • Background a.k.a. Literature review • Experiments, theory, modeling. What is special about them? Are they unique? Why are you proud of yourself? • Your interpretation of the results. • Unambiguous and honest conclusions. Don’t agree with my scheme? Fine! Use your own.But make your talk is comprehensible and interesting

9. Technicalities • Trivialities • Do not use too many colours • Do not use too many fonts • Specify axes • One plot/diagram per slide unless a comparison is needed. Crop pictures! • Number your slides sequentially (it would be easier to ask questions) • Avoid unnecessary abbreviations

10. Do not italicize! Italicize!

11. Are the listeners idiots? “No” is not an excuse What is this?! This is an undisputable evidence that I do not respect you, that I do not care whether my talk will be digested or not.Ultimately, this slide means that I am an idiot.

12. KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) L If the thermodynamic properties of both a binary stoichiometric phase a and a binary solution L are known, then the slope of the phase boundary is calculable. It can be shown that the curvature is also calculable. a But not too simple! But not too stupid!

13. A wonderful micrograph, eh?

14. What are these damned letters?!

15. How do we speak nowadays? • Not results, not even interesting results, but very interesting results • Not achievements, but outstanding achievements • Not contributions, but groundbreaking contributions • Not calculations, but sophisticated numerical modeling • Not efforts, but tremendous efforts • Not a collaboration, but a fruitful and mutually enriching collaboration • Not an analysis, but a meticulous in-depth analysis Please, avoid bombastic turns of speech. Use plain scientific English.Your greatness will be seen without extra hints.

16. Conclusions It is not uncommon to see inflection points at phase boundaries. Usually, their existence is attributed to an internal instability of one of the phases coexisting along the boundary. It has been shown that this explanation is not universal. It has been proven that if a binary ideal solution is in equilibrium with a pure component whose lattice stability is a linear function of temperature, an inflection point at a corresponding phase boundary inevitably appears if the entropy of fusion is less than 2R . Although this criterion stems from particular simplifications and thus is not general, it tells one that small entropies of melting make the appearance of inflection points at phase boundaries more probable. If the solution is in equilibrium with a stoichiometric phase, inflection points are favored by small entropies of fusion as well as by a composition of the stoichiometric phase deviating from the equimolar ratio. An influence of the entropies of transformation on a shape of a phase boundary may be quite important for solid-solid transitions, for which they are normally huge. Finally, it is worth mentioning that the habitual explanation is invoked when an inflection point is situated at a flat portion of a phase boundary, i.e. at the portion necessitating the S-shape of the whole boundary. As shown in the present work, this shape per se does not necessitate the flatness.

17. Now I need a volunteer.

18. Irritation and Boredom. Part I • Light vehicles are good • Light vehicles are really good • Light vehicles are good, indeed • No doubts that light vehicles are good • We need light vehicles • Light vehicles we need • Everyone loves Raymond and everyone likes light vehicles • Blah-blah-blah… Are light vehicles safe?

19. Irritation and Boredom. Part II • Hydrogen is our future • Hydrogen is a clean fuel • Hydrogen can be used as a fuel for automobiles • We have to develop new materials for hydrogen storage • We have to pay more attention to hydrogen because its usage in internal combustion engines is not harmful to environment • Blah-blah-blah… Is hydrogen a fuel?

20. Literature Review is about Before vs. After

21. A continuity of knowledge viaa Literature Review “Following the introduction you have to provide a literature review, unless you are the original inventor of everything.  This is not just to present a list of references, but to show the audience what has been done by the OTHERS, and what is ONGOING elsewhere.  Perhaps even better, to include a brief history of the subject.  The review should not only cover a particular material system, but also the involved processing and measurement methods. All these are necessary to make a clear cut between the existing work and yours.” An excerpt from Professor Gu Xu’s email