TOK Teacher
“We really do need randomized controlled trials to answer these questions. They do exist, but with respect to effects on lipid levels such as cholesterol and triglycerides. A meta-analysis examining eight trials found that beef versus poultry and fish consumption didn’t change cholesterol or triglyceride levels significantly.”
“Scientists working in a little-known branch of psychology called perceptual learning have shown that it is possible to fast-forward a person’s gut instincts both in physical fields, like flying an airplane, and more academic ones, like deciphering advanced chemical notation. The idea is to train specific visual skills, usually with computer-game-like modules that require split-second decisions. Over time, a person develops a ‘good eye’ for the material, and with it an ability to extract meaningful patterns instantaneously.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/29/sunday-review/learning-to-see-data.html
“But in the realms of politics, medical ethics, religion and technological innovation, the reality is that death is far, very far, from nothing at all. It is the source of challenging legal and moral questions, perhaps none more searing than whether doctors ought to be permitted to usher incurably ill patients into that next room. Should they be able to help sufferers end their lives by supplying medication that would make looming death come faster?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/23/us/stigma-around-physician-assisted-dying-lingers.html?_r=0
New York Times Euthanasia topic archive
“Its faith-based 12-step program dominates treatment in the United States. But researchers have debunked central tenets of AA doctrine and found dozens of other treatments more effective.”
“For secular thinkers, the continuing vitality of religion calls into question the belief that history underpins their values. To be sure, there is disagreement as to the nature of these values. But pretty well all secular thinkers now take for granted that modern societies must in the end converge on some version of liberalism. Never well founded, this assumption is today clearly unreasonable. So, not for the first time, secular thinkers look to science for a foundation for their values.”
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/03/what-scares-the-new-atheists
“The English philosopher John Gray, himself an atheist, says today’s evangelical New Atheists have far more in common with the religionists they despise than they think they do. In a rich, rewarding essay in the Guardian, Gray says that an earlier generation of modern atheists worshiped Science, which in their reasoning made them supporters of eugenics … until Nazism showed where that led. It is today conveniently forgotten, says Gray, that those who preached Science as the foundation for modern political life were, in the pre-Nazi 20th century, the most avid promoters of eugenics”
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/the-secret-god-of-the-new-atheists-secularists/
“As children, we all have the instinct to acquire a set of rules and to apply them. Any toddler is already a grammatical genius. Without conscious effort, we combine words into sentences according to a particular structure, with subjects, objects, verbs, adjectives and so on. We know that a certain practice is a rule of grammar because it’s how we see and hear people use the language.”
http://www.wsj.com/articles/there-is-no-proper-english-1426258286?mod=e2fb
“Perhaps Fisher offers the nation an opportunity to divorce, once and for all, memory from history. History may be an attempt to memorialize and preserve the past, but it is not memory; memories can serve as primary sources, but they do not stand alone as history. A history is essentially a collection of memories, analyzed and reduced into meaningful conclusions—but that collection depends on the memories chosen.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/03/the-problem-with-history-classes/387823/
“First, Americans prefer narratives in which they play a central heroic role. The Dwight Eisenhower of the First World War was French, Marshal Ferdinand Foch. Those Americans who cared most intensely about the war found themselves enlisting under other people’s banners. John Singer Sargent painted his great war canvases for Britain’s Imperial War Museum. Edith Wharton volunteered for French relief organizations. Raymond Chandler joined the Canadian army. Ernest Hemingway drove Red Cross ambulances on the Italian front. Henry James forswore his U.S. citizenship and naturalized as British. John Dos Passos, another Red Cross volunteer, later savagely satirized the war as ‘Mr. Wilson’s war’—somebody else’s war, not his. So it has remained. When the great American literary critic Paul Fussell wrote his marvelous “The Great War and Modern Memory,” he focused onEnglish writers. Their American counterparts may have had a lot to say, but somehow Fussell decided it was not an American thing.”
http://m.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/03/over-there-and-overlooked/387367/
“As a general rule, it is difficult for people in public life to change their minds. There is an immediate rush to portray politicians as ‘flip-floppers’ when they shift position on anything, even if they do so following a careful consideration of an issue rather than a meeting with a pollster. The hecklers will reliably accuse them of lacking the ‘courage of their convictions,’ of being ‘typical politicians,’ even though the typical politician actually tries to change his mind as rarely as possible, to avoid the hecklers.”
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