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Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - A Point of View: Why people give in to temptation when no-one's watching - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...magazine-24165872

TOK ethics evil Milgram temptation

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 23 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 23 Sep 13
     
    "After World War II showed our species just how many hells on earth it could create, a whole generation of researchers devoted themselves to what I find a much more vital question. "Why do apparently good and normal people do abnormal and appalling things ?""
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - The unwinnable game - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...magazine-25032298

TOK reason technology games chess intelligence

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 24 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 24 Nov 13
     
    "A commentator in the current Carlsen-Anand series used the phrase: "A very human move." The point is that humans make mistakes. The subtlest of mistakes, the "sub-optimal" moves, can create beautifully poised situations."
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Future - Science & Environment - Why science needs imagination and beauty - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...cret-to-thinking-like-a-genius

TOK science physics imagination beauty

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 29 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 29 Nov 13
     
    "Albert Einstein famously said: "Imagination is more important than knowledge." They're both important, says physicist and Nobel Prize recipient Frank Wilczek, but knowledge without imagination is barren. Take his subject of theoretical physics. As Wilczek says a lot of what you do is to try to understand Mother Nature's mind and her sense of beauty to see how the laws of physics could be more beautiful."
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - Face blindness: Seeing but not seeing - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...health-24385650

TOK perception vision brain neuroscience blindness

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 06 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 06 Oct 13
     
    "Imagine that suddenly you cannot recognise your mother, your partner, your child. You can see them but your brain cannot process the information - you don't know whether they are smiling, or understand their emotions."
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Capital - Managers: Train your brain for ethical decisions - 1 views

www.bbc.com/...20131007-the-morality-muscle

TOK ethics moral dilemma business

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 08 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 08 Oct 13
     
    "If you haven't already faced ethical decisions about whether to lie or cheat for your company, it's time to consider what you would do if you were faced with such dilemmas."
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC World Service - The Why Factor, Swearing - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/p01j2vps

TOK language swearing

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 11 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 11 Oct 13
     
    "#*?@! %$&@*! Why do a few, select words have such power to shock and offend? With help from swearing historian Melissa Mohr, Mike Williams traces the history of taboo language from Roman times to the present day and hears how cultural taboos have shaped offensive language down the centuries. He talks to American psychologist Professor Tim Jay about why we swear and discovers that children start using profane language at a much earlier age than you might imagine. And he meets psychologist Dr Richard Stephens who persuades him to take part in two swearing experiments, one of them rather painful, with some surprising results. "
markfrankel18

BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Liquidising goldfish 'not a crime' - 1 views

news.bbc.co.uk/3040891.stm

TOK arts ethics

shared by markfrankel18 on 14 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • An art display which invited the public to put live goldfish through a food blender did not constitute cruelty to animals, a Danish court has ruled. The goldfish were placed on display swimming in the blenders, and visitors were told they could press the "on" button if they wanted. At least one visitor did, killing two goldfish.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC Radio 4 - The Reith Lectures, Grayson Perry: Playing to the Gallery: 2013, Beating ... - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/b03dsk4d

TOK arts

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 20 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 20 Oct 13
     
    "The award-winning artist Grayson Perry asks whether it is really true that anything can be art. We live in an age when many contemporary artists follow the example of Marcel Duchamp, who famously declared that a urinal was a work of art. It sometimes seems that anything qualifies, from a pile of sweets on a gallery floor to an Oscar-winning actress asleep in a box. How does the ordinary art lover decide?"
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC Radio 4 - The Reith Lectures, Grayson Perry: Playing to the Gallery: 2013, Democrac... - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/b03969vt

TOK arts judgment

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 20 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 20 Oct 13
     
    "In the first of four lectures, recorded in front of an audience at Tate Modern in London, the artist Grayson Perry reflects on the idea of quality and examines who and what defines what we see and value as art. He argues that there is no empirical way to judge quality in art. Instead the validation of quality rests in the hands of a tightknit group of people at the heart of the art world including curators, dealers, collectors and critics who decide in the end what ends up in galleries and museums."
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - How did van Gogh find colour? - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...entertainment-arts-24537244

TOK arts painting VanGogh colour

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 18 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 18 Oct 13
     
    "Living for two years in Paris changed Vincent van Gogh. He might not have realised it at the time, but as he met other artists in the French capital, he gradually moved away from his dark, sombre Dutch works - towards much brighter palettes and expressive brush work."
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - The six key moments of the Cold War relived - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...magazine-26788606

history ColdWar TOK

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 31 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • The stand-off in Ukraine has revived memories of the Cold War, but for many under the age of 40 the events of that conflict now seem far off. The US, UK and France were allied with the communist Soviet Union during World War Two, but as it became clear victory in the war was approaching new battle lines started to be drawn. What followed was 45 years of tension, marked by espionage and proxy wars involving client states, all undertaken with the knowledge of the nuclear catastrophe that actual war would bring. People who experienced the key events of the conflict describe how it affected them - and Cold War expert Scott Lucas, of Birmingham University and EA WorldView, explains how they fitted into the bigger picture.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - Aggression from video games 'linked to incompetence' - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...technology-26921743

