Final blog post!

In the beginning of the class I was very confident with my research skills. I had done research in my previous high school and I believed that I was going to ace this class. When I handed in my first milestone I got a really bad grade and A LOT of corrections. I was very disappointed but I realized the professor always does the same thing to everybody. Something I would recommend the future students to do is to not write with the words “You and I” there is a severe grade drop when the writing style is like that. It is okay to write like that in blog posts but not in essays. Also! Always cite your work and be on top of everything or else when you fall back there would seem like theirs no way out and discourage you from doing good. I would not recommend taking a cluster class because research 103 does not really apply to any majors therefore it is a class that you will not need.

Blog # 8

During my time in this course I realized that there are a lot of topics that are influenced by philosophical thinkers and scientists. They are taken on in many different ways using very different methods. It is very interesting to read on very contraversal topics and talk about how this affects you/ your future or the world around you. I’ve learned how to cite the sources that I was given to make my writing more technical, but best of all I learned how to reduce my writing from a blog post style to an informative essay. I was always very dependent on writing the work “You” or “I” in essays but because of this class I got rid of the bad habits. It is good to write “You and I’s occasionally but for a more informal paper such as this one.

One very important topic that I feel I mastered was human cloning. I have always been the type of person that loves learning scientific procedures and new technology, so finding out about cloning was very interesting. The play that we saw “A number” was very interesting because it keeps you thinking that scenarios like these are possible and if whether or not cloning humans without their consent is a good idea.

Another thing that I learned from this class is that using the words therefore or in conclusion makes your paper sound professional. I think improved in my formal writing and its really important to be aware of the controversial topics that are around us. I’ve always been a person that believes people think with their brain and not with their heart, I believe in the empiricist way of questioning things and in the scientific method. This cluster and class showed me that although a humanity approach is persuasive I still believe that the scientific approach is better. I have decided to change my major to science and math but it was fun to learn another approach to knowledge. 

Blog #7

One of my favorite topics of eng 101 has been human cloning. It is nice to see how technology is so advance that we can play god by determining the genetic information that children are going to have. Yes it is very unethical and it should not be conducted but it is very interesting to know that if there were ever any need to clone somebody we would be able to. The play a number caught my attention because that scenario is bound to happen if human cloning were to ever be legalized.

Cloning animals now a days is very unsafe and health issues are at stake which leads me to believe that there is still a lot of work we to be done if human cloning is to ever come about. That still doesn’t matter for Churchill because in his play he made cloning possible. If you have the original person have many clones you are tasking away from their uniqueness and conjuring up mental problems or low self esteem issues because you feel that you are no longer unique which leads to many conflicts. That is what happened to the original person, Bernard. He felt as though he was the product of a bad experiment and was tossed aside because he was not worth trying to fix due to his dad, salters errors. This can lead to sao many problems because it is unfair to Bernard to lose his self identity for a science experiment that he did not even want to volunteer for!

Blog #6

 Robots are without a doubt a very controversial topic. It is crazy that nowadays there is technology that can evolve into artificial intelligence such as the artificial intelligence portrayed in the movie Blade runner. In the movie clip we get the sense of how robots are going to take over and try to kill us. When the robot killed his creator by chocking him to death and poking his eyes out we get a sense that this guy has no emotions and that he is just programmed to kill.  During the end of this movie we see on how the robot is fighting a human and when he is about to kill him he feels mercy for the human. He shows some sort of sympathy and even some sort of artistic view. This artistic view can be interpreted as the robot having a soul.  If a robot has a soul then he has some level of consciousness. The way that the robot showed that he had consciousness was by talking about the scenery and how beautiful it was.  This part reminded me of Ray Kurzweils article “The singularity is near” He believed that robots in the future will have the ability to have a consciousness. “However I do expect full MNT will emerge prior to strong AI” (Kurzweil 140) He is trying to say that yes there will be technology with some sort of capability to have rational thoughts that might seem like consciousness but no they will not really be that strong of an artificial intelligence. So far the only strong intelligence that they have created is used in the aviation industry. It is very high tech and maybe in the future it will grow to establish some sort of artificial intelligence that will lead to the singularity that Kurzweil claims to be approaching.