Instead of the university scheduled Final Exam on 10 December, we will have a second one hour exam on 3 December, the last class, and will give more weight to homework (40%) and less to exams (30% each), for the following reasons:

1. There is a lot of homework, students are working hard on it, doing well, and it is being graded well, so it would be good if this effort were weighted more heavily, with correspondingly less emphasis on exams.
2. The class material is more qualitative than CSE students are used to, and so may be difficult for some to answer quickly on a long qualitative questions on a final exam.
3. The loss of class time will make it more difficult to study for long questions on a final exam.

The optional makeup homework assignment is online.

Steve Jackson's comments on all 9 homework problem sets are on our website.

Steve Jackson's office hours are on Mondays, 1 to 3 pm, in Cafe Roma. He will have extra office hours, on Wednesday 3 December, 1 to 3 pm, again in Cafe Roma.

Joseph Goguen will have an extra office hour, Wednesday 3 December, 10 to 11 am.

The Midterm Exam of 5 November is online. The average grade was 71%.

An option of replacing 1/3 of your midterm grade by a make-up written assignment was offered; click here for details. The due date was 17 November.

Be sure to check this website frequently; important notices will be posted near the top of the homepage; homework and readings will be posted on their respective webpages, not given in class. You should reload pages frequently, because I may well be editing the same page that you are reading! All webpages are subject to frequent unannounced updates.

The lecture notes are an important part of the course, and are linked to the outline page; they will evolve as the course develops. However, the class notes are not a substitute for attending class or doing the readings - much more information is given on some topics in lectures and readings, and there will also be hardcopy handouts, guest speakers, diagrams drawn on the board, interactive discussions, and more in class. Also, the emphasis on topics in the notes may not reflect the importance of material. In short, all of lectures, notes, text, and other readings are necessary for this course.

Past classes have seen homework answers with strongly overlapping content. In this class, a grade of zero will be assigned for such answers, and there will be more drastic consequences for repeat offenders. You can talk with other students about how to approach homework problems, but you are not allowed to work together on solutions. See the Integrity of Scholarship Agreement (from Scott Baden) and UCSD's official policies on Plagariasm; see also the most recent amended policy (sorry, it's in MS Word). You are expected to abide by these rules; failure to do so can have very serious consequences.

This course explores issues on the interface between information technology and society, with a special focus on ethical issues. Topics include ethical theory, privacy and security, spam, electronic commerce, the digital divide, open source software, medical informatics, bioinformatics, actor-network theory, ethnomethodology, and some neo-classical economics.

See the course outline for more detail, but note that the outline is subject to change as the course progresses. Prerequesites are CSE 9, 10 or 11, the ability to read basic works in the humanities, especially sociology, and the ability to write reasonable English. You will have to write short homework essays. There will be midterm and final exams.

Monday, Wednesday, 17:00-18:20, Center Hall 216

Section A00, ID 483427

The Discussion Section is 16:00-16:50 Wednesdays, Center Hall 216

The TA is Steven Jackson

His office hours are Monday, 13:00-15:00, in Cafe Roma

his email address is sjjackso@weber.ucsd.edu

Instructor Office Hours: Monday, 10 - 11 am, in 3131 APM

The Midterm Exam on 5 November.

A second one hour exam is scheduled for 3 December.
THERE WILL NOT BE A FINAL EXAM ON 10 DECEMBER.

• Computerization and Controversy: Value Conflicts and Social Choices, edited by Rob Kling (Academic, 1996). ISBN 0-12-415040-3.

• The Social Life of Information, John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid (Harvard Business School, 2000).
• A Gift of Fire, Sara Baase (Prentice Hall, 2003, second edition). This is oriented towards law.
• Computer Ethics, Deborah G. Johnson (Prentice Hall, 1994).
• Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics, Mark Johnson (Chicago, 1994).
• Evolutionary Origins of Morality, edited by Leonard D. Katz, (Imprint Academic, 2000); vol. 7, no. 1/2 of J. Consciousness Studies; available through amazon.com.
• Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, Edward O. Wilson (Random House, 1999).
• Computers, Minds and Conduct, Graham Button, Jeff Coulter, John Lee and Wes Sharrock (Polity 1995).
• Sorting Things Out, Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star (MIT, 1999).
• Social Science, Technical Systems, and Cooperative Work, edited by Geoffrey Bowker, Susan Leigh Star, William Turner and Les Gasser (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1997).
• Requirements Engineering: Social and Technical Issues, edited by Marina Jirotka and Joseph Goguen (Academic Press, 1994).
• The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture and Deviance at NASA, Diane Vaughan (Chicago, 1996).
• High Wired, edited by Cynthia Haynes and Jan Rune Holvevik (Michigan, 1998).
• Computation and Human Experience, Philip Agre (Cambridge, 1997).
• Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer, Michael White (Addison-Wesley, 1998).
• Isaac Newton, James Gleick (Pantheon, 2003).
• Cognition in the Wild, Edwin Hutchings (MIT, 1996).

Grades will be based on the last three items below; the extent to which answers in your exams and homework reflect your familiarity with the course notes and readings will be important in their evaluation; 40% of the grade will be from the homework, and 30% each one in-class test. Optional homework questions count half as much as required questions.

1. Course notes
2. Reading assignments
3. Homework assignments
4. Midterm Exam, on 5 November.
5. A second one hour exam is scheduled for 3 December.
   THERE WILL NOT BE A FINAL EXAM ON 10 DECEMBER.

• Homepage of Andrew Odlyzko, fascinating material on networks, privacy, electronic publishing, electronic commerce, etc.
   
• Benetech, a non-profit organization seeking to apply Silicon Valley thinking to help disadvantaged communities through technology.
   
• The homepage of Phil Agre at UCLA contains many interesting publications, a good bibliography, and several relevant links.
• Homepage of Geoff Bowker, interesting material on sociology of science, including biodiversity informatics, information infrastructure, classification systems, medical records, and more.
   
• Homepage of Leigh Star, interesting material on sociology of science, including boundary objects, classification systems, information systems, and more.
• Homepage of Jennifer Preece; see in particular, the subsite on her new book, Online Communities.