I feel like knowledge of a desktop QWERTY keyboard has little affect on your mobile usages, aside from knowing which direction your thumb should move towards. Given the fact that (most?) people use only their thumbs when using their cellphone keyboards, I would argue that's reason enough to design a new keyboard based around this type of usage. Right now I think QWERTY is just a crutch for mobile keyboards until someone really makes something stellar.
I find it very disappointing that, in trying to show how conceited the "whiney" white girl is, the author's own vanity comes to light. Don't get me wrong, I think Miss Weiss is totally off base in thinking that affirmative action had anything to do with the rejection of a person as egocentric as herself. But let's not play the "my life was harder than yours" game. It just makes you look self absorbed.
Agreed. The white girl who didn't get in might have been rejected based on a combination of factors, but she IS legally discriminated against because of her race in college admissions, which is a reasonable complaint. IIRC, putting "black" down on your college application gives you something like a +500 point bonus on your SAT score. A rich white girl is an easy target for mocking, but what about the poor white girl who has nowhere near the resources of a rich black girl? Studies show that class is now the deciding factor in relative advantages, much greater even than race, yet still our college policies are based on 1960's society. The accomplishment gap between rich and poor is far, far greater than that between white and black, and still we see fit to punish...asians. Over indulging in white guilt leads to victimization of the poor of all races, which I find ethically deplorable.
It is my hope that race based discrimination will soon be no more. Lots of important things coming up for SCOTUS, recently. Studies show that academic mismatch from race based discrimination actually hurts the minorities it is intended to help, so if race based discrimination is made illegal, then people of all races will be better off. Minority graduation rates will be much higher once we've gotten rid of it.
I too can attest to the extensive abilities of the Sage package. It's extremely powerful and easy to use given that it's based in Python. Even if you don't want to download it, give the notebook a try: http://www.sagenb.org/.
You should also consider the possibility that the type of neural network you chose is not capable of learning the rules of chess, but may be sufficient for OCR.
They describe the "novel environment" starting on page 3.