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August 2021 TOK news letter: For artistic and natural scientists, which is more important: What can be explained or what cannot be explained. Referencing the arts and natural sciences.

One of the articles discussed how how reality can be recreated within books. The article discussed the book "The Plague" which discussed a fictional universe on how the plague swept the city of Oran in a French Algerian setting.  The plague tells the view of this story through the POV of a narrator, but however throughout the book the actual identity of the narrator is not stated. However the unknown narrator does explain the story of the plague within this French Algerian city.

This demonstrates how an unknown entity can   explain certain ideas through being unidentified. "What can be explained or what cannot be"

This TOK question and be related to many theories and situations in real life and how people choose to believe differently. Some religions are based on what cannot be explained, Some natural events as well. However without proper explanation it is still considered valid.

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Does it matter if our acquisition of knowledge happens in “bubbles” where some information and voices are excluded? Discuss with reference to two areas of knowledge.

June 2022 TOK Newsletter Story 1:

What Americans think about abortion, in 3 charts

"Americans’ support of abortion rights in some or all situations — meaning they would disagree with the overturning of Roe v. Wade"

When people take in information regarding this topic, they may take in information in "bubbles" and choose to ignore other information that goes against their point of view

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23167397/abortion-public-opinion-polls-americans

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The US Supreme Court ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade, clearing the way for states to outlaw abortion, goes against majority opinion on ending a pregnancy. Americans overwhelmingly want legal access to abortion, at least in some situations.

But get more specific than that, and the picture is more nuanced. Feelings about specifics are much more varied, and generally include support for some restrictions on when and in what situations the procedure should be performed.

Only 8 percent of adults say abortion should be against the law in all cases, without exception, while just 19 percent say abortion should be legal in all cases, without exception, according to data from Pew Research Center.

Americans' support of abortion rights in some or all situations - meaning they would disagree with the overturning of Roe v. Wade - has been fairly consistent for a long time. Back in 1975, three-quarters of Americans said it should be legal in all (21 percent) or certain (54 percent) circumstances, according to a long-running survey by Gallup. In the ensuing half-century, that number has gone up 10 percentage points to 85 percent, meaning the support has only gotten stronger.

In that sense, abortion, like gun control, is an issue where American policy appears to be at odds with American majority opinions.

But when polled on specifics regarding the situation and timelines, support for abortion is not always as strong.

While Pew found that sizable majorities of Americans said abortion should be legal if a woman's health is at stake (73 percent) or if the pregnancy was a result of rape or incest (69 percent), just over half (54 percent) said it should be legal if the baby was likely to be born with severe disabilities or health issues.

The stage of pregnancy especially affects people's views of abortion. Pew found that in the first six weeks of pregnancy, 51 percent of people said abortion should be generally legal, compared with 26 percent who said it should be illegal. By 24 weeks into a pregnancy, just 29 percent said it should be generally legal while 42 percent said it should be generally illegal.

All along, about a fifth of those polled say that it depends.

All of this, however, might be beside the point, according to Tresa Undem, co-founder of public opinion research firm PerryUndem, which has extensively researched abortion viewpoints.

"You can't take any single polling question at face value because you just dig a centimeter beneath the surface and you get data that's conflicting," Undem said. "If they're not doing qualitative research, they're not listening to people."

Polling that asks people whether they're for or against abortion or what their opinions are on particular gestational limits runs up against the fact that most people don't spend a lot of time thinking through their opinions on abortion nor do they understand a lot about it, she said. A series of polls by YouGov found that Americans don't know much about abortions in general, like when abortions are typically performed (in the first six weeks), who gets them (people with kids), and how prevalent they are (42 percent of unplanned pregnancies end in abortion). The number of abortions in the US jumped 8 percent from 2017 to 2020, after decades of decline.

Surface-level answers about abortion don't always get at what people really think.

When PerryUndem asked the binary question of whether abortion should generally be legal or illegal in the second three months of pregnancy, a majority, 57 percent of voters, said it should be illegal. But when it asked more qualitative follow-ups about their viewpoints, a third of those who said it should be illegal also said they'd prefer their state lawmakers stay out of this issue. Additionally, when asked something more personal - what Americans want the experience to be like for a woman who has chosen to have an abortion - the vast majority said they want abortion to be safe (95 percent), legal (85 percent), and without protesters (83 percent).

Overall, Undem said, such broad-based polling makes people's opinions on abortion seem more politicized and contentious than they are, though the issue does often fall on partisan lines.

"It's hard to understand through polling, but basically, in all the work I've done - qualitative focus groups, in-depth interviews, surveys - the bottom line is that the public wants people making these decisions around abortion, not the government," she said.

And high-level polling also can eclipse changes that might be going on below the surface.

In May, 55 percent of Americans identified as "pro-choice," the highest level who've done so since 1995, according to Gallup. Part of that could have to do with the fact that Gen Z is substantively more likely to support abortion rights than older generations were at their age, according to Mary Ziegler, a law professor at UC Davis and author of the upcoming book Dollars for Life: The Anti-Abortion Movement and the Fall of the Republican Establishment. The changing identification also might reflect the changing realities people are living in, rather than changing viewpoints, she said.

"It's likely that what states are doing now is too much for people," Ziegler said. "People who might be totally fine with waiting periods and mandatory ultrasounds are looking at this and saying, 'Sending people to jail if they have an abortion or if they perform an abortion at seven weeks gestation is not something I'm really interested in.'"

Perhaps unsurprisingly, people who identify as for or against abortion rights tend to have vastly different ideas about issues like adoption, murder, and bodily autonomy, according to polling by YouGov. Some 90 percent of those who say they are "pro-choice" believe forcing someone into an unwanted pregnancy infringes on their bodily autonomy; the same percentage of people who identify as "pro-life" believe abortion is the same as murdering a child.

Undem also sees abortion as moving from an issue of women's rights to a broader issue of power and control, and who has a voice in this country.

"They think power is consolidated into a small handful of people of a particular view that represents the minority and this is just one thing. It's a big thing, but they see it as part of this larger issue," Undem said, that includes things like voting rights and democracy. "Everything's changing, going backward, for the negative, and it's almost like people are just feeling loss."
Update, 10:40 am: Will you support Vox's explanatory journalism? This story was updated to reflect the Supreme Court decision.
Most news outlets make their money through advertising or subscriptions. But when it comes to what we're trying to do at Vox, there are a couple reasons that we can't rely only on ads and subscriptions to keep the lights on.

First, advertising dollars go up and down with the economy. We often only know a few months out what our advertising revenue will be, which makes it hard to plan ahead.

Second, we're not in the subscriptions business. Vox is here to help everyone understand the complex issues shaping the world - not just the people who can afford to pay for a subscription. We believe that's an important part of building a more equal society. We can't do that if we have a paywall.

That's why we also turn to you, our readers, to help us keep Vox free. If you also believe that everyone deserves access to trusted high-quality information, will you make a gift to Vox today?

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What Americans think about abortion, in 3 charts

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Americans overwhelmingly support abortion rights, but vary on the specifics.

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Is replicability necessary in the production of knowledge? Discuss with reference to 2 areas of knowledge

August 2021 TOK Newsletter - 'Contact Languages' Don't Get The Respect They Deserve

“Today, many of these contact languages are lost. Only 200 or so remain—and scores are at risk of extinction.”

The article speaks about a dying tongue, a language that is forged when people from different cultures meet. The language is not replicable as it is impromptu, which relates back to my first TOK title as the production of knowledge (in this case being the language) is restricted because of its replicability.

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For artists and natural scientists, which is more important: what can be explained or what cannot be explained? Discuss with reference to the arts and the natural sciences.

June 2022 TOK Newsletter Story 10:

Pablo Picasso was not a lone genius creator – he was at the centre of several creative hubs, and changed the course of western art

Just like the title, the article talks about how the famous artist, Pablo Picasso, known as 'lone genius', created and changed the course of Western art. Abstract art may be explainable, but most of the time they are not, because they don't have to be. Abstract art doesn't necessary need a meaning to the artwork, it could just be how they are feeling and a way to express their feelings. Pablo Picasso is one of the most famous abstract artist.

"Some people may not like the phallocentric persona of Picasso but he did effectively change the course of western art and, in the process, changed the way in which we see the world."

"Picasso affected the art of his friends and contemporaries, as well as that of those who never met him.

Although Apollinaire described him as achieving a revolution in the arts “almost unaided” and for Stein “Picasso stood apart”, in reality Picasso also reflected the cultural and intellectual milieu that surrounded him."

https://theconversation.com/pablo-picasso-was-not-a-lone-genius-creator-he-was-at-the-centre-of-several-creative-hubs-and-changed-the-course-of-western-art-181329

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Pablo Picasso, Spanish 1881-1973. Figures by the sea (Figures au bord de la mer) 12 January 193, oil on canvas 130.0 x 195.0 cm. Musée national Picasso-Paris Donated in lieu of tax, 1979. © Succession Picasso/Copyright Agency, 2022 Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée national Picasso-Paris) / Mathieu Rabeau

Review: Melbourne Winter Masterpieces exhibition 2022: The Picasso Century, NGV International.

The Picasso Century exhibition presents Picasso as we have never seen him before.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) is not presented as the lone genius creator - a mythology promoted by the artist himself - but as being at the centre of several creative hubs. He was surrounded by groups of brilliant creative men and women and his influence was a powerful presence for the whole 20th century.

In his life, Picasso rarely acknowledged his creative collaborators, this exhibition sets out to redress this omission.

The great French poet, critic and art collector Guillaume Apollinaire, wrote of his friend Picasso:

His insistence of the pursuit of beauty has changed everything in art [...] The great revolution of the arts, which he has achieved almost unaided, was to make the world his new representation of it.

Leo Stein, another of Picasso's friends and patrons, when writing on the rivalry between Picasso and Matisse observed:

Matisse saw himself in relation to others and Picasso stood apart, alone. He recognised others, of course, but as belonging to another system, there was no fusion.

Some people may not like the phallocentric persona of Picasso but he did effectively change the course of western art and, in the process, changed the way in which we see the world.

Picasso and his contemporaries

Picasso affected the art of his friends and contemporaries, as well as that of those who never met him.

Although Apollinaire described him as achieving a revolution in the arts "almost unaided" and for Stein "Picasso stood apart", in reality Picasso also reflected the cultural and intellectual milieu that surrounded him.

This very ambitious multifaceted exhibition sets out to define "Picasso's voice" during his long career through a selection of over 80 of his works, many quite major and never previously seen in this country. It also investigates his interactions with his surrounding cultural milieu.

The Picasso paintings, graphics, sculptures and ceramics are accompanied by about 100 works by more than 50 of his contemporaries to create a context through which his significance can be assessed.

Apart from Apollinaire, the contemporaries considered include Georges Braque, Salvador Dalí, Alberto Giacometti, André Masson, Juan Gris, Henri Matisse, Dorothea Tanning, Natalia Goncharova, Julio González, Wifredo Lam, Suzanne Valadon and Joan Miró.

A large, curious and little-known painting hanging near the entrance of the exhibition, Marie Laurencin's Apollinaire and his friends (2nd version) (1909) from the Centre Pompidou.

