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Click here for your extra credit problem on the finite universe method (Sectioni 9.2).
Click here to be transported to this week's quiz!
This page describes the prominent features of this course. It focuses especially on its numerous "internet-oriented" features, and provides a convenient set of links to them at the top of the page.
Our regular weekly format consists of two lectures — a 75 minute lecture on Tuesday and a roughly 30 minute lecture on Thursday followed by a 45 minute lab where you will work an online quiz. The Logic Lab, where the labs will take place, is located in 019 Bolton Hall and contains 20 Dell workstations running Linux. You will work an online quiz in each lab. You are free to discuss and ask me and your classmates questions about the problem openly in the classroom.
The most prominent web-based feature of our course is the Power of Logic Web Tutor. The Web Tutor is an online program that supplements our text, The Power of Logic The tutor provides an interactive environment for working nearly all of the problems in the text. It is especially useful for those elements of the course — notably, Truth Tables, and Proofs — whose mastery involves learning a certain set of skills that can only be acquired through diligent practice. The weekly labs will often give you the opportunity to work on the Web Tutor, though, of course, you will need to work on it during the week on your own considerably more often than that.
I will be putting links to my lecture notes on this page. Barring difficulties, I will have the slides online by noon on the day of the lecture (typically sooner). To read and print these notes you will need the free Adobe Acrobat reader. You may also have to configure your browser so that it will know what to do with the PDF (Portable Document Format) files that the links below point to. Let me know if you don't know how to do that.
Your grades at any point are available to you on the Web via an online gradebook. You will need the course password that you gave yourself in the first lab. The gradebook is secure, and cannot be viewed by anyone unless you give them your password. Don't give them your password.
I will set up a course mailing list once everyone has registered a password for the course. The web page for the list can be found at http://philebus.tamu.edu/mailman/listinfo/phil240h. I will use this primarily for announcements, but feel free to post questions or comments that you believe will be of general interest to others in the class, e.g., a request for clarification about some concept that was introduced in class. However, I would like this to be a relatively low-volume list, so use it wisely. Notably, don't post questions about particular exercises to the list; send those directly to me. And, of course, do not post anything unrelated to PHIL 240. Send your message to phil240h@philebus.tamu.edu (‘h’ for ‘honors’, of course).
On Emailing Me: Proper Etiquette I generally read and respond to email very quickly. Feel free to write me about anything related to the class (or to music, politics, or cycling). However, please do not email me with questions that are easily answered by looking around on the site (e.g., the date of an exam). Also, Windows software has this nasty habit (one of many) of sending mail formatted with all sorts of HTML junk. So if you can, please send me plain text mail. There is an option for this in your mail program. Thanks for your support.
A further note on this matter: Not only is HTML mail a wasteful use of internet bandwidth, in this day and age of multitudes of email viruses it is also unwise — most internet virus checking programs flag HTML-formatted mail as a likely candidate for spam. Depending on how paranoid your recipient is, you risk your message being shunted to his or her trash.
On AIMing Me I am regularly available via my AIM instant messaging account. My AIM screen name is "TXLogic". Feel free to ping me anytime you see that I'm online — if I didn't want to be disturbed, I wouldn't be there!