Sunday, March 26, 2006

Fun With Evaluation Forms

The women’s center at NJIT brought in a female speaker from MIT Robotics in last week. They gave a huge introduction where they yabbered on and on about this other woman NJIT chemistry professor from like the 60’s, then the MIT lady spent half the time talking about her life instead of her life work.

This wasn’t actually a big loss because while the rest of MIT builds paratrooper insects that climb mountains in outer space she’s making fuzzy stuffed animals whose sole purpose* is to display emotion. *by purpose, in no way do I mean useful purpose.

Her idea of a final frontier is, and I quote in context “not outer space but in your living room.” Clearly I have a few opinions so I filled out one of those survey things. There wasn’t enough room so I wrote on the back.

You should open the pictures to get the readable versions.


9 comments:

  1. Although it may be that the much of the lecture was pointless, the lady who it was named after, Lillian Gilbreth, was quite an impressive person. She was an excellent engineer, and with her husband raised a family of 12 children. This actually sort of explains why NJIT has some of the Gilbreth's work on display. (For more info, read Cheaper by the Dozen [dont even think of watching the movie]).

    ReplyDelete
  2. First of all, Yoni, I disagree. I think there's a huge amount of territory to be conquered "in the living room," so to speak. We don't need to climb mountains to realize that we don't yet know how people work at all, once you talk about thought or emotion.
    Wait. I just realized. You're talking about Dr. Cynthia Breazeal, who is by no means stupid, nor from what I've seen, a particularly bad speaker. And her robot, Kismet, is positively amazing.

    Also, you spelled "whose" wrong. "Who's" means "who is."

    ReplyDelete
  3. And after you submitted this form, how long did it take before the men in the suits and the gloves showed up to take you away?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Kismet is not amazing. I saw it and all it did was stare at me. There is nothing more dull than returning the stare of a lifeless robot. It can't even bulid a Volkswagon, and it calls itself a robot. Dispicable.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Elon? Was the robot turned on?
    If so, were you just sitting and staring at it, because then you were just having a staring contest. And there's nothing stupider than trying to stare down a robot.

    And you spelled "despicable" wrong. What is it with you guys?

    Seriously, it's just a matter of time before the robots try to take over.

    ReplyDelete
  6. oooooh that robot is FAMOUS... not that i've ever seen it in person, or did i know that it was designed by a female engineer. anyway.

    ReplyDelete
  7. What's with Ilan correcting everyone's spelling? It must get really boring there in Ithica.(Uuh ohh... Is that how you spell Ithica? Ithuca? Ithaca?) What the heck, Cornel.
    If he starts after our grammer we'll really be in trouble. I'm keeping this "Anonymous" so he doesn't scrutinize my other blog posts for errors just to get back at me.

    ReplyDelete
  8. I would like to point out, that out of the line comments on this post only three have anything to do with the actual post.

    ReplyDelete