The painting shows Apollinaire with Picasso looking over his shoulder and surrounded by a number of figures including Gertrude Stein, Fernande Olivier, Marguerite Gillot, Maurice Cremnitz as well as Laurencin herself in the foreground in a pale blue dress. Stein, on the left, appears in the role of one of the three inspirational graces or Muses.

Apollinaire admired this painting and had it positioned over the head of his bed for much of his life.

Picasso was to paint portraits of many in this grouping, including that of Apollinaire who was amongst the first to recognise the significance of cubism and collected Picasso's work. Picasso was to refer to Apollinaire in jest as "the pope of cubism".

Traversing artistic eras

In the exhibition, there are a number of iconic Picasso paintings, including his Portrait of a man (1902-03), a classic work from his so-called " blue period ".

It is a brooding and introspective image where the tone defined an epoch.

Dated a few year later is the memorable Mother and child oil painting from the summer of 1907 that already speaks of primitivism and the radical formal transformation evident in the Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) that was to become a defining moment in the course of western art.

The exhibition has a number of significant cubist paintings, Picasso's The violin (1914) and Georges Braque's Woman with a guitar (1913) both from the collection of the Centre Pompidou.

This chronologically is followed by the artist's return to order with neoclassicism with Picasso's stunning portrait of his wife Olga (1918).

Surrealism, at least in part a response to the violence of the 1930s, is particularly well represented in this exhibition with numerous examples from the artist and his contemporaries as well as a section on Picasso's political engagement when, as a member of the communist party, he stood up to fascism and later to US imperialism in all of its guises.

Read more: Surrealists at Sea: Dušan and Voitre Marek finally receive their place in the pantheon of Australian surrealism

A remarkable exhibition

This is a huge exhibition of over 180 pieces that explores neat niches, such as Picasso's engagement with sculpture in the context of González and Giacometti, or his excursion into ceramics, as well as his mainstream developments.

Whereas in many exhibitions one despairs over padding with inferior and irrelevant pieces, here the works have been carefully selected and are frequently of exceptional calibre. For example, the wondrous Pierre Bonnard Self-portrait in the bathroom mirror (1939-45), or the Francis Bacon Picasso inspired painted heads.

The exhibition was curated over about a decade by Didier Ottinger, deputy director of the Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris and is a triumph of visual intelligence.

No matter how well you think you know Picasso and the collections of the Centre Pompidou and the Musée national Picasso-Paris, in this exhibition you are guaranteed to be surprised, amazed and delighted.

The Picasso Century is a remarkable exhibition that may change the way you will view Picasso.
The Picasso Century is on at the NGV International until October 9.

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Pablo Picasso was not a lone genius creator - he was at the centre of several creative hubs, and changed the course of western art

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Review: Melbourne Winter Masterpieces exhibition 2022: The Picasso Century, NGV International. The Picasso Century exhibition presents Picasso as we have never seen him before. Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) is not presented as the lone genius creator - a mythology promoted by the artist himself - but as being at the centre of several creative hubs.

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Are visual representations always helpful in the communication of knowledge? Discuss with reference to the human science and mathematics.

April 2022 TOK Newsletter - I’m a climate scientist. Don’t Look Up captures the madness I see every day

The article talks about the use of carbon labeling in trying to promote better life style..

“We know that a very significant portion of the population has shifted their diet, or tried to shift their diet in the last 12 to 18 months in order to become more sustainable.” - Helpful as persuaded more people to be more sustainable, psychology

https://ig.ft.com/carbon-food-labelling/

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Are visual representations always helpful in the communication of knowledge? Discuss with reference to the human science and mathematics.

April 2022 TOK Newsletter - Serious Life Implications

“The viewers who devour these shows serve on juries and interpret evidence on the basis of what they think they know.” This can affect society in a bad way. For example, politicians can pass the tough-on-crime laws using the public fear which serves no social nor individual well-being, according to the article.

relates to human science to certain extent (how this misconception due to false representation affects politics)

https://slate.com/technology/2022/04/psychopaths-pop-culture-treatment-misunderstood.html

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What We Get Dangerously Wrong About Psychopaths

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A rational, compassionate look at the personality disorder.

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December 2021 TOK Newsletter -

This legendary 92-year-old biologist has some advice for saving Earth

For artists and natural scientists, which is more important: what can be explained or what cannot be explained? Discuss with reference to the arts and the natural sciences.

"A rough estimate suggests that there are upward of 10 million species on the planet, and we know only a small fraction of them. In most cases, we just have a few specimens in museums. It would be enormously productive and useful if we made more of an effort to identify all of the species on Earth — to find out where they are and what their status is."

This shows how for the natural sciences we know very little about the environment which these undiscovered species live in. Which then means that it would be that some of our assumptions or things about the environment and ecosystem can only be explained with the idea of vitalism, which is essentially not explaining anything.

https://www.vox.com/down-to-earth/2021/12/2/22810857/eo-wilson-ants-half-earth-conservation

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Does it matter if our acquisition of knowledge happens in “bubbles” where some information and voices are excluded?

September 2021 TOK Newsletter - Risk Analysis (National Geographic)

The article analyzes the different ways in which people assess the risks associated with the Covid pandemic. Some of the factors that influence the process of risk analysis include optimistic bias and intuition thinking.

Optimistic bias: “bias that makes individuals feel like they are somehow exempted from the potential consequences”.

People are tend to go with their intuition or experiential thinking- require less energy

Demonstrates how people tend to exclude or ignore some prior knowledge when dealing with problems or new information.

Related to selective perception + ostrich effect- ‘bubbles’

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Struggling to assess pandemic risks? You’re not alone.

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Lots of psychological factors influence individual responses to danger, as well as our willingness to make less risky decisions.

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Does it matter if our acquisition of knowledge happens in “bubbles” where some information and voices are excluded?

September 2021 TOK Newsletter - Language imperialism - how dubbing in films are used as censorship and to manipulate audiences

"Early 1930s Italy, Mussolini’s fascists manipulated foreign films during the dubbing process by altering or removing dialogue that contained any unflattering comments about the Italians. The films were also insisted to be dubbed in national Italian to prevent foreign words from entering their national language. Dubbing became a key nationalist tool that could unify and isolate Italy at a fundamental socio-cultural level."

Demonstrates how people in "bubbles" are oblivious to certain pieces of knowledge. For example, the Italian people in 1930 were limited to only positive knowledge about Italy. Which would have affected their ability to make a balanced judgement about their country's fascist regime/system.

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English-speaking audiences rarely come across dubbed films and television programmes. This probably explains why they tend to find dubbing so, well, weird. Dubbed voices usually sound a bit flat and never quite sync up with the mouths we see onscreen. This can be off-putting and perhaps even a bit unsettling.

But since the birth of sound cinema in the late 1920s and 1930s, dubbing has been commonplace in many countries, including (looking just at Europe) Italy, Spain and Germany. Dubbing is still used in many of these countries as a way of translating foreign films and television. In Italy, the dubbing system became so developed in the 1930s that it was even used to add voices to Italian films, right up until the 1980s when the growth of TV (which used directly recorded sound) led to changes in standard industry practice.

So why did such a seemingly bizarre practice gain a foothold in these countries' burgeoning film industries? After all, aren't subtitles a better way to keep the original film intact and translate it at the same time? There are a few reasons.

Nationalist voices

In the early 20th century, much of Europe's film-going population had low literacy levels. Subtitles are useless if you can't read them (or read them fast enough). There's also the argument that subtitles ruin a film's images and keep the viewer's eyes glued to the bottom of the screen. However, perhaps the most important reason for dubbing's favour was political.

Dubbing is a brilliant tool for film censorship. Sound films began to appear in the early 1930s, a time when many countries were falling under the sway of totalitarian regimes. In Europe, these included those of Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco and the Nazis. Censorship had been a feature of film production and distribution in Italy, Spain and Germany since before these dictatorships took power, but it increased markedly after they did so.

Italy and Spain, in particular, found dubbing ideologically useful. Mussolini's Fascists, for example, manipulated foreign films during the dubbing process by changing dialogue to remove any unflattering reference to Italy or Italians. They also used dubbing to alter morally undesirable elements of film plots. For example, the Italian dub of the 1931 American film Men in Her Life was altered to remove a reference to Mussolini.

Perhaps even more nefariously, they also insisted that films be dubbed into standardised national Italian (the official form of the language that was generally understood around the country). This was an effort to stop people in different regions from speaking local dialects and minority languages, and to prevent foreign words from entering Italian culture. Dubbing became a key nationalist tool that could unify and isolate Italy at a fundamental socio-cultural level.

The same story played out in Franco's Spain where dubbing kept films ideologically acceptable and marginalised minority languages like Catalan, Basque and Galician. In post-Nazi Germany, dubbing was used to alter film dialogue to play down references to the country's Nazi past and the atrocities it entailed. For example, the Nazis in Alfred Hitchcock's 1946 Notorious were rebranded as generic drug smugglers.

International voices?

In the post-second world war period, western Europe (with the exception of Spain) broke free of totalitarianism and literacy began to increase, but dubbing remained. This was partly because it had become an established and familiar habit. But dubbing had also become vital to the system of co-production, which European cinema was increasingly reliant upon. Co-production basically involved two (or more) production companies in different countries teaming up and making a film together. It was popular with producers as it meant they could pool resources and access grants and tax relief from multiple governments.

Like censorship, co-production had been around since the early days of commercial cinema. It was (and still is) a key initiative that allowed relatively small European countries to team up and push back against the ever-growing domination of Hollywood imports. Again, dubbing was crucial here as these co-produced films usually featured casts from several countries.

Dubbing meant that each actor could act in the language of their choosing on-set (if you watch an old dubbed film closely, you can often tell that actors are speaking different languages. Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is a clear example of this practice). The films were shot without sound and a range of different dubs in different languages were produced in post-production, using various teams of voice actors.

Many film directors hated this system, seeing dubbing as a way of erasing films' national origins. And some claimed it was part of a wider political drive to homogenise Europe (NATO and the Common Market were also driving European integration at this time). In other words, totalitarianism may have waned, but for many dubbing was still a political tool.

Dubbing is still used as a key method of audio-visual translation in many countries and it still attracts politicised debates. For example, the film market in French-speaking Canada has argued that dubs produced in European French are not appropriate for that territory. Dubbing frequently and unsurprisingly ends up at the centre of debates around the politics of language and cultural imperialism, the imposition of one country's culture onto another country or people.

What the political history of dubbing tells us is that even seemingly minor, technical or banal elements of film and television production can serve very concrete and significant political ends. In a world increasingly saturated with audio-visual media, we should take this lesson seriously.

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The political history of dubbing in films

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Governments could use dubbing to censor ideas they didn't like or insert messages in line with their propaganda.

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For artists and natural scientists, which is more important: what can be explained or what cannot be explained? Discuss with reference to the arts and the natural sciences.

March 2022 TOK Newsletter - Ukraine: Watching the war on Russian TV- a whole different story

- It shows a point about telling what can be explained and what cannot be explained. The article presents social media footage and photos about the Russia- Ukraine War. The footage continues to be circulated on the internet which cannot be described as anything but fake.

