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Do you agree with the video's argument?  Why or why not?  Highlight some examples

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Do you agree with the video's argument?  Why or why not?  Highlight some examples

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Task 1 - Would you want AI to predict your fate?

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Task 1 - Would you want AI to predict your fate?

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October 6, 2023

We all carry over 9,000 genetic mutations. Most are benign, but what happens if an AI predictive algorithm tells us we carry a risky disease-causing mutation?

Predictive medicine using AI algorithms can predict the likelihood of diseases such as breast cancer

We typically carry around 9,000 mutations in our genomes, making us all genetic mutants to some degree.

We inherited most of these mutations from our ancestors, but accumulate around 64 mutations during our own development, passing them on to our offspring for good measure.

Most of these mutations are benign and have little to no effect on our health, but some can severely disrupt protein function, and can cause diseases such as cancer, diabetes or heart conditions.

Scientists are now capable of predicting the risk of developing certain diseases from genetic screens. AI algorithms are the main tools used for these predictions.

For Andrea Downing, these predictive algorithms may have saved her life. Downing tested positive for a mutation in a gene called BRCA1 when she was in her 20s.

Mutations in BRCA1 and BRCA2 are known to increase the risk of cancer: between 45 and 72% of women with mutations in their genes are diagnosed with breast or ovarian cancers.

"The women in my family have a history of cancer," Downing told DW. "My mother was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer when I was very young and had recurrences that shaped my childhood."

Downing took the decision to have a mastectomy in order to eliminate the risk of breast cancer in the future. Angelina Jolie made the same decision in 2013.

"I firmly believe that my decisions saved my life. I wouldn't want to know what my path would have been if I hadn't known about the mutation," Downing said.

Predictive medicine and AI

Downing's experience was part of an early wave of an approach called predictive medicine. The idea of the approach is to predict the likelihood of getting a disease, how the disease will progress, and which treatments people are likely to respond to.

AI-based algorithms are at its heart. They are used to analyze DNA sequences, pinpoint mutations, and predict disease risks of those mutations by comparing against reference data.

Christopher Mason, a professor of genomics and biophysics at Cornell University in the US, is at the forefront of research in the field. He believes it will completely transform our approach to medicine and healthcare.

"Cancer treatment is perhaps the best example. We can use tools to know what cancer can be targeted by the best therapy. In a matter of hours or days, we can have DNA sequence information mapping the best treatment for a patient based on the data," he said.

New healthcare AI tools seemingly appear every month. There are tools to detect strokes in patients, heart diseases, analyze medical images, manage health data, and map the likelihood of treatment success based on your genetic code, along with many others.

Mason was keen to add that AI shouldn't replace physicians but could help to be a co-pilot and data resource when diagnosing and treating patients.

Difficult decisions

Along with genetic screens in clinical settings, more and more people are taking genetic tests from companies such as 23andMe and Ancestry.com.

These tests often come with many predictions about what variances and mutations in your genome might mean for your health.

They might identify risk factors for conditions like diabetes, dementia, heart conditions, even if you don't have any symptoms at the time.

It's this aspect of knowing your future which Downing said she wouldn't wish on anyone.

"There's a lot about living with knowledge of your future [after a positive BRCA1 result] which is traumatic, even though I never had cancer," she said.

It's a drastic step to undergo a mastectomy to eliminate the risk of cancer. In her mind it was worth the risk, but the decision might not be so clear for other people with different disease risks.

In conditions such as Alzheimer's disease or schizophrenia, people cannot make decisions like Downing did to remove body parts.

"If you found out you had a genetic risk factor that says you have a 95% chance of early onset Alzheimer's disease, and by 45 you won't remember much, would you just say well, I'm not going to care about my future and live a crazy life? What if a new therapy in 10 years can reverse the disease?" Mason said.

Data and privacy concerns in the US

Using AI-based algorithms in healthcare also raises other issues.

"They can help to eliminate diseases better, but they can be scary. They completely change the risks around data privacy," Mason told DW.

Downing now co-runs a patient advocacy organization called Light Collective. In 2022, she published a paper exposing Facebook's sharing of people's health data for marketing purposes without patient consent.

"We're seeing that information used from a marketing perspective to target content to those people. For people in my community, it's often chemotherapy, but also snake oil and other harmful medical misinformation," she said.

The impact goes far beyond targeted ads. Downing said data used by predictive algorithms were now also affecting people's access to healthcare in the US.

The Guardian highlighted a case in 2021 where an AI algorithm used by US healthcare providers resulted in a severely disabled woman with cerebral palsy having her access to care and benefits severely reduced.

"My big theme now is to increase the transparency of how health systems are using predictive algorithms in care. It's not clear how decisions based off those algorithms are validated," Downing said.

Predictive medicine is in its infancy. How people live with health predictions, and how health systems use those predictions to impact people's healthcare, is only just beginning to be explored.

Mason and Downing both said there was a long way to reducing the new risks they pose.

"My big hope is we have the best possible science at our fingertips to make sure we're not being taken advantage of whilst going through being a patients and suffering that path," Downing said.
Edited by: Jane Paulick

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Cancer prevention: Would you want AI to predict your fate? - DW - 10/06/2023

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We all carry over 9,000 genetic mutations. Most are benign, but what happens if an AI predictive algorithm tells us we carry a risky disease-causing mutation?

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here's a video format spreading on TikTok. Recorded in towns across suburban England, teenage interviewers stop their peers on the street, fielding questions that range from fashion choices to humorous hypotheticals and local neighbourhood dramas, in the process building a large social media following and showcasing their patch of land to the world. "950 [pounds] for that, you know my ting," a teenage white boy says about his Canada Goose jacket in a video recorded in Bury St Edmunds. "We're checking his drip, ya dun know, you heard my man," someone says in another video.

Both the hosts and many of the interviewees speak with this distinct drawl - Multicultural London English (MLE), a dialect born in London's African-Caribbean communities in the 1970s and 80s. (Some now argue that "Black British English" is a more fitting term.) It's rooted in Jamaican patois with influences from cockney, and more recently Arabic, the US and West African Pidgin English.

A primary cause of this spread - which goes beyond viral TikToks - is British rap, with drill, grime and more taking new linguistic styles to the far corners of the country. In some cases, the entire cultural spread of MLE is contained in a single song. "I'm giving them UK slang / My brudda, my fam, my akh / You say: 'The feds just done a sweep' / We say, 'The boy dem run in my gaff'," Central Cee rapped in a 2022 freestyle, nodding to patois, cockney and Arabic respectively - akh is an Arabic word that has fed into MLE from the British Somali community, who are among both the largest Muslim and Black communities in Britain. Elsewhere, west African slang and dialects have continued to creep into British rap. Drizzled on to songs by the likes of Skepta, J Hus and NSG, terms such as wahala (trouble), "let me land" (let me finish) and juju (ancient African spiritual belief systems) are a reflection of how African communities are carving themselves deeply into British soil.

"You have quite a long history of British vernaculars being exported through British cultural forms," says Christian Ilbury, a lecturer in sociolinguistics at the University of Edinburgh - from Scouse accents with the Beatles to Arctic Monkeys and the presence of industrial working-class accents in indie music. "Grime essentially became the vehicle in which we perceived MLE." Those kids in suburban England, he says, "don't speak this variety because of where they grew up. They're using it to align with a cultural orientation that they appreciate."

In recent years, the audience for UK rap has broadened, flowing out of inner cities. Key to its spread was the internet, which tore down the music industry's traditional barriers to access and spread this new way of speaking. "Social media has played a huge role," says Rob Drummond, professor of sociolinguistics at Manchester Metropolitan University. "Everybody can access everything, so it's going to spread faster. Young people are maintaining communication all the time through Snapchat and WhatsApp. It makes it much more immersive and immediate."

Ilbury agrees: "With social media, you get representations of MLE that transcend geographical boundaries."

Also key is the particular appeal of Black pop culture, as defined by US writer and activist Kevin Powell in a September 2000 interview with Time: "You cannot discuss Black music without taking into account its edginess ... its rebelliousness ... and the fact that edginess and rebelliousness ultimately appeals to white young people as much as it does to Black young people."

That dynamic took root in Britain in the 1970s, when various forms of reggae - also subversive and at times perceived as anti-establishment - became distinctly British iterations of a Black coolness that appealed to younger white audiences.

In the early 70s, slang in wider London revolved heavily around "East End, white working-class slang, with some Yiddish and with some [Romany-derived queer slang] Polari," says Tony Thorne, director of the Slang and New Language Archive at King's College London. Things began to shift in the middle of the decade, he says, when "a lot of younger white kids got into reggae and later into dancehall and dub," and started to "pick up slang that wasn't from the old varieties". They were leaning into the patois present in the music, and subsequently in MLE, with phrases like "yard' (house) and "babylon" (establishment or police).

They were leaning into the patois present in the music, and subsequently in MLE. "Jamaican culture in London," says Thorne, was perceived as "super cool. The mods loved it, then later skinheads and punks loved it." He remembers the music spreading into London's whiter suburbs, but not reaching further because the genres "weren't really global at all, they were still local" - and there was no internet to spread them onward.

Now, with digitally distributed British rap speaking to an expanded audience, this dynamic has started to play out nationally. When grime erupted in 2014, it arrived with a distinct sense of fashion and language - words like "bait", "gassed" and "ends", as well as distinct attire consisting of tracksuits and streetwear. It was more than just a genre: it was a culture. "And how do you express your alignment with grime music?" says Ilbury. "You start speaking in a way that sounds like MLE." Since then, drill and a new generation of UK rappers have arrived with a similar impact: words such as ting and certi (certified) ever-present in the sound, alongside streetwear brands including Trapstar, Hoodrich and Corteiz. Ronan Bennett's TV drama series Top Boy has also become enormously popular.

