Unit: risk and professional responsibility

• Guidelines for Effective Professional Writing document from the Technical Communication Program

1. Complete the writing assignment re: Therac 25 (required for entry to CS181/181W).
2. Please watch at least one of the following documentaries about the Iran Air 655 disaster:
   • Canadian documentary (2005) (password: "cs181")
   • Australian documentary (2000) (password: "cs181")
3. Please sign up for sections here. Due Friday, January 12th at 11:59 PM.

1. Read “The Trolley Problem” by Judith Jarvis Thomson.
2. Read the handout “Trolley Problems and Other Difficult Moral Questions” from Iowa State.
3. Please complete a short answer online (150 words) before class.

Section assignments have been finalized. Please check your section assignment and attend section starting on Wednesday (students with Wednesday sections should have already received an email giving the location—please contact us immediately if you did not).

1. Read this collection of articles about Theranos (please do read the whole collection).
2. Listen to the “Structural Integrity” episode of 99% Invisible, on the Citicorp tower and its structure engineer, LeMessurier.

1. Read three excerpts from “Metamagical Themas” (1985), by Douglas Hofstadter.
2. Fill out this form to let us know which movie screening you will attend.
3. Attend one of the following Citizenfour movie screenings:
   • Thursday 1/25, Gates 415, 4-6pm
   • Saturday 1/27, Gates 104, 12-2pm
   • Sunday 1/28, Gates 104, 12-2pm
   • Sunday 1/28, Gates 104, 6-8pm

• Please submit your response to today's in-class exercise using this form.

Unit: surveillance

1. Read the excerpts from Feynman’s “What Do You Care What Other People Think?” about the Challenger disaster.
2. Read Rogaway's “The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work.”
3. Read "The Outside Man" by Malcolm Gladwell about Edward Snowden.
4. (Optional—may be upsetting) Watch the reaction of NASA engineers at Mission Control to the Challenger disaster
5. (Optional) Read about the Colin Blyth paradox that was explained in class on Wednesday.

• Please sign up for a workshop with a TCP tutor using this form.
• View Mary McDevitt's slides from class here.
• View the TCP Guidelines for memo writing here.

1. Please fill out an end-of-first-unit evaluation of this course using our anonymous feedback form. What did you like? What did you not like? What would you like to see more or less of? Do you feel the class is succeeding at its stated goals? Why or why not?
2. Please read “Algerian Tells of Dark Term in U.S. Hands” (2006).
3. Read the Supreme Court’s opinion in Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27 (2001).

• Please send your project proposal to your TA via email.
• Read the US Government's motion to compel Apple to comply with search assistance for the San Bernardino shooter's iPhone.
• Read Stanford's amicus brief in support of Apple.

• Keith's "Bad Attitude Guide to Computer Security" (keynote talk at the 2016 Bay Area Security Research Summit)

1. Please turn in the Snowden persuasive writing assignment (600 words)
   
   For this assignment, you may find these examples of persuasive writing helpful:

   • Example persuasive memo shown in class
   • Rogaway’s “The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work”
   • Laura Kipnis’s “My Title IX Inquisition”
   • Argument in favor of a universal basic income
   • David Foster Wallace’s “Consider the Lobster”
   • Peter Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”
2. Please read these articles:
   • Luke O'Brien, 'Yahoo Betrayed My Husband,' Wired, March 15, 2007
   • Ryan Singel, Yahoo Outed Chinese Dissident Knowing Investigatino was Political, Documents Show, Wired, July 31, 2007
   • Jacqui Cheng, Congress unimpressed by Yahoo apology for China dissident e-mail testimony, Ars Technica, Nov. 6, 2007
   • David Barboza, Chinese Dissident, Jailed on Evidence Provided by Yahoo, Is Freed, The New York Times, Aug. 31, 2012
   • John Lanchester, You Are the Product, London Review of Books, Aug. 17, 2017

Unit: gender, race, and participation

1. Please respond to a classmate's essay about Edward Snowden (200 words).
2. Please read these articles:
   • Clayman Institute, Researcher reveals how “Computer Geeks” replaced “Computer Girls”
   • Communications of the ACM, Decoding Femininity in Computer Science in India
   • Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley
   • NYTimes Op-Ed, Tech’s Troubling New Trend: Diversity Is in Your Head
   • Dafina-Lazarus Stewart, Language of Appeasement

1. Please read these articles:
   • ProPublica, Machine Bias
   • Yilun Wang and Michal Kosinski, Deep neural networks are more accurate than humans at detecting sexual orientation from facial images.
   • Blaise Agüera y Arcas et al., Do algorithms reveal sexual orientation or just expose our stereotypes?
2. Please bring a laptop to class if you are able; we'll be digitally collecting responses for part of our discussion.

1. Please read the following:
   • Susan Fowler, Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year At Uber
   • Karen Wickre, Surviving as an Old in the Tech World
   • Liza Mundy, Why Is Silicon Valley so Awful to Women?
   • Alona King, No, I Am Not Lost
   • Vox, How the legal system fails victims of sexual harassment
   • Wikipedia: Employment discrimination law in the United States

1. Please write a persuasive memo to the California Supreme Court on the topic of algorithmic sentencing and bail.
2. Please read the following:
   • James Damore, Google's Ideological Echo Chamber
   • Megan Molteni and Adam Rogers' response
   • Cynthia Lee's response
   • Scott Aaronson's blog, What I believe II (Please read the first two sections by Sarah Constantin and Stacey Jeffrey; the rest by Scott Aaronson is optional)
   • Yonatan Zunger's response
   • The Atlantic, Wikipedia's Hostility to Women

Unit: hacking and information

• Please watch Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle (about 60 minutes).
• Please read:
  1. Richard Stallman's "The Right to Read"
  2. The GNU Manifesto Turns Thirty (The New Yorker, March 17, 2015)
  3. John Schwartz, With Cable TV at M.I.T., Who Needs Napster?, The New York Times, Oct. 27, 2003.
  4. Keith's interview with Jack Valenti.

Arabic proverb: إذا تخاصم اللصان ظهر المسروق (If two thieves quarreled, what was stolen emerges.)

1. Please respond to a classmate's essay about algorithmic sentencing and bail (200 words).
2. Please read the following:
   • An Explanation of the Meltdown and Spectre Bugs for a Non-Technical Audience
   • Intel Warned Chinese Chip Manufacturers of Flaws before US Government
   • Drop 'Responsible' from Bug Disclosures, Microsoft Urges
   • What's in a Bug Bounty? Not Extortion

1. C.S. Lewis, The Inner Ring, 1944
2. Ursula Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, 1973

1. CS181W only Please submit your revised essay.
2. Please submit a 400-word argument in favor of or against net-neutrality regulations.
3. Please read the following:
   • FCC Repeals Net Neutrality Rules
   • States Push Back After Net Neutrality Repeal
   • Net Neutrality Regulations Perfectly Fit the FCC's Statutory Intent