- Course Description and
Grading
- Course Schedule
- Useful Links
- Rubric
for project 1
- Rubric for
projects 2 and 4
- Rubric
for projects 5 and 7
- Piazza
- Schedule of 5-minute talks
- Rubric
for
talks
- Schedule of 15-minute talks
- Rubric
for
talks
-
Course Overview: The purpose of this course is
to make you better scholars. In particular it attempts
to make you better researchers, better writers, better
presenters, and better reviewers. It concentrates on
your reading, writing and composition skills. The course
deals with both the production and consumption of the
“media” used by computer scientists to communicate
today.
You will learn to both read and write papers, such as
conference and journal articles; you will learn to both
listen to and prepare and deliver oral
presentations. You will also learn skills that
will prepare you for your career as a scholar: how to
choose a thesis topic, and how to write a thesis; how to
be an effective reviewer of material written by others;
how to prepare yourself for the job hunt in academia or
industry when you graduate. When you’re through with
this course you should have a feel for the tasks and
activities of modern scholars in informatics.
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PSU CRN: 40933
Class meets: Winter Quarter 2020.
Monday
& Wednesday 08:30–09:50, Fourth Avenue Building,
Room 150
Instructors:
- Andrew
Black, office: FAB 115-10, ’phone 503-725-2411
Office hours: Monday 13:00–14:00, or by appointment.
It's also fine to just wander by my office and see if
I'm free, and if not, to set up an appointment.
To set up an appointment at an alternative time,
please use the telephone.
Piazza
This term we will be
using Piazza for class discussion. The system is highly
catered to getting you help fast and efficiently from
classmates, the TA, and myself. Rather than emailing
questions to the teaching staff, I encourage you to post
your questions on Piazza. If you have any problems or
feedback for the developers, email team@piazza.com.
Find our class page at: https://piazza.com/pdx/winter2017/cs669/home
Links
PSU
CS
Department Comprehensive Exam
PSU
Writing Center
Required Text:
- Lyn Dupré. Bugs in
Writing. Addison Wesley,
ISGM 0-201-60019-6. (Some online notes are at
http://www.ai.sri.com/~wilkins/dupre.html.)
This book is now out of print — which doesn't
make it any less useful. Fortunately,
used copies are available inexpensively on Amazon
(but Powells
is out of stock).
It doesn't really matter which edition you
buy.
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Ancillary Texts
Lynne Truss. Eats, Shoots & Leaves.
Gotham, 2004. ISBN 1592400876.
If you are not use how to punctuate English —
or if your instructors tells you that you are wrong —
let this consise and amusing book be your guide.
Mark Zobel. Writing for Computer
Science. Springer; Third Edition ISBN
978-1-4471-6638-2 (2014) is available as an e-Book as
well as a paperback.
Covers many of the topics of this
course. In addition to Writing, has chapters on
Hypotheses & Evidence, Style, Punctuation,
Mathematics, Algorithms, Graphs, Figures & Tables,
Editing, Statistical Principles, and Ethics.
Henry Watson Fowler. The New
Fowler's Modern English Usage, R.W. Burchfield
(Editor), Oxford, 2000.
A standard work, and one that taught me the
love of the well-chosen word.
William Zinsser. On Writing Well.
Harpercollins, 1994, and Harper Perennial; Anniversary,
Reprint edition, 2016
A classic book on wrting non-fiction from a
former Yale Professor. Not focussed on technical
or computer topics.
Mary-Clair van Leunen, A Handbook for
Scholars, 2nd Ed, Oxford University
Press,
1992. Some online notes are at http://www.cse.uu.nl/docs/tandt/html/Scholars/.
The authoratative guide to citation, and many
other things. Fortunately, effective use of
digital citation tools make a lot of the hand-work that
Mary-Clair assumes unnecessary. What is doubly
necessary, though, is checking your citation
database. As with anything in informatice,
“Garbage In” leads to “Garbage Out”.
Donald E. Knuth, Tracy Larrabee, and Paul M.
Robers, Mathematical Writing.
MAA Notes Number 14, The Mathematical Association
of America, 1989.
A book based on a course that DOn Knuth
originally gave at Stanford. The original
course notes are online, and make fo rinteresting
reading.
William Strunk, Jr. and E. B. White. The Elements of Style.
Pearson; 4th edition, 2019.
The classic style manual for American writers.
You can find old versions of this text on the
web. The Boston Globe says "No book in
shorter space, with fewer words, will help any writer
more than this persistent little volume."
Nichoals Higham, Handbook of Writing for
the Mathematical Sciences, Second Edition.
SIAM, 1998
The Strunk & White of
mathematics. If your want to know how to write
mathematics, this is your reference.
Robert I. Berkman. Find It Fast:
Extracting Expert Information from Social Networks,
Big Data, Tweets, and More. Sixth Edition.
Harper Perennial, 2015.
Extracting information from the web beyond
Google, and why print resources are still relevant.
Gary Blake and Robert W. Bly, The Elements of
Technical Writing, Pearson, 2000.
A guide to writing clear, concise proposals, reports,
manuals, letters, memos, and other technical
documents. Includes a section on the
specialized writing problems of systems analysts and
software engineers
Edward Tufte. The Visual Display of
Quantitative Information, Graphics
Press, 1983.
From the master of infographics, this and
three later books by Tufte are filled with a wealth of
examples that explain the principles of creating clear
graphics, and why they work
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