Class meeting time: 2:00-3:15 pm T-Th, Room 2A24 Swearingen

Office hours: 1:00-2:00pm T-Th

This URL is www.cse.sc.edu/~buell/csce390/csce390_2007_1spring.html

My home page is www.cse.sc.edu/~buell/Home.html

Caveat

Outline, Prerequisites, and Expectations:

The prerequisites for this course are CSCE 240 and SPCH 140.

This course will cover, as indicated in the official syllabus, professional issues in the information technology professions; history and social context of computing; professional responsibilities; privacy; intellectual property; risks and liabilities of computer-based systems.

The official syllabus for this course, which includes the course objectives, can be found here
.

The text for this course will be

• Michael J. Quinn, Ethics for the Information Age, Second Edition, Addison-Wesley, 2006.

The blog for this course is at ethics.cse.sc.edu

Web Page Links

• Gift of Fire
• The USC Career Center
• Some links on electronic voting machines
• ChoicePoint
• The ACM software engineering code of ethics and professional practice
• The National Society of Professional Engineers code of ethics for engineers
• One web reference to the Challenger accident and Morton-Thiokol
• The USC policy statements on
  • copyrights and intellectual property,
  • use of self-authored materials,
  • software,
  • conflicts of interest or commitment,
  • data access,
  • private requests for university data,
  • home pages,
  • network access and acceptable use,
  • use of equipment,
• A link to the South Carolina (and other) reporting requirements concerning child pornography.
• The Computing Research Association has a web section on intellectual property, mostly on university-industry sponsored research, but also with many links regarding patents and IP in the "knowledge economy".

Email

There is a CSE department email alias for CSCE 390, namely csce390 in the domain 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 dot forward file (via the secure web server service for this purpose) 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.

If you send me an email from some other account, then I will respond to that email with the "Reply" button. However, if I have to initiate an email to you, I will not use any account other than the CSE departmental account. This includes the engr.sc.edu or any other USC accounts.

To repeat: I will initiate mail to you individually only at userid@cse.sc.edu. I will not initiate email to you directed to any other account you may have.

Tests, assignments, and grading

Information on tests, assignments, and grading appears here.

Schedule

This is a one-credit class. The schedule for the class is found here.

Lecture notes, slides, and pointers

• Lecture notes 1 pdf
• Lecture notes 2

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 Code of Student Academic Responsibility found in the Carolina Community and should expect that every instance of a suspected violation will be reported. Students found guilty of 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.

A sample first-offense admission can be found at admission.

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.