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Comment by sp332 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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?

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