No catastrophe, but death by a thousand mouse clicks

INTRODUCTION

A future specialist is supposed to be able to develop the information he (she) has collected both in writing and in the form of public presentation. There are many forms of condensed writing, the principal ones are below:

· Annotation

· Summary

· Abstract

· Paper (including a synopsis, course or diploma paper).

These recommendations will help you to work with information including the information from the WEB to write a summary of an article or a book, to arrange your references correctly and to prepare for the presentation of your paper in English.

Moreover, we hope you find some helpful hints here while preparing for the Annual Students' Scientific Conference held in our university.

In the process of your work you are advised to use the Step-by-Step Approach:

Step 1 - Getting Started - preparing for the assignment and getting ready to choose f topic

Step 2 - Discovering and Choosing a Topic - reading to become informed

Step 3 - Looking for and Forming a Focus - exploring your topic

Step 4 - Gathering Information - which clarifies and supports your focus

Step 5 - Preparing to Write - analysing and organising your information and forming a thesis statement

Step 6 - Writing the Paper - writing, revising and finalising

Step 7 - Presenting Your Paper before the Audience - public speech

PART I. INFO SEARCH

Searching for information today is both easier and harder than it was when your only choice was the library and its massive card catalogue. More information is available than ever before, and you can access information from across the country or around the world. But finding what you want requires more skills on the part of the researcher, mainly because the human intermediaries - the reference librarian and the skilled cataloguer/indexer - are largely absent from cyberspace.

This means that you, the researcher, need to understand where information is most likely to be found, how it's organised and how to retrieve it effectively using computerised search tools. The reference librarian is an invaluable resource to help teach you and advise you, but won't be there when you're searching Yahoo at midnight on the weekend before your paper's due.

Unit 1, 2 have some resources to help you learn how to become a skilled researcher, both in the library and in cyberspace.

Unit 1. Learning to research In the library

Get to know your library

The resources available to you will vary a lot depending on whether you're using an academic library at a large university, a public library in a large (or small) community, or a high school library. Find out early in your research project what resources your library has, by visiting and taking a tour, if possible. Some college libraries offer an online tour of the library or a self-guided tour using handouts in addition to tours guided by librarians. Librarians are also skilled searchers, both of the library's catalogue and of online resources such as CD-ROM, online databases and the Internet

Learn how online library catalogues work

A library catalogue is a listing of all the items held by a particular library. A cataloguer examines the item (book, video, map, audio tape, CD, etc.) and decides how it will be described in the library's catalogue and under what subject it will be classified. When the item is entered into the library's online catalogue database, information is entered into different fields, which are then searchable by users. Most catalogues are searchable by author, title, subject and keyword.

Searching the catalogue by subject and keyword

The subject field of a catalogue record contains only the words or phrases used by the cataloguer when assigning a subject heading. If the library is using Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), for example, the subject heading for a book about how playing football affects the players' bodies would probably be assigned the subject heading "Football -physiological aspects". Unless you type in that entire phrase as your search term, you won't find the book by searching the subject field.

The keyword field of a library catalogue generally searches several fields in the database record - the author, title, and description fields. The description is any information about the catalogued item which may have been entered by the cataloguer. This is not the full text of the book, nor is it an abstract (summary) of the book but rather a short paragraph containing information the cataloguer thought would be helpful to a user. This is not like searching for keywords in an indexed database like Alta Vista on the Internet, where every word in a document has been recorded.

For this reason, keyword searching alone could miss an item pertinent to your research project if the keyword you use was not included In the short paragraph written by the cataloguer It's best to use a combination of keyword searching and subject-field searching lo make a comprehensive search of the library catalogue.

Searching other libraries' catalogues

There are lots of library catalogues on the Internet - but so what? You can search the catalogue of a library in Timbuktu, but that doesn't get you the book. Remember that library catalogues do not have full text of books and documents but are just a database with descriptions of the library's holdings. There are a few, and will be more, actual online libraries where you can go to read or search full text documents. Just don't confuse these special resources with a library catalogue, which is very different.

Find out how to search for journals and newspapers at your library.

