Earlier, I posted about Evernote. I focused particularly on the Android smartphone application that was recently released for beta testing.
In that post, I did a little blackboard test. I wanted to test the feasibility of using Evernote to (a) take snapshots of a blackboard, and (b) have those snapshots show up accurately in key word searches.
I went into school today and thought it would be fun to try it out in an actual classroom. I wrote an argument in numbered-premise form on the board the way I would when teaching an intro philosophy class, then I snapped a picture with the Android Evernote App from the first row (about 15 feet away) and the third row. (about 20 feet away).
I put both pictures in my evernote shared folder. So you can see the results.
As you can see the argument is a simple formulation of the logical problem of evil. Let’s talk about the image clarity and the quality of Evernote’s character recognition at these distances.
Image Clarity
Clicking on the thumbnails reveals a decent size version of the original picture. You can easily read the argument in both the front row and third row shots. If you click on the image again, you’ll zoom into to (what I assume) is the full size of the images. The clarity on the full size is remarkable. You can definitely capture the contents of a blackboard with this app.
Search Quality
The really impressive part is the quality of the search results. The front row shot performs surprisingly well for searches. Every word in the argument returns the front row shot. The third row shot doesn’t fare as well as the front row shot, however, it still fares pretty well. Words like “problem”, “God”, “exist”, “does not exist” all return the third row shot. You can try it for yourself and see.
Overall, pretty excellent.
p.s. Not to open a philosophical can of worms, but I don’t think the argument I used an example is sound.
Well, it’s clearly valid, so you must think there’s a false statement in there somewhere. Looking them over, I’m going to confidently guess that you don’t think evil exists.
Actually, I think premise one is the culprit. I don’t think the existence of God logically necessitates the elimination of evil. Assuming we define “evil” as pain and suffering.
If we define evil as “gratuitous pain and suffering” – and we define gratuitous as “not outweighed by some greater good”, then I’m more up in the air on premise (2). However, I think Van Inwagen and (more recently) the Howard-Snyders both have some good things to say about premise (1) even if we tack on gratuitous.
Here’s a link to the Howard-Snyders’ paper…They discuss Van Inwagen’s response in the last section.
http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~howardd/istheismcompatible.pdf