Many of the most high-profile British rappers of recent times have been men, so MLE "is often heard as extremely masculine" by wider Britain, Ilbury notes, and therefore, "often associated with young men". As a result, the dialect seems to have resonated more strongly with teenage boys in the suburbs. Drummond says that the music, and therefore the language associated with it, carries for young men in these regions, "what we might in linguistics call a 'covert prestige'".

In Drummond's field studies in Manchester, he noticed that the dialect was more likely to be used by boys, with girls maintaining their more regional ways of communicating. "Using particular ways of speaking for these young people, especially young men, is a way of performing an identity," he says. "But unfortunately, it comes with a whole load of baggage that maybe they're not quite ready for."

These developments come with questions of cultural appropriation. They also highlight the racially loaded demonisation of MLE as a language associated with "roadmen", where in increasingly popular TikTok and Instagram skits, "roadman" has become a byword for low intelligence and stupidity.

Linguists note that many of these young white men from middle England are likely to drop MLE when they move into more professional environments. But MLE's current popularity will likely leave a permanent mark, with the dialect already becoming a standardised part of white British speech. "Even when they dial it down because they get a nice responsible job in a bank, there's still a fundamental change," Drummond says. "It's like a tide. You've got a big wave coming in, and that dies down, but the tide is still moving in that direction."

Aniefiok Ekpoudom is a writer from south London. His first book, Where We Come From: Rap, Home & Hope in Modern Britain, is a social history of British rap. To support theGuardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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Bait, ting, certi: how UK rap changed the language of the nation

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Fuelled by music fandom and social media, young British people's slang is evolving to include words with pidgin, patois and Arabic roots - even where strong regional English dialects exist

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Your money, postcode, friends and family can make all the difference to how the criminal system treats you.

The New South Wales police recently scrapped a widely condemned program known as the Suspect Targeting Management Plan. It used algorithmic risk scores to single out "targets", some as young as ten years old, for police surveillance.

But similar programs remain in place. For instance, Corrective Services NSW uses a statistical assessment tool called LSI-R to predict whether prisoners will reoffend.

"High risk" prisoners receive "high intensity interventions", and may be denied parole. The risk scores are calculated from facts such as "criminal friends", family involvement in crime or drugs, financial problems, living in a "high crime neighbourhood" and frequent changes of address.

A predictive algorithm is a set of rules for computers (and sometimes people) to follow, based on patterns in data. Lots has been written about how algorithms discriminate against us, from biased search engines to health databases.

In my newly published book, Artificial Justice, I argue the use of tools that predict our behaviour based on factors like poverty or family background should worry us, too. If we are punished at all, it should be only for what we have done wrong, not for the cards we have been dealt.

Read more: Biased AI can be bad for your health - here's how to promote algorithmic fairness

Algorithms are watching us

Algorithms generate risk scores used in criminal justice systems all over the world. In the United Kingdom, the OASys (Offender Assessment System) is used as part of the pre-sentence information given to judges - it shapes bail, parole and sentencing decisions. In the United States, a tool known as COMPAS does something similar.

Risk scores are used beyond criminal justice, too, and they don't always need computers to generate them. A short survey known as the Opioid Risk Tool helps doctors in Australia and across the world decide whether to prescribe pain relief for acute and chronic illness, by predicting whether patients will misuse their medications.

Predictive algorithms literally save lives: they are used to allocate donor organs, triage patients and make urgent medical treatment decisions. But they can also create and sustain unjustified inequalities.

Imagine that we develop an algorithm - "CrimeBuster" - to help police patrol crime "hot spots". We use data that links crime to areas populated by lower income families. Since we cannot measure "crime" directly, we instead look at rates of arrest.

Yet the fact that arrest rates are high in these areas may just tell us that police spend more time patrolling them. If there is no justification for this practice of intensive policing, rolling out CrimeBuster would give these prejudices the status of policy.

Read more: The evidence is in: you can't link imprisonment to crime rates

Algorithms are judging us

The trouble deepens when we use statistics to make predictions about intentional action - the things that we choose to do.

This might be a prediction about whether someone will be a " toxic " employee, commit crimes or abuse drugs.

The factors that influence these predictions are rarely publicised. For the British sentencing algorithm OASys, they include whether someone has been the victim of domestic violence.

The American COMPAS system captures parental divorce and childhood abuse. The Opioid Risk Tool asks whether the patient's family has a history of substance abuse, and whether the patient (if female) has a history of " preadolescent sexual abuse ".

In each case, these facts make it more likely that someone will go to prison, miss out on medical treatment, and so on.

We all want to have the chance to make choices true to who we are, and meet our needs and goals. And we want to be afforded the same choices as other people, rather than be singled out as incapable of choosing well.

When we punish someone because of facts they can't easily influence, we do just this: we treat that person as if they simply cannot help but make bad choices.

We can't lock people up just in case

The problem isn't the use of algorithms per se. In the 19th century, Italian physician Cesare Lombroso argued we could identify "the born criminal" from physical characteristics - a misshapen skull, wide jaw, long limbs or big ears.

Not long after, British criminologist Charles Goring ran with this idea and argued that certain "defective" mental characteristics made "the fate of imprisonment" inevitable.

Algorithms simply make it much harder to see what's going on in the world of crime risk assessment.

But when we look, it turns out what's going on is something pretty similar to the Lombroso-Goring vision: we treat people as if they are fated to do wrong, and lock them up (or keep them locked up) just in case.

Public bodies should be required to publish the facts that inform the predictions behind such decisions. Machine learning should only be used if and to the extent that these publication requirements can be met. This makes it easier to have meaningful conversations about where to draw the line.

In the context of criminal justice, that line is clear. We should only deal out harsher penalties for bad behaviour, not other physical, mental or social characteristics. There are plenty of guidelines that take this approach, and this is the line that Australian institutions should toe.

Once penalties for their crime have been applied, prisoners should not be treated differently or locked up for longer because of their friends and family, their financial status or the way in which they've been treated at the hands of others.

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Algorithms that predict crime are watching - and judging us by the cards we've been dealt

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Tools used in the criminal justice system predict the risk of crime - but the scores are based on factors completely out of our control.

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At the National WWII Museum in New Orleans, a new interactive exhibition is using artificial intelligence to facilitate conversations with veterans, home front workers, nurses, USO dancers and others who participated in the war effort.

The show-called " Voices From the Front"-features life-sized video likenesses of 18 Americans. When visitors ask them questions, an A.I. program pulls the best answer from a series of pre-recorded videos, per the Washington Post's Katy Reckdahl.

Each participant sat before more than a dozen cameras and answered as many as 1,000 questions about their lives and war experiences.

"I'm making history, to see myself telling the story of what happened to me over there," Olin Pickens, a 102-year-old veteran, tells Kevin McGill and Stephen Smith of the Associated Press (AP). "I'm so proud that I'm here, that people can see me."

Pickens was stationed with the 805th Tank Destroyer Battalion at Faïd Pass in Tunisia in 1943, according to the exhibition page. German forces attacked his company and captured him just two weeks after he joined the unit. He spent the rest of the war in a prisoner-of-war camp.

Since the National WWII Museum opened in 2000, veterans have volunteered to sit at a table and share their memories with guests, per the AP. But their numbers are dwindling: As of last year, only 119,550 of the 16.1 million Americans who served in the war were still alive. The new exhibition is billed as a way to help World War II veterans and witnesses continue telling their stories.

"Preserving the personal accounts of those who served and sacrificed in defense of our freedom during World War II is at the foundation of our mission," says Stephen Watson, president and CEO of the museum, in a statement. "This powerful addition to the museum will give visitors the ability to authentically connect with these individuals, creating an effective way to carry on their memories of the sights, sounds, terrors and triumphs of the war for generations to come."

The A.I. copies don't always understand what's being asked of them, and they sometimes take a long time to respond. According to the Times-Picayune/New Orleans Advocate's Doug MacCash, "I don't have an answer to that question" is a common reply-at least for now. As the program fields more questions, its speed and accuracy will improve with time.

StoryFile, a company specializing in A.I. conversational videos, produced the show, which the museum began putting together after it received a $1.5 million donation. It opened last month, and participants got the chance to talk with their virtual copies at a ribbon-cutting ceremony.

"I didn't know I was that good-looking," said Tolley Fletcher, a 98-year-old Navy veteran, per the Times-Picayune. "It's kind of weird talking to yourself."

Fletcher was part of the historic D-Day invasion on Normandy's beaches on June 6, 1944. He also served in North Africa and tracked down German U-boats in the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico.

Three participants died before their virtual copies debuted. One of them was Hershel Woodrow "Woody" Williams, who was the war's last surviving veteran to receive the Medal of Honor. He served in the Battle of Guam and the Battle of Iwo Jima.

"Woody was the last one," Peter Crean, a museum vice president and a retired Army colonel, tells the Washington Post. "This is now the only place that you can go to have a conversation with a World War II Medal of Honor recipient."
"Voices From the Front" is now on view at the National WWII Museum in New Orleans.

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This Museum Lets Visitors Talk to A.I. Copies of World War II Veterans

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Eighteen Americans who participated in the war effort each answered up to 1,000 questions on camera to create their interactive video likenesses

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Opinion: Were masks useless? The deceptive interpretation of what science tells us | CNN

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Three years into the Covid-19 pandemic, we are witnessing a retrospective questioning of whether masks decrease the risk of Covid-19 spread - and it's not based on what the science is telling us, writes Kent Sepkowitz.