-Example=The independent TV channel Dozhd and popular liberal radio station Ekho Moskvy have been blocked for alleged calls for violence, and the "systematic spread of false information about the activities of the Russian military". They were stopped because they spread out information that shouldn't be explained to the public.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60571737

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Is replicability necessary in the production of knowledge? Discuss regarding 2 areas of knowledge.

February 2022 TOK Newsletter - Four Russian false flags that are comically easy to debunk

False Flags - an act committed with the intent of disguising the actual source of responsibility and pinning blame on another party.

MetaData - a set of data that analyses and gives information on other pieces of data

"Analysts are poring over video footage of purported standoffs and attacks as Europe teeters on the edge of war - all of them devised to create confusion and doubt and ultimately paint Ukraine as the aggressor. "

You can infer that the initial thought of these videos was that Ukraine was the aggressor and that everything started because of them but with further analyzation of these videos, the US and Britain believe that these are just Russian False flags painting Ukraine as the antagonist.

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On Friday, bomb squads were seen in the Donbas region in footage released by the Luhansk People's Republic.

The clip shows a military vehicle as it tows a car allegedly packed with explosives away from a bridge, where it was threatening evacuating citizens along the Lugansk-Izvarino highway.

"An hour after finding a car with an explosive, a train was supposed to pass along the railway overpass, delivering evacuated women and children to the Russian Federation," the LPR Ministry of State Security said in a publication.

Researchers have found that not all is as it seems.

They have looked into the video's metadata, which is used to learn information about a specific video and is either embedded directly into the video or included as a separate file.

It can be uncovered from clips like the one recorded in Donbas, showing key markers like when and where the video was recorded.

Metadata taken from the clip released by the Luhansk People's Republic contradicts their claims: it was created on June 12, 2019, at 20.21pm.

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Four Russian false flags that are comically easy to debunk

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On Friday, bomb squads were seen in the Donbas region in footage released by the Luhansk People's Republic. The clip shows a military vehicle as it tows a car allegedly packed with explosives away from a bridge, where it was threatening evacuating citizens along the Lugansk-Izvarino highway.

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Does it matter if our acquisition of knowledge happens in "bubbles" where some information and voices are excluded? Discuss with reference to two areas of knowledge.

"The film “Fight Club” on the Chinese video streaming service had an alternative ending. The censored version removed the bomb explosions in the movie’s final scene, replacing it with a black screen with text noting that police were able to prevent the anarchists’ plan."

This is a representation of how some knowledge/message that was meant to be shared has been ignored/excluded.

From Economics (Human science), when the government tries to collect data, some information/outliers are excluded to better represent an AVERAGE.
Specifically, in economics, the measurement of Inflation rate is measured through the usage of "Basket" where it measures the daily products consumed by an average household. During this process, some outliers are excluded in order to simplify the data to come up with conclusions.

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Fight Club Author 'Praises' China's New Movie Ending

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Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club, has given his view on China's decision to change the ending of the movie for streaming in the country. author Chuck Palahniuk has praised China for the new ending it created for the movie after it was censored for its streaming release in the country.

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Are visual representations always helpful in the communication of knowledge? Discuss with reference to the human science and mathematics.

January 2022 TOK Newsletter

More than a thousand words

Graphics of the year — making sense of 2021

“Graphics have a language as rich and expressive as the written word. Those selected here by the FTData team, from the thousands produced in 2021, might variously inspire feelings of awe, admiration, shock and fear" Alan Smith, head of visual and data journalism

Demonstrates the importance of visual representations when showing statistics. These graphics or visual representations can allow the reader to link the article with their own experience and thoughts.

https://www.ft.com/content/f0bb8405-7502-4503-918a-02598463a422

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Shows the different narrative of history where Ukrainian history is rewritten and neglected by the Russians.

relate back to prompt on the "bubbles" as the Ukrainian's version of history is excluded in the narrative of russian/ukrainian history

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Not long ago, looking for a short history of Ukraine in a central London bookstore, I was offered the following memorable advice: 'Look under Russia'.

I did. And between shelves groaning with the glories of Russian history, from the love affairs of Catherine the Great to the crimes of Joseph Stalin, I found two thin volumes on Ukraine, a country of some 46 million people. One was decorated with an impressionistic painting of the 2004 Orange Revolution. I bought both. I doubt very much they were immediately replaced.

'Looking under Russia' is, perhaps, an appropriate metaphor for Ukrainian history.

Since the Pereiaslav/Pereyaslav treaty of 1654, Ukraine has only enjoyed statehood independent from Russia at moments of extreme geopolitical dislocation, such as in the final days of the First World War, in the wake of the Russian Revolution of 1917. Russian nationalists today appear to view Ukrainian independence as a similar aberration, the consequence of what Vladimir Putin labelled the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century: the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Old habits die hard. For many Russians, Ukraine is like a phantom limb still felt to be there long after its amputation. The idea that Ukraine is really a nation at all strikes some Russians as odd. To the extent that perceptions of history condition politics, understanding the Russian view of Ukrainian history - and the Ukrainian view of Ukrainian history - is essential.

Though wrong, the idea that Ukrainian history is really just an annex of the sumptuous many-roomed mansion of Russian history is common. To some degree it is understandable. Ukraine and Russia have shared triumph and tragedy from the birth of Kyivan/Kievan Rus (the first proto-Russian state) through the wars against the Poles in the 17th century to bloody struggle against fascism in the 20th.

Shared beliefs

The historical links between the two countries, ancient and modern, are manifold and profound. The Orthodox churches of Ukraine and Russia share a patron saint - St. Vladmir or St. Volodmyr - whose statue (spelt the Ukrainian way) stands proudly on a street corner in west London. On the edge of Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, a huge concrete museum complex inaugurated in the early 1980s commemorates the Great Patriotic War (1941-45). Outside, a silvery figure of a woman, 200 feet tall, holds a sword aloft in one hand, and a shield with the emblem of the Soviet Union in the other. This is a memorial to shared sacrifice - eight million Ukrainians died in the war - and a shared victory. Seventy years after the end of the war, and nearly a quarter century after the collapse of the Soviet Union, such narratives are still powerful.

For a long time, Russians saw Ukrainians as being little more than country bumpkin relatives. Theories of Slavic ethnogenesis described the two peoples as siblings born of the same Slavic womb: the 'Great Russians' (Russians) on one hand and the 'Little Russians' (Ukrainians) on the other. Ukrainian literature, which began to emerge in the 19th century, was patronisingly viewed as the picturesque product of a peasant society, essentially subordinate to Russia's own literary canon, even when it produced such great poets as Taras Shevchenko. The fact that the flowering of Ukrainian national culture was strongest in western Ukraine, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, made some Russians dismiss the whole thing as an anti-Russian ruse sponsored by external forces, a familiar refrain to those heard today.

In the Soviet period the idea of Ukrainian nationhood was viewed with similar suspicion, now additionally freighted with suggestions it was intrinsically counter-revolutionary. In April 1918, as Russia imploded in revolution, a conservative German-backed regime was set up in Kyiv. Its leader Pavlo Skoropadsky revived the title of Hetman, an ancient Cossack military title last held by a man who had died aged 112 in 1803, in a remote Russian monastery which the Soviets would subsequently turn into a gulag. Later, in the Great Patriotic War, some Ukrainians signed up with the Germans to fight the Soviets - some even joined the SS. Nationalist anti-Soviet actions continued into the 1950s - providing the basis in historical memory for the contemporary lumping together of even moderate Ukrainian nationalists with right-wing extremists as 'fascists' and 'bandits'.

In the Soviet era Ukrainian national identity was never completely subsumed into Russian or Soviet identity. Sometimes this could be useful to the Soviet state. In 1939, when Galicia, Volhynia and Bukovyna were annexed to Soviet Ukraine as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and Stalin's co-invasion of Poland, the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet sent this message to Stalin: 'Having been divided, having been separated for centuries by artificial borders, the great Ukrainian people are reunited forever in a single Ukrainian republic'. In 1945, professions that Ukraine was not a Soviet vassal but in fact an independent Communist state allowed Ukraine to join the United Nations as a founder member alongside the USSR, thus giving Moscow an extra vote in UN proceedings.

Defining borders

The process through which the borders of modern Ukraine were defined, both in the west and on the Black Sea, was part and parcel of Russia's own headlong expansion through three centuries of Eurasian history. In the 1700s and 1800s, as the Russian geopolitical imagination became obsessed with the idea of turning the Black Sea into a Russian lake - perhaps even going so far as to seize control of Constantinople/Istanbul - the Ottoman Empire was bloodily and repeatedly pushed back from its redoubts on the northern side of the Black Sea. The Ukrainian provinces were the territorial beneficiaries. The country became ever more tightly integrated into the economics and politics of the growing Russian empire, serving as its breadbasket, and as its route to the sea.

At the end of the 18th century, German-born Catherine the Great founded the port of Odessa - and its hinterland of New Russia - with the help of a Spanish-Irish Neapolitan and, later, a French aristocrat. The city filled with Greeks, Bulgarians and Jews. Pushkin was sent there as punishment, and promptly started an affair with the wife of the city's Russian governor. Among countless others, Odessa would ultimately produce Trotsky and Akhmatova, two titans of Russian politics and culture, before becoming the site of some of the worst massacres of the Holocaust.

Further east, through war, colonisation and the ethnic cleansing of its Muslim population, Crimea, the last remnant of the Mongol Golden Horde, was turned into the finest jewel in the Russian Empire. As proverbial pleasure garden for late imperial flings (as recounted by Anton Chekhov), then fantasy holiday camp for Soviet factory managers and key to Russia's southern flank (as base of the Black Sea fleet) Crimea became firmly embedded in Russians' psychological geography as their own private playground. Less than a century after the Tsars had conquered it, Stalin chose Crimea as the place to redraw the map of Europe once more in 1945.

Nine years later, when former Ukrainian party boss Khrushchev transferred Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR in celebration of the 300th anniversary of the Pereiaslav/Pereyslav treaty, there was no thought that the internal borders of the Soviet Union would ever become international borders. It was only in 1991, as a result of an attempted coup (which took place, ironically enough, while Mikhail Gorbachev was on holiday in Crimea) that the peninsula spun out of the ultimate control of Moscow, with the Soviet superstructure itself being legislated out of existence.

The idea that Crimea became part of an independent Ukraine essentially by accident is gospel truth among Russian politicians. It is but a short step to view Ukrainian possession of Crimea as historically illegitimate. And therein lies the beginnings of a dangerous game. What happens next? Perhaps Ukrainian independence itself, or that of the Baltic states, is equally seen as the consequence of a set of historical circumstances which some might now like to reverse.

A Ukrainian narrative

Where does a concern for history shade into revanchism? And how far does one's historical perspective extend back into the past? Visions of the Crimea as eternally Russian wilfully forget the Muslim population which Russian and then Soviet power displaced and deported - sometimes violently, always tragically, and with little historical recognition. As late as the turn of the last century, before the cataclysms of the 20th, the Crimean Tatars represented nearly half the people of Crimea. Khrushchev recognised the deportation of the Tatars as one of Stalin's crimes in his famous 1956 speech to the 20th Party Congress. It was not until the 1990s that many were able to come back.

