Social Implications of Computing

    CS (H)195, Fall 2013

Course Credit

The one-unit CS 195 is meant to serve the needs of students who are here to satisfy a requirement. It is meant to be relatively painless and perhaps to spark an interest in the topic.

The three-unit CS H195 is meant to allow small-group discussion with the students who are here out of serious interest. It requires more reading and more writing (a term paper) in addition to the extra discussion time.

In both courses, students are required to attend every session, to do the weekly reading before class, to participate in class, and to carry out weekly (small) assignments, some of which will be written. In particular, there are three short (one or two page) papers on assigned topics, due Monday of weeks 6 (10/7), 9 (10/28), and 14 (12/2).

In H195, one of the assignments is a term paper instead of the third short paper.

The course is graded P/NP. The reason for that policy is to ensure that you can feel free to express opinions different from those of the instructors, both in class meetings and in written work.

There is no final exam in this course.

It is not administratively possible to assign letter grades exceptionally to individual students. In cases in which another department requires a letter grade to meet a breadth requirement, for H195 students we can write them a letter saying what your letter grade would have been based on your term paper, on the following scale:

C: The paper is scholarly, accurate, and well-researched.

B: As above, and you learned something new from writing it.

A: As above, and we learned something new from reading it.

Course Communication

We have set up a Piazza instance for the class under CS195; be sure to join it.

Course Readings

There are two course readers, although with a lot of overlap, one for each version of the course. Be sure to get the right reader! They're at Copy Central, 48 Shattuck Square (that little island in the middle of Shattuck south of University). For the non-honors (CS 195) students, all assigned readings are either in the course reader or online.

In order to save you money, and improve readability, many of the readings are available online. For most of these readings you need to have your UC Berkeley library proxy server enabled on your web browser, or install the Berkeley VPN on your computer (better privacy).