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In table groups, access the media sources. Go through the following steps:

1. Link the story to the TOK themes & AOKs

2. Identify one ‘type 1’ question (what we know), and one ‘type 2’ question (about how we know and produce knowledge)

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KNOWLEDGE & THE KNOWER _ Briefing paper 2025-26

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Welcome to the knowledge & the knower section of the site. This page will help you to take ownership of the core theme via a quick overview, and four padlets that offer you quotes, knowledge questions, real-world issues, and key thinkers relating to this optional theme.

You can use this content both to understand this component of TOK, and support discussions and arguments that you offer in your essay and exhibition.

Knowledge & the knower - the core theme of TOK - takes students on an exploration of the relationship between individual knowers and the knowledge they seek to comprehend. It delves into the pivotal role of personal cognition, biases, and experiences in shaping our understanding of the world. The core theme, links to several key concepts.

Perspective plays a central role, representing the lens through which individuals perceive and interpret the world, shaping their understanding and ability to explain reality. The concept of objectivity challenges us to critically examine the extent to which we can detach ourselves from personal biases and emotions when seeking to understand and convey knowledge. Responsibility underscores the ethical dimensions of knowledge, emphasizing the role of the knower in shaping the truth and values associated with the knowledge they possess.

Two influential thinkers in the realm of knowledge and the knower from diverse backgrounds are Elizabeth Loftus and John Stuart Mill. Elizabeth Loftus, an American cognitive psychologist, has examined the malleability of human memory, revealing the potential for cognitive biases to shape our

understanding of past events. John Stuart Mill, a British philosopher, examined the limitations of human knowledge, and how by developing more intellectual humility we make it easier for our ourselves to develop a greater understanding of the world.

Contemporary issues related to knowledge and the knower are both relevant and thought-provoking. Discussions on cognitive biases highlight the ways in which inherent mental shortcuts can influence our perception and interpretation of information, sometimes leading to errors in judgment. Additionally, debates on digital identity raise questions about the construction of online personas and the impact of technology on our sense of self and knowledge formation.

The core theme encourages students to critically reflect on their own perspectives, biases, and ethical responsibilities as knowers. It emphasizes the importance of self-awareness, critical thinking, and empathy in navigating the complex relationship between the knower and the knowledge they seek and share.

Subscribe to the free TOK newsletter!

Subscribe to our free newsletter, and collect fantastic examples to help you understand the key TOK ideas, support your essay and exhibition, and make you an authentic critical thinker.

You'll encounter some of the most important thinkers from the past and the present, go beyond the headlines of contemporary events and issues around the globe, and see how TOK concepts manifest in the real-world. Subscribe HERE!

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Welcome to the knowledge & the knower section of the site. This page will help you to take ownership of the core theme via a quick overview, and four

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Related exhibition prompt Are some types of knowledge less open to interpretation than others (Prompt 9)?

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Related exhibition prompt Are some types of knowledge less open to interpretation than others (Prompt 9)?

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Refer to the ideas from this lesson to answer this question.

For example, think about whether knowledge from other themes and areas of knowledge is more open to interpretations from different perspectives.

Which objects could help to illustrate your answer? How would you link this object to the prompt?

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How can confirmation bias cause us to misinterpret and misunderstand the world?

How serious can the implications of this be?

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How might the context in which knowledge is presented influence whether it is accepted or rejected (Prompt 24)?

Refer to the ideas from this lesson to answer this question.

For example, think about what kind of context might persuade you to believe or reject something - particularly if you were biased towards it already.

Which objects could help to illustrate your answer?

Minimum of 150 words

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Debate: Should we be allowed to say what we want in the digital (and real) town square? ​

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Debate: Should we be allowed to say what we want in the digital (and real) town square? ​

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The platform for rational debate. Empowering reason through friendly and open discussions.

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An article to possibly include

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Privately owned public spaces like Twitter are often viewed as "public town squares." But it's unclear exactly how private companies' influence on the so-called public spaces they control affects actual civic outcomes.

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discussion-qr-code_Should we be able to say what we like in the digital (and real) town square_

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KK16 The limits of free speech _ Class presentation (25-26)

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With reference to SOME of the 12 Key Concepts explain the

difference between

knowledge, opinion,

and belief? (A minimum of a couple sentences per EACH of Opoinion, Knowledge, and belief)

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Should we be able to say what we like in the digital (and real) town…

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Should we be able to say what we like in the digital (and real) town square?

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I can discuss the importance of technology in helping us understand the world, and discuss its place in the course

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TE1 Technology: nature & scope | Class presentation (25-26)

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Don’t believe everything you see and hear about Israel and Palestine

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Don’t believe everything you see and hear about Israel and Palestine

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Don’t believe everything you see and hear about Israel and Palestine

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Misinformation about the Israel-Hamas war is easy to find online. Here’s how to avoid spreading it.

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TE7 Miraculous communication _ Class presentation (25-26)

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In our digital era of smartphones and social media, it seems nearly everyone suffers from communication overload. Less than 15 years ago, most netizens had just one or two email accounts, texting was tedious and costly, and mobile phones were primarily used to make, well, phone calls.

Today, it's common for people to manage numerous social media accounts and email addresses. One recent estimate claimed the average internet user has social media accounts - excluding email. Chunky mobile phones have been replaced by pocket touchscreen computers that constantly jingle and buzz notifications, pulling their owners away from face-to-face encounters with other human beings into a constantly churning social networking vortex.

Experts who look into such things say that while social networking has its benefits -- professionally, personally, politically -- it's also dumbing down the ways people communicate with each other. Having so many channels of communication has overwhelmed our ability to thoughtfully interact online, encouraging cheap and easy forms of communication.

Instead of taking the time to formulate a thoughtful reply to an online friend's social media post, social media users tend to gravitate to using an emoji or firing off a brief comment meant to convey little more than acknowledgment.

"When you look at social media apps, particularly Facebook, the most common action is to 'like' something; it's not to comment, it's not to post, it's to 'like,'" Larry Rosen, co-author of "The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World," told Salon. "The reason for that is because it takes minimal cognitive effort."

Indeed, Facebook's "like" icon has been such a popular way to communicate that last year the world's largest social network expanded its thumbs-up icon into a suite of five "reactions" icons that represent anger, sadness, surprise, laughter and , giving users the same depth of communication that could be taught to a chimpanzee.

These icons may be overly simplistic and ambiguous, but studies have shown that receiving even these tiny and insignificant gratifications has a neurological effect on social media users that is similar to what we feel when eating delicious food, after an intense workout, or during sex. (Anyone who has seen one of their Facebook posts amass dozens of "reactions" and comments has experienced that little boost to self-esteem.)

Facebook's long-established resistance to adding a " " button suggests it is trying to emotionally engineer its online community toward uplifting and positive interactions. This would make sense, since a happy and content (and troll-free) Facebook community is a more appealing consumer target for the company's advertisers. Income from advertising was Facebook's main source for its $27.64 billion in revenue and $10.22 billion in profit .

That Facebook is constantly tweaking what we see and how we interact on its platform has led to past controversies. In 2014, the company admitted to secretly manipulating the content on 689,000 users' home pages in a test to measure if content could cause users to share positive or negative content on their own feeds.

The study, conducted by Facebook data scientists and researchers from Cornell University, secretly filtered users' Facebook news feeds of comments, pictures, videos and news links from others in their social networks. One group was subjected to a flow of mostly "positive emotional content" while the other group was shown posts with "negative emotional content." The researchers concluded that users subjected to predominantly negative or predominantly positive emotions on their news feeds were more likely to express the same emotions in their own posts.

"The emotions expressed by friends, via online social networks, influence our own moods," the concluded.

While Facebook won't comment on how its system decides what users see on their news feeds, it's clear from the study the company is aware of the relationship between user-provided content, what users see on their profiles and what kind of feedback these users might provide to their online friends. Steering users toward sharing positive and uplifting commentary is a potent incentive for advertisers, who might balk if Facebook had more negative emotional content.

So with Facebook and other social media constantly nudging you toward shallow, happy thoughts that can be turned into advertising dollars, what can users do to improve the quality of their social media communications?

Rosen, a psychology professor at California State University, Dominguez Hills, says you should consider what psychologists call your core social media group. These are the people whose so-called social capital has the most value to you. This could include family members, real-world friends, colleagues or the few social media connections who provide substantive and thoughtful feedback. (These are the people in your life who, for example, would remember your birthday without you setting up Facebook to remind them to send you a happy birthday greeting.)

"What's really important [for better social media feedback] is to define where you want to amass your social capital from," Rosen said. "Figure out your core ties, figure out who you want to be part of that group and focus on them." This includes, Rosen says, using more private rather than public communication.

People use social media for many different reasons, but if you desire constructive criticism, thoughtful commentary and engaging group conversation, your best bet might just be to cull your herd of followers, cut back on social media accounts, and be more thoughtful in the content you share. There's no emoji that can replace real effort at human interaction online.

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How social media is dumbing down our communication

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Communication overload encourages thoughtless commentary, but it doesn't have to be that way

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Say it with a smiley: More prefer to express feelings via emojis instead of phone calls, study finds

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More than just a fun way to tell your friends what you’re having for lunch, emojis have become a “cultural phenomenon” that is shaping the way we express ideas and emotions across languages and generations, software firm Adobe said.

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Is social media, texting, and technology in general ‘dumbing down’ language? ​

Explain your answer, with reference to the ideas and terms used by the thinkers we have met today. Use terminology learned today as well as any of the ToK concepts that are appropriate

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Related exhibition prompt Can new knowledge change established values or beliefs? (Prompt 11) ​

Refer to the ideas from this lesson to answer this question.​

For example, think about the deeply entrenched belief that technology such as WhatsApp, emojis, etc., are dumbing down language, and whether drawing on McWhorter’s ideas can change this attitude.​

Which objects could help to illustrate your answer?

