Critical Thinking Post #8 - Final Course Reflection

        After this course, my thoughts on humanism, science and technology has changed. I view these topics differently now than before. It seems that in the beginning, I was wrong about the type of person I was. This course has helped me discover my real views on this. I guess that before I wasn't required to think about it and I didn't. Now that I learned more about each area, I feel comfortable enough to say that I am neither a humanist or a scientist. I am a combination of the two. 
         I didn't become any more or less of that person; I only realized my true self-identification in this area. There are many things I learned about these fields and all of them impacted what I associated myself with. However, these are things I already associated with myself, I just discovered it after this course. I am less optimistic about technology after this course, because we learned about negative impacts and I think that they outweigh the positive impacts. 
        This class has taught me a lot, whether using fiction or fact, about real life. We don't get to see what happens outside of our lives, but this course makes us step out and look from an observer's view. We have to realize that science and technology aren't always good and neither is humanism. We have to be critical of the world and question things that don't make sense to us. Otherwise, they never will.

Critical Thinking Post #7 - Critical Thinking About a Scientist’s Life and Work

       Rosalind Franklin was an amazing woman. Her intelligence lead her to discover one of the most important things in all time. DNA has always been seen as a good thing in the scientific community, and her help in the research on it has been one that lead to today's science. Nowadays, it has a great impact. Scientists are learning many new things about DNA, none of which would have been possible without Franklin's contribution. She was discredited in the beginning, of course, but the work she had done is still remembered and now her credit has been restored. It takes mistakes and mishaps to be successful at science - this is what Rosalind's story tells me. 
        Rosalind Franklin gave us all a sense of wonder. Growing up, I had a microscope and I used to look at a lot of things. Had it not been for Franklin, I would not have been able to learn about the DNA I was looking at in tiny living organisms. I would not have learnt about the structure of DNA throughout the years. The words "double helix" would not be used in my vocabulary. Her work bridged science and the humanities. It is a core concept of what it really means to be human - and that is something that everyone wanted to understand.
        A bad thing that can come from her research is creation of artificial and potentially harmful life forms. For the first time in history, we are becoming able to generate different base pairs in DNA. This is another big step that would not be possible if not for Franklin's research. This can be harmful if the life created becomes a plague, or if it feeds on different species that can become extinct from this creature and the other species that thrived without this creature. However, this research can also be used for good in the future. It may help us discover new things, or possible create beneficial forms of life.

Critical Thinking Post #6 - Sharing and Reflecting on Two Research Sources

        The topic for my research paper is Altruism and the Selfish gene. More specifically, I am writing that Roger Mitchell's film adaptation of Ian McEwan's Enduring Love argues for altruism rather than selfish genes. 
        Two sources that I found were as listed below.

Barash, David P. "Are We Selfish Altruists? Group-Oriented Individualists? (Or What?)." Natural Selections: Selfish Altruists, Honest Liars, and Other Realities of Evolution. New York: Bellevue Literary, 2008. 112-14. Print.

Ruse, Michael. "Review of Ian McEwan's Enduring Love." Metanexus 1 Aug. 1999. Web. 13 May 2014.

        The first source is a chapter from a book. I found this source in the library. I was looking up sources online and came across the book when searching for selfish genes and altruism. This source provides a lot of information on the selfish gene and altruism, which ways and when they both appear,  why they occur... It gives all of the scientific evidence and research behind the concepts. The author is not biased toward one part of the conflict, but supports both in his writing. This source matches my research paper perfectly because I needed evidence of how people act and why they act that way in order to compare that information to the way people behaved throughout the film Enduring Love and McEwan's story. 

        The second source is a review of the film. It has information about the characters, plot, altruism throughout the film and all of that good stuff involving the details of the movie and how altruism is seen. This source was found on the internet via Google Scholar. It provides perfect information based on the movie and includes altruism as a theme of the movie. It shows mostly stuff from the film, which can go perfect with details that I found in the scientific sources. It goes well with my paper because it gives me another perspective to see the movie from and to compare my own thoughts with.

Critical Thinking Post #5 - The Promise and Peril of Robots in Film, TV and Real Life: Friends or Foes?

        For this blog assignment, the first video I chose to write about was “The Touch Bionics i-Limb Hand. REMARKABLE!.” This video is interesting, because it shows both the benefits and flaws of robots. It shows that the robot is being used for good, however there are some things it is incapable of doing (ie. moving the hand to the mouth; when attempted, it wiggles around trying to bring a drink to the mouth). It is a beneficial technology, overall. It is a good way to look forward to robotics in our future, because they can help people with missing limbs possess them once again, and in the near future these limbs will be perfected to work as regularly as the real thing. However, the fact that the robot doesn't have the capability to listen to per for certain commands worries me. When you look at a robot that may be massed produced, you don't want to see that they are disobedient and this may bring out fear in some people. 

        Another clip shows more direct disobedience by a robot named HAL. The clip, named “Hal wont Open the Pod Bay Door,” is about a robot who does not listen to, and actually goes against, what man is telling the robot to do. In doing this, he shows not only that he is capable of being disobedient, but that he is against the intentions of the humans. It is import ant to note that this is fiction, however possible it does seem. This film shows us the possibility of betrayal by robots, with many films on its side. However, unlike the arm-bot, HAL is artificial intelligence. There is a difference between the two, because HAL has the capability to think for itself, whereas the arm does not. 

        Looking at these two clips has made me realize that while some people may still fear robots, we are growing more towards a future involving such technology. Most people are used to having a ‘robot' in their pockets nowadays (think Siri, Galaxy on Androids). We are rapidly looking towards a future with robots because they are useful to us. Perhaps we don’t fully understand the technology well enough to risk our lives in being hopeful in technology. With this view, though, we can only be sure of one thing: Humans and robots will coexist. The only question is which will be the master of which.