Rape question baffles computer science students | Hacker News Reader

Rape question baffles computer science students

cbc.ca

16 pointsbcj27 comments

From http://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/dailybrew/memorial-university... here is the question:

Write and test a Prolog program that solves the following problem: Everybody needs love and understanding. People get their courage to live from loving and understanding. Understanding means listening and compassion. Rape victims have to gather their courage to live in order to stand on their dignity and to face future. Heather is a young rape victim. She would die if she could not stand on her dignity and no future. Unfortunately the persistent bullying online and calling her “slut” in her community show that nobody would listen her and there is no compassion towards her. A person willing to die causes the person’s attempting suicide. Whether is Heather attempting a suicide?

I wonder why the English is so bad? It's hard to tell if the teacher is really encouraging compassion, or just contriving a situation that translates easily into Prolog.

Certainly, the English is not bad - but there's nothing in that assignment text that should offend anyone. Except, of course, "political-correctness" and feminist extremists who want to see offensiveness everywhere they look at, so that they can attention-whore around.

And yes, I can't stand this kind of people. Seek for attention where the situation demands it, not just for your own personal gain.

One in six women in the US have experienced an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime (src: https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles/172837.pdf ). Is it worth potentially inducing PTSD symptoms to use that subject matter in this question? I'd say no.

It's not just PTSD, but trivializing the act in a word problem. I'm not sure the teacher meant it in a trivial way though. It could have been an awareness campaign gone wrong.

So it's 1 in 6 now? When I was in college the claim was 1 in 4. So I guess there's a silver lining there. Although some research asserts the ratio may be even smaller:

http://www.leaderu.com/real/ri9502/sommers.html

> Certainly, the English is not bad

Is that a typo? Because the English is bad. I suspect there are some people on HN capable of answering the questions on the paper without giving the results expected by the quiz setter.

> but there's nothing in that assignment text that should offend anyone. Except, of course, "political-correctness" and feminist extremists who want to see offensiveness everywhere they look at, so that they can attention-whore around.

Do you understand why it is important not to dump references to rape and suicide into an unrelated [quiz]assignment without warning?

I guess that is is not politically correct for non-rape victims to empathize with rape victims, to put themselves in that other person's place and try to understand what the rape victim is going through in their life. Only government funded rape programs are allowed to talk about rape or to communicate with rape victims. That's how the media report comes across. Yet another example of the extremely poor quality of journalism nowadays. There was a time when the CBC was a trusted source of news in Canada, but that day is gone.

Actually I think this is a very good way to get the message across to CS students that software development is not just about technology. It is about understanding the application of technology in the real world which means that you need to listen and learn about real world problems and the people who deal with them.

I would go so far as to say that a professional software developer needs to have empathy with the people who work with the problem domain in order to excel.

In terms of social network infrastructure, recognizing whether your user is a rape victim, or any victim, and analyzing their communications to determine if they are being bullied is a valuable asset. Instagram displays an eating disorder help line if you search for "#ana," "#mia," or other eating disorder related hashtags. I once had Facebook delete all my messages from a certain person because they thought that person was bullying me - which they weren't. What baffles me is that this professor is being sent to "training" when their work is ultimately wanted out of social networks.

> What baffles me is that this professor is being sent to "training" when their work is ultimately wanted out of social networks.

Overzealous feminists gone on a rampage. He should have prefixed the assignment with a [TW R*pe], that 'd have stopped them...

The question (src: http://i.imgur.com/CwegI9i.png ) is a Prolog problem, which is just a bunch of logical premises that the system is supposed to find the conclusion for (kinda like A=>B, B=>C, therefore A=>C). The problem doesn't involve analyzing communications or predicting anything, and it would have little or no use when developing social network systems.

Frankly, you can't have it both ways. Social networks are pressed to take more accountability for the activities of bad apples, and their first line of defense is to automate and monitor. The algorithms that do so are going to be complex and involve insight that I don't believe has much research behind it. So this is fairly cutting edge and worthwhile.

