Welcome to the CSC 290H course home page.

 

This site contains information about the CSC 290H5S, 2007(1) offering of the course “Communication Skills for Computer Scientists.”

 

Here is a collection of useful links for the course:

 

Administrivia

 

Lectures

 

Tutorials

 

 

 

 

 

Handouts

 

Midterm

 

Final

 

 

 

 

 

UTM Blog, CSC290H5

 

UTM Submit, CSC290H5

 

turnitin.com

 

 

 

 

 

Course Description

 

Course Info Sheet

 

Grades

 

 

 

 

 

Resources

 

 

 

 

 

Great Moments in Communications:

 

- January 4, 2007, one day before the course begins -- a clerk in Chapters, upon seeing my kiosk book order: “Let me take a look at it to make sure that everything was entered in correctly.”

 

- January 9, 2007 -- The Bulletin, University of Toronto, page 16, Forum: “Elizabeth Smyth is a professor in OISE’s departments of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning and Sociology and Equity Studies in Education.”

 

   << Pat, I’d like to buy a comma, or two, or … . >>

 

- January 15, 2007 -- in the “branding” material for University of Toronto Mississauga (no at, no UTM: heaven forbid!), the Photography section has the statement: “Faculty should appear youthful, somewhat quirky or fun, and engaged in their teaching and research.” For “quirky”, answers.com has definition from Webster’s 1913 dictionary: full of quirks, tricky. So “somewhat quirky” is not full of quirks, where a quirk is a peculiarity of behaviour. I don’t even want to touch “tricky.” The website has a thesaurus listing from the Houghton Mifflin Company, with the list: “deviating from the customary, bizarre, cranky, curious, eccentric, erratic, freakish, idiosyncratic, odd, outlandish, peculiar, quaint, singular, strange, unnatural, unusual, weird.” It sounds as though the executive focus group really did its homework.

 

- January 22, 2007 -- upon reading the front page of the January 3, 2007 edition, Volume 33, Issue 14, of The Medium, the Voice of the University of Toronto at Mississauga:
> “Friends and fellow dissidents of Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB agent suffering from …”
> “The explosion, which occurred at the Upshur County coal mine, killed twelve of the miners, and one survivor.”
> “Despite international pressure from the United Nations, as well as other leading countries, North Korea proceeded to …”
> “After ruling Iraq for a quarter-century, the dictator’s life came to an end …”

 

- [breathlessly waiting for the next entry]