Swansea University Gwyddor Cyfrifiadur

Module: CS_124, Computers and Society

We post some useful links to supplementary material here in order to help first year students with their tutorial.

Phase I: Research a Topic

  1. CS_124 Coursework Phase I Requirements: researching a topic
  2. The ACM Digital Library: a source of many journal and conference papers. You'll have more access to PDFs if you log on from campus.
  3. IEEE Xplore: another source of many journal and conference papers. Again, log in from campus, and you'll automatically be logged in as a Swansea University user.
  4. theregister.co.uk: an IT news web site that can help first year students develop report topic ideas.
  5. Plagiarism.org: a whole web site devoted to the topic of plagiarism. It also describes what a citation is, how to cite sources, and describes citation styles. The web site is very good so have a look.
  6. A Very Rough Guide to University Exams: a few slides on how to answer (British) university-style questions.
  7. AMA Citation Style: The American Medical Association Manual of Style, 9th edition. This link is very helpful because it describes precisely the information needed in citations.
Research paper topics inlcude: aritificial intelligence for games, computers and their impact on work quality and productivity, computer addiction, computer use and its negative physical impacts, computer networks and identity theft, computers and privacy impact of online social-networking, massive, multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPG), open source vs proprietary software, piracy: how-to, piracy of music, software piracy and its impact on industry,

Phase II: Writing a Research Paper

  1. CS_124 Coursework Phase II Requirements: writing a research paper
  2. Writing a Research Paper: a nice guideline of how to a research paper from the Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL)
  3. AresearchGuide.com: The goal of this site is to provide all the necessary tools for students to conduct research and to present their findings.
  4. Planning and Writing a Research Paper: This page lists some of the stages involved in writing a library-based research paper. (from the University of Wisconsin Madison Writing Center)
Helpful LaTeX links:
  1. http://www.latex-project.org/ -the LaTeX Project Site contains a lot of helpful documentation including user guides.
  2. The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX -An excellent LaTeX user guide by T. Oetiker et al.
  3. http://www.tug.org/-The TEX Users Group (TUG) Web Site
  4. Why LaTeX? A great explanation from the Cambridge University Engineering Department.
  5. Why LaTeX? From the Department of Mathematics and Computing University of Southern Queensland.
  6. http://www.BibTeX.org -Here you will find everything you need to know about BibTeX. There are also several links to useful BibTeX tools.
  7. The Collection of Computer Science Bibliographies -This is a collection of bibliographies of scientific literature in computer science from various sources, covering most aspects of computer science.
  8. JabRef -JabRef is an open source bibliography reference manager.
  9. VIM-LaTeX -An environment providing a comprehensive set of tools to view, edit and compile LaTeX documents using Vim.
  10. Excalibur -The LaTeX Aware Spelling Checker
  11. Text Processing using LaTeX -A nice LaTeX resource page at Cambridge University in the Department of Engineering. There are lots of links.
  12. Ulrich Berger's LaTeX Page -This is the web page written by Ulrich Berger containing more useful links.
  13. http://detexify.kirelabs.org/ -Anyone who works with LaTeX knows how time-consuming it can be to find a symbol in symbols-a4.pdf that you just can't memorize. Detexify is an attempt to simplify this search.
  14. The Comprehensive LaTeX Symbol List -The Comprehensive LaTeX Symbol List is an organized list of over 4900 symbols commonly available to LaTeX users.
  15. Squeezing Space in LaTeX -some tips on how to squeeze a little more onto LaTeX pages.

Phase III: Giving a Presentation

Phase III of CS_124 is to give a 10 minute presentation that summarizes the findings in your research paper from Phase II. The format of your presentation can be either Powerpoint or PDF. You may bring your own laptop or you may use a given Apple Macintosh laptop (with NeoOffice installed, link to NeoOffice given below). You may (1) bring your presentation on a memory stick, (2) send the presentation file to Bob the day before your presentation via email (and Bob will place it on the laptop, or (3) place it on the web server (instructions below) and Bob can download it onto the laptop.

Helpful links on how-to give a good presentation (helpful for all presentations including first year and Gregynog!):

  1. Giving a good presentation -A nice and concise article on how to give a good presentation.
  2. How-to give a good presentation -Some more helpful guidelines on giving a good presentation
  3. Death by Powerpoint by Alexei Kapterev -Death by PowerPoint (and how to fight it), a great video
  4. Life After Death by PowerPoint -Funny and true!
  5. Death by PowerPoint by Angela R. Garber -a nice article that describes some common presentation mistakes
  6. ThinkOutsideTheSlide.com -Wow! A whole website dedicated to making better presentations!
  7. Presentation Evaluation Form -Here's the form used to evaluate your presentation.
Links to Helpful Reading and Documentation:
  1. Free Tech Books: No more using the money excuse for not having your textbooks. Here you'll find free online computer science and programming books, textbooks, and lecture notes.
  2. Academic Skills are all about helping you learn how to be a more effective learner and develop the research skills that will help you now and in the future. Use these resources to find out what works for you. (From the University of Southampton)
Helpful Java links:
  1. Bob's Java souce code: These are the examples used in class.
  2. The Java SE API: This page lists the documentation for the Java Platform, Standard Edition, and the JDK.
  3. The Java Tutorials: are practical guides for programmers who want to use the Java programming language to create applications. They include hundreds of complete, working examples, and dozens of lessons.
  4. NetBeans.org -Netbeans is a free, open-source Java IDE (and more). It Runs on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and Solaris.
  5. Eclipse.org -Eclipse provides free, open-source tools for Java developers creating JEE and Web applications, including a Java IDE, tools for JEE and JSF, Mylyn and others.
  6. Java-Tips.org -a repository of online Java tutorials including forums
  7. Java2s.com -a large repository of online Java programs and source code
  8. Jambi the Qt library made available to Java. It is an officially supported technology aimed at all desktop programmers who want to write rich GUI clients using the Java language...
  9. JUnit is dedicated to software developers and testers using the JUnit testing framework.

Links to Useful Tools

  1. PrimoPDF This application converts Word, Excel, and Powerpoint formats to PDF (Portable Document File), free.
  2. http://www.koolwire.com/: This web service converts PDF (Portable Document File) files to RTF (Rich Text Format), free.
  3. http://www.doc2pdf.net: This web service converts Doc files (Micro$haft Word) to PDF (Portable Document File) files, free.
  4. http://www.pdfonline.com: This great web service will convert Doc files (Micro$haft Word) to PDF (Portable Document File) files and vice-versa for free. Just google "doc to pdf" for more similar services.
  5. http://www.freewaregenius.com/: This helpful article reviews different freeware tools to convert PDF to DOC (ugh) format. Check out the rest of the web site for more free tools!
  6. http://www.NeoOffice.org: NeoOffice is a full-featured set of office applications (including word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing, and database programs) for Mac OS X.
  7. http://www.cometdocs.com: CometDocs will convert PDF files to text files automatically. Other conversions are also supported.
  8. PDFTK (PDF Toolkit): is a simple tool for doing everyday things with PDF documents...

This page is maintained by Robert S. Laramee.
In case of comments, questions, suggestions, or collaboration ideas, please sent email to: r.s.laramee "at" swansea.ac.uk.

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