You are to write a term
paper and deliver a presentation on a topic suggested by
you and agreed to (or modified by) the instructor. In
addition, you will be required to critique the papers
and presentations of your classmates. Suggest your
topics on Piazza, where I will approve them, or ask for
modifications.
Your paper will be
1400–1700 words, including a reasonably comprehensive
bibliography. Your talk will be a 15-minute presentation
of the material in your paper. I will be strict on the
time limit.
Preliminary
presentation slides: You are to turn in the contents of the four
slides described below by Friday 20th April. They should
convey a sense of what your 15-minute talk will be
about. Submit your slides using the dropbox in D2L.
The goal of asking for a
few of your slides early is not to restrict you from
changing them later, but to encourage you to start
planning your presentation.
Paper
abstract: You are
also to turn in an abstract of your paper by
Monday, 21st April. This abstract will include:
Your name
Title of Paper
The introduction to your paper (this should convey a sense of what your paper will be about)
A sentence or two of your "My Opinion" section so we have an idea of what your position will be on the issue.
Your presentation will be with a partner, on the topic you have selected. Both partners must do part of the presentation. Your talk must meet the following specifications:
The slides must be
submitted to D2L as a PDF document. No other formats
or submission methods are allowed. No email, no
PowerPoint, no Open Office.
The talk should be 15 minutes in length, plus 3 minutes for questions.
The slides must be in presentation form. That is, they may not be a cut-and-paste of your paper abstract. Prefer graphics to text bullets; the slides are a visual aid, not a replacement for your paper.
The slides must include:
You must submit your final presentation slides in PDF format by 2pm on the day of your presentation. All the slides will be loaded onto the instructor’s computer before the presentation – you will not be able to connect your own computer to the projector!
You will be required to
complete an evaluation form for each presentation
delivered by other students. You will
rate each presentation by expressing your agreement or
disagreement with the following statements:
Your ratings will be
scored not by how well your ratings conform to my
ratings, but by how successful you are in
discriminating between strong and weak presentations,
using your interpretation of these criteria.
Your paper will be on the same topic as your presentation, but will of course go into more depth. Each student must submit a paper individually. The paper must meet the following specifications:
It must be submitted to EasyChair as a PDF document. No other formats or submission methods are allowed.
Formatting: 8.5” x 11”, with 1" margins all around, 11pt font, 1.5 line spacing
The paper must be 1400–1700 words in length. Put the word count at the top.
The paper should
have at least 5 credible references at the end.
These references must be cited in the paper in a
meaningful way. At least 4 of them should be
to documents that are available other than
on the web. Wikipedia is not a credible
reference.
The introduction should clearly convey the purpose of the paper and must present an opinion based upon a reasonable analysis of the data that you gathered.
Your paper must include a section entitled "My Opinion". The purpose of this section is for you to draw your own conclusions on the topic that you are investigating.
Grading will be as follows
| Following the above specification | 20% |
| Information content |
20% |
| Grammar/Spelling/Mechanics | 10% |
| Organization |
10% |
| Clarity and Concision |
10% |
| Logical Analysis | 20% |
| Grader discretion | 10% |
Make sure you take the time to
proofread your paper. It is important for a computer
scientist to be clear and concise. Remember all of the poor
instruction manuals you have read in the past! Have at least two of your
colleagues proofread your paper. Put their names in
the acknowledgements
section.
Plagiarism of any kind will
not be tolerated. You can reference existing works and
facts, when needed, as long as the sources are cited in the
paper, and you clearly distinguish your own work from your
sources. Minor re-phrasings of others' writing is plagiarism.
You are also required to
review 4 term papers submitted by your colleagues. As
you write your reviews, ask yourself if this a paper that
you would recommend your colleagues to read to gain a better
understanding of this ethical problem. Is it likely to
provide an interesting discussion. Why? Here are the
review criteria; you will also be asked to summarize the
ethical problem that the paper addresses.
Specification:
To what extent does the paper follow the specifications? Specifically:
- Is it in 11pt font or larger, with a 1" margin, and 1.5 line spacing?
- Is it between 1400 and 1700 words (± 5%)? Does it give a word count at the top?
- Does the introduction clearly convey the purpose of the paper?
- Are there 5 or more references, and are at least 3 of them to documents available other than on the web?
- Does the paper have a "My opinion" section?
Research:
- Has the writer done his or her research? Does the paper present the reader with information that he or she is likely to find interesting?
- Are there adequate references substantiating all claims of fact?
Analysis:
- Does the paper tell a "story" from beginning to end?
- Does the introduction set the context and survey the issues that are discussed later?
- Is the information presented in the paper analyzed logically?
- Does the author justify his or her opinion by logical reasoning from this information?
Mechanics:
- Is the paper largely free of spelling, grammatical and typographical errors?
- Is it written in mechanically-correct English?
- Is it organized to help the reader, e.g., does it use section headings, is every paragraph focused on a single topic?
- Are the facts clearly separated from the opinions, or is it sometimes hard to tell one from the other?
- Do you find the writing clear and concise?
As with your presentation reviews, your ratings will be scored not by how
well your ratings conform to my ratings, but by how
successful you are in discriminating between strong and weak
presentations, using the above criteria.
Hint: since you know that
your peers will be reviewing your paper against the above
criteria, make sure that you write your paper to score
highly against these criteria. For example, if you
can't write a succinct summary of the ethical problem that
you selected, it's unlikely that your peers will be able to
do do better!
You will be assigned 4 papers
by your fellow students to review. To help in the
assignment, you will be asked to "bid" on the papers that
you would like to review; at the same time as you bid, you
should declare a conflict of interest with your own paper and
the papers of any friends or relations whose papers you
don't feel that you could evaluate impartially. Please
bid positively on at least 8 papers; this will increase the
chance that you will be able to assign you papers that you
like.
As a member of th eEthics'14
PC, image that you task is to choose the best 20 to 25 per
cent of the papers for presentation at an Ethics in
Computing conference. So it won't help for
you to rate every paper as Excellent; you have to
discriminate between the truly excellent and the merely
good! (It's usually not a problem to distinguish the
merely good from the truly awful.)
You should submit your reviews
in EasyChair, either by completing the review online, or by
downloading the offline review forms, completing them
offline, and then uploading the forms. EasyChair
will ask you to give each paper a score between 0 and 10
inclusive. Use the chart below to calculate your
scores, add them up, and then round to the nearest whole
number. If the verbal descriptions of what the ratings
mean don't agree with your overall assessment, you can say
that in the written part of your review.
| Following the specification
for the assignment |
0–2 |
| Information content,
quality of research |
0–2 |
| Grammar/Spelling/Mechanics | 0–1 |
| Organization |
0–1 |
| Clarity and Concision |
0–1 |
| Logical Analysis | 0–2 |
| Your discretion | 0–1 |
The written part of the review
can be used to list strong and weak points, what you
particularly liked, whether the opinion was logically
argued, and whether the numeric rating calculated as above
agreed with your subjective "feeling" about the paper.
Don't be afraid of being critical, but try to be
constructive in your criticism; instead of writing "this
argument is weak", say "this argument would have been much
stronger if it had included data on ..."
Typically, a review is a few
paragraphs long. A page woudl be long; one or
two sentences would be superficial.