BTR820 Lecture 1: January 8th, 2008

Professor: Adam Norman
Class: S2173
Website: http://www.BTR820.com
Text: Writing White papers, Michael A. Stelzner

Description:

Students think they know how to research but don't, and overuse internet resources. Journals are underused, books as well.

In this class we will write a white paper (big, heavy and sorta fun).

White papers are cutting edge papers on an emerging technology or business solution. To persuade someone to make a purchase. In this class we will not be making an "advertisement" paper.

White papers Have:
- A thesis
- Research
- - Methodology
- - Sources
- Documentation
- Very nice formatting

Thesis:
- *Point you'll prove
- *Opinion about a topic
- the opinion will be proven through
- - facts (research via experimentation and previous facts)
- - argumentation
- The thesis should appear in
- - the title
- - the abstract
- - the introduction
- - the conclusion

A thesis must be provable!

Ways to come up with a good thesis:
- combine two topics (slashdotting vs small business)
- criticize a developed school of thought/philosophy (chop off small section and attack those viewpoints)
- do original research and data gathering (won't be able to do very much... very small area)

Some Whitepaper topics:
- VMWare is not cost effective for small businesses
- Amazons S3 Service is best suited for short term storage of large files
- An AMD-based Toshiba notebook is a good choice for a medium-sized business
- Linux on the desktop is ready for non creative academics

Then ...
Good Papers prove the opinion with:
- Data (eg 75% of all email is spam)
- Opinions (the percent will continue to increase
- Methodology (found this by surveying traffic at three ISPs, sampling 2000 emails over 31 days)

What we do in the class:
Two large papers (25pgs) on an *IT* topic of some sort... can be political, academic,