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LA1 Language_ nature & scope _ Class presentation (25-26)

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KNOWLEDGE & LANGUAGE _ Briefing paper 2025-26 (5) (1)

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In Groups of 3-4, Choose ONE mini-lesson.

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In Groups of 3-4, Choose ONE mini-lesson.

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Either follow the ‘knowledge journey’ (slide 3), or read/watch the media source the mini-lesson is based on. Find out:​

What the story deals with​

Key terms from the article​

The insights it provides us about language and knowledge

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Short, impactful, thought-provoking mini-lessons on knowledge & language.

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A young Latina mother I was interviewing once laughed uncomfortably as she described her sons' embarrassment when put on the spot by older Latinos.

They would speak to her sons in Spanish, before quickly adding in the same language, "How awful! You don't understand me in Spanish?" Her sons would then sheepishly reply - in Spanish - "Yes, I understand. But I don't speak it."

Despite our different backgrounds, her story hit close to home.

I grew up in Arizona as the child of Chinese immigrants, learning to navigate the language and cultural currents that surrounded me inside and outside of the home. Reclaiming my Chinese language and understanding its role in my life has been a lifelong journey. At the same time, I was also immersed in the bilingualism of the U.S.-Mexico border, where Spanish and English are both used but the power and politics of language always linger in the background.

I've also witnessed these dynamics in my extended family, where my husband's Latin American roots bring with them the expectation of Spanish fluency. While he is fluent, many children of Latino immigrants are not.

I've studied these issues for many years as a linguist, and I'm currently exploring them in my current book project on how language helps shape Latino identity in Washington, D.C.

What I've learned upends assumptions that heritage languages are "lost" from one generation to the next because of a simple lack of motivation or children rejecting their roots. My research paints a more complex picture that delves into how we understand - or misunderstand - the bilingualism of heritage speakers.

Assimilation nation

Heritage speakers are people who, although they may have learned their parents' native language at home, no longer speak it in the same way as a traditional native speaker because of growing up in a bilingual environment.

Their language abilities are often misunderstood both within their cultural communities and by outsiders. That's what happened with Celia's sons: Other community members assumed they couldn't speak Spanish, even though they could understand and respond in the language.

Heritage speakers face a unique set of circumstances. The U.S. has a long history as a multilingual society, and an equally long history of oppressing minority groups and their languages and cultures.

Many U.S. families descended from Europe lost their heritage languages because of pressures to assimilate. Policies promoting English as part of broader "Americanization" efforts were enacted through school policies and legislation in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Most heritage languages in the U.S., such as German and Polish, were no longer spoken in families after three generations.

Meanwhile, Native American groups are still fighting to revitalize languages weakened by targeted cultural eradication. Within living memory, Latinos were punished for speaking Spanish at school. I will never forget when a middle-aged Latina in my bilingual education class shared her humiliation and fear when her kindergarten teacher physically punished her for speaking Spanish - the language of her home and her family, and the only language she spoke at that time. Decades later, the memory was still raw.

Heritage speakers still face discrimination in school, and examples of linguistic prejudice - people being attacked for speaking languages other than English - are rampant on the internet.

Straddling two worlds

Under these circumstances, support for heritage languages in the home and within the community is key. Speaking Spanish is certainly an important value for many Latino parents. But they can be quick to criticize their children's Spanish acumen, which can inadvertently undermine these efforts.

In my research, I discovered that elders' negative judgments of the Spanish abilities of younger Latinos created insecurity and language avoidance. Youth were held to unrealistic standards that did not reflect their bilingual realities. When younger Latinos code-switched, understood more than they could say, had a non-native accent in Spanish or spoke English among themselves, older community members often saw this as evidence that they didn't really speak Spanish.

In reality, these are normal behaviors for the children of immigrants all over the world. But parents' comparison of their children to monolingual norms - the speech of native speakers who speak only one language - meant that they often inadvertently disparaged their kids' bilingualism instead of celebrating it.

The relationship between language and identity is intensely personal. Since language is intimately linked to identity, it is often used as a gatekeeper, with young Latinos being shamed for being "Americanized" or seen as rejecting the home culture.

Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Many of the children and grandchildren of immigrants whom I spoke with told me they felt insecure about their ability to speak Spanish. Even if they were quite fluent, they felt that it was never good enough. As one U.S.-born Latino commented, "I speak Spanish, you know, people down the street can hear me and be like, 'This guy's a gringo.'"

Criticizing the way they speak, even with good intentions, can cause them to question their identity and feel insecure, discouraging them from speaking Spanish - the exact opposite of the desired result.

Never enough

While their Spanish comes under attack, Latinos also weather doubts and assumptions about their English. Even Latinos who speak only English get stereotyped as not speaking it based on their ethnicity. People often mistakenly assume that Latino English - a native dialect - is "broken" English, or criticize it as "nonstandard" due to its historic Spanish influence.

Latino English can also experience another layer of prejudice since it is often influenced by African American language, as I found while researching how Latino children acquire their peers' African American English as a second language.

The heritage-speaker dilemma encapsulates some of the contradictions that Latino youth must navigate: Their parents see them as not Latino enough, while many others view them as not American enough. This dynamic can make them doubt themselves and give others ammunition to question their identities.

These beliefs are so entrenched that even powerful Latinos cannot escape them. U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's bilingualism is constantly under scrutiny. She has been mocked for pronouncing her name in Spanish, as if the English pronunciation were more correct. She's also been accused of faking her accent.

Criticism of heritage speakers lies in the mistaken belief that there is only one "pure" way to speak a language and that this lines up neatly with culture and identity. But language always evolves, and culture is always changing. Fluid forms, such as Spanglish, play an important role in identity for many young Latinos.

Increasingly, heritage speakers are sharing their experiences and realizing that wherever they are in their language journeys, it's good enough.

Their language and culture is not "less than" or inauthentic - just different. It's based on the experience of growing up in a diaspora. Ultimately, many people can identify with their experiences, regardless of their different backgrounds. Learning how to integrate different aspects of yourself into a whole while not losing your roots is a quintessentially American - and, ultimately, human - experience.

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Language induces an identity crisis for the children and grandchildren of Latino immigrants

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Young Latinos in the US often navigate a contradictory landscape: Their parents see them as not Latino enough, while teachers and peers view them as not American enough.

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Your brain processes letters, words, sounds, semantics and grammar at breakneck speed. StudioM1/iStock via Getty Images Plus

The days of having a dictionary on your bookshelf are numbered. But that's OK, because everyone already walks around with a dictionary - not the one on your phone, but the one in your head.

Just like a physical dictionary, your mental dictionary contains information about words. This includes the letters, sounds and meaning, or semantics, of words, as well as information about parts of speech and how you can fit words together to form grammatical sentences. Your mental dictionary is also like a thesaurus. It can help you connect words and see how they might be similar in meaning, sound or spelling.

As a researcher who studies word retrieval, or how you quickly and accurately pull words out of your memory to communicate, I'm intrigued by how words are organized in our mental dictionaries. Everyone's mental dictionary is a little bit different. And I'm even more intrigued by how we can restore the content of our mental dictionaries or improve our use of them, particularly for those who have language disorders.

Language is part of what makes humans special, and I believe everyone deserves the chance to use their words with others.

Your mental dictionary

While a physical dictionary is helpful for shared knowledge, your personal mental dictionary is customized based on your individual experiences. What words are in my mental dictionary might overlap with the mental dictionary of someone else who also speaks the same language, but there will also be a lot of differences between the content of our dictionaries.

You add words to your mental dictionary through your educational, occupational, cultural and other life experiences. This customization also means that the size of mental dictionaries is a little bit different from person to person and varies by age. Researchers found that the average 20-year-old American English speaker knows about 42,000 unique words, and this number grows to about 48,000 by age 60. Some people will have even larger vocabularies.

By now, you might be envisioning your mental dictionary as a book with pages of words in alphabetical order you can flip through as needed. While this visual analogy is helpful, there is a lot of debate about how mental dictionaries are organized. Many scholars agree that it's probably not like an alphabetized book.

One widely rejected theory, the grandmother cell theory, suggests that each concept is encoded by a single neuron. This implies that you would have a neuron for every word that you know, including "grandmother."

While not accepted as accurate, the aspect of the grandmother cell theory suggesting that certain parts of the brain are more important for some types of information than others is likely true. For example, the left temporal lobe on the side of your brain has many regions that are important for language processing, including word retrieval and production. Rather than a single neuron responsible for processing a concept, a model called parallel distributed processing proposes that large networks of neurons across the brain work together to bring about word knowledge when they fire together.

For example, when I say the word "dog," there are lots of different aspects of the word that your brain is retrieving, even if unconsciously. You might be thinking about what a dog smells like after being out in the rain, what a dog sounds like when it barks, or what a dog feels like when you pet it. You might be thinking about a specific dog you grew up with, or you might have a variety of emotions about dogs based on your past experiences with them. All of these different features of "dog" are processed in slightly different parts of your brain.

Using your mental dictionary

One reason why your mental dictionary can't be like a physical dictionary is that it is dynamic and quickly accessed.

Your brain's ability to retrieve a word is very fast. In one study, researchers mapped the time course of word retrieval among 24 college students by recording their brain activity while they named pictures. They found evidence that participants selected words within 200 milliseconds of seeing the image. After word selection, their brain continued to process information about that word, like what sounds are needed to say that chosen word and ignoring related words. This is why you can retrieve words with such speed in real-time conversations, often so quickly that you give little conscious attention to that process.