Russia's version of Ukrainian history, wrapped up in its own narrative of imperial rise and fall, from the Romanovs to the Soviets, helps explain Moscow's attitude towards its southern neighbour - not in terms of objective interests, though these are real enough, but in terms of emotion, in terms of who is right and who is wrong. What makes things truly bad, from the Russian perspective, is that Ukrainians by and large no longer share the Russian interpretation of their history. The past looks different these days from Kyiv (still more from Lviv). Instead of Ukrainians cherishing their supporting role in Russia's geopolitical greatness - which essentially means the power and prestige of the state - Ukrainians have come to cherish alternative narratives of their history, based around freedom and resistance. Rediscovering their past has been a critical part of asserting Ukrainian independence. Accepting the possibility of multiple histories, not just one, is a hallmark of democracy.

Episodes once viewed as the historical glue of the Russo-Ukrainian relationship have become contested. While Russians tend to see the Pereislav/Pereyaslav treaty of 1654 as a moment of reunification for the Russian and Ukrainian peoples, many Ukrainians see the same treaty as a temporary alliance between military leaders which the Russians subsequently interpreted to their advantage. In 2009, on the 300th anniversary of the Battle of Poltava - perhaps the most important battle in Russia's 18th century history - then-President of Ukraine Viktor Yushchenko was blasted by Russia for suggesting that the Ukrainians who fought with the Swedes against the victorious forces of Russian Tsar Peter the Great were true patriots.

Similarly, while the famines of the early 20th century used to be viewed as a common experience of Soviet suffering, even as part of the forging of the Soviet industrial miracle, some now argue that the famines were, in effect, a Moscow-led assault on Ukrainians in particular. Some go so far as to suggest genocidal intent. The incorporation of western Ukraine into the Soviet Union in 1939 can still be seen in its traditional light: as the re-unification of the Ukraine under Soviet leadership. But for the old aged pensioners of Lviv - and increasingly for their grandchildren - it may be remembered as the beginning of a 50-year Russian occupation. And while Ukrainian nationalists in the Great Patriotic War used to be roundly condemned as nothing more than opportunistic, antisemitic fascist lowlifes - which some of them no doubt were - more savoury elements may now be rehabilitated, as in the modern Baltic states, as patriots caught in a vice between the equivalent totalitarianisms of Nazism and Communism. Some Ukrainians make what is, for many Russians, a sacrilegious parallel: Putin as Hitler.

For both Russians and Ukrainians, the interpretation of Ukrainian history is personal. As in all borderlands, the contradictions and complexities of the tangled past are reproduced over and over in the stories of families and in the identities of individuals. For the governments in Moscow and in Kyiv, history is political too. Narratives of the past can be spun to justify, oppose or defend different courses of action in the present. History can be a tool of influence - a tool of long-term psychological warfare even - used to manipulate the here-and-now, to give added emotional resonance to geopolitical imperatives or to claims of political legitimacy.

Bluntly put, history can be a kind of territory. In Ukraine, it is not just the country's land which is being tussled over. It is the country's past as well. If Russia and Ukraine are to live as respectful neighbours side by side, they will have to find a way to live with each other's history too.

Charles Emmerson is the author of Crucible: The Long End of the Great War and the Birth of a New World, 1917-1924 (Bodley Head, 2019).

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Not long ago, looking for a short history of Ukraine in a central London bookstore, I was offered the following memorable advice: 'Look under Russia'. I did. And between shelves groaning with the glories of Russian history, from the love affairs of Catherine the Great to the crimes of Joseph Stalin, I found two thin volumes on Ukraine, a country of some 46 million people.

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1) I used to think that TOK would involve a great deal more philosophy: big thinkers but the old, classic ones from a really long time ago. I now know that it's way more geared towards the current and ongoing ways that knowledge is created but also changing. It lets us see that knowledge isn't a fixed concept, but is constantly evolving.
2) First, Mr. Crossley recommended it. Second: “If I could give each of you a graduation present, it would be this—the most inspiring book I’ve ever read.” —Bill Gates... I mean, come on.

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1) To be honest, when going into the first lesson of TOK, I wasn’t really sure what to expect. I just thought that it was just another part of IB that I have to do to get my diploma. However, as we get deeper into the course, I realized that it was more than that. This course requires us to think critically and creatively, it really helps me question what I've learned more often, and allows for self-reflection.

2) I found this book interesting as it explores "knowing how we know" and centers around scientific concepts about us.

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1) I used to think TOK was just like any other subject where there are right and wrong answers and you're meant to know them but now I realize it's nothing like that. The subject is entirely based on perception and how one views a certain topic. There aren't wrong answers as there isn't a definitive way to see something.

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1) I used to think of TOK as a course that is very far from our lives. However, now I know that TOK is closely related to our lives. Not only does it relate to specific academic courses but it also relates to what we see apart from them.

2) This book interests me as I think it relates to lots of global issues that are present these days.

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1) Discuss what you used to think TOK was vs. what you know about TOK now.
2) Choose and commit to reading one TOK-related book this summer.
- Use the cover as your image
- Why does this book interest you?

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Alfred Wegener’s contemporaries rejected his theory of continental drift because it challenged many established scientific theories at the time, and he lacked a compelling explanation for the cause of continental drift. Wegener believed that continental drift was the result of centrifugal force and tidal attraction, but the scientific community found the argument weak.

He argued that Pangaea (a single supercontinent) was originally located near the south pole and that centrifugal force and tidal pull caused the continent to break up and drift apart. Scientists quickly rejected this explanation, stating that these two forces were not strong enough to cause continental drift.

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Alfred Wegener's contemporaries rejected his theory of continental drift because it challenged many established scientific theories at the time, and he lacked a compelling explanation for the cause of continental drift. Wegener believed that continental drift was the result of centrifugal force and tidal attraction, but the scientific community found the argument weak.

Wegener was a German scientist who was one of the first academics to suggest the theory of continental drift. He believed that the Earth once consisted of a single supercontinent called "Pangaea," which broke up and drifted to form the continents that exist in the present day. He based his theory on the fact that the African and South American coastlines fit together, contain many of the same fossils and share many similarities in geological specimens. His book, "The Origin of Continents and Oceans," was published in 1912.

Other scientists at the time had observed the similarities in fossils in South America and Africa. However, many embraced the idea that these were the result of a land bridge between the two continents. In addition, Wegener's explanation for continental drift was weak. He argued that Pangaea was originally located near the south pole and that centrifugal force and tidal pull caused the continent to break up and drift apart. Scientists quickly rejected this explanation, stating that these two forces were not strong enough to cause continental drift.

Although modern scientists continue to reject Wegener's explanation for continental drift, the theory of drifting continents has gained wide acceptance in the scientific community. Discoveries in the 1950s provided evidence for paleomagnetism, suggesting that continents do move. The modern theories of plate tectonics and continental drift argue that large plates carry continents and the ocean floor, and that these plates move.

MORE FROM REFERENCE.COM

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Why Was Alfred Wegener's Continental Drift Theory Rejected?

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Alfred Wegener's contemporaries rejected his theory of continental drift because it challenged many established scientific theories at the time, and he lacked a compelling explanation for the cause of continental drift. Wegener believed that continental drift was the result of centrifugal force and tidal attraction, but the scientific community found the argument weak.

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https://retractionwatch.com/2014/11/25/publisher-discovers-50-papers-accepted-based-on-fake-peer-reviews/
"Most of the cases were not published because they were discovered by a manuscript editor on a final pre-publication check. The five or so that have been published will go through some sort of re-review, which may result in expressions of concern or retraction.

The narrative seems similar to that in the growing number of cases of peer review manipulation we’ve seen recently. What tipped off the editor was minor spelling mistakes in the reviewers’ names, and odd non-institutional email addresses that were often changed once reviews had been submitted, in an apparent attempt to cover the fakers’ tracks. Those “reviewers” had turned in reports across several journals, spanning several subjects."

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BioMed Central has uncovered about fifty manuscripts in their editorial system that involved fake peer reviewers, Retraction Watch has learned.

Most of the cases were not published because they were discovered by a manuscript editor on a final pre-publication check. The five or so that have been published will go through some sort of re-review, which may result in expressions of concern or retraction.

The narrative seems similar to that in the growing number of cases of peer review manipulation we've seen recently. What tipped off the editor was minor spelling mistakes in the reviewers' names, and odd non-institutional email addresses that were often changed once reviews had been submitted, in an apparent attempt to cover the fakers' tracks. Those "reviewers" had turned in reports across several journals, spanning several subjects.

It would seem that a third party, perhaps marketing services helping authors have papers accepted, was involved.

The publisher has let all of its external editors in chief know about the situation. To prevent it from happening again, authors will not be able to recommend reviewers for their papers. Here's a message from BioMed Central senior managing editor Diana Marshall that went out to a number of journal editors earlier today:

We need to inform you of a situation that has come to light on several journals involving potentially fake peer reviewers.

When completing final editorial checks on a manuscript an in-house Editor spotted irregularities in reviewer reports from author-suggested reviewers. Further investigation suggests that the reviewers have been fabricated. By searching systematically across our systems we have uncovered a number of cases of these potentially fake peer reviewers returning reports across several journals including a number in the BMC series.

There doesn't seem to be an obvious link between the authors as they are different in each case. We are concerned that a third party is involved, possibly supplying the names of fake reviewers to authors to influence the peer review process. While we investigate further we will temporarily switch off the functionality which allows authors to suggest potential peer reviewers directly into our workflows. This change will come into effect in the next few days.

We appreciate this may cause concern but given the level of sophisticated fraud that appears to be taking place we hope you will understand.

We will be in touch with individual Editors if manuscripts you have handled have been directly affected and if your attention is required for individual cases.

BioMed Central tells Retraction Watch:

In completing our checks and balances on a manuscript, one of our in-house editors spotted problems in reports from author-suggested reviewers. Since this was flagged, we have searched our systems and found several potential false reviewer accounts that seem to have returned peer review reports to several of our journals. At present this amounts to around 50 manuscripts, the majority of which have not been published and are held in our systems.

We cannot see a clear link between the authors and believe that a third party may be involved, and influencing the peer review process.

At this stage we are investigating further and the manuscripts are on hold. We have informed our staff and external editors and are switching off the functionality that allows authors to suggest potential peer reviewers directly into our systems while we look into the issue in more depth.

Journals have retracted more than 100 papers in the past two years for fake peer reviews, many of which were written by the authors themselves.

Update, 2 p.m. Eastern, 11/25/14: Based on additional information, clarified headline and first line of post to reflect that most of the 50 manuscripts were somewhere in the editorial process, not accepted. BioMed Central also tells us that in many cases, editors did not use the author-suggested reviewers, but nevertheless held the manuscript after noticing the irregularities.

