Course Requirements

QR48 meets three lecture hours per week, MWF 11-12. The class will also be divided into sections of about15 students each. Sections will meet one additional hour per week at times to be arranged. Sections are the place where you will get hints and reinforcement on how to do the required exercises.

CSCI E-2 students will watch QR48 lectures by live streatming at the time of the lecture, or video-on-demand after an editing delay of a day or two. CSCI E-2 will have its own teaching assistant, who will lead a weekly section in which students will be able to participate remotely.

There will be no lectures or regular sections in reading period (though we will hold some review sections in the days leading up to the final exam). A project, described below, will be due late in reading period.

There is one required book: Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion, by Abelson, Ledeen, and Lewis.. It is available in paperback from the Coop or through online booksellers, and it is also availalbe for free dowload in pdf form. For certain quantitative material, we will make notes available on the course web site. Assigned readings will come from the required book, off the web, or via the Harvard electronic library resources. There is no source book for this course. We also will list some recommended readings, which provide more background on various topics of interest.

There will be four problem sets. This is where the drill on mathematical concepts will be done. If you cannot do the homework, you will likely not do well on the exams, so while the homeworks taken together count only 25% of the course grade, they are your canary in the mine. It is a bad mistake to think you can slough off on the mathematics and catch up on this material over reading period. The technical material builds on itself. It is not a steep climb but it becomes insurmountable if you fall behind.

Keep up with the reading and start on the problem sets as soon as they are available!

One unusual thing about QR48 is that all homeworks will be done in teams. (CSCI E-2 students will work by themselves.) We have assignments done in teams because Harvard undergraduates are typically good at competition with one another and learn less in college about working cooperatively. In real, i.e. nonacademic life, certainly in the engineering world, tasks are almost always better done in groups, and the members of the group may be people you don't even know. So each person will work with one other to do homeworks. It will be up to the team members to figure out how to coordinate their work. But both members of the team need to understand and take responsibility for the answers as either may be called on to explain the work. Moreover, it will be expected that teams will not share information with each other. So if your roommate is in the course you should not be discussing the homework with him or her unless that person is your teammate.

You can choose a teammate or we can assign you one from those who also ask to be paired up by the course.

There will be a 50-minute midterm exam and a regular three-hour final exam. (The CSCI E-2 final exam will be two hours.)

The reading period assignment will be The Code Book by Singh.

Finally, there will be a final project due during reading period. The project writeup will be five pages in length. . The projects will be evaluated less on the length of the writeup than on the substance of the exploration and thinking that have gone into them. Projects also will be done in teams of two in QR48, and individually in CSCI E-2..

The objective of the project is to have you probe some question involving the impact of information technology on society. You should pick a topic close to your heart. If you like softball, you might figure out what has been done about gathering softball statistics, and how that has changed or may change the nature of the game. If you are addicted to clothes shopping, talk to the buyer for your favorite department store and try to find out how the better information about customer preferences is changing the way stores stock and promote clothing. If you are politically active on human rights abroad, research whether information technology is on balance more liberating or controlling to oppressed minorities. If you have spent time working on an election campaign, try to understand how much change will have occurred in the campaign and voting process by the time of the next election due to the availability of information resources. The research techniques for these projects are not deep; online reading and efforts at interviewing practitioners in the field should give you enough material, given that you will have done plenty of reading of a more general nature about privacy, communications, and intellectual property issues. It is essential, however, that your project involve interviewing some practitioners in the field, to inform your perspective on how the information revolution is changing the area of interest. Projects are not to be done in the library, via the web, or from your room. We will facilitate online brainstorming about project ideas, so birds of a feather can find each other.

Grading

There is no predetermined grade distribution. The various course requirements will be weighted in the following proportions:
• Homeworks 25%
• Midterm exam 10%
• Attendance and Participation 5%
• Project 30%
• Final Exam 30%