Rape question baffles computer science students (opens in new tab)

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.

In terms of social network infrastructure, recognizing whether your user is a rape victim, or any victim, and analyzing their communications to determine if they are being bullied is a valuable asset. Instagram displays an eating disorder help line if you search for "#ana," "#mia," or other eating disorder related hashtags. I once had Facebook delete all my messages from a certain person because they thought that person was bullying me - which they weren't. What baffles me is that this professor is being sent to "training" when their work is ultimately wanted out of social networks.

Obviously this could be important work. Also, really obviously, you don't just dump a question involving rape and suicide into a minor quiz without any warning.

What level is CS3710 aimed at?

Frankly, you can't have it both ways. Social networks are pressed to take more accountability for the activities of bad apples, and their first line of defense is to automate and monitor. The algorithms that do so are going to be complex and involve insight that I don't believe has much research behind it. So this is fairly cutting edge and worthwhile.

On the other hand, understanding how mainstream student and academia may react to a lightening-rod topic like rape is not the strong suit of a lot of computer scientists.

The professor needed to clearly communicate why this was a worthwhile assignment. I'd bet he'd have gotten a completely different response.

so their college stands for running away from hard problems because the are socially unpalatable.

And how about the first question on the quiz - which evokes a story about a man's father marrying his step-daughter?

Perhaps the last question was not written by the same person who wrote the preceding questions. It's totally nonsensical, although perhaps that's due to the bad writing combined with trying to make the question easier to parse into Prolog?

In any case, this is indeed a bizarre little quiz.

student does not know how to complete assignment; so raises fuss with admin to avoid it.

This would actually have been a fun and interesting assignment to do, not to mention the potential application.

I'm sure the opposition would have been fine with it if it had been more "weasel-wordy", i.e. develop system to determine if cis-gendered anthropomorphic entity is likely to cause [TRIGGER WARNING] non-self-help.

If I type suicide into google, google gives me a special infobox providing me information on how to seek help.

suicide.org tells me:

About 33% of rape victims have suicidal thought. About 13% of rape victims will attempt suicide.

I think these factoids provide abundant evidence the question is relevant to the world and industry these students will graduate into.

You can decide for yourself if feminism and political correctness in the universities are helping or harming academic education and research.

I see nothing wrong with the question. I can't stand these people that get up in arms about every little thing that they can.