Related

Posted on Categories biomedcentral, faked emails

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Publisher discovers 50 manuscripts involving fake peer reviewers

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BioMed Central has uncovered about fifty manuscripts in their editorial system that involved fake peer reviewers, Retraction Watch has learned. Most of the cases were not published because they were discovered by a manuscript editor on a final pre-publication check. The five or so that have been published will go through some sort of re-review,...

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The journal Retrovirology retracted, written by a researcher who "spiked rabbit blood samples with human blood to make it look as though his HIV vaccine was working.” The runner-up is probably the situation that forced the Journal of Vibration and Control to retract 60 articles, which had been accepted for publication after receiving fraudulent “peer review” by scientists who manipulated the online submission system using up to 130 fake email accounts.

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“Steven Eaton, 47, was jailed for the maximum three months at Edinburgh Sheriff Court for falsifying test results on medicine which medics hoped could be used to treat the life threatening illness.

Sheriff Michael O’Grady QC said his sentencing powers were “wholly inadequate” and told Eaton he could have caused cancer patients “unquestionable harm”.

The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency said several new medicines had been significantly delayed, including one to treat depression.”:

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Steven Eaton became the first person in Britain to be jailed under scientific safety laws. Picture (posed by model): AFP

Steven Eaton, 47, was jailed for the maximum three months at Edinburgh Sheriff Court for falsifying test results on medicine which medics hoped could be used to treat the life threatening illness.

Sheriff Michael O'Grady QC said his sentencing powers were "wholly inadequate" and told Eaton he could have caused cancer patients "unquestionable harm".

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The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency said several new medicines had been significantly delayed, including one to treat depression.

The court had earlier heard how the researcher was working at the Edinburgh branch of US-based pharmaceutical firm Aptuit in 2009 when he came up with the scam.

Eaton was hoping to generate funding which would allow the drug he was working on to be treated on humans.

So he concocted information about the medicine that would persuade Aptuit to allow the drug to be treated on real life patients.

The court heard that if the scam had been successful, Eaton could have harmed the health of cancer patients who took the experimental drug.

However, executives at the firm became suspicious about what he was doing and reported him to the MHPRA.

Investigators there discovered that Eaton had been selectively reporting research data since 2003.

Details of the case emerged after Eaton, from Cambridgeshire, was convicted last month under the 1999 Good Laboratory Practice Regulations.

Sentence had been deferred so the court could obtain reports about his character.

Eaton is only the second person in the UK to be prosecuted under the law, but is the first to be convicted.

Passing sentence, Sheriff O'Grady said under the terms of the legislation, a prison term of three months was the longest sentence that Eaton could be given.

Sheriff O'Grady said: "I feel that my sentencing powers in this are wholly inadequate.

"You failed to test the drugs properly - you could have caused cancer patients unquestionable harm."

At the earlier hearing, the court heard how Eaton had manipulated the results of experiments he carried out at his laboratory in the firm.

His manipulation ensured an experiment was deemed successful when it had actually failed.

When managers at his firm scrutinised his work, they noticed it was fraudulent and were forced to stop work on the project on which Eaton was working.

The court heard that if Eaton's work had passed undetected, patients could have been given the drug and been exposed to an increased risk that the substance was unsafe.

Today, defence solicitor advocate Jim Stephenson told the court that at the time of the offence, his client had been working in a stressful environment.

Mr Stephenson said: "He appreciates that custody could be an option in this case.

"At the time of the offence he was under a lot of pressure. He was working long hours. There were also issues in his personal life.

"Mr Eaton did not benefit financially from this. At the time of the offence, he was making £32,000 per year. "

Mr Stephenson said the social worker who wrote the report about Eaton's background thought the scientist was at low risk of re-offending.

Mr Stephenson asked Sheriff Michael O'Grady QC: "I would urge your lordship to consider a non custodial disposal."

However, Sheriff O'Grady told Eaton that he had no other choice but to impose a custodial sentence on him.

Before sending him to prison, Sheriff O'Grady also said he found the case "disturbing".

He said: "Why someone who is as highly educated and as experienced as you would embark on such a course of conduct is inexplicable."

Speaking after the case, Gerald Heddell, the MHPRA's director of inspection, enforcement and standards, said: "This conviction sends a message that we will not hesitate to prosecute those whose actions have the potential to harm public health.

"[Mr] Eaton's actions directly impacted on the validity of clinical trials and delayed a number of medicines coming to market, including one to treat depression."

The MHPRA said Aptuit had identified "serious irregularities" in data collected to support clinical trials on humans.

It involved false data that would have been used to determine the concentration of medicine given to people during trials to assess its safety and effectiveness.

The agency said the discovery led to hundreds of safety studies about the impact of data manipulation being reviewed.

A spokesman said: "As a result of [Mr] Eaton's actions, the development of a number of new medicines were significantly delayed and considerable cost to the study sponsors was incurred as a result of the delay.

Patients groups applauded the sentence in helping restore trust in medical research.

Scotland Patients Association executive director Dr Jean Turner said: "We depend on research to be as truthful as it can be. If someone has been proved to have deliberately falsifed it, that is fraud, and people's lives might have been affected.

"Once trust has gone, it's really very difficult to restore. See what happened with MMR - a lot of people lost faith [because of discredited research] and we now have a measles outbreak in Wales."

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Scientist jailed for faking research data

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Steven Eaton became the first person in Britain to be jailed under scientific safety laws. Picture (posed by model): AFP Steven Eaton, 47, was jailed for the maximum three months at Edinburgh Sheriff Court for falsifying test results on medicine which medics hoped could be used to treat the life threatening illness.

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https://www.wired.com/2014/05/fantastically-wrong-martian-canals/

The Martian canals were a network of gullies and ravines that some 19th century scientists erroneously thought to exist on Mars. First detected in 1877 by Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, modern telescopes and imaging technology completely debunked the myth. The “canals” were actually found to be a mere optical illusion.

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"Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids," Elton John once said. "In fact, it's cold as hell. And there's no one there to raise them if you did." Wrong, American astronomer Percival Lowell would have said if he hadn't ... I guess ... died 100 years ago. Also, what do you mean there's no one there to raise them? What about you, dummy?

Our man Lowell, you see, was quite convinced that an alien race occupied Mars, though he never directly commented on their potential as babysitters for human astronauts. And he even had the evidence to prove they existed: an immense network of canals carved into the Martian surface that he spied through a telescope.

This saga begins in 1888, when Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli announced that he had observed what he called canali on Mars, drawing the sketch below. You might be thinking that Martians would seem to struggle with the whole digging in a straight line thing, but to Schiaparelli, these were purely natural features of the landscape. That's because canali is Italian for channels, not canals.

That's not how it was translated into English, though.

So, along comes Lowell, who takes the idea of "canals" on Mars and gets ... a bit carried away with it. In 1894 he built the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, with a world-class telescope, so he might prove that a desperate Martian race had built "a system whose end and aim is the tapping of the snow-cap for the water there semiannually let loose; then to distribute it over the planet's surface."

In 1906 he published, no joke, a 400-page tome on the topic, in which he named and mapped an astonishing number of canals that interconnected around the entire planet, in some places forming vast oases, which "are clearly ganglia to which the canals play the part of nerves." He then proceeded to exhaustively - and, quite frankly, a bit exhaustingly - reason that if "the environment be suitable life will ensue," but not "until the creatures had reached a certain phase in evolution would their presence become perceptible."

(An aside: This is a common trope still bandied around about evolution, that there are milestones creatures reach, like us humans with our brains. In reality, critters can develop incredibly complex features such as, say, eyes, then go and lose them in a pitch-black ecosystem like a cave. There are no "phases" to evolution, just continuous adaptation to an environment - or stagnation as a living fossil, if you hit the sweet spot.)

Anyway, the cooperation the aliens achieved in their task, he marvels, puts our own belligerence as a species, our "boyish and unthinking element of the nation," to shame. He concludes, rather enigmatically and triumphantly: "That Mars is inhabited by beings of some sort or other we may consider as certain as it is uncertain what those beings may be."

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Fantastically Wrong: One Astronomer's Quest to Expose the Alien-Built Canals of Mars

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"Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids," Elton John once said. "In fact, it's cold as hell. And there's no one there to raise them if you did." Wrong, American astronomer Percival Lowell would have said if he hadn't ... I guess ... died 100 years ago.

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https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/04/107-cancer-papers-retracted-due-to-peer-review-fraud/

in the journal Tumor Biology 107 research papers were retracted because they got caught faking the peer review. it says that its easy to fake a peer review because the authors can name their own peer reviewer and they can suggest their own reviewers

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107 cancer papers retracted due to peer review fraud

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New papers were found through investigations into previous fraud.

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Cyril Burt is known for his studies on the heritability of IQ. Shortly after he died, his studies of inheritance of intelligence were discredited after evidence emerged indicating he had falsified research data, inventing correlations in separated twins which did not exist andand of inventing two co-authors in questionable papers he had published.

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Until his death in 1971, the British educational psychologist Sir Cyril Burt was viewed as one of the most significant and influential educational psychologists of his time. Within a year of his death, however, the legitimacy of his research was being questioned. The questions began to turn into accusations, and by 1976 he was officially accused of fabricating data to prove that intelligence was inherited. The publication of Burt's official biography by Leslie Hearnshaw in 1979 seemed to seal Burt's fate by concluding that the charges of fraud were merited. However, the recent work of two independent researchers, Robert Joynson and Ronald Fletcher, has reopened the issue and raised doubts about the accusations of fraud.

Burt's Work
The Accusations
The Controversy
Conclusions

Cyril Lodowic Burt, born on March 3, 1883, was a leading figure in psychology during an exciting time when psychology was breaking away from philosophy and becoming a field of its own. Burt's research on factor analysis and the genetics of intelligence was groundbreaking, and helped to pave a new path for psychology. It is his work in these areas that led to the great controversy surrounding his name. Many researchers, including Galton, Pearson, Spearman and L. Thurstone were investigating the use of factor analysis in determining the components of human intelligence. Burt joined the discussion and adapted the new developments in statistical techniques to the study of genetic analysis of intelligence. Burt's most famous work on the genetics of intelligence involved the study of twins. In a series of papers published between 1943 and 1966 Burt concluded that heredity plays a much more prominent role in the development of intellectual ability than does the environment. Due to Burt's acclaimed reputation, his findings impacted both the international academic community and the local educational system within England.

At the time of his death in October of 1971, Cyril Burt was viewed as a esteemed and influential member of his profession. Within months of his death however, the Princeton psychologist Leon Kamin recognized and reported a number of flaws in Burt's research--particularly his research involving monozygotic twins who were reared apart. Although Kamin suspected the data were fraudulent, he did not immediately make a public condemnation of Burt's research; he simply concluded that the data were not worthy of scientific consideration. In 1974, Kamin published The Science and Politics of IQ, which denounced the hereditarian position and contained much criticism of Burt's work with monozygotic twins. Shortly before Kamin published his book, another American psychologist, Arthur Jensen, published a paper which also found fault with Burt's data. Ironically, Jensen was in favor of the hereditarian position. It is interesting that two researchers with radically different professional agendas independently arrived at many of the same conclusions.

