“At TEDGlobal 2010, author Matt Ridley shows how, throughout history, the engine of human progress has been the meeting and mating of ideas to make new ideas. It’s not important how clever individuals are, he says; what really matters is how smart the collective brain is.”
“This ‘curse of knowledge’ means is that it is dangerous, and often profoundly incorrect to think about student learning based on what appears best to faculty members, as opposed to what has been verified with students. However, the former approach tends to dominate discussions on how to improve physics education. There are great debates in faculty meetings as to what order to present material, or different approaches for introducing quantum mechanics or other topics, all based on how the faculty now think about the subject. Evaluations of teaching are often based upon how a senior faculty member perceives the organization, complexity, and pace of a junior faculty member’s lecture. In the pages of APS News, this same expert-centered approach to assessing educational experiences has played out recently in the debate over the use of interactive simulations vs. hands-on labs.”
“You’ve never seen data presented like this. With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, statistics guru Hans Rosling debunks myths about the so-called ‘developing world.'”
“Backed by stunning illustrations, David Christian narrates a complete history of the universe, from the Big Bang to the Internet, in a riveting 18 minutes. This is “Big History”: an enlightening, wide-angle look at complexity, life and humanity, set against our slim share of the cosmic timeline.”
“The ‘curse of knowledge’ leads writers to assume their readers know everything they know.
“Why is so much writing so bad? Why is it so hard to understand a government form, or an academic article or the instructions for setting up a wireless home network?”
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-cause-of-bad-writing-1411660188
Handout I made based on this article:
“Now a team of Italian researchers has found that newborn chicks, like humans, appear to map numbers spatially, associating smaller amounts with the left side and larger amounts with the right side.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/30/science/left-means-less-even-for-chickens.html?_r=0
Former Minnesota Governor, professional wrestler, and navy seal chimes in on the issues of waterboarding and torture.
“After a seven-year legal battle, the diary of a prisoner held at Guantánamo Bay has just been published and has become a surprise best-seller. Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s diary details his experience with rendition, torture and being imprisoned without charge. Slahi has been held at the prison for more than 12 years. He was ordered released in 2010 but is still being held.”
http://www.democracynow.org/2015/1/22/inside_the_us_torture_chambers_prisoners
http://www.cnn.com/2015/01/21/americas/guantanamo-bay-prisoner-book/
After the September 11th attacks and for much of the war on terror, the CIA widely used waterboarding as a form of “enhanced interrogation” to get information from suspected terrorists. Waterboarding is widely considered a form of torture and raised a lot of ethical and moral concerns about how we were conducting ourselves in this war on terror. Questions that were raised: Is waterboarding torture? If so, is torture ever justified?
For a basic description of the technique take a look at the wikipedia page.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterboarding
In 2008, Vanity Fair writer, Christopher Hitchens, volunteered to be waterboarded because he did not believe the technique constituted torture. Below that is the article he wrote about his experience and below is a video of his experience that changed his mind on the technique.
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/08/hitchens200808
“Somehow, a plant gathers and integrates all this information about its environment, and then “decides”—some scientists deploy the quotation marks, indicating metaphor at work; others drop them—in precisely what direction to deploy its roots or its leaves. Once the definition of “behavior” expands to include such things as a shift in the trajectory of a root, a reallocation of resources, or the emission of a powerful chemical, plants begin to look like much more active agents, responding to environmental cues in ways more subtle or adaptive than the word “instinct” would suggest. “Plants perceive competitors and grow away from them,” Rick Karban, a plant ecologist at U.C. Davis, explained, when I asked him for an example of plant decision-making. “They are more leery of actual vegetation than they are of inanimate objects, and they respond to potential competitors before actually being shaded by them.” These are sophisticated behaviors, but, like most plant behaviors, to an animal they’re either invisible or really, really slow.”
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/23/the-intelligent-plant?currentPage=all
TOK Topics 