Bibliography surfing

Web surfing is finding an interesting Web page and then using the hyperlinks on that page to jump to other pages. If you find the first page interesting, chances are you'll also be interested in the pages the author has chosen to link to.

Librarians and researchers have been doing this for a long time, in the print medium. It's a valuable tool for identifying sources on your chosen topic.

What you do is using the bibliography provided at the end of an encyclopaedia article, journal article or book that you've found particularly pertinent to your topic and follow the bibliographic references much as you would hyperlinks on the Web. Since you're locating items which influenced the author of the original article and to which he or she referred, they're likely to be "on point" to your topic. Then use the bibliography at the end of those cited articles to find even more items, and so on. Consult the reference librarian for advice

Questions to Unit 1:

a) Now to know your library? b) How to search the catalogue? c) What is bibliography surfing

Unit 2. Learning to research on the Web

Cyberspace is not like your library

Librarians have a weird sense of humour. This is now an old joke: The Internet is like a library with no catalogue where all the books get up and move themselves every night... This was the state of the Internet up until 1995 or thereabouts.

The new joke is: The Internet is like a library with a thousand catalogues, none of which contains all the books and all of which classify the books in different categories-arid the books still move around every night. The problem now is not that of "finding anything" but finding a particular thing. When your search term in one of the popular search engines brings back 130,000 hits, you still wonder if the one thing you're looking for will be among them.

This can be an enormous problem when you're trying to do serious research on the Internet. Too much information is almost worse than too little, because it takes so much time to sort through it to see if there's anything useful. The rest of this section will give you some pointers to help you become an effective Internet researcher.

Get to know the reference sources on the Internet

Finding reference material on the Web can be a lot more difficult than walking into the Reference Room in your local library

The subject - classified Web directories described below will provide you with your main source of links to reference materials on the Web. In addition, many public and academic libraries, like the Internet Public Library, have put together lists of links to Web sites, categorised by subject. The difficulty is finding Web sites that contain the same kind of substantive content you'd find in a library.

Understand how search engines work

Search engines are software tools that allow a user to ask for a list of Web pages containing certain words or phrases from an automated search index. The automated search index is a database containing some or all of me words appearing on the Web pages that have been indexed. The search engines send out a software program known as a spider, crawler or robot. The spider follows hyperlinks from page to page around the Web, gathering and bringing information back to the search engine to be indexed.

Most search engines index all texts found on a Web page, except for words too common to index, such as "a, and, in, to, the" and so on. When a user submits a query, the search engine looks for Web pages containing the words, combinations, or phrases asked for by the user. Engines may be programmed to took for an exact match or a close match (for example, the plural of the word submitted by the user). They may rank the hits as to how close the match is to the words submitted by the user.

One important thing to remember about search engines is this: once the engine and the spider have been programmed, the process is totally automated. No human being examines the information returned by the spider to see what subject it might bs about or whether the words on the Web page adequately reflect the actual main point of the page.

Another important fact is that ail the search engines are different, fhey index differently and treat users' queries differently (how nice!). The purden is on the searcher to learn how to use the features of each search, engine.

Task 2.1. Read an excellent article about search engines:

Searching the Internet Part I: Sorne Sasid Considerations and Automated Search indexes in IhterNlC News, September 1998, by Jack Solock.

http.//rs.internic.net/nic-support/nicnews/archive/september96/enduser.html

Bookmarks or favourites

Before you start a research session, make a new folder in your bookmarks or favourites area and set that folder as the one to receive new bookmark additions. You might name it with the current date, so you later can identify in which research session the bookmarks were made. Remember you can make a bookmark for a page you haven't yet visited by holding the mouse over the link and getting the popup menu (by either pressing the mouse button or right clicking, depending on what flavour. computer you have) to "Add bookmark" or "Add to favourites." Before you sign off your research session, go back and weed out any bookmarks which turned out to be uninteresting so you don't have a bunch of irrelevant material to deal with later. Later you can move these bookmarks around into different folders as you organise information for writing your paper-find out how to do that in your browser.

Printing from the browser

Sometimes you'll want to print information from a Web site. The main thing to remember is to make sure the Page Setup is set to print out the page title, URL, and the date. You'll be unable to use the material if you can't remember later where it came from.

