Having your AI analyze a cell phone photograph of a rash isn't likely to help in most cases-- you need to know if the rash is palpable, if it blanches when you press on it, exactly how it is distributed over the skin, etc. And a cell phone photograph of smallpox lesions would be completely indistinguishable from shingles.
Why did the parent post get modded down to zero, I wonder? The only reason I can imagine is that it rambles on for a while before arriving at the main point. The parent poster wants to make an observation about a book he read, but takes time to mention that he read the book in a library in Woodstock, NY, that he wasn't originally planning to go to the library on that day but was going to the bank, that the person who was giving him a ride to the bank wanted to go to the library to use the Internet, etc.
All of which makes it the most Mark Twain-ian comment posted thus far.
Anyway, I thought the PP's point (when he finally got around to it) was an interesting one. Twain's idea that you could write an autobiography without following a chronological structure was a) manifestly ridiculous-sounding and b) the sort of thing he would have been able to pull off brilliantly. It's been done recently, BTW, in at least one book I can think of: Dylan's "Chronicles Part One".
Basically, Dr. Nutt is proposing that we legalize one or two benzodiazepenes as a sort of replacement for alcohol (which could then, he suggests, be gradually marginalized and outlawed). Benzodiazepenes are a class of fast-acting drugs which includes Klonopin, Valium, Xanax, and Ativan (also a number of less-used ones like Librium and Tranxene).
And the problem with that is it's just not going to work. Leaving aside the fact that benzos don't feel the quite the same as alcohol (most people would find them overly sedating-- not really the thing you want to take before a night of clubbing), you have the problem that benzos are themselves very addictive. Ask any doctor. (They've all had to deal with the benzo-seeking patient who "lost his prescription" for the third time this month). I guess you could speculate that benzos taken ad libitum might prove to be somewhat *less* addicting than alcohol, relatively speaking, but there's no data to support that happy hypothesis, and good luck trying to design a study to prove it.
The rest of the article is full of irrelevancy and hand-waving. Dr. Nutt states that you can "sober up immediately" from a benzo, I guess by taking flumazenil-- and so what? Heroin addicts can sober up immediately with Narcan. That doesn't make heroin particularly safe.
He also says that his team is going to "identify the closest match to alcohol" from among "thousands" of benzos. The closest in what sense? Time of onset? Half-life? Xanax is close enough already. Receptor-binding profile? Not going to work, since no benzo will duplicate the multiple actions of alcohol on the neuron(which IIRC include effects on membrane fluidity). Anyway Dr. Nutt says that he wants his drug to be more "focused in its effects" than alcohol, so he wouldn't want a close analog even if he could find one.
In short: TFA is politically-motivated bullshit which might win Dr. Nutt some publicity and funding but will never produce anything useful. A previous poster got it right. If you want a safer alternative to alcohol, legalize pot. We already fucking *know* it's less addictive (and have the studies to prove it).
I think you are really mulling over two different questions here-- the first is which books you want to teach, and the second is *how* you want to teach them. The second question is probably the more important of the two.
What kind of analysis do you and your students want to engage in? What kind of questions do you want to ask about these books? You've suggested that you mostly want to focus on the socio-political messages within SF. Or, to quote from your course description:
"Through this course, students will utilize analytical skills and reading strategies to evaluate our current situation and project into the literature of different worlds while sharing and learning of an author's insight."
Now... I get the sense that this is an early draft, and that you aren't quite happy with what you wrote here. You seem to be saying something like this: "We want to see if we can draw analogies between world-historical events and the events depicted in these books". But that probably isn't quite what you meant to say, and at any rate, it's not a very good question to build a course around. You're going to get a lot of very boring term papers... comparing "Starship Troopers" to the Cold War or whatnot (as a previous poster suggested).
What I would do in your shoes is to think up some specific questions or topics that you *would* like to see your students write term papers about. Here are a few I can think of offhand.
* Both Asimov and Herbert wrote about secret groups of technocrat-heroes who manipulated human history without their subjects' knowledge or consent. Did the authors intend a political message? Or were they apolitical, and simply using technocrats as a storytelling device?
* How do you define "science fiction"? Is "1984" science fiction (some would say it isn't, despite taking place in a projected future)? What about "Gulliver's Travels"?
* What does the genre of science fiction owe to the Western?
And so on... of course yours will be different from mine. Come up with 10-15 good ones and share them with your students. I think that'll help you to clarify, both for you and for them, what your goals are for this course.
Oh, and there's a book by Kingsley Amis ("New Maps of Hell") in which he analyzes early SF. I haven't read it but Amis was a great writer, so it's probably worth checking out.
