BIO 190—Scientific Communication I

Important computer information

• Electronic mail
• Submitting assignments
• Note to Netscape users

You may use any email account for this course. If you already have an account through your internet service provider, Yahoo, Hotmail, or wherever, you may use that account. All students at Cal Poly Pomona also receive a University email account, which can be accessed with Webmail (among other methods). Here is information about your Cal Poly email account.

For more information on email, especially at Cal Poly, read Introduction to Electronic Mail from BIO 256.

These are listed in the order of my preference, although any are acceptable.

• Plain text in the body of an email message - If you are using email on Windows (this includes Juno email) or Mac, you can copy the text from your word-processor and paste it into an email message, or you can just type it into the email message (be sure to save occasionally so you don’t lose it all if your system crashes). It will probably lose most or all of its formatting (italics, bold, unusual indenting, centering, etc.), but the assignments in this class are designed to require little or no formatting.
• Email attachments - Many email programs are able to encode computer files such as word-processor documents and spreadsheets in such a way that they can be sent as part of an email message. The email program that I use (Eudora Pro) can decode these attachments, so if you can send them, I can use them. (For more information on attachments, see Eudora 3: Things the Help File Doesn’t Tell You).

  If you use Eudora Pro, Eudora Lite, Netscape Navigator, or Microsoft Outlook for your email, you can do attachments. Recent versions of the AOL program, and many web-based email services such as Yahoo and Hotmail, also support attachments. The Pine email program on the Cal Poly Intranet sends attachments, but it is a challenge for all but the technically-inclined and a headache even for them.

  Ideally, attached files will be Microsoft Word documents (any version, Windows or Macintosh).

• Delivery of a diskette by hand or snail mail - Copy your assignments onto a diskette (IBM-format, 3.5", 1.44 Mbyte) and deliver it: by hand during an office hour, to the Bio Sci office (8-119), or by “snail mail” (U.S. Mail, UPS, or whatever). Diskettes delivered to the Bio Sci office must be date stamped prior to the due date; all other diskettes must be received prior to the due date. Use this address:

  Curtis Clark - BIO 190
  Biological Sciences
  Cal Poly Pomona
  Pomona CA 91768-4032

  Diskettes will not be returned.

• Providing assignments on a personal web page - If you have a web page, you can upload the assignments to your web directory, and as long as they have the *.doc file name ending, I can download them. Don’t link them from your home page; instead, send me an email with the full URL including the file name. And if you can do stuff like this, why don’t you get yourself some decent email that will do attachments?

These web pages are designed to look best in modern standards-compliant browsers, such as Mozilla, Netscape 6, Opera, and Internet Explorer 5.x. If you are using Netscape 4, parts of the pages will look clunky, but all the information is still available. If you are using older versions (especially version 3) of Netscape or Internet Explorer, you might want to upgrade, or else turn off Cascading Style Sheets, since these browsers don't implement them correctly.