"Saving as" a file

Know how to temporarily save the contents of a Web page as a file on your hard drive or a floppy disk and later open It In your browser by using the "tile open" feature. You can save the page you're currently viewing or one which is hyperlinked from that page, from the "File" menu of the popup menu accessed by the mouse held over the hyperlink.

Copying and pasting to a word processor

You can take quotes from Web pages by opening up a Word processing document and keeping it open while you use your browser. When you find text you want to save, drag the mouse over it and "copy" it, then open up your word processing document and "paste" II Be sure to also copy and paste the URL and page title, and to record the date, so you know where the information came from

Learn how search syntax works

Search syntax is a set of rules describing how users can query the database being searched. Sophisticated syntax makes for a better search, one where the items retrieved are mostly relevant to the searcher's need and important items are not missed. It allows a user to look for combinations of terms, exclude other terms, look for various forma of a word, include synonyms, search for phrases rather than single words. The main tools of search syntax are these:

Wildcards and truncation

This involves substituting symbols for certain letters of a word so that the search engine will retrieve items with any letter in that spot in the word. The syntax may allow a symbol in the middle of a word (wildcard) or only at the end of the word (truncation). This feature makes it easier to search for related word groups, like "woman" and "women" by using a wildcard such as "wom*n." Truncation can be useful to search for a group of words like "invest, investor, investors, investing, investment, investments" by submitting "invest*" rather than typing in all those terms separated by OR's. The only problem is that "invest*" will also retrieve "investigate, investigated, investigator, investigation, investigating." The trick, then is to' combine terms with an AND such as "invest*" AND "stock* or bond* or financ* or money" to try and narrow your retrieved set to the kind of documents you're looking for.

Phrase searching

Many concepts are represented by a phrase rather than a single word. In order to successfully search for a term like "library school" it's important that the search engine allows syntax for phrase searching. Otherwise, instead of getting documents about library schools you could be getting documents about school libraries or documents- where the word "library" and "school" both appear but have nothing to do with a library school.

Capitalisation

When searching for proper names, search syntax that will distinguish capital from lower case letters will help narrow the search. In other cases, you would want to make sure the search engine isn't looking for a particular pattern of capitalisation, and many search engines let you choose which of these options to use.

Field searching

All database records are divided up into fields. Almost all search engines in CD-ROM or online library products and the more sophisticated Web search engines allow users to search for terms appearing in a particular field. This can help immensely when you're looking for a very specific item. Say that you're looking for a psychology paper by a professor from the University of Michigan and ail you remember about the paper is that it had something about Freud and Jung in its title. If you think it may be on the Web, you can do a search in Alta Vista, searching for "Freud" AND "Jung" and limit your search to the "umich.edu" domain, which gives you a pretty good chance of finding it, if it's there.

Make sure you know what content you're searching

The content of the database will affect your search strategy and the search syntax you use to retrieve documents. Some of the different databases you'll encounter in your library and online research are:

Things you're not likely to find on the Web for free:

· encyclopaedias (the CD-ROM versions are selling too well)

· index and abstract services (very labour - intensive to produce but are essential to a scholarly researcher looking for journal articles and therefore very profitable to sell to libraries)

· books that are still under copyright

· full -text non-fiction books on scholarly topics

· most scholarly journal articles (this is changing)

· pre-1994 (pre-Web) magazine and newspaper articles (this may change)

If you look at the list of what's not on the Web, it covers about 90% of the contents of a college library's collection, both the reference and the circulating collection. It's apparent that researchers still have to spend a good portion of their research time in the library rather than on the Web.

Questions to Unit 2: 1. Do you agree with the opinion that too much information is almost worse? 2. How to print from the browser? 3, How does search syntax work? 4. What do wildcards and truncation mean? 5. What things are you hardly to find on the Web for free?

Unit 3. Writing a summary

What is a summary?

A summary is a short version of a reading; it is a condensed version of a piece.

Why is summary writing useful?

Teachers use summary writing to test your understanding of reading material.

