(I worked with Oak and shin1068111)

1. What was your response to the film?

- we agreed, none of us particularly liked it

- did not accurately describe computer science: there were too many strange Greek characters

- hard to follow, with a lot of what seemed like irrelevant information

2. What questions does the film raise for you?

- Are information waves real?

- How did Emmy conceive/ give birth to "Ada?"

- Did this accurately describe Ada's personality and her relationship with others? (specifically men)

- What condition/disease did Ada have?

3. How can you place it within the frame of this course? How does it illustrate-or-challenge some of the ideas we have been exploring?

 I want to perform the personality of the Islamic scholar Ibn Sina ( Avicenna)

So, due to a wonderful illness I have not been in class this week and managed to miss the discussion on Conceiving Ada. I watched the film and seemed to understand what happened, but never quite knew why. I get that the main character is trying to connect with Ada through vitual space, but I am not sure why there has to be a chronological narrative. If this woman can make a connection with a historical figure at a specific moment in time why can she not go back to that moment again? Why can she only connect with Ada at moments that happened chronologically after their last discussion?

Since its creation by Tim Berners-Lee in the early 1990s, the World Wide Web has shaped the way our society works. This technology has enabled us to communicate in ways that were previously unimaginable. We no longer need to mail letters, as we can now easily send an email. Receiving mail is also becoming unnecessary, since something like bank statements can now be read on the Web. Other forms of communicating, like instant messaging and social networks have enabled us to form more connections with different people. Through the use of search engines like Google, we can search for information on a topic and find a relevant website in barely seconds.

In Hayes' article "How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine", there is much discussion of two points that seem contradictory to me:

This week, I was the first to admit that the film "Conceiving Ada" didn't really do it for me. I was quick to judge its clunky technology, unrealistic elements, and unconventional protagonist. When Anne pushed my discussion group to go beyond these surface reactions and think about how we might "forget meaning" and see what extensions we can learn from such a film, I was resistant. I thought, "There's nothing to learn if it's all fake and impossible." But when I posted about my panel character for next week, I saw startling similarities between my beloved "Fringe" and this movie that had rubbed me the wrong way. They both deal in impossible technologies, sharing a focus on finding or extracting information that seems lost forever.

          When I think of historical and contemporary examples of technology that have significantly impacted the human race, the first things that come to mind are computers, cell phones, mp3 players, cameras, radios, cars, and airplanes. While looking at this list I noticed an interesting pattern. Most of these “pieces” of technology somehow directly relate to the idea of communication. Human beings are social creatures, and it is no wonder that our attitudes toward technology reflect this.  

 My friends, right off the bat I can tell you that a human is worth more than 57 cents. The amount it costs to purchase one strand of DNA, only 20 nucleotides long, totals around 8 dollars. Imagine then, how much it would cost to synthesize a strand of DNA encoding an entire protein or genome.

After getting past some of the general difficulties I had with Conceiving Ada, I tried to get past the far-fetched idea of the movie and think about how gender roles functioned within it.  For Ada, having children is a full-time job, something that as a woman, must take over her life and stop her from pursuing her own goals.  Similarly, Emmy's pregnancy frightens her at first and from looking at her life with her boyfriend, it seems clear that her work comes before any personal relationships do.  In a way, her daughter becomes her work because she is a clone of Ada, another "experiment" for Emmy to explore.