Until ... you have a breakdown in word retrieval. One common failure in word retrieval is called the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon. It's the feeling when you know what word you want to use but are unable to find it in that moment. You might even know specific details about the word you want, like other words with similar meaning or maybe the first letter or sound of that word. With enough time, the word you wanted might pop into your mind.

These tip-of-the-tongue experiences are a normal part of human language experience across the life span, and they increase as you grow older. One proposed reason for this increase is that they're due to an age-related disruption in the ability to turn on the right sounds needed to say the selected word.

For some people, though, tip-of-the-tongue experiences and other speech errors can be quite impairing. This is commonly seen in aphasia, a language disorder that often occurs after injury to the language centers of the brain, such as stroke, or neurodegeneration, such as dementia. People with aphasia often have difficulty with word retrieval.

Fortunately, there are treatments available that can help someone improve their word retrieval abilities. For example, semantic feature analysis focuses on strengthening the semantic relationships between words. There are also treatments like phonomotor treatment that focus on strengthening the selection and production of speech sounds needed for word production. There are even apps that remotely provide word retrieval therapy on phones or computers.

The next time you have a conversation with someone, take a moment to reflect on why you chose the specific words you did. Remember that the words you use and the mental dictionary you have are part of what make you and your voice unique.

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Your mental dictionary is part of what makes you unique − here's how your brain stores and retrieves words

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Most people can draw from tens of thousands of words in their memory within milliseconds. Studying this process can improve language disorder treatment and appreciation of the gift of communication.

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In Groups of 4 you will work through the above and summerise your points in the comment section below

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LA4 The emergence of new meaning | Student handout 1

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collinsdictionary.com/woty

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Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year for 2023 is -the term for something we're thinking about, writing about, aspiring to, and judging more than ever.

A high-volume lookup most years, authentic saw a substantial increase in 2023, driven by stories and conversations about AI, celebrity culture, identity, and social media.

Authentic has a number of meanings including "not false or imitation," a synonym of real and actual; and also "true to one's own personality, spirit, or character." Although clearly a desirable quality, authentic is hard to define and subject to debate-two reasons it sends many people to the dictionary.

Authentic is often connected to identity, whether national or personal: words frequently modified by authentic include cuisine and dish, but also self and voice. Celebrities like singers Lainey Wilson, Sam Smith, and especially Taylor Swift all made headlines in 2023 with statements about seeking their "authentic voice" and "authentic self." Headlines like Three Ways To Tap Into Taylor Swift's Authenticity And Build An Eras-Like Workplace associate this quality with pop-culture superpower.

And with the rise of artificial intelligence-and its impact on deepfake videos, actors' contracts, academic honesty, and a vast number of other topics-the line between "real" and "fake" has become increasingly blurred.

Authentic is what brands, social media influencers, and celebrities aspire to be. Elon Musk made headlines when he said that people should be more "authentic" on social media. Apps and platforms like BeReal make recording "authentic" experiences their main purpose. No matter how much artifice and calculation goes into the production of these videos, as Rebecca Jennings of Vox puts it, "wherever people are supposedly being 'authentic' on the internet, the money will follow." Ironically, with "authentic content creators" now recognized as the gold standard for building trust, "authenticity" has become a performance.

Other words also stood out in the dictionary's 2023 data, including:

, an example of internet-driven slang, shot to the top of lookups when it was added to the dictionary in September.

As a noun, rizz means "romantic appeal or charm" (as in "a bro who has rizz"); as a verb (typically used with up, as in "rizz up that cutie") it means "to charm or seduce." It's frequently considered a play on charisma, but YouTuber Kai Cenat (shown above), widely credited with coining the word, says nah, that's not what it's from. No other lexical inspiration has been identified though.

The quest for authenticity partly results from technologies like the deepfake: "an image or recording that has been convincingly altered and manipulated to misrepresent someone as doing or saying something that was not actually done or said."

In late April and early May, we saw a surge of interest in deepfake when lawyers for Elon Musk argued that he shouldn't have to give legal testimony about public statements he made, since, as a famous person, some of his statements might be deepfakes. (This argument was rejected by the judge.)

Another spike for deepfake followed in May, when a fan-made ad for Tesla featured a likeness of Ryan Reynolds, and again in June, when online ads for Ron DeSantis used apparently fake images of Donald Trump.

The ceremony to crown a new British monarch-Charles III-caused this term to spike in May.

Coronation refers to the literal act of placing a crown on a monarch's head, a synonym of crowning. It is also more figuratively used to refer to the assumption of a prominent position or office, as in "the coronation of the league's MVP."

Coronation comes from French, as do so many of the words associated with nobility and royalty, including noble, royal, monarch, and ceremony. These French words are used because the British aristocracy was originally the Norman (i.e., French) aristocracy following William the Conqueror's victory in 1066. The word has been used in English since the 1300s.

A number of events this year drove interest in . A video produced by the Republican National Committee in early April, and built entirely with AI-generated imagery, portrayed what was widely described as the "dystopian future" the RNC asserts will result from the reelection of Joe Biden. And the 54th Earth Day celebration on April 22nd, which followed weeks of record-high temperatures, came with warnings from activists that action must be taken to avoid a "dystopian future." That future was evoked in June when smoke from Canadian wildfires blanketed the eastern U.S. creating a "dystopian landscape." And the year was full of dystopian warnings that AI could eventually replace or subjugate humankind.

Dystopian gets applied not only to frightening real-world issues, but also to entertaining fictional ones. Video games, books and movies depict a dark potential future that typifies the imagined world or society that dystopian so often calls to mind.

One of the rarest distinctions an entertainer can achieve is winning four particular awards: the Emmy, the Grammy, the Oscar, and the Tony. This accomplishment is referred to by a word made up of the first letters of each award, the . EGOT was first used in 1984 and was added to our dictionary in 2019.

Lookups for EGOT spiked in February when Viola Davis won a Grammy for her reading of the audiobook version of her memoir, adding to the Emmy, Oscar, and Tony awards she had already received.

EGOT is pronounced as a word as /EE-gaht/ rather than by spelling out its letters. We heard Viola Davis pronounce it when she used EGOT as a verb in her acceptance speech at the Grammys, exclaiming "I just EGOT!"

We don't currently enter EGOT as a verb in the dictionary, but perhaps this usage will catch on.

Elon Musk's rebranding of Twitter as X sent many people to the dictionary to learn more about this unusually flexible letter. It doesn't just represent a letter and its sound, but also has various meanings and functions: for example, it stands for "an unknown quantity," it's a symbol for the act of multiplication, and it is used as a substitute for "by" in measurements, as in "The room was 10'x15'."

Other letters carry meaning by themselves, (think of F for "failure" or to a T meaning "perfection"), but X has a mystique all its own. Linguist Marcel Danesi was quoted as commenting that X " reverberates with all kinds of meanings that are intuitive, unconscious, and archetypal."

Lookups for X spiked 885% on July 23, the date of the rebranding announcement, although the value of the platform has declined significantly since then.

When a submersible attempting to visit the wreck of the Titanic disappeared in June, the search made international headlines. Titan, the world eventually learned, had imploded.

While explode is a common word, is encountered less frequently; people turned to the dictionary to understand it. Something that implodes bursts inward or undergoes violent compression-in this case, from the immense water pressure two miles below the ocean's surface. The noun also saw a dramatic increase in lookups.

Submersible itself was also a top lookup. A submersible is a small underwater craft used for deep-sea research.

Doppelgänger saw multiple lookup spikes from independent events. Media coverage of two crimes- one in Germany and one in New York, each involving the murder or attempted murder of someone's lookalike-focused on the word. So did a story about two minor league baseball players who, despite sharing professions, names, and similar physical features (height, coloring, glasses), were shown via a DNA test to be unrelated. And September saw the release of Naomi Klein's book, Doppelgänger: A Trip Into the Mirror World.

Doppelgänger can refer to a living person that closely resembles another living person-that is, a double; or it can refer to the opposite side of one's personality. In German folklore a Doppelgänger is a ghostly counterpart of a living person. The word is formed from two words that together mean "double goer."

Several very different stories contributed to an increase in lookups for , defined as "a formal, solemn, and binding agreement" or "a written agreement or promise."

A tragic shooting at the Covenant School in Nashville on March 27th coincided with the first spike in lookups for covenant. The word remained higher during the April release of Guy Ritchie's The Covenant, a film depicting the rescue of an Afghan interpreter who had saved the life of a U.S. soldier in combat. In May, a much-anticipated new novel by Abraham Verghese, The Covenant of Water, became an instant bestseller featured in Oprah's Book Club. Finally, reports in early November revealed that the new Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, uses an app called Covenant Eyes to monitor the websites he visits, by sharing them automatically with an accountability partner, in this case Johnson's teenage son.

Covenant has a religious resonance because of its use in the Bible. It appears over 200 times in the King James Version of the Bible, mostly in the Old Testament, referring to promises of different kinds, sometimes between people, and sometimes between individuals and God. In the Book of Exodus, covenant refers to the Ten Commandments.

was often in the news this year. Former President Donald Trump was indicted in four separate cases now moving through the legal system, and indict spiked by 9440% on March 30, when a New York City grand jury charged the former president in the hush-money case.

Indict is defined as "to charge with a crime by the finding or presentment of a jury (such as a grand jury) in due form of law." Like most words in our legal vocabulary, indict comes from French (others include judge, jury, arraign, appeal, and acquit).

The is the result of scholars in the Renaissance "correcting" the spelling of the French borrowing by adding the c from its Latin ancestor. Before their tampering, the word was spelled indite.

In June, the title of the new Pixar film Elemental made lookups spike. Appropriately enough, this title employs the original and oldest meaning of : "any of the four substances air, water, fire, and earth formerly believed to compose the physical universe."