Summary writing helps you comprehend information as you attempt to pull out just the essential information from a reading.

Key points to remember:

· Write a summary in your words, not the author's.

· Avoid using quotes in a summary. Paraphrase key ideas. (If you use three or more words in the same order as the author, you must place them in quotes).

· Include only the most important information.

· Avoid detailed information of actions or events.

· A summary is rarely longer than a page.

Organisation of a summary

The 100-word summary consists of three parts:

· Introduction

· Body

· Conclusion

Introduction

The introduction of a summary is usually one paragraph long.

What to include in the introduction t

· Title of the reading

If it is an article, essay, or short story place the title in quotes.

If it is a book, underline the title.

· Name of the author

· Purpose of reading or overall point the writer is trying to get across

Body of a summary

The body of a summary is generally one to three paragraphs long, dependent on the length of the reading.

What to include in the body

Important points of reading, such as main ideas, facts, and examples.

Other secondary points that are relevant to key ideas. Include specific details as needed to get the author's points across.

Paraphrase the information while maintaining the author's tone and attitude as much as possible.

Conclusion

The conclusion of a summary is generally one paragraph long.

What to include in the conclusion

Conclude by presenting the author's final comments or by bringing up the main point of the reading. Add your personal opinion of the reading.

Checking your summary:

· Read it out loud closely.

· Do you have at least three paragraphs?

· Examine each part (introduction, Body, and Conclusion).

· Check spelling and style of your summary

· Make sure your information is accurate!

· Remember that a good summary must be precise and clear.

Is your summary good?

Have a friend who hasn't read the piece and read your summary to him.

Someone who has not read the piece should be able to get a clear picture of the ideas and the tone of {he actual writing from reading your summary.

Benefits of summary writing

Summary writing helps you understand and remember information, improves your writing skills. The more summaries you write, the better you will get at using language effectively.

Other benefits

Consider writing summaries for all your readings; it will help you "know what you know" and do better on mid-term and final exams.

Questions to Unit 3: 1) What is a summery? 2) What is a summery structure? 3) How can you check your summary? 4) What arc the benefits of summary writing?

Task 3.1. Without having read the story, try to figure out whether it is complete or not?

Summary of "I Won't Learn from You" (introduction, paragraph 1)

Herbert Kohl wrote a story about an experience that he had with a. student named Barry and the lesson he learned about not-learning and failing. The author started out by talking about his frustrations with students. They were intelligent but were not trying to learn. Kohl tried to figure out the reasons why these students were failures and lists all kinds of reasons.

(Body, paragraph 2)

One year, he got a new student in his class that nobody else wanted because he was difficult and uncooperative. All the teachers were afraid of Barry because of his size and behaviour. The students though really liked

Barry because he was a good athlete and storyteller. It seemed that Barry was smart, but he never did his homework. Kohl figured out that Barry didn't know how to read and decided to help him. He planned out a performance and tricked Barry into presenting by reading him the words first. The trick worked and Barry learned how to read.

(Conclusion, paragraph 3)

Kohl learned that choice and would play a very important role in learning, and that if Barry had chosen not to go along with his trick, he wouldn't have (earned how to read.

Task 3.2a. Read the article "What's Your Favourite Class?" for the purpose of writing a summary of the article:

What's your favourite class?

Most kids would say recess. Yet many schools are cutting back on unstructured schoolyard play.

By Anna Mulrine {Science & Ideas 5/1/00)

1. As the kindergarteners line up under the giant papier-mache puffer fish in their classroom at PS 87 in New York, they are bouncing like a batch of Slinkys ready to spring. Many have pre-recess rituals: Some balance backpacks on their heads, while others sing quietly to themselves. One child transforms her scrunchie into a crown, confident it's time for festivity, not practicalities.

2. Holding hands, the tiny pairs whoop and scatter as they are released into a simple blacktopped playground. Kaitlin, 6, a redhead in pedal pushers, grabs a piece of chalk and starts sketching a steam engine. "I don't draw animals," she says resolutely. Naji, 5, whispers secrets to a crew-cutted Moataz, 6, as they play on the slide. Bettina, 5, lies on her stomach admiring her necklace-a shell on a piece of purple yarn-until friends grab her ankles and turn her into a human wheelbarrow.

