Finishing term papers and turning them in

Turing in the paper

Papers are due on Tursday, May 17, which, by MIT rules, is the last day assignments can be due, so there will be no extensions.

Turn in your finished paper on-line. Send copies by email to both Hal and Danny. Format your paper either as HTML or .doc; or send Latex source togeher with all necessary macro files and also a postscript or pdf version of the output. Actually email us the paper -- don't just put it up on a web page and tell us the URL.

Turn in a single, uniformly edited paper -- not separate contributions from the various teams members. Remember that you are supposed to produce a coherent paper, not merely separate pieces glued together. Papers should have a summary introduction and table of contents, and they should have adequate citations and references in accordance with standards for research papers.

As announced before, the paper should be a substantial piece of work. We're expecting papers around 50 or 60 pages long, but we're more interested in quality than in length. Although the paper should be a coherent whole, it should be divided into sections, and the individual author of each section identified. You will probably want to have one team member identified as editor, responsible for the overall uniformity and coherence of the entire piece.

For a model paper, see the report done for this class in fall 98:

Digital Identity in Cyberspace, by Paul Covell, Steve Gordon, Alex Hochberger, James Kovacs, Raffi Krikorian, Melanie Schneck, HTML version, MS Word version

Adding papers to the class archive

With the team's permission, we would like to post the papers on the web. We also request your permission to post the slides from your class presentations. If you agree to let us post your paper and/or sides, please send us a note on behalf of the group giving us permission to post these (and send us the slides). If you prefer, we can post papers and slides with the authors' names removed to help respect your privacy. Whether or not you grant us permission will have no effect on your grade.

Pitfalls to avoid

Quality of writing

Some of the drafts have spelling or grammatical errors, or stylistic and organization problems in parts of the writing. Please remember that the whole group is responsible for the whole paper. If one of your team mates writes sloppily or poorly, it will reflect on the whole team. Before handing in the paper, the whole group should work together to edit and correct the whole paper.

References and citations

Legal "arguments"

A is like B. A is clearly unacceptable. Therefore A is unacceptable.

A is like B. A is unacceptable because of the following legal standard ... (cite the standard)... Someone could argue that this same standard also appplies to B, as follows ... (give the argument, citing laws and court rulings where appropriate)... Someone else might argue that this same standard does not apply to B, as follows ... (give the argument, citing laws and court ruling where approrpriate, or propose a more refined legal test that gives the basis for distinguishing between A and B).

Introductions, and the contributions of your paper

Sarnation has been a key element of our democratic society, and new internet reprecation technologies threaten to upset the delicate balance around sarnation. In this paper, we begin by reviewing the history of sarnation in the US. We then look at laws aimed at regulating reprecation and summarize the major court rulings. In the next section, we analyze some current reprecation technologies, and look at some companies that provide reprecation services. The last section of the paper presents our conclusions.

Sarnation has been a key element of our democratic society, and new internet reprecation technologies threaten to upset the delicate balance around sarnation. In this paper, we we begin by reviewing the history of sarnation in the US. We then look at laws aimed at regulating reprecation, and we summarize the major court rulings. As we will see, there has been a longstanding tension between the desire to protect wibblies and the right to freely sarnate: Congress has struggled to maintain a balance here, and the Courts have emphasized traditional Third Amendment rights in limiting government's ability to regulate reprecation. In the next section, we analyze some current reprecation technologies, and look at some companies that provide reprecation services. The main conclusion of our analysis is that current reprecation techniques do not adequately account for sarnation in a scalable way. The main contribution of the paper is to demonstrate a new framework for analyzing reprecation technologies and to show that reprecation can rely on the increasing availability of IPv6 in order to better protect sarnation.

The difference between these tow examples is that the second one indicates what the important conclusions of the sections of the paper are, and says explicitly what the main contribution of the paper is.

An introduction like this can be dificult to write, because it forces you to identify the conclusions and contributions of your paper -- or, painfully, to face the fact that you don't know what the conclusions and contributions are.

Needless to say, we expect your paper to make a contribution, not just rehash things that other people have written.