Month: April 2020

Comic: Fake News Can Be Deadly. Here’s How To Spot It

April 20, 2020

Interesting cartoon that explains the dangers of fake news and how to combat it in your own mind. Unfortunately I am skeptical about the value of laying out such processes to deal with this problem. How can you stop someone from being “fooled” into believing something that they already believe? That confirms and conforms to their deeper world views? The deeper issue is motivated reasoning rather than an ignorance of how to deal with new information. All that being said, this is a fun cartoon, there is more than just this one panel featured below, click on the image for the full cartoon.

Screen Shot 2020-04-20 at 3.06.03 PM
Click on image for link to full cartoon.

A Comic Strip Tour Of The Wild World Of Pandemic Modeling

April 15, 2020

Artist Zach Weinersmith teams up with FiveThirtyEight to break down and explain the challenges in building accurate models for the pandemic from differing assumptions, data collection, and just a general lack of information.

Interesting quote from the cartoon: “Every variable is dependent on a number of possible choices and gaps in knowledge.”

Click on the images for the full cartoon.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-comic-strip-tour-of-the-wild-world-of-pandemic-modeling/

 

Reminds me of a funny tweet I saw, “Using the right denominator is 50% of data science.”

 

TOK Distance Learning

April 4, 2020

We are about to start week 3 of distance learning. I’ve worked on adapting my lessons to be completed on google classroom and submitted. Students can join the “class” on zoom to work through these as if we were doing a normal class. This provides for opportunities to discuss course content which is a central part of the course.

Here is a folder of the work I have done. Please feel free to take what works for you. You can duplicate any of the docs. Please also feel free to share other experiences you have had that work.