preoccupations

little bloggity bloggy blog, i'll tell you what is swirling around this ROC home today:

the jonbenet ramsey case. we have a cat that looks like jonbenet. in life.

the fact that at my friend's brother's funeral, someone said that the fault in the car accident that killed the brother and his family lay with the "n-----s down at the DMV," for issuing a driver's license to the elderly driver whose responsibility the accident ultimately was.

this is just so unbelievable, i think the person who said this should be studied in order to find out the thought process that leads to thinking this is something OK to say out loud at a funeral as consolation. also, this utterance is a strong argument for alternate universes, a line of inquiry that should not be ignored, given its quantum and theological implications.

vile anti-intellectual creatures that inhabit various academies who call themselves feminist and yet ignore women they feel are below them, and who only ever want to read things that reinforce their insular worldview. such creatures are afraid of people they know are smarter than them, but they (the vile creatures) dismiss them (those smarter than them) as being nerdy or bombastic or mean, even as they (the vile creatures) proceed to stab in the back every person who comes within five feet of them who doesn't agree with them. such creatures make terrible hosts, and i bet are bad tippers and line cutters, two of the worst kind of human. (possibly even worse than the person who made the above comment, because that was well-intentioned [???????], probably doesn't have any ramification anywhere else, and because it is so very odd. not that it's a contest.)

my syllabi.

one, a writing class for women in computer science majors, is going to go a little something like this. as a response to the national exigence of keeping women in computer science majors, and given studies that indicate young women's interest in computer science as it relates to other areas of life, i've decided to focus the class on gender and computing.

first, students will read news reports about larry summers' comment that women are not naturally adept at science. they will write a brief response to it. then, because we will be learning to write analytically, we will turn to understanding the conditions that lead to summers' comment, in particular the relationship between the human and computing. as we well know, "the human" has historically meant men and their thoughts.

and so we will turn to the turing test, based entirely on language, much like descartes' argument that beasts have no souls. a machine, or computer is said to have passed the test if they can convince the tester that it is a human, based on its verbal responses to various questions. (as an interesting side note, it was something of a question why women would have souls at all. john donne satisfactorily answered that women's souls were there to be damned.)

students will read excerpts from descartes and from turing, as well as later engagements with it, all the while writing short papers (we are on quarters!!) about the texts that demonstrate their understanding of the argument.

my idea is that the situation that summers was speaking to was one in which the answer was already decided by the question ("why aren't there more women scientists?), much like the turing test. what kind of turing test was summers setting up? one in which in order to pass as a legitimately disciplined computer science major, women would have to perform as men at tasks invented by men. hopefully this will also get them to wrestle with nature/nurture questions, and be able to pull apart stakes of arguments, explicit and tacit.

i'm still trying to decide what to do as a final project. i'd like to have them design their own turing test, to test for anything of their choice. i'd also like to have them come up with assignments or classes that computer science majors should take, with set of reasons why. or maybe this is all a stupid idea?

my other class is science writing. i will have them read science writing and then write some of their own. how 'bout that?