conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a story titled The Prodigy about Toby, Frank, Peretti with the genre: Christian Books & Bibles, Literature & Fiction.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Since Frank Peretti penned his groundbreaking Christian suspense novel This Present Darkness back in the '80s, he's been often emulated, usually without much success. Enter this supernatural page-turner, The Prodigy , which raises the bar for the genre. the author weaves theological questions about spiritual forces in contemporary culture into a thrilling saga that will keep the reader hooked from the first pages. Six-year-old Toby, a child prodigy from the backwoods of North Carolina, has strange powers. Toby walks through a hospital corridor, and patients with incurable illnesses are suddenly healed. Storms melt away at his words. He diagnoses and cures the innermost mental and physical afflictions of strangers. When Toby and his unusual gifts are noticed by those seeking money and power, disaster is inevitable.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a story about International, Screenwriting, Contest with the genre: Crafts, Hobbies & Home, Antiques & Collectibles?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this story could be 'The Prodigy'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a story titled The Prodigy about Ocicat, Midwest, Kellys with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction.. End with the sentence ' Kelly has more than twenty short stories published in various genres and publications, has been included in four anthologies, and has seven published novels.'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: the author lives with a ferocious Ocicat and her husband, who is also a writer, but not ferocious. She resides on the edge of a lake, which is as close to beach living as the Midwest gets. She enjoys painting, dancing, hiking, and deck sitting with a glass of wine when she isnt writing. Kellys stories usually have a touch of magic or the paranormal. She especially enjoys creating female characters who may have much to learn, but are perfectly capable of saving themselves. She also is fascinated by the amazing diversity of human activities and beliefs, and enjoys both researching and introducing her readers to concepts they may not have encountered, such as Voodoo, life in Kuala Lumpur, or roller derby. Kelly has more than twenty short stories published in various genres and publications, has been included in four anthologies, and has seven published novels.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this story.. End with the sentence ' Derelict transfers were admissible and should never be overlooked just because they had been thrown away.'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Prodigy
  The following week's editorial again pointed to Sidis / Greene, as an "instigator of riot." Jones cautioned that Greene and his ilk should "either cease their action or come into the open with their fancied grievances, or they will find themselves definitely out in the cold."
  While Jones was obviously something of a madman, it cannot be denied that William had willingly entered the fray, and it is curious to consider that he did so with nearly the same intensity he dedicated to dangerous and important issues, such as conscientious objection. In fact, he had no option in the matter—his mind raced at an astounding speed that could not be turned down or off, regardless of the issue involved. Perhaps, in fact, memorizing lists of thousands of bus and streetcar routes throughout the country with every variation and alteration, in all their overwhelming detail, was for William a kind of quiet, low-key occupation, a lulling pleasure to be enjoyed much as the average man would muse over a baseball score, try to piece together the words of a popular song, or drift into reverie about his plans for Saturday night.
  One transfer buff in William's circle guessed that there were about two hundred serious collectors in the United States. William received letters from several teenagers ("I am a very serious railroad fan of fifteen, with no 'kid stuff' about my hobby," wrote one from Brooklyn), but only a few were from women. One collector wrote to William, "I believe Mr. Dunlop of Cicero has left the hobby. He told one collector 'that he wanted to devote all his time to his wife' —of all things!" For some collectors, such as this one from Cincinnati, the hobby occasionally resembled a drinking problem: "One doesn't take to collecting transfers overnight—it grows on you. I can't recall offhand just how I started. It was about five years ago. With each year it accelerated until the present, and I'm up to my neck now."
  Most collectors did not share this relaxed attitude toward William's aliases. In 1941, William wrote a long Code of Ethics for Transfer Collectors, in which he addressed this topic: "A transfer collector is entitled to use a pseudonym for the purpose of making contacts with other collectors; and other collectors are bound to respect his right of privacy in this regard. A collector may adopt a new pseudonym as often as he finds reason to believe that the privacy of his pseudonym is being threatened; and collectors are bound not to discriminate in any way against collectors using or changing a pseudonym in the hobby."
