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Computer Science 101 - Computer and Information Technology
Prof. Steven Skiena
Fall 1996
Project 2 - Searching the Internet
Due Wednesday, October 23, 1996
The Internet provides access to an amazing amount of useful information,
if you know where to look.
This assignment will use both your Microsoft Word and Internet skills,
as you will write a short term paper while doing all your research via
the Internet.
Doing a thorough search on the Internet is much more than just typing
in the search title into one search engine:
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Use Multiple Search Engines - Lycos, Alta Vista, Yahoo, and the rest
all use different indexing strategies, and organize information differently.
Try them all and see which you like best.
Yahoo in particular organizes by topic, as opposed to keyword.
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Newgroups - There are literally thousands newsgroups on all
kinds of different topics.
Search through the titles to find out which ones are most relevant to you.
News can be accessed by clicking on the `Window' button on the top-right
of Netscape.
Don't post any questions to a newsgroup until you have read it regularly
for at least one week, preferably longer.
Read through the FAQ (frequently asked questions) file for the newgroup
if one exists - check out the FAQ collections.
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Find the Experts - See if you can find the homepage or email addresses
of various experts in the field.
These might be college professors, government workers, etc.
Don't send email messages to multiple people, or to anyone unless you
have a very good idea that they can help you!
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Check out printed guides to the WWW -
Any bookstore these days has a zillion guides to the Internet.
Leaf through some of them to identify sites relevant to your topic.
You are likely to be very impressed.
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Try related keywords -
In searching the WWW, find alternate keywords to use if you don't find what
you want.
A search for "fresh-water fish" might come up empty, where "freshwater fish"
or "river fishing"
might not.
If you get too many documents, refine your search by adding more
specific words.
If you get too few, be less specific.
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Hunt for large sites with lots of resources -
Newspapers, historical Stock market data, government sites,
encyclopedias, dictionaries, etc.
The contents of many of these will not appear directly
as a result of your search.
Think about which resources might help you, and check them out.
You are required to turn in a two part paper written in Microsoft Word.
There should be a 5-7 page term paper describing the most interesting and
important material that you found.
There should also be a 3-5 page paper describing how you proceeded on your
search, what resources you found, and what you learned (good and bad) about
searching on the Internet.
You must include the URLs of all resources you used and properly acknowledge
your sources.
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The grade will be a depend upon (1) the quality of the information you
find, (2) the depth of your search and reported experiences, (3) the appearance
of the document produced, and (4) the quality of the writing.
I anticipate that there will be more significant difference is quality on
this assignment than the resume.
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Plagiarism is an academic crime, where you take someone elses words and
use them directly in your paper.
The nature of the Internet makes it each to incorporate someone elses text
into your document.
Resist this temptation!
As quoted on my syllabus ``Because a primary goal of the course
is to teach professionalism,
any academic dishonesty will be viewed as evidence that this goal has not
been achieved, and will be grounded for receiving a grade of F.
(See CEAS Procedures and Guideline Governing Academic Dishonesty, 1/81.)''
Speak with me if you have any questions about this.
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In order to ensure that each student does their paper on a unique topic,
I have randomly assigned three topics to student IDs,
and this list is posted on my WWW site:
http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/ skiena/101/cse101.html
Pick whichever one of the three topics interests you the most, or
which you find the best material for.
These topics have been selected to be broad enough that there should be
enough good information if you look hard enough.
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If you are very unhappy with your topic, discuss it with me at office hours.
I will only permit topic changes until October 16, 1996 at 6:30PM,
to ensure that you have time to do a complete search!
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By the begining of next week, you should have email accounts on the lab
machines.
Your login name is your first initial, followed by the first 7 characters
of your last name.
When you sign on, give you login name, your password (there is no initial
password), and help for the server name.
After you have signed on and started Windows 95, click the1
PMail icon on desktop to read and write mail.
To send Internet mail, you must preface the address by in:, for example
in:skiena@cs.sunsyb.edu
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This project can be completed during your lab section, during open
lab hours in either Engineering 106 or the new lab 318 Harriman,
or on any other computer running Word that you have access to.
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Steve Skiena
Wed Oct 9 17:12:56 EDT 1996