Readings for PhD Students

In this class, there are weekly out-of-class readings that are assigned. They fall in two categories: required readings and optional readings. Each week, there is one or more required readings, which may include a video or magazine article. Students are required to submit a summary+question of these required readings. Then, there are also one or more “optional” readings, which are almost always a set of economics of security research papers that the content for that week is at least partially based on. These readings are optional because most undergraduates don’t get much out of reading full academic papers.

As a PhD students, you are training to be able to create the kinds of research studies and academic papers that appear in the “optional” reading lists. Your goal in your program is to learn more about how to produce these types of papers. To help you do this, PhD students in this course have a substitute assignment for the weekly readings:

Instead of submitting a summary + question for each week, you must do the following:

  • Read all of the required readings
  • Read up to three of the “optional” readings (which are now required for you)
  • Submit detailed notes about each academic paper you read
  • Do NOT submit a summary+question; the notes are instead of the summary+question

Readings

The focus here is to read the academic papers related to the course. The goal is to learn more about what academic research in usable privacy and security looks like by reading a variety of different papers in the usable privacy and security space. By reading these papers and thinking critically about them, you will gain a broader understanding of the academic field and learn about how to produce research like this. By reading the academic papers and then seeing how those papers translate to course ideas, you will also learn about how academic research gets used in the world and incorporated into undergraduate student learning.

The course caps the number of papers to read each week at three papers. This is to manage your workload. You are welcome to read more than that, but if more than 3 academic papers are listed, you only need to read three. It is up to you which three you choose to read (if there are more than 3 options).

Notes

To help think about readings, Emilee Rader has come up with a set of 5 questions. Every time she reads a paper, she writes down answers to these 5 questions about that paper. This turns out to be excellent to help her think through the papers and how they relate to her research ideas, and also are an great resource to go back to later. I’d like you to do the same: write down answers to Prof. Rader’s 5 questions for every paper that we read, and submit those written answers on Canvas.

The answer to each of these question is likely to be more than once sentence long, but an answer that is 1-3 paragraphs is perfectly normal. Try to include details in your answers. The answers for each paper should be in a separate page of file.

Emilee Rader’s Five Questions when reading a paper

  1. What questions/theories/problems/situations does this paper address?
  2. What is the main contribution/research finding(s) of the paper, in your own words?
  3. What do the authors assume or take for granted in doing this research? (what audience is this paper intended for? and what is the paper not saying that they assume the audience already knows and agrees with?)
  4. How is this paper related to my current project / what is it I find interesting and relevant about this paper?
  5. How is this paper related to other papers I have been reading?

Bonus (optional) 6th “question”: Specific critiques of this work? New ideas that came up while reading? Anything you want to cite from this paper?

Discussion

I would like to meet with you (PhD students) to discuss the readings briefly each week. Only about 30 minutes is enough; I just want to talk with you, answer questions you have about the research papers, and help you understand the context and ideas.