On the other hand, understanding how mainstream student and academia may react to a lightening-rod topic like rape is not the strong suit of a lot of computer scientists.

The professor needed to clearly communicate why this was a worthwhile assignment. I'd bet he'd have gotten a completely different response.

> The algorithms that do so are going to be complex and involve insight that I don't believe has much research behind it. So this is fairly cutting edge and worthwhile.

Here's the assignment paper.

https://i.imgur.com/yj7aaQA.png

Pouring liquid between a 3 and 5 gallon jug to end up with 4 gallons shows the kind of level this assignment is aimed at.

This would actually have been a fun and interesting assignment to do, not to mention the potential application.

I'm sure the opposition would have been fine with it if it had been more "weasel-wordy", i.e. develop system to determine if cis-gendered anthropomorphic entity is likely to cause [TRIGGER WARNING] non-self-help.

so their college stands for running away from hard problems because the are socially unpalatable.

I agree. Is the subject matter painful? Absolutely. But is this potentially life saving work? Also Absolutely.

Obviously this could be important work. Also, really obviously, you don't just dump a question involving rape and suicide into a minor quiz without any warning.

What level is CS3710 aimed at?

Why is this "warning" everywhere needed? If you can't read a simple text where the word "rape" is present, then get fucking medical/psychological help instead of going on everybody else's nerves by turning texts into unreadable walls of [TW XYZ] or omitting (potentially life-saving) research just because it involves "rape".

This isn't "potentially life saving research". It's a 25 point question on a quiz.

Edit: here's an image of the assignments to see whT level this is aimed at. The three and five litre jug question, and 7 day time frame, are clues that this in not "life saving research" but in fact a simple assignment in an intro level course.

https://i.imgur.com/yj7aaQA.png

So, are you implying that anything involving potentially "dangerous" stuff like rape, suicide, violence, drinking, war etc is to be reserved only for "serious" academic research and be left out of test questions?

Imagine a test question "To one liter of a water/alcohol mixture in 1:1 ratio half a liter of water is added. What is the new alcohol-to-water ratio?". A former alcohol addict might be "triggered" by this question - but would you exclude it from a test?

Or, in a history test, avoid asking questions about the Afghanistan war because the kid's father lost a leg in Afghanistan?

Suicide is one of the biggest causes of death, especially for men in that age range. Suicidality involves complex mental health. It is entirely possible for a person with suicidal thinking to be in treatment for that thinking but also continuing to study at university. Dropping references to suicide into minor assignments is a weird thing to do, especially if it's going to be framed with such odd choice of words.

Rape is similarly common and for some (but not all) victims is extremely distressing.

Can you understand why you don't just drop references to rape and suicide into a short assignment with no other context?

So what? You're exposed to these topics everytime you watch TV news, listen to any radio station with news reporting, read a newspaper (or the headlines while walking through the city), reading Wikipedia articles, books, basically taking part in life.

If I type suicide into google, google gives me a special infobox providing me information on how to seek help.

suicide.org tells me:

About 33% of rape victims have suicidal thought. About 13% of rape victims will attempt suicide.

I think these factoids provide abundant evidence the question is relevant to the world and industry these students will graduate into.

You can decide for yourself if feminism and political correctness in the universities are helping or harming academic education and research.

And how about the first question on the quiz - which evokes a story about a man's father marrying his step-daughter?

Perhaps the last question was not written by the same person who wrote the preceding questions. It's totally nonsensical, although perhaps that's due to the bad writing combined with trying to make the question easier to parse into Prolog?

In any case, this is indeed a bizarre little quiz.

The first question is from an old silly song https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_My_Own_Grandpa

I see nothing wrong with the question. I can't stand these people that get up in arms about every little thing that they can.

student does not know how to complete assignment; so raises fuss with admin to avoid it.

The question has been posted in this thread. Use the language of your choice to solve the question asked.

Compare that to the other questions on the assignment - the two jugs problem for example.

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