Writing Requirements in Computer Security

This paper presents suggestions in incorporating essays in a Computer Security course. The first approach is a short essay that presents the student\u27s personal view on computer security within the campus. In the paper, s/he uses information from the university\u27s IT website and documents, as well as security disclosures of websites and software applications. This assignment is presented at the beginning of the course and serves as a basis of discussion both for the development of writing skills and for the identification of vulnerabilities faced by the campus community on the intranet and Internet illustrating the need for clear written regulations in IT security. The second approach requires an extended essay that describes the work performed in a term project. The essay assignment is developed in several stages that include a summary proposal, partial and complete drafts and final paper. The writing requires the student to go through all the steps needed to develop a significant scientific paper. The work must be original, supported by extensive literature review and follow a topic relevant to computer security. The essay development is complemented by ongoing class discussion of scientific papers, and by an in class presentation. The course was already piloted with the extended essay version and has received significant positive feedback from the students. It was recently approved to fit the Graduation Writing Requirements at our institution

Pre-College Student Learning of Web Development Technologies

This paper reports a pre-college student learning of web development technologies in our college. The Weston Science Scholar Program, a community out-reach program for the past five years, is a program that aimed at high school students. This paper reports our experiences and findings of running this program for the past three years. We offer some thoughts about mentoring pre-college students. Based on the experiences with these pre-college students, we discuss how this may affect the teaching of a general education introduction computing course for college students

Gestational growth trajectories derived from a dynamic fetal-placental scaling law.

Fetal trajectories characterizing growth rates in utero have relied primarily on goodness of fit rather than mechanistic properties exhibited in utero. Here, we use a validated fetal–placental allometric scaling law and a first principles differential equations model of placental volume growth to generate biologically meaningful fetal–placental growth curves. The growth curves form the foundation for understanding healthy versus at-risk fetal growth and for identifying the timing of key events in utero