picasso

Yesterday 5/5/10 a painting which Picasso made in a single day was sold for 106.5 million dollars at an auction. It is a new record for a work of art and the bid reached the selling price within barely 9 minutes.

Do you think the amount of money is an indication of its real worth or is it just because the thing is a Picasso? If everything Picasso created is worth Millions is the emphasis on the work or the man? And in general what should determine the value of an artistic work? Follow the link to see the painting in question and let’s hear what you have to say.

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/04/picasso-sold-at-auction-for-106-5-million-a-world-record/

don't talk to aliens

Stephen Hawking, a British physicist regarded by many as the most famous living scientist, recently was in the news for saying that we should stop trying to contact extraterrestrial intelligent life because it could be dangerous for us. In a documentary for the Discovery Channel he warned, "If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans." His argument is that if aliens could come to our planet travelling across light years they must have developed a superior civilization and can easily colonize or destroy us.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/space/article7107207.ece

The question is should our quest for knowledge be thwarted by fear of unintended consequences? What if we could benefit from their advanced civilization? What if we stopped splitting the atom fearing that it may lead to nuclear weapons? Is there something as dangerous knowledge?

can you hurt a chimpanzee's feelings?

Reading the following article made me think about the origins of our ways of knowing and how this might affect our ethical stance with regard to other animals:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/apr/30/chimpanzees-emotions-ethics

Here are some TOK-related questions to which you may want to respond:

1) How can we know if animals experience feelings that correspond to the emotions we as humans possess?

2) If certain animals (such as chimpanzees) are indeed receptive to the kinds of emotional experiences with which we are familiar, would that obligate us to treat those animals ethically?

3) Would such an ethical treatment extend to recognizing that animals have rights? Can anyone or anything have rights without responsibilities?

4) Why might we make the existence of feelings or emotions the deciding factor in our ethical attitudes to animals? Why not the ability to construct or use language, or to reason effectively? Or, for that matter, to perceive?

orlando figes's reviews

Hi Everyone,

Here are a couple of links to an academic scandal that has emerged in the last few days:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/apr/23/historian-orlando-figes-amazon-reviews-rivals

http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/Home/The-historian-the-savage-reviews-and-the-literary-whodunnit.htm

A hitherto well-respected and prominent historian admits to writing anonymous bad reviews of the work of other historians on the Amazon site, and nice ones about his own work! When suspicion is aroused, he first of all says it was his wife that wrote them, then eventually admits that he did.

What might this tell us about the world in which historians work? Before the WWW age, it would be very difficult to broadcast views so easily and so anonymously - do you think this raises any ethical issues and, if so, how should they be addressed?

mathematician refuses $1m prize

You will remember our discussion (further down this blog) on the millenium challenges in Mathematics set by the Clay Foundation in 2000.

Read the following for an interesting update:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/23/grigory-perelman-rejects-1m-dollars

Any thoughts about this?

milgram experiment updated

Hi everyone,

Take a look at:

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/5/20100317/tod-torture-game-show-draws-nazi-compari-870a197.html

Does this simply replicate the original psychology experiments on obedience by Stanley Milgram, or are there important differences?

In Milgram's work, authority was represented by a "scientist" figure. Who or what represents authority in this instance?

Does this "game show" tell us more about the power of individuals in positions of authority (Milgram's primary focus) or the power of institutions as a whole to mould our behaviour?

Do you think the reported "Nazi comparisons" could be justified? Is it OK for "lay people" to make such comparisons on the basis of this "game show" but not OK for a professional psychologist like Stanley Milgram to make similar comparisons?

If Milgram's findings on human behaviour are valid, what should be done in order to avoid the negative consequences that seem to stem from them? Are we drawn to the conclusion that society must somehow be "engineered" in ways that prevent certain circumstances from arising?

weekend presentations

Dear TOK presenters,

You will get some further feedback on Friday concerning the presentations that you gave during the TOK weekend. This will include the scores awarded by the TOK teachers. You may notice some discrepancy between your self-evaluation and the judgements of the teachers. There may be a number of reasons for this.

First of all, this was your first “real” experience of giving a TOK presentation (the micro-presentations in November aside), and so it might well be a little difficult to know the standard expected for the highest levels of the criteria and grade descriptors. Thus the scores given by the teachers will be useful in providing a realistic benchmark in this regard.

Secondly, perhaps we don’t do enough student self-evaluation in the school, and therefore the task was not a particularly familiar one. The purpose is not to offer a high score in the hope of influencing the teacher!

Thirdly, we need to focus on the content of the presentations itself. We already gave you some important feedback at the end of the weekend, but I’ll summarize some of it here.

