Tue Sep 18 20:09:34 EDT 2007
Class: 26 freshmen, 34 sophomores, 22 juniors, 29 seniors (from the registrar's database). With 99 responses (out of 113 registered at this instant):
Your major or likely or possible major, generally counting only the first when people listed multiple options.
20 HIS, 11 ECO, 10 ENG, 10 POL, 6 REL, 6 COM, 6 CLA, 6 UNK, 5 ART, 3 WWS, 3 EAS, 3 ARC, 3 SPA, 2 PHI, 2 MOL, 2 TPP, 1 SOC, 1 ORF, 1 NES, 1 FRE, 1 EEB, 1 ANT
Your life outside class, e.g., sport, music, theater, service, Prince, sleep, ...:
Lots of sports, both varsity and club, followed closely by a very wide variety of service activities, music in its myriad forms, writing in various venues, theater and dance and the like, work, and (wishful thinking, I suspect) sleep.
Your computer experience: none 15 a little 42 some 29 a lot 9
What kind of computer do you have? PC 56 Mac 43
This ratio is by quite a bit the closest I've seen (compare to 3% Macs in the real world).
Which one(s) of these do you use? MySpace 13 Facebook 99 Friendster 1?
Which mail system(s) do you have an account with? Gmail 49 Yahoo 27 Hotmail 19 AOL 21
Who is your cell phone provider? AT&T/Cingular 23 Verizon 53 T-Mobile 10 Sprint 11
How happy are you with them? reasonably happy 80 pretty unhappy 19
There was a strong correlation between "unhappy" and the non-Verizon carriers.
Are there any topics you would especially like to hear about in class?
Security and privacy issues and viruses: we'll get to them mostly when we do communications. Programming will be covered both in class and in the labs; you won't be a programmer by the end, but it should be non-mysterious. Web design: the early labs will do the basics. Among the others, how various devices work, digital music, cell phones, file-sharing, cryptography, and search engines -- all of these will be included. There will also be on-going discussion of social and legal issues related to all of the above, especially copyright and other forms of intellectual property. I'm not going to do anything very "vocational", but the labs provide a chance to learn some specific skills; for example, one is a decent intro to Excel.
We'll have to see how the labs work out. The distribution is not very uniform, and of course we'll get killed if everyone shows up for any session; the evening room (Friend 005) only has 21 seats and there's likely to only be one assistant at any session. The numbers are the sum of first and second choices.
| Monday | 1:30-4:20 PM 26 | |
| Tuesday | 1:30-4:20 PM 23 | 7:30-10:20 PM 47 |
| Wednesday | 1:30-4:20 PM 12 | 7:30-10:20 PM 34 |
| Thursday | 1:30-4:20 PM 16 | 7:30-10:20 PM 15 |
| Friday | 1:30-4:20 PM 20 |