With characters that embody fire, water, earth, and air as anthropomorphized qualities, the film's plot becomes an allegory about identity and prejudice.

When Hamas launched attacks on Israel from the Gaza Strip on October 7th, civilians living in kibbutzim were among the targets. A term unfamiliar to many outside Israel, refers to a communal farm or settlement in Israel.

Other terms relating to Hamas's attack and Israel's military response that saw an increase in lookups were blood libel and .

saw a large increase in lookups in March with "Parental Rights" bills being considered in several states. Such bills require schools to use what many transgender supporters call a "deadname"-the name someone was given at birth and no longer uses upon transitioning. While deadname does not appear in legislation, the word was used in media coverage of the issue.

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Find out why Merriam-Webster named 'authentic' as the Word of the Year for 2023. And learn more about the words that inspired a large number of lookups from AI, politics, pop culture, and international conflict.

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Collins - The Collins Word of the Year 2025 is...

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Collins - The Collins Word of the Year 2025 is…

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Each year, the Macquarie Dictionary calls together a selected Committee to discuss the new words and definitions that have entered the Macquarie Dictionary over the year. The aim of this is to select one of these to be awarded the Committee’s Choice Word of the Year. As part of this process, our editors create a

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Oxford Word of the Year 2024 - Oxford University Press

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The Oxford Word of the Year 2024 is ‘brain rot’. Discover more about the winner, our shortlist, and 20 years of words that reflect the world.

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The Cambridge Dictionary Word of the Year 2024

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Cambridge Dictionary has announced ‘manifest’ as its Word of the Year 2024. The news follows a year-long interest in the controversial global trend of manifesting.

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Dictionary.com’s 2024 Word of the Year Is… | Dictionary.com

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Each year, Dictionary.com’s Word of the Year and short-listed nominees capture pivotal moments in language and culture. These words serve as a linguistic time capsule, reflecting social trends and global events that defined the year. The Word of the Year isn’t just about popular usage; it reveals the stories we tell about ourselves and how […]

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In groups of 4-5, which of the WOTY do you think is the most appropriate and why?

NOW decide what your WOTY would be. Base this on a word that sums up one or more events from the last 12 months, or represents a new trend or concept. Give a justification for your decision

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LA5 Big branches proliferating _ Class presentation (25-26)

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The centuries-old language watchdog the Académie Française has warned that growing use of English by public and private bodies risks poor communication and could even undermine social cohesion.

A report by six members, published online this week, warns that "today's communication is characterised by a degradation that must not be seen as inevitable".

Over 30 pages, it picks through dozens of messages from public bodies, such as ministries or local authorities, as well as private firms, highlighting examples of bilingual wordplay.

The flagged terms include train operator SNCF's low-cost Ouigo (pronounced "we go") services, or imports from English such as "big data" or "drive-in".

"Many anglicisms are used in place of existing French words or expressions, inevitably leading to the gradual erasure of the French equivalents," said the body, which was founded in 1635 under King Louis XIII to guard "pure" French.

"Aside from fashion and sport, the internet and digital field is unsurprisingly the most strongly and visibly 'anglicised'," the academy said, dubbing tech terms "Californisms".

In one example, it notes that there are at least five possible French translations for the social networking term "follower", a word commonly peppered into everyday French speech.

The Covid-19 pandemic has also resulted in a number of hasty bolt-ons from English like "cluster" and "testing".

English words themselves are "often distorted" to fit French pronunciation or syntax, the academy notes, resulting in "the creation of hybrid forms that are neither English nor French".

Sometimes this can make even fluent speakers stumble - as with carmaker Peugeot's slogan "Unboring the Future" or the concept of a "drive piéton" (a "pedestrian drive-through", or pickup point for products ordered online).

Overuse of English "has the contradictory consequence of risking an impoverishment of French vocabulary and growing discrimination among sections of the public", the academy said.

"By widely using an English vocabulary not understood by much of the public, online services contribute to stoking the defiance that has visibly developed in recent years towards all kinds of authorities."

The Académie Française has become more assertive under permanent secretary, Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, about its mission to protect French.

In January, it threatened legal action against the government for including English translations of information fields on national identity cards.

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Académie Française denounces rise of English words in public life

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The centuries-old language watchdog the Académie Française has warned that growing use of English by public and private bodies risks poor communication and could even undermine social cohesion. A report by six members, published online this week, warns that "today's communication is characterised by a degradation that must not be seen as inevitable".

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In your group discuss and record in the comments below-​

Which language does Your article focuses on?​

Which power is keen to prevent this from happening?​

What does this reveal about how some people view: a) the relationship between culture and language; b) the nature of language in terms of change and stability?​

Overall, do you believe that language needs ‘preserving’?

Terminology Key Words-

preserve – keep something safe

culture – traditions and way of life

identity – who people are

change – become different

power – people or groups who control decisions

language loss / extinction

Which language does your article focus on?

The article focuses on the language called …

This language is spoken in …

Which power is keen to prevent this from happening?

The group/person/government that wants to prevent this is …

They are trying to stop this because …

What does this reveal about views on culture and language?

This shows that some people believe language and culture are …

It suggests that language should / should not change because …

Do you believe language needs preserving?

I believe language does / does not need preserving because …

In my opinion, preserving language is important because …

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In your same groups agree on ONE new words using the prompt below: What is your word's definitions

1. Steal​

2. Compound​

3. Blend​

4. Functional shift​

5. Back formation​

6. Making words from acronyms (my word!)

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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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1. What counts as knowledge?

2. Are some types of knowledge more useful than others?

3. What features of knowledge have an impact on its reliability?

4. On what grounds might we doubt a claim?

5. What counts as good evidence for a claim?

6. How does the way that we organize or classify knowledge affect what we know?

7. What are the implications of having, or not having, knowledge?

8. To what extent is certainty attainable?

9. Are some types of knowledge less open to interpretation than others?

10. What challenges are raised by the dissemination and/or communication of knowledge?

11. Can new knowledge change established values or beliefs?

12. Is bias inevitable in the production of knowledge?

13. How can we know that current knowledge is an improvement upon past knowledge?

14. Does some knowledge belong only to particular communities of knowers?

15. What constraints are there on the pursuit of knowledge?

16. Should some knowledge not be sought on ethical grounds?

17. Why do we seek knowledge?

18. Are some things unknowable?

19. What counts as a good justification for a claim?

20. What is the relationship between personal experience and knowledge?

21. What is the relationship between knowledge and culture?

22. What role do experts play in influencing our consumption or acquisition of knowledge?

23. How important are material tools in the production or acquisition of knowledge?

24. How might the context in which knowledge is presented influence whether it is accepted or rejected?

25. How can we distinguish between knowledge, belief and opinion?

26. Does our knowledge depend on our interactions with other knowers?

27. Does all knowledge impose ethical obligations on those who know it?

28. To what extent is objectivity possible in the production or acquisition of knowledge?

29. Who owns knowledge?

30. What role does imagination play in producing knowledge about the world?

31. How can we judge when evidence is adequate?

32. What makes a good explanation?

33. How is current knowledge shaped by its historical development?

34. In what ways do our values affect our acquisition of knowledge?

35. In what ways do values affect the production of knowledge?

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What is the relationship between personal experience and knowledge?

Knowledge Claim 1: Personal experience shapes what we accept as knowledge, even when it conflicts with shared knowledge.

Knowledge Claim 2: Knowledge gained through personal experience is emotionally powerful but not always reliable.

Knowledge Claim 3: Personal experience limits knowledge by restricting understanding to a single perspective.

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Aphorism enthusiast and author James Geary waxes on a fascinating fixture of human language: the metaphor. Friend of scribes from Aristotle to Elvis, metaphor can subtly influence the decisions we make, Geary says.

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What role does imagination play in producing knowledge about the world? (Prompt 30) ​

Refer to the ideas from this lesson to answer this question.​

For example, think about the the way we draw on our imagination to come up with metaphors, and how metaphors activate our imagination in helping us to visualize and understand ideas and concepts.​

Which objects could help to illustrate your answer?

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Welcome to the natural sciences section of the site. This page will help you to take ownership of the natural sciences via a quick overview, and four padlets that offer you quotes, knowledge questions, real-world issues, and key thinkers relating to this area of knowledge.

You can use this content both to understand this component of TOK, and support discussions and arguments that you offer in your essay and exhibition.

The natural sciences are dedicated to the systematic exploration and understanding of the physical world and the laws that govern it. This area of knowledge encompasses disciplines like physics, chemistry, biology, and astronomy, that all seek to uncover the mysteries of the natural universe. This AOK links to many key concepts.

Certainty plays a central role in the natural sciences, as they seek to establish empirical and predictable patterns in the physical world. Explanation involves deciphering the underlying principles and mechanisms that govern natural phenomena. The concept of objectivity emphasizes the importance of unbiased observation and impartial analysis in the pursuit of scientific knowledge.

Two influential thinkers in the natural sciences from diverse backgrounds are Marie Curie and Albert Einstein. Marie Curie, a Polish-born physicist and chemist, made groundbreaking contributions to the study of radioactivity and was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize.

Albert Einstein, a German-born physicist, revolutionized our understanding of space, time, and the universe through his theory of relativity.

Contemporary issues in the natural sciences often revolve around ethical considerations and the responsible use of scientific advancements. Discussions about genetic engineering and CRISPR technology raise questions about the ethical boundaries of manipulating the genetic code and the potential consequences for future generations. Additionally, the exploration of climate change and sustainability underscores the need for scientific solutions to address urgent global environmental challenges.