3. Recess has long been a schoolyard staple, a pageant of play replete with drama and intrigue, tears and reconciliation. But today, it's

disappearing for America's kids More than 40 percent of school districts across the country, including those in Atlanta and Chicago, have done away with recess or are considering it. Parents and educators aren't pleased-to say nothing of the children. "I think without recess," says Lily, a pragmatic 6-year-old hanging from monkey bars, "we'd be boring."

4. Which is precisely what early recess advocates were trying to avoid. Before the Revolutionary War, the right to play superseded even the right to bear arms. Recess was considered vital for emotional and intellectual growth. When training for soldiers interfered with the games of schoolchildren on Boston Common, the kids protested to the governor-who promptly ordered the soldiers to back off. Freud believed play to be perfect time to act out dreams and fears. By the 1950s, three recesses a day were the norm.

5. But today, testing frenzy has overtaken time-honoured tradition. "It's this Puritan ethic that playing gets in the way of learning," says Anthony Pellegrini, professor of educational psychology at the University of Minnesota. The irony, he says, is that studies suggest the opposite-breaks actually help children learn.

6. In a nod to the need for physical activity, school districts like Philadelphia have created "socialised" recess in which play is highly structured. But Rhonda Clements, an education professor at Hofstra University, notes that there's more to recess than getting a workout. It's a chance to practice social skills such as how to gracefully join a kickball game, comfort a sad friend, or tell a hurtful schoolmate to knock it off. Teachers should step in to stop incessant bullying, says Clements. But when adults are always around, as during socialised recess, children show a marked decrease in the ability to handle conflict en their own.

7. And in an era of overscheduled children shuttled from play dates to sports practice, with activities and even buddies chosen by well-meaning parents, recess is a rare chance to explore new friendships or simply follow a personal muse. Lily's mom seems to sense this as she watches her daughter slide down the fireman's pole at PS 87. "Something tells me," she says, "that I should reschedule her violin lesson."

Task 3.2b. Answer the questions. The correct answers to these questions will help you identify the essential elements that make up a summary.

Introduction

1. Citation: Write a sentence that contains the information for a proper citation of "What's Your Favourite Class?"

2. Topic: What is the general subject matter or focus of "What's Your Favourite Cluss?"

3. Thesis: What is the major assertion that the author is making about the topic? Incorporate this into a clear one-sentence thesis statement.

Body

4. Re-read Paragraph #4 of "What's Your Favourite Class?" Identify its main idea.

5. Re-read Paragraph #5 of "What's Your Favourite Class?" Identify the main idea.

6. Re-read Paragraph #6 of "What's Your Favourite Class?" Identify two key ideas in that paragraph.

7. Re-read Paragraph #7 of "Wnat's Your Favourite Class?" Identify the main idea.

Conclusion

8.Write a sentence where you agree or disagree with the author Give your reasons,

Task 3.2c. Write a three-paragraph summary of "What's Your Favourite Class?"

Task 3.3a. Read the article " No catastrophe, but death by a thousand mouse clicks " for the purpose of writing a summary of the article:

No catastrophe, but death by a thousand mouse clicks

By Thomas E. Weber (from The Wall Street Journal, May 5, 2000) The Love Virus came and conquered. So how bad was it? For many of us, things were already getting back to normal by the time we left the office Thursday.

1. OUR COMPUTERS were working fine, our important files were still there and the most obvious lingering effects were office jokes like "Did you get that e-mail I sent, ha ha?"

2. Now the experts are carefully dissecting this latest electronic pathogen and vaccinating our computers to protect them from relapses- They're also assessing the severity of the attack — including the possibility that users' passwords were compromised — and the difficulty of pulling off such a feat. Is the Love Virus worse than the denial-of-service attacks that shut down Yahoo! and other big sites back in February? Did it surpass last year's Melissa virus?

3. It doesn't matter. Those incidents came and went too, and life went on. After each new attack on the Internet, the very backbone of the New Economy, it's only natural to wonder about the worst-case scenario. But the biggest threat is the cumulative effect of all these assaults, which are fast becoming almost routine. For those of us who rely on the Internet, it's like death by a thousand clicks.