  The Code of Ethics was controversial, and William circulated it widely among his fellow collectors. It consisted of twenty-six points, several of which were strict and dictatorial. "Peridromophily," he wrote, "must not be made to extend to anything but the collection of local transit transfers.... Collectors who have other hobbies besides peridromophily should be careful to keep the collection of transfers separate from all other hobbies, and not to classify them together for any purpose." William went into detail explaining what was and was not admissible as part of the hobby—overlap fare receipts were, tickets were not. Derelict transfers were admissible and should never be overlooked just because they had been thrown away.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me three more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Bird and Pilpel threw themselves into a hearty and time-consuming exchange of insulting red tape, and matters heated up once again. Pilpel observed that more than five years had elapsed since Sidis served his original complaint, during which time the case had "had a complicated and busy history." Why, she asked, had Sidis waited so long to press the issue of falsity in The New Yorker article? Furthermore, she objected that he had done so "in the broadest possible terms, despite the fact that obviously a great many of the hundreds of statements about him must be true." Bird answered irately, "Must be true! Indeed! Unless publication in The New Yorker makes it ipso facto true, there is no warrant whatever for assuming that there is any single statement in the article that is obviously true." Much debate followed over whose job it was to detail the libelous portions of the article, the responsibility falling finally to the prosecution.
  Sidis, said Bird, was the victim of The New Yorker, which injured him "without justifiable motives or good ends and with a reckless and careless disregard of the plaintiff's reputation and feelings." In short, he stated, the magazine had libeled him by causing the readers of The New Yorker to believe the following statements to be true of the plaintiff:
  As one pretending extraordinary intellectual attainments and being a genius, yet in fact a fool, incapable of making a decent living and living in misery and poverty.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The answer to the question can be found by first discarding the swamp of myths and lies that surrounds the memory of America's greatest prodigy. Author Abraham Sperling, director of New York City's Aptitude Testing Institute, became deeply interested in Sidis in the period immediately following his death. Sperling had been testing intelligence quotients since the 1930s, and was startled to see the obituaries that proclaimed Sidis a burnout. Said Sperling, "My knowledge told me that this was completely erroneous. I learned, much to my satisfaction, that there's no evidence that his intellect had burned out. This business of a nervous breakdown was nonsense.
  Where, precisely, did his parents fail him? Though the mythmakers have held Boris and Sarah's child-rearing methods at fault, there is in fact nothing to fault in them. Upon the closest inspection, they are similar to the basic, sensible techniques popularized by the brilliant educator Maria Montessori. William James Sidis was not pushed, he was taught to reason. He did not merely conquer forty languages, or one hundred—he had the mental technology to grasp any language, no matter how difficult, in a day. His was not a genius of mere retentive ability—it was that of a magnificent reasoning machine. Boris and Sarah did not create his high IQ through training—their genes provided the better part of it—but their training nurtured and encouraged in a superb manner the rare plant they had borne.
  In 1957, Norbert Wiener wrote an article for The New York Times Magazine entitled "Analysis of the Child Prodigy." It was the era of the highly popular television stars the Quiz Kids, and the question of the proper treatment of brilliant children was strongly on the minds of millions of viewers. Wiener, speaking from the other side —as one who had been a child prodigy himself—disapproved of the television show. He urged Americans to emulate European education, where "there is much less pressure on the bright youngster to keep in lockstep with the average and below-average student, who is the darling of our American educational system." In Europe, he wrote, brilliant children were encouraged to blossom early and inconspicuously, well out of the public eye.
  It has been suggested by many writers and commentators that William James Sidis, in not living up to any of the goals predicted for him in his youth, betrayed society. This is not so—Sidis owed no debt to humanity. Nor did society betray Sidis. But its many members who inspired the retreat of an intellect of Sidis's magnitude unwittingly worked against society's best interests. Sidis may have found his own path to happiness, but at what cost to the world? How many Einsteins and Galileos has the world lost by treating prodigies as unwelcome freaks in their youth? What mountains might William James Sidis have moved, had he not been stunned into hiding by the public's mockery of his eccentricities and achievements?
  Let us hope that in the future all gifted, exceptional children will grow up in a world that instead of shunning them as oddities, will welcome and nurture their talents, their achievements, and their vision.