Week 5: Proposal Presentations, LaTeX, and the Midterm Report

Week 5: Proposal Presentations, LaTeX, and the Midterm Report#

Learning Outcomes#

  • See the first two final-project proposals and practice giving substantive peer feedback.

  • Basic familiarity with LaTeX: edit and compile the report templates in the course project template using TeXworks (included with TeX Live), and work through the latex/ examples in the in-class examples repo.

  • Understand how to automate the inclusion of an image or table into a LaTeX document, so a PDF report rebuilds itself from your pipeline’s outputs.

  • Understand the Midterm Report: what each student contributes, how topics are claimed through the issue tracker, and how contributions are merged through pull requests.

  • Understand the GitHub pull-request workflow used in open-source projects: branch → PR → review → merge.

Announcements#

  • Proposal presentations start tonight. See the schedule for who presents. Format: 10 minutes to present, 5 minutes of Q&A, then ~5 minutes of quiet time for everyone to submit the peer-feedback survey.

  • Peer-feedback survey. Required from everyone, for every group (Attendance & Feedback, 10% of the course grade). The questions and the form link are on the Proposal Peer-Feedback Survey page. Read them before the presentations so you know what to listen for; the link will also be pasted in the Zoom chat. You’ll be given time in class right after each presentation; the form stays open until Friday at 11:59 PM if you want to revise or expand your comments. Survey submissions also serve as the attendance record.

  • Accept your invite to the midterm report repo. Before class I sent every student a GitHub collaborator invite to finm-32900/finm_midterm_report (it’s a private repo). Check your email or github.com/notifications and accept it, and confirm tonight that you can open the repo.

  • Book your instructor consultation. If you present July 23, your consultation should already be scheduled; if you present July 30, book it now; it must happen at least one week before you present.

  • HW 3 is due Friday, July 24.

Agenda Item 1: Proposal Presentations (Two Groups)#

Two groups present tonight, in the order listed on the schedule. Each group gets a 10-minute presentation, 5 minutes of class Q&A, and then ~5 minutes of silent time for everyone to submit the peer-feedback survey (one response per group). Presenters, remember that the presentation is an advertisement for the product you’ll build: what the paper is about, your data sources, and the new table/figure you’ll produce (rubric).

Agenda Item 2: LaTeX for PDF Reports from Your Pipeline#

Last week’s ChartBook site was the HTML half of report generation; tonight is the PDF half.

  • Introduction to LaTeX and LaTeX Essentials. Compile the report templates from the course project template in TeXworks (ships with TeX Live); scaffold a fresh project with cruft create or chartbook init if you don’t have one.

  • Work through the latex/ examples in the in-class examples repo, a progression from a five-line document (01_minimal) up through figures and tables, bibliographies, and Beamer slides.

  • Demo: the market-brief handout in latex/08_handout, a polished handout built from a custom class file (handout.cls), whose charts (chart_sp500.pdf, chart_yield_curve.pdf) and returns table (returns_table.tex) are generated by a Python script (create_market_data.py) and pulled into the document with \includegraphics and \input. The PDF rebuilds itself whenever the data changes: the same principle as ChartBook, and exactly how the Midterm Report (next item) is assembled.

Agenda Item 3: Launch the Midterm Report#

The Midterm Report replaces a midterm exam: the whole class collaboratively produces one shared, LaTeX-built PDF report on the current economy and financial markets. Each student contributes one figure plus one explanatory paragraph, and everything is assembled in one shared (private) GitHub repository: finm-32900/finm_midterm_report. You should already have access via the collaborator invite sent before class.

  • Live walkthrough of the repo: the skeleton layout, the style guide, and how the PDF builds itself from everyone’s contributions, using exactly the automated \includegraphics / \input pattern from the LaTeX demo above.

  • Claiming a topic: each candidate topic is an open issue in the repo’s issue tracker; assign one to yourself to claim it (one student per topic, so claim early; you may also propose your own topic via a new issue). Where possible, pick a figure that relates to the themes of your assigned final-project paper.

  • Contributing: build your figure reproducibly, write your paragraph, and submit both as a pull request, which is exactly what the next agenda item teaches.

  • Deadlines are announced on Canvas.

Agenda Item 4: GitHub Issues and Pull Requests#

GitHub Issues and Pull Requests: how contribution works in the open-source world, and the exact workflow you’ll use for the Midterm Report.

  • Issues as the coordination layer: claiming work, discussing scope, and linking fixes with fixes #123.

  • The PR loop, demoed live on the midterm-report repo: branch → commit → open a pull request → review comments → revise → merge.

  • Why maintainers protect main and require review, and how these same mechanics let total strangers safely collaborate on the open-source packages we use every day.

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