TOK SocialScience social studies correlation causation

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 07 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Feelings of aggression after playing video games are more likely to be linked to gameplay mechanics rather than violent content, a study suggests.
Nastia Ilina

BBC - Reading the minds of the 'dead' - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...1-inside-the-minds-of-the-dead

ethics consciousness reason health medical mind future memory

shared by Nastia Ilina on 22 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Nastia Ilina on 22 Apr 14
     
    People in a "vegetative state" are awake yet unaware. Their eyes can open and sometimes wander. They can smile, grasp another's hand, cry, groan or grunt. But they are indifferent to a hand clap, unable to see or to understand speech. Their motions are not purposeful but reflexive. They appear to have shed their memories, emotions and intentions, those qualities that make each one of us an individual. Their minds remain firmly shut. Still, when their eyelids flutter open, you are always left wondering if there's a glimmer of consciousness.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - Caesium: A brief history of timekeeping - 1 views

www.bbc.com/...magazine-29476893

TOK science time relativity

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 04 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • The answer is that whenever you have a network operating over distance, accurate timekeeping is essential for synchronisation. And the faster the speed of travel, the more accurate the timekeeping must be. Hence in the modern world, where information travels at almost the speed of light down wires or through the air, accuracy is more important than ever. What caesium has done is to raise the standards for the measurement of time exponentially.
  • As the electron moves out into the wider orbit it absorbs energy, and as it jumps back in it releases it in the form of light, fluorescing very slightly. That means you can tell when you've hit the sweet spot of 9,192,631,770 Hz. It's because this transition frequency is so much higher than the resonant frequency of quartz that a caesium clock is so much more accurate. The caesium fountain at NPL, Szymaniec tells me proudly, is accurate to one second in every 158 million years. That means it would only be a second out if it had started keeping time back in the peak of the Jurassic Period when diplodocus were lumbering around and pterodactyls wheeling in the sky.
  • Now, if such insane levels of accuracy seem pointless, then think again. Without the caesium clock, for example, satellite navigation would be impossible. GPS satellites carry synchronised caesium clocks that enable them collectively to triangulate your position and work out where on earth you are. And the practical applications do not end there. Just ask Leon Lobo - he's in charge of time "dissemination" at NPL. His job is to tell the time to the UK. For a fee. NPL has just begun offering businesses standardised timekeeping accurate to the nearest microsecond - a millionth of a second. Mr Lobo is targeting a wide range of clients that all have one thing in common - they need to synchronise a network that operates at speeds far faster than any trains.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Mr Lobo's biggest target is the financial markets, which these days are dominated by computers programmed to place thousands of trades per second, transmitted down wires at almost the speed of light. In this world, the equivalent of a train crash would be ill-timed bets that rack up millions of dollars in losses, and might even briefly sink the market in the process. Unsurprisingly, financial regulators increasingly require a super-accurate timestamp on every transaction.
  • The switch to atomic time was for good reason. The rotation of the earth, it turned out, was not such a reliable measure of time. No day or year is exactly the same length.
  • Due to the earth's elliptical orbit, the sun can be as much as 16 minutes out of line with mean solar time. Add the distortion of time zones, which average time across huge regions, and the difference is far greater. China, which is almost 5,000km wide, has a single time zone spanning 1h40 of solar time. The decision of some countries to adjust the clocks twice a year as a "daylight saving" measure exaggerates the issue yet further.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - The difficult task of reading the brain - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...science-environment-27221632

science technology brain neuroscience psychology tests TOK

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 05 May 14 - No Cached
  • Neuroscience is a fast growing and popular field, but despite advances, when an area of the brain 'lights up" it does not tell us as much as we'd like about the inner workings of the mind. Many of us have seen the pictures and read the stories. A beautiful picture of the brain where an area is highlighted and found to be fundamental for processes like fear, disgust or impaired social ability. There are so many stories it can be easy to be swayed into thinking that much more of the brain's mystery has been solved than is the case.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - YouTube artist on Turner Prize list - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...entertainment-arts-27299819

arts TOK

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 07 May 14 - No Cached
  • A video artist who uses YouTube clips, a print-maker and an artist who pairs spoken word with photography are among this year's Turner Prize nominees.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - SS St Louis: The ship of Jewish refugees nobody wanted - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...magazine-27373131

history holocaust war refugees

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 13 May 14 - No Cached
  • On 13 May 1939, more than 900 Jews fled Germany aboard a luxury cruise liner, the SS St Louis. They hoped to reach Cuba and then travel to the US - but were turned away in Havana and forced to return to Europe, where more than 250 were killed by the Nazis.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - Sleep's memory role discovered - 0 views

www.bbc.com/health-27695144

memory sleep learning science brain neuroscience

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 07 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • The mechanism by which a good night's sleep improves learning and memory has been discovered by scientists. The team in China and the US used advanced microscopy to witness new connections between brain cells - synapses - forming during sleep. Their study, published in the journal Science, showed even intense training could not make up for lost sleep. Experts said it was an elegant and significant study, which uncovered the mechanisms of memory. It is well known that sleep plays an important role in memory and learning. But what actually happens inside the brain has been a source of considerable debate.
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