TASK DEFINITION: In this task, you are given books product reviews in English language. The goal is to classify the review as "POS" if the overall sentiment of the review is positive or as "NEG" if the overall sentiment of the review is negative.
PROBLEM: Chain of Emtotions . This book masyerfully unmasks the sorrows of the nation. The author is able to compose a memoir of the haunting lives of children in New York's ghettos. The fierce images of rat-infested homes, and schools filled with poisonous lead walls leave readers unable to fathom how people truly exist in such harsh conditions. Kozol addresses every area of the spectrum from the children's point of view to the political views of the country. Also presenting an array of diverse issues such as AIDs, drugs, underage prostitution, death, motives based in moral, religious beliefs, and inhuman treatment towards others to the reader. Feelings of pathos arise after hearing the accounts of the children in the area; readers feel sorrow for the children because they are stripped of their childhood. Numerous quotes and examples are given in the book, but one that particularly struck me was when Kozol asks one of the children if he knows anyone happy at all the boy candidly responds, "Not many...Well, to tell the truth, not any who are happy for more than one day...No! Not for one day. For 15 minutes...Not any. That's no lie"(212). To honestly not know at least some form of happiness is incompressible for me and I'm sure for many others as well. By using statements made by children the author easily wins the readers pity and sympathy. Our pity soon turns to anger when he describes the lack of government support. Examples such as unsanitary hospitals, toxic incinerators, closet sized school rooms, and shabby, less then adequate housing evoke sentiments of detest towards the government's lack of aid towards these poor devastated people. But once again Kozol quickly changes our feelings to those of denial. He provides shocking statistics and first hand accounts as to how the nation sympathizes with these people for five minutes and then continue on with their lives.  It seems shocking that people would do things so cruel such as disposing of their waste in the ghetto streets. While reading, it became a necessity for me to remind myself that the events taking place were all true; this is not a cleverly composed work of fiction, though it would certainly be far more assuaging if it were.       Taking into account the brilliant components of the book, I must say that I was vexed by one minor detail; Kozol's overall presentation of his opinions. The beginning of the book revolves around the accounts of parents and children within the area and the author provides few opinions on the subject. But towards the end he fills several pages with statistics followed by passages of his opinions. I feel that this takes away from the book because rather than focusing on the children and people living in the area we turn our attention to the author and how he is impacted by the events and things he witnesses.         Other than this minor dislike I think that the piece as a whole is very informative and certainly does a good job at presenting what appears to be the ideas and realities for several minorities in New York. It may not be a thriller, or adventure novel, but it most certainly is a mystery. A mystery as to how people are able to survive in such hostile conditions and retain hope. Kozol's mastery of rhetoric reveals that the issues taking place have been around and that until something changes they will remain so.

SOLUTION: POS

PROBLEM: Good . It is a good book recommended from Cuttle

SOLUTION: POS

PROBLEM: Good for a skim, that is all . This book speculates about both the advance of computer technology in the 21st century and the socio-political response to it.  Although it is peppered with a few interesting notions worth skimming, much of the speculation is unreasonable and philosophically naive.    In the first chapter, Kurzweil attempts to lay a sort of theoretical framework for his speculations, which boils down to his belief that Moore's Law is just one instance of a cosmic principle of exponential advance which explains everything from the first second of the universe after the Big Bang to the evolution of life on Earth and now the evolution of technology.  The second chapter argues that it is possible for an intelligence to create something more intelligent than itself:  just as evolution "intelligently" created us, we will (soon!) create computers which will build machines of far greater cognitive ability than us.  It is indeed intriguing to consider that someday machines will outperform humans in many ways, but the book to this point is best skimmed, because there's actually very little substance and a lot of dry, pseudo-intellectual filler.    Chapter 3 examines the philosophical problem that is going to be brought to the forefront by super-advanced computers:  what is consciousness, and can machines possess it?  Kurzweil unimpressively touches on a handful of schools of thought here (his sentences on Descartes made me wonder if he has read anything on the subject besides pop philosophy), though he does not try to decide between them.  Instead, his prediction is social:  eventually machines will be accepted as real people -- just as real people will physically merge with technology -- even if that sounds bizarre to us now.  This theme comes up again and again, and it proves to be one of the only thought-provoking issues of the book.    Chapters 4 and 5 talk about the field of artificial intelligence, where it has been, and where it needs to go.  In a section entitled "The Formula for Intelligence", Kurzweil provides his recipe for the strong AI of the future:  recursion, neural nets, and genetic algorithms -- all taking hints from the reverse engineering of the human brain.  This wishful thinking is one of the Achilles' heels of this book.  For a software entrepreneuer, Kurzweil is strangely blind to the evidence:  software is hardly becoming more complex or "intelligent" at all, let alone exponentially.  Today's software systems are perhaps bigger but not significantly "smarter" than systems of past decades, and software quality continues to barely meet the lowest of expectations.  Despite Moore's Law and the faith that it will continue to provide more and more cycles in the hardware world, progress in the world of software seems, to this software engineer of 15 years, to be nearly a flat line, not an exponential curve.  Just compare how many hundreds of man-years have gone into the lastest version of Windows, versus what it would take to design and implement Kurzweil's ideal of software that is able to write more powerful software.    Part of the problem may be that Kurzweil simply ignores the fields of cognitive psychology and epistemology, which are in their infancy.  He does not seem to even be aware of the issues in these fields which would have to be solved (probably by geniuses) in order to create "strong AI."  Instead, the solutions he predicts are purely materialistic:  brain deciphering, massively parallel hardware, and genetic algorithms.    Part 2 of the book focuses on potential technologies.  The most powerful computers he speculates about are quantum computers, and he doesn't waste any time before asserting that someday we will be able to download the entirety of a brain into a quantum computer, so that the computer will in effect have a clone of that person's mind.  Kurzweil, in his materialism, does not seem to even be aware that there is a philosophical argument that this is impossible.  He also speculates about nanotechnologies and how they will eventually give us a unprecented ability to manipulate physical reality.    Part 3 of the book is comprised of specific predictions for 2009, 2019, 2029, and 2099.  This book was written in 1999, and we can already see that some of his 2009 predictions are either just simple extensions of things we were starting to see in 1999, while others wildly miss the mark, such as:  "the majority of reading is done on displays", "the majority of text is created using continuous speech recognition", and "intelligent roads are in use, primarily for long-distance travel."  That Kurzweil could be so far off in his 10 year predictions does not bode well for his 20-, 30-, and 100-year predictions.  Indeed, his predictions for 2019 sound like a science fiction novel, and of the ones that sound plausible I think he must be off by at least 30 years.  His speculations for 2029 are just fantastic.  In general he seems to "predict" based on the assumption that new technologies will be deployed as soon as they are available, underestimating a myriad of resisting factors:  legal, political, social, market, scientific, etc.    Ultimately this book can be fun for skimming and raises a couple of thought-provoking issues, but as speculating about technology more than 10 years in the future is necessarily a foolish activity, there's plenty of foolishness to be found in here

SOLUTION:
NEG