The CompSci 1 Project, Spring 2006

The project is worth 20% of your grade.

Schedule:

• Topic selection due (on Blackboard): Thursday, March 30 at 5pm
  • Topic assignment announced: Friday, March 31
• Position statements due: Wednesday, April 5
• Project material quiz: Friday, April 7
• Debates: Monday, April 10, Wednesday, April 12, and Friday, April 14
• Project outline due: Friday, April 14  ( Details )
• Final projects due (project): Monday, April 24 Submission Instructions

Groups

You will complete most of this project in groups. For the final project, you may and should work with one partner. The students in a group do not need to be in the same lab section, and both partners will receive the same grade.

On occasion, we have a few delinquent students who do nothing and rely on their hard-working partners to do the project for them. We have three bits of advice on that matter. First, plan on doing your share of the work and make sure you are available in the time before the project is due. Second, if you find a group member is delinquent see Siddhesh or Prof. Forbes as soon as possible. We will usually give a warning and then if problems persist, we can grant divorce requests. The delinquent partner typically receives a zero for the project.

Often, groups claim that the computer somehow ate their files. You are responsible for making sure your project is in working order, so save early and do not leave anything to the last minute.

Turning in unacknowledged writing not written by members of your group or supplied by the course staff constitutes cheating and will be dealt with as an Duke Community Standard Violation.

Project Topics

You will be creating a critical project. Your project will state some opinion and provide supporting and dissenting arguments. Your essay must have some sort of discernible thesis statement where you take a stand on some issue.

Example of a thesis statement: "Computer science is a pointless enterprise that has no place in university."

Bad example of a thesis statement: "Computer science involves the study of computation."

The first example takes a position that can then be backed up by more writing, while the latter one just states what is more or less a fact.

1. Digital Divide

   The public should subsidize computer and/or Internet access for underserved areas and communities.

2. Digital IP

   Software should not be patentable.

3. Digital Rights Management

   Users can and should circumvent digital rights management systems if the use is one typically granted under fair use..

4. E-voting

   Direct recording electronic (DRE) voting terminals as currently used are better than current hand ballot alternatives.

5. Privacy

   The benefits of biometric technology outweigh the risks to civil liberties.

6. Internet governance

   The Internet should offer different tiers of service to different kinds of data from different kinds of users.

7. Security

   The use of encrypted email should be restricted to systems that implement some sort of key escrow or recovery system.

8. ISP Policy

   A university should monitor university networks and connected computers for improper activity such as copyright infringement.

Your overall project will be graded on:

• Content: Just like any other essay, you are expected to make your points in a well thought out and clear manner. In the sciences, being concise is generally desired, so you need to make a complete and convincing argument not necessarily long one.

• References: Links to web pages, papers, and books that either support or dissent from your position. There should be at least four of each. You should summarize and discuss the contributions of these pages. You will probably need to use research tools like LexisNexis™ Academic for news and laws or CiteSeer for Computer Science papers, search engines such as Google, and web directories such as Yahoo.

• Presentation: While I do not expect you to make professional quality web pages, your site should be readable, well-designed, and utilize standard web technology such as images and links in illustrating your points. You should use other web pages for style ideas. Pictures and a reasonably well-thought out interface are required. See for http://www.useit.com/ for good ideas and http://www.gui-bloopers.com/ and http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com for bad ones. You can use a web design program like Dreamweaver or Frontpage or use any program that can output web pages (such as Microsoft Word).

Tips

A way of improving your essay is to actually correspond with experts in the field that you are studying. You can easily find the email address for most professors, for example, online. If you plan to do this, keep your inquiries short and expect a short reply, don't harass anyone, and start early because you probably will not hear back from people early if at all.

Google is your friend. Whenever you need to find a page or a person related to particular topic, searching with Google will probably give you a good start. You still need to do your own research and analysis

Do not lose points on simple things. For example, if you are required to have names of all team members on a document, make sure that the names are there. Turn each part of the project in on time. Each part of the project from topic selection to the final project contributes to your project grade. Late submissions will not be accepted for all of the parts of the project other than the final submission. For the final project, you can turn in up to 2 days late for a 10% penalty.