The first formal, public accusation of fraud against Cyril Burt came in 1976 from Dr. Oliver Gillie, the medical correspondent to the London Sunday Times. Gillie became suspicious of Burt's work after he read Kamin's The Science and Politics of IQ, and began to investigate. He set out to find two of Burt's research assistants: Miss Margaret Howard and Miss Jane Conway. Despite a thorough search, he was unable to locate either, and was forced to conclude that they were fictitious names. This fact, in conjunction with other findings, led Gillie to conclude that Burt had falsified his data. The article which appeared on the front page of the October 24, 1976 edition of the Times began with these lines

"The most sensational charge of scientific fraud this century is being leveled against Sir Cyril Burt. Leading scientists are convinced that Burt published false data and invented crucial facts to support his controversial theory that intelligence is largely inherited." (Gillie, 1976)

The primary source of concern voiced by both Kamin and Jensen was the suspicious consistency of the correlation coefficients for the intelligence test scores of the monozygotic twins in Burt's studies. In each study Burt reported sum totals for the twins he had studied so far. His original results were published in 1943. In 1955 he added 6 pairs of twins and reported results for a total of 21 sets of twins. Likewise in 1966 he reported the results for a total of 53 pairs. In each study Burt reported correlation coefficients indicating the similarity of intelligence scores for monozygotic twins who were reared apart. A high coefficient would indicate that the twins had similar intelligence scores. Since the twins were reared apart, a high correlation coefficient would also make a strong case for his hereditarian argument. In his studies Burt reported the following coefficients: 1943: r = .770; 1955: r = .771; 1966: r= .771. These correlation coefficients suggested a strong relationship between genetics and intelligence. One would expect to see greater variability among the coefficients when more sets of twins were added.

Other critics later pointed out that it was unlikely that Burt had been able to find so many sets of monozygotic twins reared apart. His 1966 study involving 53 sets of twins was the largest twin study of the time. In 1955, Burt himself commented that it was unusual to find even 21 sets of subjects. Yet only eleven years later he had more than doubled his number of subjects, claiming that society held misconceptions about the frequency with which twins were reared in separate environments. Tucker (1997) examined the numbers of research subjects used in all of the twin studies conducted between 1922 and 1990 and found that no other study came close to having 53 sets of twins that would have satisfied Burt's conditions. The combination of all the twins in all the studies (who fit Burt's criteria) would barely sum to be 53!

It did not take long after the official accusation was made by Gillie in the London Sunday Times for supporters of Burt to come forward. Among the first was H.J. Eysenck, who attacked Gillie's arguments and contended that the evidence provided thus far warranted a charge no stronger than carelessness. Several other supporters came forward, the most effective of whom was a former student of Burt's by the name of J. Cohen. Cohen addressed Gillie's claim that the two research assistants, Miss Howard and Miss Conway, did not exist. Cohen claimed that he remembered Miss Conway.

In the middle of this controversy, Leslie Hearnshaw began writing Burt's official biography. Hearnshaw had great respect for Burt--He had even delivered an address at his memorial service. Hearnshaw was outraged at the accusations, and implored the academic community to delay judgment until he had finished the biography. Hearnshaw did not doubt about Burt's integrity, and intended to clear his name with the book. As Hearnshaw examined Burt's private records, distressing evidence became to accumulate and he was forced to report that the accusations were most likely true.

The conclusions reached by Hearnshaw had a great impact on the academic community, but this was not the end of the debate. In the years since Hearnshaw published Burt's biography, other researchers have investigated the issue and have come out in support of Burt. Two such men are Robert Joynson and Ronald Fletcher. These researchers argue that Burt did not invent any of his twin data. They explain the large increase in the number of subjects by asserting that some of Burt's data had been lost during World War II. After Burt found it, it had taken him a long time to sort it out. They also believe that the research assistants were indeed real people, although it is doubtful that they actually used their real names. Joynson and Fletcher claim that Burt used pseudonyms when publishing, and contend that such behavior, while eccentric, does not constitute a moral or ethical violation.

Since the controversy around Cyril Burt's name is of great importance to the integrity of psychology and other research fields, it has drawn significant attention from the academic community as a whole. Many prominent individuals in psychology and related fields have examined the evidence on both sides, and the conclusions are mixed. Recently, senior fellows of the British Psychological Society campaigned to have Burt's case reheard so that a new verdict can be rendered. The Society agreed to reopen the case, causing some strong reactions on both sides of the debate. For now, Burt's reputation remains sullied, and his story reminds the field of psychology and academia in general of the importance of intellectual honesty.

Gillie, O. (1976, October 24).. Crucial data was faked by eminent psychologist. London: Sunday Times.

Hearnshaw, L. (1979). Cyril Burt: Psychologist. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Joynson, R. B. (1989). The Burt affair. New York: Routledge.

Kamin, L.J. (1974). The science and politics of IQ. Potomac, MD: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Mackintosh, N. J. (1995). Cyril Burt: Fraud or framed? New York: Oxford University Press.

Tucker, W. H. (1997). Re-reconsidering Burt: Beyond a reasonable doubt. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 33(2) 145-162.

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Content questions: Dr. Jonathan Plucker (jonathan.plucker AT uconn.edu)
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Copyright © 2013

Last Modified: 29 April 2018

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Human Intelligence: The Cyril Burt Affair

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Until his death in 1971, the British educational psychologist Sir Cyril Burt was viewed as one of the most significant and influential educational psychologists of his time. Within a year of his death, however, the legitimacy of his research was being questioned.

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"Niels Birbaumer, once a prominent neuroscientist at the University of Tübingen in Germany, fell hard from his pedestal three years back. He was accused of scientific misconduct for his controversial “brain-reading” research, stripped of funding, and fired from his job."

"A prominent German neuroscientist committed scientific misconduct in research in which he claimed to have developed a brain-monitoring technique able to read certain thoughts of paralysed people, Germany’s main research agency has found.

The DFG’s investigation into Niels Birbaumer’s high-profile work found that data in two papers were incomplete and that the scientific analysis was flawed — although it did not comment on whether the approach was valid. "

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German funding agency imposes strict sanctions on Niels Birbaumer, whose studies it says contained incomplete data - but Birbaumer stands by his results.

A prominent German neuroscientist committed scientific misconduct in research in which he claimed to have developed a brain-monitoring technique able to read certain thoughts of paralysed people, Germany's main research agency has found.

The DFG's investigation into Niels Birbaumer's high-profile work found that data in two papers were incomplete and that the scientific analysis was flawed - although it did not comment on whether the approach was valid. In a 19 September statement, the agency, which funded some of the work, said it was imposing some of its most severe sanctions to Birbaumer, who has positions at the University of Tübingen in Germany and the Wyss Center for Bio and Neuroengineering in Geneva, Switzerland. The DFG has banned Birbaumer from applying for its grants and from serving as a DFG evaluator for five years. The agency has also recommended the retraction of the two papers, published in PLoS Biology, and says that it will ask him to return the grant money that he used to generate the data underpinning the papers.

"The DFG has found scientific misconduct on my part and has imposed sanctions. I must therefore accept that I was unable to refute the allegations made against me," Birbaumer said in a statement e-mailed to Nature in response to the DFG's findings. In a subsequent phone conversation with Nature, Birbaumer added that he could not comment further on the findings because the DFG has not yet provided him with specific details on the reasoning behind the decisions.

Birbaumer says he stands by his studies, which he says, "show that it is possible to communicate with patients who are completely paralysed, through computer-based analysis of blood flow and brain currents".

The DFG also found that Ujwal Chaudhary, first author of both of the PLoS Biology papers and a member of Birbaumer's team at the University of Tübingen and the Wyss Center, had committed scientific misconduct. The agency banned Chaudhary from applying for its grants and from serving as a DFG evaluator for three years. Chaudhary did not respond to a request for comment from Nature.

Brain activity

The misconduct findings against Birbaumer and Chaudhary relate to research conducted in 2013-14, in which they worked with four people with the neurodegenerative condition motor-neuron disease, also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, who were being cared for at home by relatives. The scientists recorded the patients' brain activity using sensors on their scalps. In a 2017 paper, Birbaumer and his colleagues reported that their analysis of the recordings allowed them to determine whether the patients were silently answering 'yes' or 'no' to simple questions. The paper attracted extensive media attention.

In the summary of its investigation committee's findings, the DFG says that the scientists did not film patient examinations in full, did not appropriately show details of their analyses in the papers and made false statements.

The DFG stressed that the scientists had a "special responsibility" towards seriously ill people participating in innovative research. It said that they had not met this responsibility, "in particular by failing to document exactly the entire research procedure".

Birbaumer says that filming often had to be interrupted to meet the participants' immediate care needs, such as the need to suction saliva from their mouths. "For this reason, we did not upload data that we collected but had to declare as not analyzable in the publication. In addition, we did not describe every single step of the complex data evaluation and did not fully document it with accompanying video recordings," he said in his e-mailed statement.

Data reanalysed

The DFG and the University of Tübingen opened separate investigations into the work in earlier this year, after a whistle-blower raised concerns about the research. Martin Spüler, who was then a postdoc in informatics at Tübingen, said he was unable to reproduce the findings when he reanalysed the published data. An independent expert commissioned by the DFG confirmed Spüler's findings, as did two additional whistle-blowers, according to the agency's statement. The DFG commission found that the researchers had not analysed their data correctly. Four other co-authors of the studies were not investigated.

Birbaumer and his team published a rebuttal to Spüler's criticisms in April this year - the second paper whose retraction the DFG recommended. PLoS Biology added expressions of concerns to both studies shortly after the DFG announced the findings of its investigation.

The University of Tübingen's investigation into Birbaumer and Chaudhary's work concluded in June that the two had committed guilty of scientific misconduct.
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-02862-4

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Prominent German neuroscientist committed misconduct in 'brain-reading' research

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German funding agency imposes strict sanctions on Niels Birbaumer, whose studies it says contained incomplete data - but Birbaumer stands by his results. German funding agency imposes strict sanctions on Niels Birbaumer, whose studies it says contained incomplete data - but Birbaumer stands by his results.

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https://nltimes.nl/2022/01/27/fmr-leiden-university-researcher-accused-fraud-15-studies

"The committee concluded that she committed fraud in at least 15 publications. The committee said that she made changes to the research design, added control groups afterward, and even omitted data. In seven cases, the committee recommended the university contact the journals that published the studies and request that they be withdrawn. Due to fraud, the conclusions presented are incorrect, or it's plausible to conclude that they are inaccurate. In the other eight cases, the fraud affected the results to a lesser extent, and the committee advised leaving it up to the journals to decide how they want to inform their readers about it."

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Former Leiden University researcher Lorenza Colzato committed fraud in at least 15 scientific publications. The university concluded this in an investigation launched after the psychology lecturer was first accused of fraud in 2019, Omroep West reports.

In 2019, two of Colzato's publications were withdrawn after it was discovered that she had illegally taken blood from test subjects. There were also suspicions about dodgy grant applications and authors' names being removed from reports. Leiden University then decided to break ties with the Italian lecturer and conduct further research into her work. The university's Scientific Integrity Committee examined 53 of the 174 publications to Colzato's name.