Engaging with the natural sciences within TOK invites students to explore the wonders of the physical world, embrace the certainty of empirical evidence, and critically examine the ethical implications of scientific discoveries. It underscores the importance of objectivity, universal truths, and the ethical considerations inherent in the pursuit of scientific knowledge.

HUMAN SCIENCES: DEEPER DIVES

Follow these links to access a range of notes, essays, and observations. Use them to research this AOK, and hone your essay arguments.

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Welcome to the natural sciences section of the site. This page will help you to take ownership of the natural sciences via a quick overview, and four

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●Read through the quotes padlet, and find:

○A quote that surprises you.

○A quote that you find challenging.

○A quote that you think best sums up the nature of knowledge

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NS2 False starts and wrong turns | Class presentation (25-26)

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add ONE idea suggested by the scientists that indicate that processes other than the scientific method are involved in the creation of scientific knowledge .

Example - Sara Seager’s point that science is not a “linear” process, and “False starts and wrong turns” are common.

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The secret to making a scientific discovery | CNN Business

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Scientists spend years in search of answers to the some of the world's biggest breakthroughs. Three eminent professors share how they do it.

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Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science.

James Clerk Maxwell

[Science is about ] farting around in the dark.

Stuart Firestein

How does these quotes suggest a different approach to the scientific method?  Write one paragraph to answer this question in the comment section below

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Stuart Firestein: The pursuit of ignorance

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Watch this 14 minute video

How do their own life experiences and ambitions explain their adherence to the flat-earth theory?

How does our understanding of this belief change when we consider the human perspective that drove it? Offer a nuanced response to this question!

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Flat Earth rising: meet the people casting aside 2,500 years of science

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I’ve talked to dozens of parents about why they don’t vaccinate. Here’s what they told me.

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How modern parenting culture is driving the anti-vaccination movement

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Read the article by Dr Jennifer Reich, looking at why people refuse to vaccinate their children. Locate the following ideas, and explain how they contribute towards people deciding not to vaccinate their children.

1. Government agencies being “too close” to pharmaceutical companies

2. High-stakes decision-making for mothers

3. A culture of individualist parenting & healthcare

4. Shared values and practices

5. Fear of uncertainties in a world that feels increasingly risky

Overall, how does exploring anti-vax beliefs in a nuanced way help us to understand this issue more comprehensively? (write one paragraph to explain)

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“You know when you pick your child up from preschool and the teacher tells you he had a really good day? I have never had that day.”

This is how one mother who I’ll call Katie described what it’s like parenting her son, who is now 6 years old. She visited 15 preschools before she found one she thought would work for him, a place where teachers would understand his passion for space but also his difficulties reading social cues or transitioning between activities. She meticulously manages his diet due to his extensive food allergies and eczema. She also rejects vaccines, which she fears could impair his seemingly challenged immune system or worsen his autism spectrum disorder traits.

Katie is just one mother I spoke to while studying parents who reject some or all vaccines for their children. I’m a sociologist who aims to understand how parents make choices for their families and children, and compiled almost a decade of research into my book Calling the Shots: Why Parents Reject Vaccines.

Katie, like many of the mothers I spoke with, agonizes over how to make sure her kids are healthy, happy, and able to succeed in what seems an increasingly dangerous, competitive, and uncertain world.

Their reasons for rejecting vaccines vary widely. Vaccines, these parents tell me, do not always protect children. Some insist their children’s immune systems would benefit from contracting the illness. Some don’t trust the government agencies that approve vaccines because they are “too close” with pharmaceutical companies. Many believe their healthy lifestyle or prolonged breastfeeding ensures that their children will not experience the worst outcomes of a vaccine-preventable disease.

All insist that each parent must gather her own information and make an informed decision without feeling pressured by expert recommendations. And all insist that whatever happens to their children, they will ultimately be responsible.

Right now, the country is watching the number of measles cases increase each day, hitting a new high of 764 cases across 23 states since it was eradicated from the US in 2000. With 60 new cases in the past week, we can expect the outbreak will continue to spread.

There is no disagreement that vaccine refusal is the cause of outbreaks. More than 70 percent of measles cases this year were in people who had received no vaccines, and in all, 88 percent of cases were associated with under-immunized, close-knit communities. Yet parents’ decisions have effects that can reach far beyond these networks and neighborhoods.

Just this week, actress Jessica Biel appeared with anti-vaccine proponent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the California State Assembly to lobby against a bill that limits medical exemptions for vaccines. When a photo of her appearance went viral, Biel posted on Instagram that she was against the bill “not because I don’t believe in vaccinations, but because I believe in giving doctors and the families they treat the ability to decide what’s best for their patients and the ability to provide that treatment.”

It’s easy to question why any parent would choose not to vaccinate, and to look at mothers like Katie with suspicion, confusion, or disgust. As a mother of three vaccinated children and the granddaughter of a woman who lived her life with a limp that resulted from polio, I too wonder this. And while it is easy to dismiss these parents as anti-science, selfish, ignorant, or delusional, the answer is much more complicated.

Parents who don’t vaccinate are prioritizing their children over other people’s children

First, a few points of clarification. Although I spoke with fathers and mothers in my research, it became clear that health care decisions tend to be maternal terrain. Mothers are most likely to take their kids to doctor appointments and make decisions about food and daily care. They also face scrutiny for their children’s behaviors, performances, and abilities, which makes every decision — including whether to vaccinate — feel high-stakes.

Second, there’s a small number of people who will never believe vaccines work and will never be persuaded to accept them, and I spoke to some of them. This is the group we tend to conflate with the entire world of people who don’t vaccinate.

But the larger and more interesting group to discuss is the significant portion of American parents who say they believe in vaccines but just don’t want them for their children — or don’t want all the vaccines that experts insist are safest and most efficacious. As much as 20 to 25 percent of American parents fall into this latter group, and they arguably pose the greatest threat to herd immunity. They are also the most likely to be persuaded as long as we don’t call them ignorant and selfish.

Finally, parents who refuse vaccines are most likely to be white and college-educated, and to have a higher-than-average family income. I believe their decisions are less about how informed they are and more about the culture of what I term individualist parenting — one that insists parents are personally responsible for their own children, but not other children. Individualist parenting has encouraged mothers to trust their own judgment more than that of experts and believe they can manage their way out of disease risk, even as their choices present risk to others.

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For the past two decades, we have increasingly prioritized individual behaviors and choices as the key to good health. Experts recommend people count their calories, steps, pounds, or servings of vegetables as a path to disease prevention. When we hear someone is sick, our first question is often, “What did they do, or fail to do, that led to illness?” These questions ignore how the majority of illness is beyond individual control and reduce health promotion to a series of consumption decisions.

For mothers, the pressure to manage their children’s nutrition, body size, learning styles, peer interactions, or physical activity is boundless and reinforced by schools, doctors, peers, and parenting magazines. Beyond health, we see demands that mothers individually manage their children’s lives and optimize opportunities for their success. Choosing schools, traveling soccer teams, or SAT tutors promises to increase some children’s opportunities for success. Yet when parents choose to send their kids to private schools or competitive public schools, they implicitly accept that it is fine that other children don’t have safe or adequately resourced schools — as long as it’s not their own kids. The culture of individualist parenting makes clear: Parents have a duty to exercise choice to the bounds of their resources, even at the expense of others.

We can persuade vaccine-refusing parents by appealing to their sense of community responsibility

Mothers often tell me how hard they work to do “research” about raising their children. They don’t mean systematic research in the way scientists do. Rather, they conduct research the way we all do before making a consumption decision like going to a new restaurant or buying an appliance: They gather information, read advice from experts, talk to friends and family, peruse reviews and comments, weigh risks and benefits, and, in the end, trust their instincts. On a range of topics — from cooking to finding a pediatrician to requesting the best teacher to deciding whether to consent to vaccines — mothers routinely share information and advice to support their efforts to make good decisions for their families.

We know that parents who refuse vaccines tend to cluster and that living near a high number of other unvaccinated people significantly increases risk of infection. After all, most people are more likely to trust those who are like them. It is therefore not surprising that many of the outbreaks we are seeing are in tightly woven ethnic and religious communities with shared values and practices.

Although public health campaigns aim to convince parents to vaccinate because they love their children, the reality is that vaccines work best when used at a population level. In fact, many vaccines provide more protection to others than the child who receives them.

For example, rubella, which is the third component of the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine, is a mild disease in childhood but can cause blindness, deafness, mental disabilities, and a range of birth defects in fetuses, or miscarriage, when pregnant women are infected. Measles can kill about one or two of every 1,000 people infected at any age but is most dangerous to infants and adults. The mothers I studied would often weigh each of these facts to decide if and how it would benefit their own children to get vaccinated. They would not consider that those too young, too old, or too immune-compromised to be vaccinated might benefit most from the herd immunity caused by mass vaccination.

I am not suggesting that parents should no longer advocate for their own children or prioritize their family’s values in making choices for their children. Rather, I am suggesting that we should consider how we can begin to reject the logic that we are only responsible for our own children.

Parents’ rejection of vaccine recommendations often emerges from fear of the uncertainties that surround children in a world that feels increasingly risky. I understand and admittedly sometimes even share these anxieties. I also recognize the pressures on parents to anticipate all possible outcomes and aim to control for them.

When thinking about her son’s struggles, Katie, like many mothers, made clear that she feels alone. Feeling unsupported by schools, health care providers, insurance companies, and her extended family, Katie insists she alone must take responsibility for her child and become his advocate.

Like high-quality education, safe drinking water, food inspection, or any number of resources children need to thrive, infectious diseases cannot be controlled with individual hard work, and thus cannot remain a private concern. In the end, we must find ways to protect each other’s children and support everyone’s family. And perhaps then, mothers who don’t think their children need vaccines will consent anyway.

