[Plsugs] FW: Fall Classes (and a minor!) in ISTA

[Tanya Quist]

The following ISTA courses can be substituted to satisfy the Plant Science
and Crop Production requirement for ABE120.

 

ISTA has got some cool new classes with either no or minimal prerequisites.
These classes, described below, would be great for any student in any
discipline, and whether they take them for their own edification or towards
a minor in Information, Science, Technology, and Arts, thinking about our
place in the information age is critical to becoming leaders in the 21st
century. 

 

Minor in Information, Science, Technology and Arts

The minor is designed to provide students in all majors complementary
experience in dealing with information-deriving it, managing it, and
extracting meaning from it. Courses in the minor reflect the core classes in
the BA and BS offered through SISTA, and provide opportunities to focus on
discipline-specific applications of information science.

.         ISTA 100: Introduction to SISTA: Big Ideas in Information Science
3

.         ISTA 116: Statistical Foundations of ISTA
3

.         ISTA 130: Computational Thinking and Doing (or the equivalent)
4

.         ISTA 160: Ethics in a Digital World
3

.         6 units of upper-division ISTA course work
6

Interested? Contact us at advising at sista.arzoizona.edu.

 

ISTA Fall 2011 Course Offerings

 

ISTA 100 


Great Ideas of the Information Age


Important ideas and applications of information science and technology in
the sciences, humanities and arts. Information, entropy, coding; grammar and
parsing; syntax and semantics; networks and relational representations;
decision theory, game theory; and other great ideas form the intellectual
motifs of the Information Age and are explored through applications such as
robotic soccer, chess-playing programs, web search, population genetics
among others. 

 9:30-10:45am TTh, Chem 111, taught by Paul Cohen

 

ISTA 116 


Statistical Foundations for the Information Age


Understanding uncertainty and variation in modern data: data summarization
and description, rules of counting and basic probability, data
visualization, graphical data summaries, working with large data sets,
prediction of stochastic outputs from quantitative inputs.  Operations with
statistical computer packages such as R.

1:00-1:50pm MW (varying lab sections) McClelland Park 105

 

ISTA 130: Computational Thinking and Doing (in Python!)

No programming experience necessary-just an interest in problem solving!

An introduction to computational techniques and using a modern programming
language to solve current problems drawn from science, technology, and the
arts.

5:00pm-6:15pm TTh (varying lab sections), Ctr for ESL 102, taught by Rick
Mercer

 

 

ISTA 161 Ethics in a Digital World 

This course explores the social, legal, and cultural fallout from the
exponential explosion in communication, storage, and increasing uses of data
and data production. In this class, we emphasize the opposing potentials of
information technologies to make knowledge widely available and to distort
and restrict our perceptions. In a world of rapid technological change,
topics include (but are not limited to): eavesdropping and secret
communications, privacy; Internet censorship and filtering, cyberwarfare,
computer ethics and ethical behavior, copyright protection and peer-to-peer
networks, broadcast and telecommunications regulation, including net
neutrality, data leakage, and the power and control of search engines. 

3:00-4:15pm MW, Opt Sci 408, taught by Laura Howard

 

ISTA 230 Web Development 

An introduction to web design and development, with an emphasis on
client-side technologies. Topics include HTML, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS),
JavaScript, and web design best practices. This course is designed for those
with no previous web design experience. While there are no prerequisites for
this course, ISTA 130 or CSC 127A or equivalent course work is recommended.
There will be a brief introduction to programming. It is assumed that you
are familiar with a computer (files, folders, email, and the Internet).
3:30pm-4:45pm, Educ 211, taught by Justin Spargur

 

ISTA 301: Computing and the Arts

Also no programming necessary, just a willingness to think outside the box!

This course examines the ways in which computing and information science
support and facilitate the production and creation of art in current
society. A particular focus of the course will be to discuss how artists
have used advances in technology and computing capacity to explore new ways
of making art, and to investigate the relationships between technical
innovation and the artistic process.

2:00-3:15pm MWF, Speech & Hearing Sci 205, taught by Kelland Thomas

 

 

ISTA 370 


Research Methods for the Information Age


For some reason, the methods and tools used by the natural sciences are not
taught in the information sciences.   Consequently, information scientists
are rarely good at designing experiments, making data give up its secrets,
or quantifying their confidence in results.  This course is about how to
think and work like a scientist. It covers exploratory data analysis and
visualization, experimental design, statistical hypothesis testing and
effect size, computer intensive methods such as the bootstrap and Monte
Carlo sampling, performance assessment and other performance measures,
modeling complex systems, and other empirical methods for students in the
information disciplines. 

2:00-3:15 TTh, Harvill 204

 

 

Cheryl Craddock, Program Coordinator Senior

School of Information: Science, Technology, and Arts

Department of Computer Science

P.O. Box 210077

University of Arizona

Tucson, AZ 85721

 

To schedule an appointment or view walk-in hours, please log in to
http://advising.cs.arizona.edu/.

 

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