As an IB student, keep your eyes and ears open. You need to be observant and open to what is going on around you locally and in the wider world. If you do that, it becomes much easier to identify promising real-life situations for TOK presentations, not to mention examples for essays, articles for economics portfolios, research topics for extended essay and so on.

Use your real-life situation as the backdrop for your presentation. If you introduce it and then drop it like a stone, it suggests that it was just an excuse for your presentation and you haven’t thought it through, seen how it can support or illustrate the points you want to make at the “TOK level” in the diagram you were given.

Don’t replace your situation with an endless stream of unrelated examples. The result here is too much breadth and not enough depth – a “butterfly approach” that gives the impression that you hope that at least one of the examples will hit home. It is up to you to choose wisely your central real-life situation. You need to commit.

Remember that your presentation is supposed to analyze, not merely describe. Make sure you have thought through the implications of the points you raise. Consider alternatives, but make a stand for your own conclusion, even if you think it is partial or tentative or you might change your mind later. Show how we can make progress in our thinking even if we can't be totally sure about everything.

A real-life situation or a knowledge issue doesn’t need to be about something weird. TOK is not supposed to be about crazy things; it is a method of conducting enquiry into issues that matter in the world by trying to expose their roots. Often these roots are tough and knotted but we need to examine them if we are really to understand how knowledge works in the world. Review the “understanding knowledge issues” document for more on this.

Prepare well. Know the material. If you do, there will be no need to read to your audience. Reading from a script suggests that you haven’t done enough work to be confident about what you are presenting. Think about alternative ways of presenting your material.

Start your presentation slowly. Give your audience time to understand what is to come. Don’t rattle off your knowledge issue and real-life situation in about 7 seconds and leave everyone scratching their heads and trying to remember what you just said the whole point of the presentation was about.

I hope that these comments will help to explain some of the weaknesses that can be eliminated for next time. Your contributions to class, to follow-up discussion at the end of presentations – and particularly the very high quality of many contributions to this blog – indicate that you are capable of performing at the highest level in this course, so let’s continue on that journey up the mountain.

"the island"

Dear Everyone,

I hope you are settling back into the school routine after such a busy weekend. We all hope that you found a satisfactory combination of work and enjoyment (and the intersection between).

Let us turn to our Saturday afternoon activity (before the storm). In effect, we had 5 "worldviews" interacting - liberal, religious conservative, capitalist, xenophobe and eco-pantheist! These might have been caricatures of more nuanced positions, but I think the principle is valid and leads us to the following questions:

Despite our differences as humans, are there some core values that we can all accept? Many of you expressed your response to the activity as a set of rules, but those rules surely arise out of underlying values. What were some of those values on which you think we can all agree?

How difficult was it to identify these common values, and what are the implications of your answer to this question? If it was extremely difficult, does this mean that our efforts in the modern world to create functioning multicultural societies are doomed? Is all this "international-mindedness" a grave error, an impossible dream? Or is there some way of nudging people towards acceptable compromise - perhaps through legal or political means?

What would be the consequences of believing that our sense of morality arises from abstract principles such as fairness and the avoidance of harm, or from an external authority such as a god, or perhaps from our feelings and conscience? How did these alternatives affect your group's work?

Let's explore the issues here and see where they lead...

coming of age in drongaland

Here is a new question of the week. It does not close down the last one - please continue to contribute there as well.

Consider the following research question:

"What is the nature of the rites of passage associated with adolescence among the people of Drongaland?"

In order to reach the truth about this topic, would it be better if the investigator came from Drongaland or from somewhere else? Why?

the humans sciences: poor relations in the family of knowledge?

Dear All,

We are reviving the item on this blog called "question of the week". Here is this week's question:

"When comparing areas of knowledge, it is clear that the human sciences are the poor relations of the natural sciences. They struggle to apply the scientific method, and fail to produce reliable theories or laws." Do you agree with this?

We expect everyone to contribute to this discussion over the next 7 days. Remember that your contributions to this blog are factored into the semester assessment, and that these discussions are a rich source of material for your own thinking and other assignments.

astronomy

Hello everyone - wishing you a very prosperous digital new year!

It's been a while since we enjoyed the quite sophisticated blog exchanges that took place toward the end of last semester. I intend to draw on the combined wisdom to be found there and write some comments that I hope will generate some further discussion on those topics and beyond, but, for now, here is something else.

The following link will take you to a book review, of sorts:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/dec/17/galileo-seeing-believing-richard-panek

Please read the piece and see if you can make some connections to our TOK discussions - both recent and older. Think about some of the concepts we have covered.

