Movie: Memento
January 21, 2015
“A man creates a strange system to help him remember things; so he can hunt for the murderer of his wife without his short-term memory loss being an obstacle.”
Category: Knowledge and the Knower
Movie: Rashomon
January 21, 2015
“A heinous crime and its aftermath are recalled from differing points of view.”
For Air Crash Detectives, Seeing Isn’t Believing
January 21, 2015
“The investigators say there is no evidence in the wreckage or on the flight recorders of an in-flight fire or explosion. A plane breaking up in flight, as this one did, might in its last moments produce flashes of fire from engines ripping loose, but the idea that the plane caught fire is a trick of memory, they say.”
Blind man who uses echolocation to help him “see”
January 21, 2015
3 links, the first to a news article, the second to a youtube video, and the third to a chapter in a podcast, This American Life, about this amazing man.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/09/tech/innovation/daniel-kish-poptech-echolocation/
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/544/batman?act=1
Five tough ethics issues in Bergdahl swap
January 21, 2015
“When Obama approved the release of dangerous, top-value Guantanamo prisoners in exchange for an American soldier captured under mysterious circumstances, he negotiated a tangle of competing moral principles. If it were possible to wrestle with these issues in a nonpartisan way, the country might gain from this difficult experience.
The Bergdahl-Taliban trade will be discussed in ethics classes for years to come.”
http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/04/opinion/ghitis-bergdahl-swap/index.html
How culture shapes our senses
January 21, 2015
“The team also found that some of these differences could change over time. They taught the Dutch speakers to think about pitch as thin or thick, and soon these participants, too, found that their memory of a tone was affected by being shown a bar that was too thick or too thin. They found that younger Cantonese speakers had fewer words for tastes and smells than older ones, a shift attributed to rapid socioeconomic development and Western-style schooling.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/opinion/sunday/how-culture-shapes-our-senses.html?_r=1
How well do you see color?
October 7, 2013
Here is an interesting site that asks you to arrange colors by shade and hue and then grades you on how accurately you can arrange them. Really cool.
(Click on the image above)
Implicit Association Test
September 24, 2013
Check out the link below. These are clever computer tests that test your immediate responses with associations for race, gender, among other things and what types of qualities you associate with those.
Read Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
September 24, 2013
The handout we worked on in class this week was adapted from pages of a book called, Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. Overall a really interesting book. If you want to borrow the book, I have a copy to lend you. If you don’t mind being unethical, here is a link to a .pdf of the book.
Watch Justice with Michael Sandel
September 12, 2013
Click on the image below to watch an episode from the popular Ethics course taught by Michael Sandel and Harvard University. Much of the discussion we had in class was taken from the episode linked below.
TOK Topics 