Jennifer Reich is a professor of sociology at the University of Colorado Denver. Her publications include the award-winning books Fixing Families: Parents, Power, and the Child Welfare System and, most recently, Calling the Shots: Why Parents Reject Vaccines.

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NS5 Marginalized perspectives | Class presentation (25-26)

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Female scientists are less likely to receive authorship credit or to be named on patents related to the work they do compared with their male counterparts - including in fields such as healthcare, where women dominate - data suggests.

This gender gap may help to explain well-documented disparities in the apparent contributions of male and female scientists - such as that of Rosalind Franklin, whose pivotal contribution to the discovery of the structure of DNA initially went unrecognised because she was not cited on the core Nature article byJames Watson and Francis Crick.

"We have known for a long time that women publish and patent at a lower rate than men. But, because previous data never showed who participated in research, no one knew why," said Prof Julia Lane at New York University in the US, who led the new research.

Lane and her colleagues analysed administrative data on research projects conducted at 52 US colleges and universities between 2013 and 2016. They matched information about 128,859 scientists to 39,426 journal articles and 7,675 patents, looking at which people who worked on individual projects received credit and which did not.

The study, also published in Nature, suggests Rosalind Franklin was far from unique in not receiving due credit for her work. It found that, on average, across all job titles and fields, men were around twice as likely to be named on a scientific article or patent by their research team as women.

This gap was seen in female-dominated fields such as health, as well as in male-dominated fields, such as engineering, and was particularly evident during the earliest stages of women's careers. For example, only 15 out of 100 female postgraduates were ever named as an author on a publication, compared with 21 out of 100 of their male peers.

"There is a clear gap between the rate at which women and men are named as co-authors on publications," said Lane. "The gap is strong, persistent, and independent of the research field. I fear that it will deter young women from pursuing science as a career."

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The team also surveyed more than 2,400 published scientists, asking whether they had ever been excluded from a paper to which they had contributed, and why they thought this happened. Of women, 43% reported having been excluded from a publication, compared with 38% of men. The most common explanation was that others had underestimated their contribution, however, women were twice as likely to cite discrimination or bias as an explanation, while men were more likely to say their contributions did not warrant authorship.

Dr Tina Joshi, a lecturer in molecular microbiology at the University of Plymouth, said: "This is a welcome study that highlights the gender disparity many women continue to face in academia. We can continue to address this inequality as an academic community by encouraging dialogue regarding equality, diversity and inclusion, and working together to give all researchers credit for their contributions."

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Female scientists less likely to be given authorship credits, analysis finds

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Disparities extend to lower chance of being named on patents and to areas such as healthcare where women dominate

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Why it argue that people see feminist ideals as being incompatible with true science?

How can feminism generate new questions and methodologies that help scientists identify and correct hidden biases?

Why does the article argue that the idea that science is objective is “outdated”?

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Why Are Scientists So Afraid to Call Their Work “Feminist”?

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The idea that researchers can be objective is outdated.

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Why did the photo become such an iconic image?

How did Goodall differ from other primate scientists at the time?

In what ways is she considered a ‘trailblazer’?

Why can a formal education sometimes hinder the production of knowledge?

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On 14 July 1960, 26-year-old Jane Goodall arrived by boat to the shores of Lake Tanganyika, Tanzania. Here, in what is now Gombe Stream National Park, her ground-breaking scientific research into chimpanzee behaviour began.

Previously a secretarial student without an undergraduate degree in science, Goodall says she observed her wild subjects with an open mind and without preconceptions. Controversially at the time, she defied convention by giving these chimps names instead of numbers.

One image taken of Goodall during this time captured her fresh approach, challenged the scientific norm and has become one of the world's most recognisable photos.

Her late husband, Dutch photographer Hugo van Lawick, went to Gombe in 1962 where he took thousands of photographs of Goodall. But it was in 1964 that he took what became an iconic photograph of Goodall with an infant chimp known as Flint.

In the photo, Goodall is shown crouching down and reaching out with her right arm to Flint, the first chimp to be born at Gombe after Goodall's arrival, as he extends his left arm up towards her.

As Goodall tells BBC Future, this was long before the era of digital photography, so she had to wait a while before she could see the printed images. "It was couple of months or more before there was a safe way to send exposed rolls to the [National] Geographic for processing, and then another wait while they sent the prints back to Kigoma," she recalls. "When I saw it, though I did not realise it would become iconic, it did make me think of Michelangelo's painting of God reaching out to Man."

The photo of Jane Goodall with infant chimp Flint challenged scientific norms and changed our view of the animal kingdom (Credit: Hugo van Lawick)

The photo, taken in 1964, was first published in National Geographic magazine in December 1965. Another photo of Goodall studying the Gombe chimpanzees was on the front cover and published as part of van Lawick's photo series titled "New Discoveries Among Africa's Chimpanzees". That same year, National Geographic released Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees, the first of many documentaries showcasing Goodall's research.

The photo, along with van Lawick's documentary film People of the Forest: The Chimps of Gombe, "forced science to abandon the idea that humans were the only sentient beings with personalities, minds and emotions" says Goodall, adding that she was taught this as a student at Cambridge University in 1962. "Thus [this image] opened up a whole new way of understanding who animals are and showed that we humans are a part of and not separated from the rest of the animal kingdom."

Goodall was the first person to notice that chimpanzees were stripping down stiff blades of grass, then sticking them into holes in termite mounds to catch and eat these insects. Until then, tool use like this was believed to distinguish humans from all other animals.
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Mark Wright, director of science at conservation charity WWF, says Goodall was "a real trailblazer" in many ways. But this photograph helped people recognise the importance of a female perspective within the scientific research community, he says. "She was a young woman saying that women are equally well-placed to do really first class research in the field.

"Up until then, it had been a pretty male-dominated environment. There then was a succession of high profile women doing this sort of work."

Gilbert M Grosvenor, former chair of the National Geographic Society, has likewise argued that "Goodall's trailblazing path for other women primatologists is arguably her greatest legacy".

"During the last third of the 20th Century, Dian Fossey, Birute Galdikas, Cheryl Knott, Penny Patterson, and many more women have followed her," he wrote in the Jane Goodall Institute's biography of the primatologist."Indeed, women now dominate long-term primate behavioural studies worldwide." (Read more: The woman who redefined mankind).

When the photo was taken in 1964, Goodall was immersed in life at Gombe, beginning to understand the chimps she was studying and slowly building up her observations of their behaviour. This first-hand experience has always been her priority, says Wright. "This photo reminded us that for much of this work, there's no alternative to being in the field. A lot of studies were in zoos or safari parks - you need to get in the field to really understand the natural behaviour. And you have to do that for the long-term, you can't just nip in for a couple of weeks. She reinforced that."

Goodall went to East Africa without any formal qualifications and lived in Gombe for more than two decades, dedicating her life to studying chimps for generations. Wright says this photo relays a powerful message to people who haven't studied science but still want to get involved in research because sometimes, an open mind is the best starting point: "This wasn't someone in a lab coat, she made it relatable. And because she wasn't encumbered by lots of formal training, she could go in as a free thinker and then interpret [what she saw]."

Jane Goodall's research into chimps in Tanzania paved the way for other female primatologists (Credit: Penelope Breese / Getty Images)

Keen to open the world of scientific research up to everyone, Goodall has inspired many people to study primatology in the field. Since 1960, more than 482 scientific research papers and graduate theses about chimpanzee health and behaviour have been published by Gombe Stream Research Center, with hundreds of scientists studying there.

Alongside her vast body of documentary films, books and National Geographic articles, Goodall's photographs with Flint flagged the importance of conserving individual animals. "Previously it was all about saving species - individuals were not important. The scientific thinking changed," says Goodall.

A 2021 review by US anthropologist Michael Lawrence Wilson summarises the many findings of research undertaken at Gombe and reflects on the impact of the chimpanzee research efforts pioneered here by Goodall. "Gombe exemplifies what has become a standard approach for primate field studies: collaborative research, collecting systematic information on identified individuals, followed throughout their entire lives," it concludes.

Today this photo makes Goodall feel nostalgic. "It reminds me of a magical time when I knew each individual chimpanzee as well as members of my family. I watched Flint's development from a tiny infant to a spoilt brat, always supported by his older sister or one of his older brothers if another youngster accidentally (or sometimes deliberately!) hurt him. The image makes me think of those best days of my life," she says.

The closeness between Goodall and Flint in the photograph also reflects the culture at the time, says Wright, noting that scientists now keep further from the animal subjects they are observing. "But she was doing something that hadn't really been done before...I take my hat off to her. Her work was absolutely ground-breaking."

Above all, the picture shows Goodall's genuine love for her subject, Wright says. "There is a warmth and an affection for the species she's studying. There's also a love for Gombe, too - she found her place."

For Goodall, it's her simple connection to Flint that makes this image so captivating. "I suspect it was the appeal of that little infant reaching out so trustingly - a real bond between human and chimpanzee. At least, that is why it is so powerful for me!"
*The Jane Goodall Institute notes that physical contact with wild animals is no longer deemed appropriate and says that it -- Join one million Future fans by liking us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter or Instagram. "does not endorse handling, interacting or close proximity to chimpanzees or other wildlife".
If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called "The Essential List" - a handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife, Travel and Reel delivered to your inbox every Friday.

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The human-chimp bond captured in an iconic photo

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In 1964, Jane Goodall's husband Hugo van Lawick took a photo of her and an infant chimp reaching out to each other. Decades later, it continues to impact how we view chimpanzees.

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HI1 History_ nature & scope _ Class presentation (25-26)

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HI2 Single stories & stereotypes _ Class presentation (24-25)

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Prompt 14