The Cuckoo's Egg--Case Notes
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Author - Laurie White -
Summer 2004
The Cuckoo's Egg Case Study
This page gives an outline for using The Cuckoo's Egg as a major case study. Items here include:
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Major topics. Supporting material for the major topics in the text.
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Tangents. Other topics that can be tied into the text.
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Exercises. Suggested in and out of class exercises, including potential reading order and quiz questions.
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Links. Web sites that may be useful.
Major discussion topics from The Cuckoo's Egg include:
Warning! None of these Word files is complete yet. But they should all be done by the beginning of fall semester. Let me know if you need them earlier.
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Just the facts. This book has a lot of details spread throughout. The Word file The Cuckoos Egg Cheat Sheet.doc is a chapter by chapter guide through the text. (And since you can't tell the players witout a score card, an index to the people involved will be put in People.doc real soon now.)
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Using the scientific method. There are some very obvious places where Cliff calls on the scientific method to help track the hacker and other more subtle places. A list of these is in the Word file Ties to Science.doc.
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Science as a profession. Stoll was trained as an astro-physicist, but ended up working in a computer lab. Why do some scientists work outside of their fields? This can be explored from a theoretical point of view: What general attributes do all scientists have? What approaches can be used on many different problems? It can also be explored from a more base point of view: What impact do funding agencies have on research? The Word document Science as a profession.doc contains a list of many of these points.
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The personality of scientists. Yes, Stoll does have a personality that comes through here! A list of some of his personality traits that come through in the text is in the Word document Life of a scientist.doc.
Besides the obvious lessons of this text, there's the opportunity to
tie in many other ideas. Some of these include:
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Distribution of scientific literature. This story has appeared in many different forms in the press, including the book, a Reader's Digest version, a documentary, an article in the New York Times, and a Time Magazine article. How do the various reports differ? Why do they differ?
Big procedural question here: I purchased a single copy of the Time, New York Times, and ACM article reprints. What do we have to do to use them in class?
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Sequences and patterns. Recognizing patterns is a
major theme of the book. But there's also a very specific pattern on
page 313. I could see starting some discussions with a few simple patterns (like 1, 3, 7, 13, 21, ___ or 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, ___) and discussing arithmetic and geometric series, the Fibonacci numbers, etc.
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Expectations of privacy. Stoll monitors the users of the Lawrence Berkeley Labs. This is a common practice, but many students may not know it is being done. The
Mercer IT Policy warns it may happen in a passage at the bottom of the second page of a six page document.
Some possible exercises related to the text include:
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Daily reading with quizzes. The classic reading assignment and pre-discussion quizzes.
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Distribution or scientific literature. A group of either in-class or out-of-class exercises looking at the various different ways this story has been reported.
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Record keeping. Stoll's scientific notebook is very useful throughout the text. In this (mostly) out-of-class exercise, students will keep a record of their time over a period, organize the raw data, and look for patterns.
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Tangential activities. In trying to come up with good in-class ideas, I think I may have gone too far. The Word document Other activities.doc has a list of some potential candiates for your amusement. Your suggestions are invited (they can't be as bad as some of the ideas on this list!).