The committee concluded that she committed fraud in at least 15 publications. The committee said that she made changes to the research design, added control groups afterward, and even omitted data. In seven cases, the committee recommended the university contact the journals that published the studies and request that they be withdrawn. Due to fraud, the conclusions presented are incorrect, or it's plausible to conclude that they are inaccurate. In the other eight cases, the fraud affected the results to a lesser extent, and the committee advised leaving it up to the journals to decide how they want to inform their readers about it.

According to the committee, a proper investigation was impossible in 27 articles because no data sets were available. They found no indications of fraud in the remaining publications.

A spokesperson for the university told Omroep West that they'd informed the involved journals of their findings. "It is up to the publishers to withdraw articles, not to us. This is usually preceded by the publishers' own research." The spokesperson stressed that Leiden University pays a lot of attention to scientific integrity. "It is brought to the attention of researchers in various ways, but we also tell students about it in education. We have a website about it. There is a committee, a special confidential advisor, and a Dutch code of conduct. For the university board, every violation of scientific integrity is one too many. That is clear."

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Fmr. Leiden University researcher accused of fraud in 15 studies

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Former Leiden University researcher Lorenza Colzato committed fraud in at least 15 scientific publications. The university concluded this in an investigation launched after the psychology lecturer was first accused of fraud in 2019, Omroep West reports. In 2019, two of Colzato's publications were withdrawn after it was discovered that she had illegally taken blood from test subjects.

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Find an article about a scientist who was discredited/shamed/ostracized/vilified for their findings failing the peer-review process.

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it gets lower because there might be false spread of knowledge. it might feel like its easier to spread knowledge but there are some people online that doesn't really know what they are talking about and they don't have the correct source they are just saying it from their opinion instead of the facts. if more and more people start doing this there will be more and more false knowledge spreading so it will be difficult to classify which is true and which is false.

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I think it does. As communication is easier and more contagious, words can have huge impacts. More importantly, a person can disable people from knowing who they are on the internet; this causes people to spread information before consideration. As these factors continue to grow bigger, people may simply share a non-factual scientific knowledge their close elders told them. Also, as news platforms increase, they compete for the interest of citizens. Some may do this by simplifying the languages to offer the news to more people. However, this may very possible alter the scientific information a research may be trying to deliver.

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I think it does. Scientific knowledge has always been for the well educated people. It is professional. However, with communication now better than ever, all the professional knowledge is being simplified and communicated to the general public. Some of these knowledge can be positive as it makes the people more educated, but we cannot prevent people from abusing this. Many use pseudo science or change meaning to gain benefit for themselves, and since the majority of the world isn't well educated, these knowledge will be believed by those, which undermines the integrity of science

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With better technology and the use of social media, knowledge can spread quickly and efficiently. On the other hand, if the knowledge spread was not correct, or twisted, this false knowledge will also be able to spread quickly. As said in the article, people tend to read articles with catchy headlines and new discoveries. However, these are the articles that are most likely to contain twisted knowledge. By reading these articles and forward it to others, this will undermine the integrity of scientific knowledge found on social media.

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Since anyone can post any content they want online without verifications, information online can be unreliable, inaccurate, and false. Publication bias also affects the content being posted, as people tend to 'spin' or distort the facts into 'interesting scientific knowledge' to attract readers to read their articles. Some people will try to make a scientific fact eye-catching and not convey actual scientific knowledge to the readers. This will undermine the integrity of scientific knowledge we found online.

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It's like a double eded sword. The presence of the internet allows scientists to share information but the way they share it determines the level of integrity of the scientific knowledge. If this communication pathway is used correctly, then accurate and truthful information will be shared. However, because of the need for "Likes" and "Shares", it has distorted the way that information is shared. Shock value and click bait-tyness has overtaken the need to share truthful knowledge.

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Personally I do feel like it is easier now to undermine the integrity of knowledge. We have all the information and news in our hands, and it is always the decision we make whether or not to trust what we read. Theres lots of fake news out there misleading people.

Not only that, because we have access to lots of knowledge, as Vox article supports, people crave and only seek for knowledge that is fresh and exciting. People get bored of reading long credible sources.

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I feel like how easily information is able to move around and be changed is worsening the integrity of scientific knowledge. Un-credible people are affecting reliable pieces of information and it's never going to end.

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Does the fact that communication is now much easier undermine the integrity of scientific knowledge?

Explain your answer.

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The first quote suggests that the creation of new knowledge in natural sciences is meant to be surprising. It suggests that the really exciting discoveries are not found through directly working towards it but instead through facing it in serendipity. The second quote adds on to this information. It suggests that serendipity doesn't just magically happen from nothing. A person has to be ready to spot and work on them when they appear throughout their broad investigation.

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I think that what these quotes are suggesting is that you should never seek things with a narrow view. Opportunities and findings will appear when you are least expecting it. Even though things may not be going out as planned, but new things may emerge. However when these new things appear make sure to not just bat an eye and leave it.

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It suggests that in the natural sciences, the creation of new knowledge often proceeds in an unplanned way. Which not only results from scientific methods but also requires one to be innovative and creative. This could also lead to discoveries of accidental knowledge too.

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These quotes suggest that what leads to the creation of new knowledge in natural sciences are the number of attempts a scientist try to experiment on one thing. When we aim to create new knowledge, we should have an open mind and be ready for unexpected results.

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The quotes suggest that sometimes the creation of knowledge is not exactly planned or expected, but new knowledge can be discovered if we continue to work hard and not give up on the journey of discovering new knowledge. Putting in more effort will give us a higher chance of discovering new knowledge.

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Your mindset shouldn't be so focused on proving one specific thing but instead, be more open-minded and accept difficulties that you encounter, and maybe these difficulties will help you come across serendipitous discoveries.

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The pacemaker was a serendipity invention. An engineer called Wilson Greatbatch was building something to record the rhythm of people’s heart beats. He reached into his tool box and accidentally pulled out the wrong bit of kit. He fixed it to his circuit. The circuit ‘pulsed’ for 1.8 milliseconds and then stopped for one second. As luck would have it, that was just the right rhythm needed to make a pacemaker.

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In 1989, British scientists Peter Dunn and Albert Wood create a drug called sildenafil citrate. they first though it would be a treatment for high blood pressure and angina. but later it had little hope for curing the heart disease but instead volunteers have noticed that it increased their erection several days after. it was a serendipitous discovery because they were using Viagra to cure heart diseases but instead it improves erection and people now use it for erection improvement

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Wilhelm Roentgen, Professor of Physics in Wurzburg, Bavaria, discovered X-rays in 1895 accidentally while testing whether cathode rays could pass through glass. He didn't intend for a green light to project itself onto a fluorescent screen when trying to see if cathode rays could pass through glass. Later on, he saw that this light would pass through most things except the bone of a human. Since he didn't know what these rays were, he called them "X", for unknown, rays. This is why it was a serendipitous discovery.

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Teflon was a serendipitous discovery made by Roy J. Plunkett when he was researching on a refrigerant for Chlorofluorocarbons.
When he was storing tetrafluoroethylene gas in a small cylinder with dry-ice temperatures before chlorinating it, none of the gas came out.
TFE had polymerised to produce Teflon

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Explain how your discovery was made.

Make sure you include the word ‘serendipity’ in your explanation.

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I agree with this statement because from experience we can tell that language has changed overtime. for example some words or phrases from the past are not used in this generation. and there are also some words that people use nowadays thats people won't understand. for example people nowadays shorten words because it is more convenient for them to text and people in the past wouldn't understand because they don't text or need it to be more convenient

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The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka!” (I found it!) but “That’s funny…” (Isaac Asimov)

Chance favours a prepared mind (Louis Pasteur)

What do these quotes suggest about the creation of new knowledge in the natural sciences?

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I agree. Language is a system of communication used by people, thus it changes to better suit the needs and trends in the society. It is similar to natural selection and evolution, where only the words that are widely used are preserved and words not commonly used are forgotten. For example, Chinese language used to be more concise and one word can have multiple meanings (文言文), but now there are more words to represent each meaning.

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Yes. Since people from different ages can interpret something differently, its intended purpose or meaning from the original author might be twisted. Since the world is constantly changing, we might be able to see things in a different perspective than from ten years ago.

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I agree. The language we use everyday is changing constantly. Now days, a form of slang has evolved throughout the internet in China. These words do not really have a definition in the dictionary, but these words are widely used throughout social media. On the other hand, some language and words such as Shakespearean English starts to fade out as no one uses it anymore.

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I agree. Language has changed through the development of the world and human's basic nature of adapting to things that are more convenient. Older and less fitting words are now being used less by people. For example, a typical example is "gonna" which means "going to". It has changed because "gonna" is easier and it flows better. It has been adapted to the point where people use it unconsciously.

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I agree. As languages evolve, definitions of words alter slightly to fit the way people use them. Many languages blend and new words come about. For example, the article I read mentions how English is everywhere now and French is losing its origins. Therefore, the Académie Francais had to ban words (such as buzz, fashionista, and hashtag) in order to make it the 'proper french'.

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I agree but I see languages more like a species and less like a living thing. Because languages evolve over time and the definition for each word change to suit what is needed in the present. Just like how species evolve, they can change slowly (gradual whatever it's called I forgot) or a new word might appear out of no where (punctuated equilibrium????)

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I agree with this statement as some words used in the 19th century is barely used anymore like tis, art thou, whig, etc. Just like how words we use now will probably not be used in the 23rd century in the future. With each year, another trend comes along which makes new words rise and more popular, allowing them to replace existing words.

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“Language is a living thing. We can feel it changing. Parts of it become old: they drop off and are forgotten. New pieces bud out, spread into leaves, and become big branches, proliferating.”  (Gilbert Highet)

Do you agree? Justify your answer, supporting it with examples.

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Yes, I think the lesson we had supports this idea. Great art should be able to always apply to a certain scenario or thing that will constantly change. George Orwell's 1984 is a perfect example. Though the events presented might not be accurate, its message covers many incidents that has happened until now. World wide crisis, issues and wars can all relate to this book and teach us the consequences of them.

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Yes, because art can be understood in many ways, by different people, which is why some things may only be applicable to a certain generation, but art, since it can be interpreted in many ways, can also be understood by future people, making it eternal

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Today's lesson supports this idea. As mentioned in class, our taste for art( movies, books, music) changes over time resulting from having different interpretations, perspectives, and the gain of new experiences and knowledge. Therefore, from the given examples of 1984 and the trailer, we can see how people would react differently to reoccurring historical events.

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The term good sense to me feels like being too objective. The perspectives and personal emotions and feelings create was is art. The idea of good art comes in sense of how we interpret things. The idea of restriction here can be shown in Picasso's paintings. Picasso's drawing for example can be thought of as a drawing or a mess made by a kid if looked at in a very objective view. Because we have don't have perfect senses, it allows us to imagine and portray things with our emotions. Leads us to put value to objects

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Definitely. Today’s class we talked about how 1984 the book always gets the hot topic after certain events (for example Trump’s inauguration). This shows that 1984 is a relatable but also (unnervingly) realistic. In this aspect, 1984 is a good piece of art because it’s all rounded and a lot of people can relate to it.

