Internet and New Media

(706.003 1VU Internet und neue Medien WS 2008/2009)

Exercise 3: Email and Web Research

In this exercise you will send email from a proper email client and do some research on the web.

3.0 Set Up a Proper Email Client

For this exercise you will need to have set up a proper email client to access your TU Graz email account. If you do not know how to do this, read the lecture notes or go to your tutorial.

A real email client speaks either POP3 or IMAP protocols. This includes mail clients such as Thunderbird, Mozilla Mail, Mulberry, Outlook, Outlook Express, Netscape Messenger, or Eudora.

Do not use webmail for this exercise! Using a web browser to access a webmail account is not the same as using a real email client.

3.1 Send New Email to Your Tutor

Compose a new email to your tutor with the following message body:

Dear Tutor, Please send me Exercise 3.
Give your email a Subject line of the form:

[INM] MatrNr Exercise 3 Request

where MatrNr is replaced by your Matrikelnummer.

If you select the above subject line with your mouse to paste it into Thunderbird, be careful that no spurious characters are copied as well. If you have Thunderbird set to compose HTML by default, sometimes HTML tags are copied as well, then converted to vertical bars when the message is sent as plain text. If in doubt, send a test message to yourself.
Enter your TU Graz email address into the CC field, to send a copy of your mail to your TU Graz email address. Keep this copy in your TU Graz inbox as proof of sending in case of technical difficulties.
Send your email as a standard, inline, plain text email to your tutor:

inm-t1-chrissi@iicm.edu inm-t2-vesna@iicm.edu inm-t3-matthias@iicm.edu inm-t4-sabine@iicm.edu inm-t5-stefan@iicm.edu inm-t6-markus@iicm.edu

Bear in Mind

Send your email using your real name and your TU Graz email address, so that we can identify you (princess@gmx.at is no good!).
Send your email using a real email client, such as Thunderbird, Mozilla Mail, Mulberry, Outlook, Outlook Express, Netscape Messenger, or Eudora. Do not use webmail! [We want to check that you can configure a real email client].
Your email must be in plain text only. Do not send HTML, a word document, or an attachment of any kind.
Your email should have a valid signature.
Keep the copy of your mail (which you CCed to your TU Graz email address) in your TU Graz inbox as proof of sending in case of technical difficulties.
Your tutor will not be very happy if you keep resending improved versions of your email. You can practice by sending email to yourself, or by sending email to a secondary email address.
And all of the other relevant points in the lecture notes.

3.2 Web Research

Your tutor will reply with an email containing your topic for this exercise. Note that topics will vary between students, so complete the topic which you receive.

Please allow your tutor at least one full working day to respond to your email. The tutors do have other things to do as well as being INM tutors. They may have other plans for the weekend, so do not expect them to start replying until Mon or Tue.

This year, the exercise will involve researching a personality from the field of computer science:

Research and write a short report about the person you have been given, as follows:
1. Full name of the person.
  - As far as you can determine it, including first name, family name, and middle name(s) or initals.
2. Place and year of birth.
  - The city (or town or region) and the country where the person was born.
  - Year of birth.
3. What is the person (most) famous for?
4. Where and what subject did the person study? (if they studied at all)
5. What is the most recent publication (paper) in the ACM digital library (http://acm.org/dl) of which the person is a (co-)author?
  - Title
  - Author(s)
  - Where published (name of journal or conference)
  - Publication date
  - DOI
6. Download and read the above paper, then write a short summary (100 to 200 words) of the paper in your own words (except obviously for the direct quote):
  - Include a direct quote from the paper, following the rules of acceptable academic practice.
  - At the end of the summary, include a full reference to the paper.
Research your report online.
For each of points 1 to 4 above, cite the online source(s) you used, including a full URL for each source.
When researching at the ACM Digital Library, bear in mind:
- By default, the search results are listed in order of relevance (to the query). You have to change the sort order manually to list the results by publication date.
- The search results sometimes include matches to other authors with the same family name (and sometimes the same first name and/or same initials), so double-check that the person you are looking for really is one of the co-authors.
- You can search and read paper abstracts without needing an account. To download the full papers (usually in PDF), you need to access the ACM DL from an IP address within the address range (TUGnet, 129.27.*) of the TU Graz. You can do this from off campus by "logging in" to the TU Graz using the VPN.
  
  You can also log into the ACM DL with a personal ACM account, if you have one.
A DOI looks something like this "10.1145/1168149.1168151". Any preceding "http://..." prefix is not part of the DOI.

A DOI can be converted to a working URL by prepending the prefix "http://dx.doi.org/" to the DOI. This should always work (report it to doi.org if it does not work). For example: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1168149.1168151.
You may write your report using whichever writing tool you prefer (for example Microsoft Word, OpenOffice Writer, LaTeX, ...), but you must hand in a PDF file.
(You can install the free PDFCreator or CutePDF to create PDF from Microsoft Word.)
Your PDF file should be no larger than 1 mb in size.
Your PDF file must contain text characters. This is standard when you create a PDF file from Microsoft Word, LaTeX, or other text processing programs.

It is possible to create a PDF containing pages captured as bitmap (raster) images (which look similar to fax pages), but which do not contain searchable text, for example by printing out a document and then scanning it in as PDF. This is not what we want here.
Any URLs in your PDF file should be clickable.
Name your PDF file "surname-nnnnnnn.pdf", using only lower case letters and digits and no special characters, where surname is your family name and nnnnnnn is your Matrikelnumber. If your name contains an umlaut (ü), write it out in long form (ue).
Submit your report in PDF format to your tutor's room at the TU Graz Teach Center. There are six TC rooms, one for each tutorial. The URL of your room will be contained in the email reply sent to you by your tutor:
- You have to log in to the Teach Center room using your TUGonline account.
- You can then upload exactly one file of upto 1 mb.
- Note that you will currently not be able to view the originality (plagiarism) report for your work yourself. Only your tutor and the lecturer will have access to the originality report.
- If you make a mistake, you can upload a new version of your PDF (under the same name) up until the (late) deadline [Click on Modifizieren].
- If you make a mistake with the file name, you can delete the PDF and upload a new one with a new name [Click on Modifizieren, then on Delete beneath the submit dialog].
- If you upload a new version of your PDF after the deadline, we will only see that version and it will count as a late submission.
- After the late deadline (deadline + 48 hours) has expired, uploading (or modifiying) will no longer be possible.

Bear in Mind

You must write your report in your own words. Copying verbatim (exactly, word for word) from the web or from someone else is not allowed (unless you are making a direct quote).
You must use online sources, not printed books or other non-online sources.
You must give the full URLs of the sources you use. Simply stating "via Google" or "from wikipedia.org" is not enough.
Do not post your research to the TU Graz newsgroups or give it to anyone else!
And all of the other relevant points in the lecture notes.