For anyone following this story, there’s an update: “What might have been the biggest physics story of the past century may instead be down to a faulty connection.” The story may end up being a deadend for science, but it becomes, more than ever, a splendid example for TOK on how science works. For a TOK treatment of the Opera collaboration’s research, you can move back through this blog to the earlier postings.
Triple A Learning IB Blogs
TOK meets global citizenship
In this blog, Eileen Dombrowski treats awareness and critical thinking, applied to the world, as central to both TOK and global citizenship. She gives overtly analytical treatment to some topics and reflects more gently and whimsically on others.
February 24, 2012
February 15, 2012
“How the Hippies Saved Physics”
![How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival [Excerpt]](http://www.scientificamerican.com/media/inline/how-the-hippies-saved-physics-science-counterculture-and-quantum-revival-excerpt_1.jpg)
An excerpt from David Kaiser’s book, reproduced in Scientific American last month, gives a TOK teacher some fresh material on the creative process in science, played out in social context. It’s not necessary to understand the physics (fortunately for me!) to enjoy this piece from How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival. If you think of reading bits of it out in class, for instance, it could be useful for raising several questions — about stereotypes of scientists, the relationship between individual creative thinking and established science, and the influence of a particular historic period on the development of knowledge.
Is it truly a book about “hippies” saving physics? The lively title catches attention, and could provide provocation for asking students what their stereotypes are of scientists. What are creative scientists like? What do they do? What would a typical scientist wear? In treating creative individuals in science, it could be both edifying and entertaining to see whether old stereotypes live on, resisting (as science does not) massive counter-evidence. But hippies saving science? What….exactly….do we mean by “hippy”? It would be uncharitable to be picky over the catchy title, I suppose, and unappreciative not to seize the central point — that the science David Kaiser treats in this book had much of its genesis through the 1960s was essentially anti-establishment in challenging the interpretations of the time.
February 7, 2012
negative campaigning: ethics, politics, and a black-and-white universe
“Look, You Jerk, Negative Campaigning is Unethical” This commentary by Rushworth Kidder is worth reading. It centres on ethical issues of political attacks, with concern for the consequences of negative campaigning for election on the subsequent capacity for effective governing: “the qualities you need in order to get elected are stunningly at odds with the qualities you need to govern after you win.” It links ethics and politics, and brings in other topics, too, that interest us in TOK — for example, the creation of a black-and-white framework for thought and the preference for glossy superficiality rather than depth. Although the article is looking specifically at the American elections, it is relevant, to a greater or lesser extent, to all liberal democracies. Stepping back critically to see the envelope within which claims are made — or mud is slung — is important to being able to evaluate the reliability of the claims, and the implications for accepting them.
Eileen Dombrowski
February 3, 2012
cat-free images of galaxies
Space cats? After yesterday’s posting, you might find it as interesting as I do to see how images of galaxies from the Hubble space telescope are actually made. The images are indeed “made” rather than simply “taken”. When we talk about manipulating images in class, we are generally dealing with selected views or gradations of deception. The Hubble images are something different — a combination of “takes” not for a representation of a “better reality” but for a “better representation” of reality.
It’s a 2 and a half minute video, perhaps worth playing shortly after Space Cats
February 2, 2012
space cats
Take 3 minutes out of your day to watch this splendid spoof. You might even want to use it in class if you’ve been talking about either the human tendency to see faces in random shapes (pareidolia, relevant to sense perception) or manipulation of photographs. After some serious treatment, you may want to lighten the class with a laugh.
Eileen Dombrowski
January 28, 2012
Professional development with Triple A Learning’s cost-effective online workshops
I pass this on. Eileen
There is still time to take advantage of Triple A Learning’s cost-effective online workshops. Over the last three years we have trained over 4000 IB teachers on our IB authorised workshops, at both category 1 and category 3.
January 16, 2012
making reality…better
Fotoshop by Adobé from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo.
It’s easy to make reality so much better! One problem? You’d better stay within the computer screen if you want to preserve your perfect figure and radiant skin. I’d say that videos like this one are good to use with students — not only for their increased critical capacity regarding misrepresentations of reality, but also for their own emotional defence against marketing campaigns that make mega-bucks out of creating and selling, selling, selling a sense of inadequacy. We’ll all fall short of the photoshopped ideal. I’m not sure, though, that any advertisement could ever sell me on the desirability of gucky eyelashes….
January 15, 2012
memory and forgetting
This excerpt from an article by Ingrid Wickelgren, writing in the Scientific American, has really made my morning. I have valued being able to remember, and despaired at times over my own vague blanks. But now I’m heartened (as a blurry-headed person) and fascinated (as a teacher of critical thinking) by the important role for decision making and emotional health of forgetting. Wickelgren documents the case of Solomon Shereshevsky, who remembered so readily and completely that “the weight of all the memories, piled up and overlapping in his brain, created crippling confusion.”
“The act of forgetting,” she writes, “crafts and hones data in the brain as if carving a statue from a block of marble. It enables us to make sense of the world by clearing a path to the thoughts that are truly valuable. It also aids emotional recovery. …. In recent years researchers have amassed evidence for our ability to willfully forget. They have sketched out a neural circuit underlying this skill analogous to the one that inhibits impulsive actions.”
January 14, 2012
Make those circles pulse!
Eileen Dombrowski
January 6, 2012
The Debunking Handbook
In a very simple model of knowledge, we accept ideas — believe them — on the basis of good justification. The more the evidence and the better the reasoning, the more likely we are to believe a knowledge claim. Alas that such a fine idea should be flawed!
It would appear, instead, that attempts to counter misinformation often have exactly the opposite effect: the very attempt to debunk a myth may entrench it the more firmly in people’s minds. The Debunking Handbook, by John Cook and Stephan Lewandowsky, downloadable free on the website of Skeptical Science, treats some of the psychological factors of which communicators should be aware in trying to counter false information and the myths within which they are very often embedded. It identifies three major “backfire effects”: countering a myth involves talking about it and thus making it more familiar; providing an explanation that is overly complicated may make people reject it in favour of a simpler myth; counter-arguments that threaten people’s worldviews may strengthen their own views in resistance. I recommend highly this short, clear, free pamphlet. It adds some interesting complexity to a TOK treatment of the relationship between justification and belief.
