Basics

Class meeting time: 4:00-5:00 pm M, Room B201 Main Street Office hours: 8:30-9:30am T-Th This URL My home page

Caveat This page will be changing throughout the semester.

Rules for this course The following rules are in effect for this course and you should not expect me to deviate from them. You are expected to read this website carefully. You are expected to know who I am, how to get in touch with me by email, and how to find my office in person. (See the first point above.) You are expected to turn in assignments on time to the dropbox. When you turn things in to the dropbox, you should check that in fact the material has been stored as it should be. If for some reason the dropbox is not functioning, you should immediately send me an email with your assignment attached. Late assignments will be penalized. (See the first two points above.) You are expected to read your email as indicated below. You are expected to attend class. Attendance will be taken, and it will affect your grade. See below for details about the relationship between your grade and your attendance. NEW: The seating chart is now online.

Outline, Prerequisites, and Expectations

This course has a corequisite of CSCE 145, 204, or 206.

This course is intended to provide you with the bigger picture of how computing fits into the modern world and why there is more to "computing" than just "programming." Unlike nearly everything else taught in the department, this will not be a highly technical course. We encourage you to participate in the discussions and ask questions. As the department chair, I am nominally in charge of this course, but as the lecture list indicates, this is a course that is truly team taught by most of the faculty in the department.

Official Syllabus

Here is the official syllabus for this course.

Email

There is a CSE department email alias for CSCE 190, namely CSCE190-001 in the domain lists.cse.sc.edu. This alias sends email to the CSE departmental login userid@cse.sc.edu that you get with this course. A mass mailing to the entire class will be done through these mail aliases. Actually, any of you can send mail to this alias.

The mail alias of the previous paragraph sends mail to the CSE departmental login that you get with this course. You are responsible for reading mail sent to this account. You can set the forwarding to any other account you wish, whether it be an engr.sc.edu, gwm.sc.edu, yahoo.com, or similar account, but you are responsible for reading the mail that gets sent to your cse.sc.edu account.

Texts and References

This course will be taught with multiple materials provided to you during the semester. In addition, there are a number of books and papers that are worth reading about computing, its past, and its future.

• The USC Career Center.
• The ACM.
• The ACM student membership page.
• The ACM TechNews page.
• The ACM Career and Job Center page.
• The ACM CareerNews page.
• The IEEE.
• The college page about computing support
• Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month, 1995.
• Peter Denning, "Computing is a Natural Science," Communications of the ACM, July 2007, pp. 13-18.
• Peter Denning's website, especially the Great Principles of Computing pages
• Hubert L. Dreyfus, What Computers Still Can't Do, 1992.
• Stan Kelly-Bootle, The Computer Contradictionary, 1995.
• The Jargon File.
• Stan Kelly-Bootle, The Devil's DP Dictionary, 1981.
• Stan Kelly-Bootle's website
• Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Intelligent Machines, 1990.
• Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines, 1999.
• Ed Lazowska's website
• Pamela McCorduck, Machines Who Think, 1979.
• Donald Norman, The Psychology of Everyday Things, 1988.
• Jef Raskin, The Humane Interface, 2000.
• Herb Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 1968.
• Guy Steele, The New Hacker's Dictionary, 1996.
• Henry M. Walker, The Limits of Computing, 1994.
• (and for something completely different) Charles Stross, Accelerando
• Electronic voting machines (DREs): The Florida report on the iVotronic and the 2006 election.
• Electronic voting machines (DREs): The California reports on DREs, including the iVotronic.
• Electronic voting machines (DREs): The Ohio report on DREs, including the iVotronic.
• Electronic voting machines (DREs): A NIST paper on recommendations for voting machines.
• Electronic voting machines (DREs): A second NIST paper.
• Electronic voting machines (DREs): Buell's white paper for the League of Women Voters of South Carolina. (not yet online)

Tests and Assignments

The assignments are detailed here. The last day to drop the class with a "W" grade is 25 February.

Schedule

Note: The scheduling of lectures into days may change some. Precise dates will be firmed up as the semester progresses.

