Week 10: Apr. 1 – Apr. 7

What did you do this past week?

Last week, I attended the Ethics lectures for this class, and I worked on the project as well. I also took an exam for my Declarative Programming class. Although it requires fewer things than Phase 2, Phase 3 of the project can be stressful at times since we can be particular about how we want our application to look and function. Implementing the search function with the highlighting of keywords may also pose a challenge.

What’s in your way?

Nothing in particular for now. I’m through with midterms for the time being. I won’t have any until the first week of May, which will be a hectic week.

What will you do next week?

Next week, I will finish Phase 3 of the project with my group for this class. I have to work on a problem set for my Algorithms class and keep up with Cerego sets for my Jazz Appreciation class. I also have to study for a few in-class quizzes throughout the week.

What did you think of the talk by Dr. Rich and Dr. Cline?

I thought the talk was very thought-provoking. Dr. Rich and Dr. Cline brought up a few interesting ethical scenarios that may arise in one’s career. Utilitarianism, the Golden Rule, and Kant’s Categorical Imperative may help people make ethical decisions, but ultimately, it seems like there is no one-size-fits-all approach, no philosophy that can make the obvious “right” decision in every circumstance. Moral decisions are often weighted by an individual’s circumstances as well as the stakes of the choice. I thought that it was good of MIT to include ethics in the mission statement for its new College of Computing. Ethical dilemmas are likely to crop up as the field of artificial intelligence advances.

What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

My pick-of-the-week is this guide to using Flexbox. Flexbox is a CSS tool that simplifies formatting the layout of a webpage. I found the article’s illustrations very helpful in visualizing what I want the layout of our instance pages to look like for our website. The explanations of the CSS properties were also very clear.