Slashdot Mirror
Having your AI analyze a cell phone photograph of a rash isn't likely to help in most cases-- you need to know if the rash is palpable, if it blanches when you press on it, exactly how it is distributed over the skin, etc. And a cell phone photograph of smallpox lesions would be completely indistinguishable from shingles.
Lousy example, in other words.
Well, I'm about a third of the way down this thread, and you all have killed any interest *I* had in learning to program.
Why did the parent post get modded down to zero, I wonder? The only reason I can imagine is that it rambles on for a while before arriving at the main point. The parent poster wants to make an observation about a book he read, but takes time to mention that he read the book in a library in Woodstock, NY, that he wasn't originally planning to go to the library on that day but was going to the bank, that the person who was giving him a ride to the bank wanted to go to the library to use the Internet, etc.
All of which makes it the most Mark Twain-ian comment posted thus far.
Anyway, I thought the PP's point (when he finally got around to it) was an interesting one. Twain's idea that you could write an autobiography without following a chronological structure was a) manifestly ridiculous-sounding and b) the sort of thing he would have been able to pull off brilliantly. It's been done recently, BTW, in at least one book I can think of: Dylan's "Chronicles Part One".
Basically, Dr. Nutt is proposing that we legalize one or two benzodiazepenes as a sort of replacement for alcohol (which could then, he suggests, be gradually marginalized and outlawed). Benzodiazepenes are a class of fast-acting drugs which includes Klonopin, Valium, Xanax, and Ativan (also a number of less-used ones like Librium and Tranxene).
And the problem with that is it's just not going to work. Leaving aside the fact that benzos don't feel the quite the same as alcohol (most people would find them overly sedating-- not really the thing you want to take before a night of clubbing), you have the problem that benzos are themselves very addictive. Ask any doctor. (They've all had to deal with the benzo-seeking patient who "lost his prescription" for the third time this month). I guess you could speculate that benzos taken ad libitum might prove to be somewhat *less* addicting than alcohol, relatively speaking, but there's no data to support that happy hypothesis, and good luck trying to design a study to prove it.
The rest of the article is full of irrelevancy and hand-waving. Dr. Nutt states that you can "sober up immediately" from a benzo, I guess by taking flumazenil-- and so what? Heroin addicts can sober up immediately with Narcan. That doesn't make heroin particularly safe.
He also says that his team is going to "identify the closest match to alcohol" from among "thousands" of benzos. The closest in what sense? Time of onset? Half-life? Xanax is close enough already. Receptor-binding profile? Not going to work, since no benzo will duplicate the multiple actions of alcohol on the neuron(which IIRC include effects on membrane fluidity). Anyway Dr. Nutt says that he wants his drug to be more "focused in its effects" than alcohol, so he wouldn't want a close analog even if he could find one.
In short: TFA is politically-motivated bullshit which might win Dr. Nutt some publicity and funding but will never produce anything useful. A previous poster got it right. If you want a safer alternative to alcohol, legalize pot. We already fucking *know* it's less addictive (and have the studies to prove it).
OK, let's say Google creates a digital copy of a public-domain work... Is the digital copy still a public-domain object, or does it belong to Google?
I think you are really mulling over two different questions here-- the first is which books you want to teach, and the second is *how* you want to teach them. The second question is probably the more important of the two.
What kind of analysis do you and your students want to engage in? What kind of questions do you want to ask about these books? You've suggested that you mostly want to focus on the socio-political messages within SF. Or, to quote from your course description:
"Through this course, students will utilize analytical skills and reading strategies to evaluate our current situation and project into the literature of different worlds while sharing and learning of an author's insight."
Now... I get the sense that this is an early draft, and that you aren't quite happy with what you wrote here. You seem to be saying something like this: "We want to see if we can draw analogies between world-historical events and the events depicted in these books". But that probably isn't quite what you meant to say, and at any rate, it's not a very good question to build a course around. You're going to get a lot of very boring term papers... comparing "Starship Troopers" to the Cold War or whatnot (as a previous poster suggested).
What I would do in your shoes is to think up some specific questions or topics that you *would* like to see your students write term papers about. Here are a few I can think of offhand.
* Both Asimov and Herbert wrote about secret groups of technocrat-heroes who manipulated human history without their subjects' knowledge or consent. Did the authors intend a political message? Or were they apolitical, and simply using technocrats as a storytelling device?
* How do you define "science fiction"? Is "1984" science fiction (some would say it isn't, despite taking place in a projected future)? What about "Gulliver's Travels"?
* What does the genre of science fiction owe to the Western?
And so on... of course yours will be different from mine. Come up with 10-15 good ones and share them with your students. I think that'll help you to clarify, both for you and for them, what your goals are for this course.
Oh, and there's a book by Kingsley Amis ("New Maps of Hell") in which he analyzes early SF. I haven't read it but Amis was a great writer, so it's probably worth checking out.