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Subsections
This assignment is an exercise to get you more familiar with the
resources in the library, particularly with the computer indexes
available on MELVYL and with the hardcopy indices of most value
to computer people.
The puzzle was devised by Kevin Karplus, in imitation of puzzles
created by Alan Ritch, a librarian at UCSC, who writes and edits the
Mind of Melvyl newsletter (affectionately known as
MOM), which sometimes contains such puzzles.
The puzzle will stretch your MELVYL search skills far beyond the
level of competence attained by most students or faculty.
We hope that the assignment will make it easier for you to do any
necessary library research for your final paper, and
the library search skills exercised should also be
applicable to other courses and research projects.
Some of the questions below are simple, straightforward exercises of
the obvious MELVYL commands, others are puzzle questions
requiring ingenuity and perseverance to find the requested
information. These library puzzles often appeal to crossword puzzle
fanatics.
Remember this is a writing class!
For each question below, give one or two sentences as an answer--not
just the one word or number the question asked for. Show the search
command that found the answer you got, and, perhaps, some commands
that you thought should work and didn't. When you get a negative
result, show partial solutions (e.g., UCSC doesn't have it, but
someone else does, and we have something else by the same author).
All the questions can be answered without visiting the library, since
MELVYL is accessible from any terminal on campus.
However, you might want to visit McHenry library or the science
library to see some of the books and journals that you find.
- 1.
- Does UCSC have the latest edition of The Joy of TEX?
Here is a sample answer:
No, UCSC does not have the latest edition, based on the
exact-title search f xt joy of tex.
UCLA, UCD, UCSD, and UCB have the
most recent edition:
UCLA Engr/Math Z 253.4 T47 S673 1990
but the UCSC library has only the 1986 edition:
UCSC McHenry Z253.4.T47 S673 1986
- 2.
- What package does The Joy of TEX describe?
- 3.
- Give the UCSC call number of a book on ``computer gamesmanship''.
- 4.
- Find books or conferences from the last ten years about random graphs.
Use the MAIL command to mail the results to yourself.
Give the search strategy and the total number you found.
- 5.
- How many computer files are catalogued by the UCSC branch of the library?
How many of them are more than ten years old? (Note: computer
file is a type of format that can be searched for in the FORM
index--you may have to use HELP FORM to get the correct
abbreviation for the format name.
- 6.
- Try to find more than 100 books (or things cataloged as books),
all published in the last ten
years and all in the UCSC library, that are relevant to CMP 215.
Remember that you can find course names and catalog copy on the
InfoSlug gopher server.
Hint: use TEN and f SU. The tricky part is finding a
relevant subject--start with a book or conference that you believe is
relevant, display subjects for it, then look for other books with the
same subject. A few iterations should converge.
You can try keywords from the catalog description, but that may take a
little longer to converge.
I don't want the long list of books, but the search strategy and the
number of books you found.
What percentage of the Ph.D.'s granted in computer science in
1989-90 were to women? Find articles that attempt to explain why
there are so few women, and articles explaining what is being done to
improve the situation. [Note: this question can be answered entirely
from MELVYL, using the stored abstracts.
The following questions are intended to improve your web-searching
skills. Personally, I find the Alta Vista Advanced Query page
(http://www.altavista.digital.com
) the most useful of the web
search engines.
- 1.
- Using Lycos (http://www.lycos.com), Alta Vista (
http://www.altavista.digital.com), or other Web search engine find
the 1994 version of the surveys that the data about women with PhDs in
computer science is based on.
Note: this question will be much easier if you can get the real name
of the survey from the previous question.
- 2.
- Find a copy of the most up-to-date documentation for the
Latex2HTML translator. Who is the author? Make sure you find the
primary site, and not a copy that someone else has made.
- 3.
- Find a report from the National Academy of Sciences on
responsible conduct in research.
- 4.
- Find the home page for Computer Professionals for Social
Responsibility. Is there a Santa Cruz chapter? Do they have a home
page? Who do you contact about creating or joining a Santa Cruz chapter?
- 5.
- Find a data sheet for part CY7C1031-7JC. Who makes it? what is it?
How fast is it? Hint: the last part of a part number is often a speed
or packaging qualification, and the datasheet may only have the first
part of the number.
- 6.
- Find a chip directory that contains list of manufacturers and
part numbers for FIFOs. Find a 32k by 9 FIFO.
- 1.
- Find an article on fast matrix multiplication.
- 2.
- How many articles can you find on FPGAs?
You should get a list of at least 300.
The following questions may require hardcopy indices in addition to
the computer indices. Please outline your search strategy, and tell
us what false leads you followed, as well as how you finally found the
solution.
- 1.
- How many searches were made from UCSC in the last month for
which statistics were available, counting both dedicated terminals and
internet access? Note: can get the data from MELVYL, but
getting totals of local usage may require some processing of the data.
Explaining how to get the numbers will suffice, with extra credit for
actually producing them.
- 2.
- Find the best article you can on asymptotically fast matrix
multiplication.
Give the reference and the asymptotic running time.
- 3.
- In an early 1980s conference, Ramachandran wrote a paper on
driving long lines in a VLSI layout. Find the conference paper and
the journal paper that updated it.
- 4.
- Find out how many books on C or C++ the Stanford Bookstore carries.
This search can be done without leaving your workstation. For extra
credit, separate the C books from the C++ ones (I believe that this
cannot be done using only the library search programs, but should be
fairly easy if you know how to use your computer effectively).
- 5.
- C. V. Papadopoulos was a graduate student at the Computer Science
Department of the University of Piraeus in Greece. In recent years,
Papadopoulos published several papers in respectable journals covering
a huge range of fields, giving him the appearance of a ``superstar''.
In spring of 1995, if became known that he had systematically
plagiarized every paper he had published, often by making only minor
changes to the title and abstract of already published work.
Find as many of C.V. Papadopoulos's papers as you can.
For at least two of these papers, find the original that he
plagiarized from.
Next: 10. Survey article
Up: Workbook for CMPE 185
Previous: 8. Naive-user documentation
Kevin Karplus
Computer Engineering
University of California, Santa Cruz
Santa Cruz, CA 95064
USA
karplus@cse.ucsc.edu
1-831-459-4250
HTML version created 1/1/1999