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Yes, because it is about how the same piece of art can be interpreted in different ways at different time periods and the meaning of the art can be different. People will also have different understandings based on the society they live in and their experiences.

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Today's lesson definitely supports this idea. As said, history repeats itself as shown by the purchase of the book 1984. The book criticises politics. Another example can be the song "rockstar" by dababy which it handles racism, and this idea will be prolonged

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Yes, I think our lesson does support this idea. We explored that one piece of art may have multiple meanings and can be applied to different time eras which mean that it wont only be used for its intended purpose but can be used for many other things as well. Art created right now may be able to be applied to things that will happen 100 years from now, you never know.

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“Great art transcends its culture and touches on that which is eternal.” (Madeleine L'Engle)

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“Great art transcends its culture and touches on that which is eternal.” (Madeleine L'Engle)

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Does today’s lesson support this idea? Can you think of any other examples?

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I think what he’s trying to say is that judging art will restrict our creativity. Art can be liked or disliked but not judged as being good or bad/ right or wrong. because that’s based on an individual's perception and not something decided by any rule.  Therefore, this explains that new knowledge can be created only if people think in a creative and innovative way.

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I think what Picasso meant by the "enemy of creativity is good sense" is how the perspectives and bias we have can restrict creativity and new ideas.

This quote from Picasso helps us explain how the creation of new knowledge might be limited if people care too much about how an issue might be right or wrong. To have creativity, scholars or scientists need to think in ways that might not seem to be true. Since objectivity is crucial in creating knowledge, caring too much about how people might think about an object will influence the new knowledge created.

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What I think Picasso meant was that if we follow 'good' sense or in other words play by the rules, we restrict our creativity. Therefore it helps us explain that in order for us to create new knowledge, we have to think outside the box and try new things.

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If 'good' sense means having the 'right' judgment, then I think Picasso meant the need for having good judgment is restricting the development of new ideas.

This helps us to explain how the creation of new knowledge can be restricted if people are concerned about having good sense or judgment and their thoughts will be limited by the need of being rational. They will think that the knowledge should have 'good' sense and do not think outside the box. Their perception of the area of knowledge will be limited to the norms of the area of knowledge so new knowledge would be building on the knowledge already known only.

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I think what he meant by "good sense" is  conventional art. I also think he is trying to express that there is no "good" in art because it is an objective field of study. If 'good' sense is a thing, then 'bad' sense would also be a thing. However, these bad sense may turn out to be more influential and is the created by creativity. While conventional art and 'good' sense may lack this creativity aspect.

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Definitely Bj581. I've always though that I'm a slightly more pro-women and a more feminist person out of all the girls in our grade. And I have also tried to get rid of gender stereotypes and tried to think more gender neutral. But Bj581 definitely made me realise that I have a long way to go and it kind of just shocked me how certain stereotypes have been enculturated into my subconscious.

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BQ5: “The chief enemy of creativity is 'good' sense.” 

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BQ5: “The chief enemy of creativity is 'good' sense.” 

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What do you think Picasso meant?

How does this help us explain the way new knowledge is created?

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The idea of Bj581 made the greatest impression on me. As it demonstartes how assumptions leads to false knowledge. Like when we were doing the activity of drawing our impression of vikings, we assumed that Bj581 was a men by just looking at the list of items discovered in the grave. Which turned out to be the opposite. This impression may be established from movies or books, mostly illustrated vikings as a masculine character. This suggests that stereotypes and unconcious attitudes could potentially affect how we percieve others, without us even knowing it.

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I think the idea about Bj581 made the biggest impression on me because it shows that we all have stereotypes for people based on what they are called. Our beliefs and perceptions are also heavily influenced by how we acquire knowledge, such as Vikings are mostly portrayed as men/masculine in movies. It also suggests that some of the knowledge that we have about the past might not be the actual truth as our stereotypes and biases influence the interpretation of artifacts.

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The idea that has left the biggest impression on me is academic & intellectual traditions. It has left a huge impression on me as I can see how significant it is to the modern society and it makes me think that people to really understand these traditions to notice that they should adjust how they comment on people or etc. For example, in terms of relativism, people do not realize that a tradition that is unfamiliar or even weird to them can be denied but shouldn't be proven wrong or insulted. This happens widely online.

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the idea of a single story had the largest effect. I have been living in china my whole life and haven't gone out of Asia. So it is difficult to meet people who are different from me. The idea that a person from for example USA or African may have similar traits with me blows my mind. We have always judged people from our perspective, from a single story, we see a person doing a certain action and we decide that the person will always do this action, in addition, we also see person from the same group as the other, we think of them as the same. This is never the case, I have learnt the danger of a single story, that we should not judge a person by one story, and generalize it to them and to their group.

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The idea of a single story made the biggest impression on me. We can only try to recognize and ignore bias when we think, but we can not ignore the fact that we all think with bias. The quote "There are facts, there are opinions, and there are lies." said by Deborah Lipstadt has the biggest impression on me. it made me realized that what we have learnt before might not be true. Facts can be twisted and changed, so we need to consider which parts of it might be false.

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I think one thing that will stick with me from BQ4 will probably be how there are hundreds of terms for biases and there are so many different types. I always knew that bias was a thing and that it can affect us in a way where we prefer something but I never knew that there's a bias term for literally everything. Like unconsious bias, anchoring bias, recency bias, etc

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Wrapping up BQ4: How do our perspectives and biases shape our knowledge of the world?

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Wrapping up BQ4: How do our perspectives and biases shape our knowledge of the world?

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Which idea from Big Question 4 made the biggest impression on you, and why?

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We should learn history as it is a record of the past. By learning from the past, we can prevent the tragic events that we happened before. Although history has many different perspectives and might not be true in some way, it is still important to learn about it. By learning history, we can come up with solutions that resolves the past issues and to prevent future problems.

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Xin Yen and Tsz Yan - analytical philosophy

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Xin Yen and Tsz Yan - analytical philosophy

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1)This form of thinking dominates academia in English-speaking countries, such as the USA, UK, and Australasia. It is characterised by clarity and precision of argument, and often the use of mathematical and scientific evidence to support claims. Bertrand Russell, the British mathematician and philosopher asserted that this approach “is able, in regard to certain problems, to achieve definite answers, which have the quality of science rather than of philosophy.” It is not an overriding system that can be applied to everything, rather, it is an approach that can lead to different answers depending on the issue it addresses.

2) a method of approaching philosophical problems through analysis of the terms in which they are expressed, associated with Anglo-American philosophy of the early20th. Analytic philosophy is a branch and tradition of philosophy usinganalysis, popular in the Western World and particularly theAnglosphere, century.

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1) Thinkers within this school of thought place social class at the centre of their understanding of the world, seeing many aspects of history as being a conflict between the classes, generally with those at the top trying to protect their interests, and ensuring that those at the bottom remain there.
2)
3) The political and economic theories of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and was later developed by their followers to form the basis of communism.

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1）This is an approach that is centred around the idea that evolution is the key to understanding not just the natural world, but also the human one as well. It argues that in the same way that our anatomy and physiology has evolved over time, so has our psychology adapted to solve persistent problems facing us within the environment. This form of thinking can be applied to many different fields, such as economics, health, law, management, and politics.
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3) Evolutionary Psychology proposes that the human brain comprises many functional mechanisms, called psychological adaptations or evolved cognitive mechanisms designed by the process of natural selection.

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1) This tradition is based on the theory that there is no universal objective truth, rather that each point of view - formed by different backgrounds, religious frameworks, and intellectual systems - are equally valid, and nothing is right or wrong. There are many different strands of this tradition: for example, in moral philosophy, proponents of this perspective hold that there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ when it comes to ethics.

3）The followers of this belief would agree that there is no definite true or false knowledge. Instead, there are different views of a single knowledge and that they all exist. Basically, there can be different perspectives for knowledge affected by cultural, society or historical context.

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1) This movement was developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a period of history which saw the quick growth of cities, massive industrialisation, and the horrors of World War I. Thinkers who belonged to this school of thought believed in rejecting traditional aspects of society - such as religion and social classes - and formulating new approaches to life, often using the aid of science. Art was an important part of this movement, with completely new techniques developed, such as abstract shapes and colours rather than realism.

3) Modernism refers to radical movements in architecture, art, photography, music, and literature. It's when you have your own meaning/interpretation on something.

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BQ4.10 - Academic & Intellectual Traditions

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BQ4.10 - Academic & Intellectual Traditions

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1) Match up your example of an academic tradition with the description on the handout (copy and paste in italics).
2) Add an image to represent your Academic tradition
3) Research the ideas of this tradition yourselves. Provide a brief description in your own words what perspective followers of your tradition share.

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We should study history because of its a main part of human society due to all of the lesson we learn come from histories and the knowledges being learn will be use in the future. In that sense history is important for us. On the otherhand it also tell also how human interact with each other in different scenario its the study of human which analysis how and why it could help us prevent danger and make us know what's the right decision to make under certain situation because in the past it had happen.

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We should put more emphasis on history because it helps us understand our society today, those evidence of the people and events are incredibly important as it shapes who we are too. These include how families, groups, or countries were formed and how they evolved while retaining cohesion.

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I believe history is important to teach and learn as it can help us understand certain things that happened in the past. We can avoid tragedies and horrific events by knowing what caused it as well as learning what happened. Learning history will also help us determine what's right and whats wrong based on what followed the decision of something.

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I think one of the main reason of why we study history would be to understand human behaviours. By analyzing the “why’s” and “how’s” of events, it allows us to connect history to other studies such as anthropology, psychology and politics etc. to further understand on the development of human civilisations now. For example, we can further understand the Russian-Ukraine conflict through learning USSR’s role in the Cold War. It provides us answers to why a certain event might have happened.

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I think we should study history because we can learn from the mistakes and events that happened in the past and avoid repeating the tragedies. By learning about the past, we can understand the decisions made by people, such as how their religions, cultures, or traditions affect their beliefs and values.

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Based on everything we've now learned, why do you think we should study history?

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1) People assume that Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas

2) but he didn't "discover", because there were people living there already, and he wasn't even the first European to step foot,  but a viking named Leif Erikson.

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From the perspectives and from what we were thought up until now, we tend to believe that the invasion of the European benefited and made lives of the indigenous people better trough civilization. We know now that there was genocide, and we made an assumption that there were in need of help.

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1) George Washington being a good guy

2)Because he was the first president of the US, and that he was a military personal. However, recently, it turned out that he wasn't that good of a person and he has became a controversial figure.

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Page not found | Teaching American History

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1) How cave-man really look like in real life.
People with very less clothing
Holding Spears
Hunters
Barbarian Like
Big Packs
Nomadic
Huge Bodies

2) Animation movies such as The Good Dinosaur, flintstones, the croods show the origins of cavemen

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The idea of cold reading have the biggest impression on me as we seem to only listen and see things that we want to see. It also explains the reason why some people believe in pseudoscience as the "fortune teller" gives general information that might sound specialized.