(Tentative) Schedule by date

14 Jan 2008:	Introduction. Core curricula in computing: what are the core courses, how do they fit together, what are the "tracks" one can follow in electives (tracks such as computational math/scientific computing, graphics/visualization/multimedia, agents/ecommerce, bioinformatics, etc.) Professor Duncan Buell (confirmed)
21 Jan 2008:	NO CLASS (MLK DAY HOLIDAY)
28 Jan 2008:	The 2007 USC DefCon competition. White hat hacking and system security in the real world. Ronni Wilkinson, Boris Kurktchiev, Paul Sagona (confirmed)
4 Feb 2008:	The job market and employment trends. What do job titles mean? What should one expect as a career path? Professor Duncan Buell (confirmed)
11 Feb 2008:	Trends in the control of physical devices: robots, pervasive/embedded computing. Professor Jason O'Kane (confirmed)
18 Feb 2008:	Life in the real world of software. Paul Manning, Duck Creek Technologies (confirmed)
25 Feb 2008:	Computer security. Professor Csilla Farkas (powerpoint presentation)
3 Mar 2008:	Parallel computing: Why is parallelism so hard? Professor Duncan Buell (powerpoint presentation)
10 Mar 2008:	NO CLASS (SPRING BREAK)
17 Mar 2008:	How do the internet, the Web, and Google work? Professor Jose Vidal (confirmed) (powerpoint presentation)
24 Mar 2008:	Proteomics: Biochemistry meets computation. Professor Homayoun Valafar
31 Mar 2008:	Networks: Connecting everything to everything. Professor Srihari Nelakuditi (confirmed)
7 Apr 2008:	A brief history of computing. Professor Duncan Buell
14 Apr 2008:	Indexing, searching, retrieving, organizing. Steve Leicht, Collexis (confirmed)
21 Apr 2008:	Game development, and this semester's student projects. Professor Jijun Tang (confirmed)
28 Apr 2008:	Discussion.

Notes and Slides

(Caveat: any lecture notes prepared in advance may well change during the lecture process, and if you print them too early or too often you may use up your print quota.

Deadlines

Assignments will have due dates. Unless otherwise specified, these will be turned in by the beginning of the class period on the due date. Late assignments will not be accepted without prior arrangement to accommodate truly extraordinary circumstances.

You are responsible for attending class.

No makeup quizzes will be given.

Academic Honesty

Assignments and examination work are expected to be the sole effort of the student submitting the work. Students are expected to follow the University of South Carolina Honor Code and should expect that every instance of a suspected violation will be reported. Students found responsible for violations of the Code will be subject to academic penalities under the Code in addition to whatever disciplinary sanctions are applied.

There seems to be a widespread misunderstanding of the concept of "your own work." In addition to the USC Code, some good sources of text for what is or is not acceptable behavior are the academic honesty policy statement from Harvey Mudd College, the policy statement from Professor Steven Huss-Lederman at Beloit College, and the text of part of the collaboration policy statement from MIT. You can expect your programming assignments to be checked against those turned in by other members of the class as well as code that I can find on the web. I expect the correlations between your work and that of others to be minimal.

I can also offer an operational definition of what you can do and of how you can distinguish "learning from a group discussion" and "turning in someone else's work." If, after having participated in a group activity, you can walk away, put the books down, have lunch, and then come back afterwards to re-create from your own head the material and techniques you discussed as a group, then you can legitimately say that you have learned from the group but the work you turn in is your own.

On the Proper Use of Computing Resources

Students are expected to be aware of the university policy on use of computing resources, including the Student Guidelines for Responsible Computing, as well as the college and departmental policies on proper use of computing resources. Every instance of a suspected violation will be reported. Students should be aware that neither the instructor nor the department are responsible for making alternative arrangements should improper use leading to revocation of access to departmental or college resources make it impossible for you to complete the programming assignments on time.

On the Nature of Academic Work

Students might also find relevant an essay from a professor at Georgia Tech.