The most important question is - what can we learn about the nature of the natural sciences from this story?

Hope to see some discussion emerging...

JHK

to know is to be able to predict?

Just recently I sat through a very interesting TOK presentation given by a group of IB2 students that focussed on the role of prediction in science and beyond. It has been said that to know is to be able to predict. But how true is this? Scientists often feel obliged to make predictions. Is this really what we should expect of them? Why might they feel pressured to predict? Is all science amenable to making predictions? If we can't predict, does this lessen the value of what we know? There are some examples below to get us started. I would like us to concentrate on the sciences in this thread.

The source for the following is: http://www.the-scientist.com/article/print/56082/

1869: Dmitri Mendeleev’s periodic table left spaces for elements that he predicted would be discovered. Three of these (gallium, scandium, and germanium) were subsequently discovered within his lifetime. PREDICTION: RIGHT

1964: Physicists predict the existence of the Higgs Boson. If CERN’s Large Hadron Collider finds no evidence for the existence of this massive fundamental particle, working models of the material universe might require a fundamental rethink. PREDICTION: PENDING

1965: Intel cofounder Gordon E. Moore predicts that the number of transistors on a computer chip would double every two years. The industry has so far managed to keep up (despite many predictions over the years about the law’s imminent demise). PREDICTION: RIGHT

1968: Entomologist Paul Ehrlich predicts that hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in the next two decades. PREDICTION: WRONG

2002: At the website longbets.org, astronomer Sir Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society, predicts that “By 2020, bioterror or bioerror will lead to one million casualties in a single event.” Also at Long Bets, entrepreneurial engineer Ray Kurzweil bets $10,000 that by 2029 a computer will have passed the Turing Test for machine intelligence. PREDICTION: PENDING

2003: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory sponsored GeneSweep, a sweepstakes on the number of human genes. While bids averaged around 60,000 genes, it was eventually won by a bid of 25,947—the lowest of the hundreds received. PREDICTION: WRONG

2007: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 4th Assessment Report projects that global surface air temperatures will increase by between 1.1 and 6.4°C over preindustrial levels by the end of the century. PREDICTON: PENDING

want to win $1 million?

How about the chance to win a million dollars? Sounds good? All you have to do is solve one of the seven problems described here:

http://www.claymath.org/millennium/

What does this tell us about mathematical knowledge?

too few top women in science and technology?

Lawrence Summers is a very intelligent man. He is also one who enjoys a certain amount of controversy. I hope you don't think I am picking on him - it's just that the controversies he creates are such good TOK controversies!

In 2005 (having given up the World Bank and become president of Harvard University), Summers gave a talk concerning the fact that so few women in America occupy the very top positions in academic institutions for science and technology. He gave a number of possible explanations - explanations which he said were supported by some of the social science research which has been done in this area. He gave three:

1) The positions in question require very long working hours, and women with children are generally not prepared to make this commitment.
2) Fewer girls than boys have top scores on science and math tests in late high school years.
3) Women are discriminated against.

Summers emphasized the second explanation and downplayed the third - that was the initial source of the controversy.

Now two questions:
1) Which of these explanations, if any, seem convincing to you? Why, and why not the others?
2) As a TOK student, presumably you are committed to keeping an open mind about matters that have not been established beyond doubt. So what evidence, collected by what methods, would convince you of the truth of each of the hypotheses?

the fall of the berlin wall - 20 years ago

Twenty years ago today, the Berlin Wall fell. This was a momentous event in Europe with repercussions around the whole world. It is hard for me to think of this as history because I was there living in Germany at the time, and the excitement is still fresh for me.

But by twenty years after an event, historians are indeed already buzzing around it looking for fresh explanations based on the new insights that the passage of time can bring. Many books are being published about this event. Some say that communism was flawed from the start and it was inevitable that it would collapse one day. Others say that it was America that bankrupted communism through an arms race the the Soviet Union and its allies couldn't sustain. Others again look to the actions of influential individuals for explanation - what the Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev did since assuming office in 1985, or what the East German leader Erich Honecker didn't do before he was replaced in 1989, or the knock-on effects of the earlier revolt in Poland led by Lech Walesa in 1980, or the fact that a Polish Pope was installed in 1978. Yet others invoke the will of the people - the mass protests and occupations of embassies throughout the memorable year of 1989.

We will spend some quality time thinking about the nature of history next semester, but, in general, what do you think about the causes of historical events? Should we look for explanations more to the grand structural forces or to individuals who can command these forces and bend them to their own ends?

I know some of you will answer "both", but if you had to make a choice...