CS-90.3: Information and Intelligence
Syllabus

This syllabus is not ready yet.

Students who complete this course successfully will be able to:

There are two 75 minute class meetings per week. Attendance will not be taken (except at the beginning of the semester to verify your registration for the course), but students who often miss class will probably fail the course. The reading assignments for the course are listed below, and will be broken down further in the course schedule page for the semester.

Assignments

Grading

Grades are posted on the web as soon as they are available.

Exam and assignment grades become permanent one week after they have been posted, even if there has been a scoring error. Be sure to check that your exam was scored correctly and that the correct grade has been recorded (using the “Check My Grades” form on the course schedule page) as soon as exams are returned.

The College has a standard policy for converting course averages into letter grades, which I follow mechanically, except I compute fractional course averages and round to the nearest integer, which gives you half a point of automatic grade inflation. For example, the college policy specifies a grade of B+ for course averages between 87 and 90: because of rounding, that means that any score between 86.5 and 89.5 is a B+.

• James Gleick, The Information. Pantheon, 2011. ISBN-13: 978-0375423727
• Brian Christian, The Most Human Human. Doubleday, 2011. ISBN-13: 978-0385533065
• Edward Tufte, Beautiful Evidence, Graphics Press, 2006. ISBN-13: 978-0961392178

Notes:

• Both the Gleick and Christian books are available in electronic format. Both are required.
• Prof. Tufte has offerred to make copies of Beautiful Evidence available to students in this course for $10 each (below cost).

Here is an idealized schedule of topics and assignments for the course. The actual assignments are posted on a separate page.