This is a course offered by the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University.
Course Instructor: Professor Stephen
H. Unger
Read the IEEE GUIDELINES FOR ENGINEERS DISSENTING ON ETHICAL GROUNDS
Supplementary Material. NOT
Required
The term paper should deal with an ethics-related issue, rather than with a purely technical subject. Informal one-page proposals are due 9/29. These are to enable me to give you advice as to possible modifications of the topic, suggestions for sources, etc. Information may be obtained from books, periodicals or, preferably, from the results of your own investigations: site visits, personal interviews, phone calls, email, web sites, letters of inquiry (letters can be a problem due to time lags). The minimum length requirement is 2000 words (roughly 8 double-spaced typed pages.). The paper itself is due December 1.
You are expected to produce a paper reflecting your level of education. Apart from content, care should be taken to minimize bad grammar, typographical and spelling errors, which are distracting to the reader and which reflect badly on the writer. Papers replete with such errors will not be accepted. Use your spell checker, but don't rely on it completely. Papers should have appropriate headings indicating title, author, date, course. Pages should be numbered.
Your topic should be defined sharply enough so that you can do more than make sweeping, superficial statements. A term paper is NOT a book summary or a book review; it goes beyond simply summarizing a lot of material that you have read. It should include some of your own ideas and formulations, possibly resulting from information you have obtained directly from interviews etc. Following are suggestions for topics, NOT an all inclusive list:
This course constitutes an introduction to the impacts of technology on society and to the responsibilities of technical professionals as the principal agents in developing and applying new technology.
Various important and controversial issues will be discussed, such as computers and privacy, effects of communications technology on the democratic process, environmental problems, intellectual property, and technology and war. Several different ethics codes will be used as the basis for discussion of professional obligations. Since most technical professionals are employees, they sometimes find themselves torn between the demands of their employers and their own interpretations of what is right in the light of their professional judgments. A number of real world cases involving such conflicts will be treated, ranging from some very recent ones to some important cases dating back several decades. Practical ideas for handling conflicts in the workplace will be introduced. The root causes of abuses of technology will be examined, along with some ideas for dealing with them.
Teamwork and cooperation among engineers and scientists is very important. Students should get into the habit by helping one another master the subjects they are learning. For example, studying in pairs or groups can be very helpful. Answering one another's questions, sharing information about resources, such as books or reprints, are all good things to do. In some courses (not this one) there are projects in which students work in teams.
But there are special situations in which collaboration is NOTproper. While it is all right to help a classmate understand the meaning of a homework question, it is NOT all right to help a classmate generate a solution (or of course for you to obtain help in solving a homework problem). Copying work on an exam from another is also of course improper (as would be the surreptitious use of disallowed information sources during an exam).
Improper collaboration or other forms of cheating will result in unpleasant interviews with a dean, followed by punishment that can go as far as expulsion from the university.
Reading the relevant parts of the text and doing the homework is essential in order to understand the subject matter of the course. But everything will be much harder if you skip lectures. Asking questions at lectures, making comments, and hearing the questions and comments of classmates, along with the responses, deepens your understanding and gets you past difficult points much more easily. Students who skip lectures soon start to fall behind and then have difficulty in catching up, because of the connections between the topics. Examples used in the lectures are generally different from those in the text, and often explanations given in class are more detailed. Material not in the text is sometimes introduced in lectures (but also note that not everything in the text is included in lectures.)