4. By now the pattern is familiar. You arrive at work to find a warning notice posted on the door or handed to you by a security guard. Or maybe the office manager flags you down, cautioning you to avoid the dreaded virus.

5. Next the e-mail system goes down. Computer techs scurry through the office, performing arcane rituals on each PC. Finally someone gives the official all clear and everyone gets back to work.

"This is really just an annoyance," says a spokeswoman at Barnes & Noble, which shut down the e-mail system serving its headquarters –and more than 900 book stores across the U.S. for two hours. That story was repeated over and over, at company after company Catastrophe, no Inconvenience, absolutely. Now the Love Virus has joined Melissa in the ranks of Famous Web Maladies. But have you heard of the Dengue virus? Or Prettypark? Or Kakworm? 6. What does that add up to in dollars? Even the experts don't know for sure. "So you shut down the e-mail server for a day. How do you put a cost on that?" says Mikko Hypponen, a renowned virus expert at F-Secure in Espoo, Finland.

7. Here's what had to happen at a typical company to eradicate the virus. First, the system administrator needed to learn about the virus Since the Love Bug had already swept through Europe by the time offices opened in the U.S. Thursday, that wasn't a problem. Most of the big antivirus services used by corporations had already contacted their customers by phone or fax with an alert.

8. Then, to prevent the spread of the virus, most.system administrators either severed their computers' ties with the Internet or set up filters to screen out all messages with the subject line "ILOVEYOU." (This, presumably, did not prevent most important business correspondence from getting through.) With those measures in place, they could move on to downloading antivirus software updates and installing them, first on the e-mail servers, then on other critical file servers, and finally on individual users' PCs.

9. In other words, for all but the smallest companies it took at least one person the better part of a day to deal with the virus. Multiplied across all the companies linked to the Net, that's a lot of time indeed.

10. And it's only getting worse. Now the Love Virus has joined Melissa in the ranks of Famous Web Maladies But have you heard of the Dengue virus? Or Prettypark? Or Kakworm? All of them are floating around out there and are considered reasonably serious. It's the rare virus that wreaks sufficient havoc to penetrate the public consciousness.

11 Those most at risk are those who embrace the Internet to its fullest. Witness the impact Thursday in tiny Estonia, which has more Net connections per capita than any other Eastern European country. "About half the companies here took the afternoon off," says Juri Kaljundi, director of international development at CV-Online, an online resume company in Tallinn that escaped infection.

12. Ultimately, dealing with these annoyances is simply part of the overhead of being linked to the Internet, kind of the way having a telephone in your house brings with it calls from telemarketers. We'll just have to get used to it.

Task 3.3b. The correct answers to these questions will help you identify the essential elements that make up a summary:

1. CITATION:

What is the citation for "No catastrophe, but death by a thousand mouse clicks"?

NB!: A citation should include the title of the article, its author, its source.

2. TOPIC:

What is the topic of "No catastrophe, but death by a thousand mouse clicks"?

NB!: The topic is the general subject matter or focus of the article. Summarise it in a short phrase.

3. THESIS:

What is the thesis of "No catastrophe, but death by a thousand mouse clicks"? Write the thesis in your own words.

NBI: (a) The thesis consists of the author's major assertion about the topic, (b) In this article, the thesis is located in Paragraph #3. (c) After you have selected the thesis statement, re-state it in your own words.

4. SUPPORTING IDEAS:

Re-read Paragraphs #4-6. Summarise the troubles occurred after infecting by ILOVEYOU in no more than three sentences. Make an effort to use your own words.

5. SUPPORTING IDEAS:

Re-read Paragraphs #7-9 in which steps against the virus which should be taken by a system administrator are described. Using your own words, summarise these steps in a numbered list (e.g. (1).........;(2)........;(3).......;). Use no more than 2 sentences for each step.

Task 3.3c. Write a three-paragraph summary of "No catastrophe, but death by a thousand mouse clicks".

Task 3.4. Read the information letter about the International conference and do the tasks below:

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