Currently, most students learn history as a set narrative—a process that reinforces the mistaken idea that the past can be synthesized into a single, standardized chronicle of several hundred pages. This teaching pretends that there is a uniform collective story, which is akin to saying everyone remembers events the same. Yet, history is anything but agreeable. It is not a collection of facts deemed to be "official" by scholars on high. It is a collection of historians exchanging different, often conflicting analyses. And rather than vainly seeking to transcend the inevitable clash of memories, American students would be better served by descending into the bog of conflict and learning the many "histories" that compose the American national story.
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The Problem With History Classes - Atlantic Mobile - 1 views
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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.
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Although, as Urist notes, the AP course is "designed to teach students to think like historians," my own experience in that class suggests that it fails to achieve that goal. The course’s framework has always served as an outline of important concepts aiming to allow educators flexibility in how to teach; it makes no reference to historiographical conflicts. Historiography was an epiphany for me because I had never before come face-to-face with how historians think and reason—how they construct an argument, what sources animate that approach, and how their position responds to other historians. When I took AP U.S. History, I jumbled these diverse histories into one indistinct narrative. Although the test involved open-ended essay questions, I was taught that graders were looking for a firm thesis—forcing students to adopt a side. The AP test also, unsurprisingly, rewards students who cite a wealth of supporting details. By the time I took the test in 2009, I was a master at "checking boxes," weighing political factors equally against those involving socioeconomics and ensuring that previously neglected populations like women and ethnic minorities received their due. I did not know that I was pulling ideas from different historiographical traditions. I still subscribed to the idea of a prevailing national narrative and served as an unwitting sponsor of synthesis, oblivious to the academic battles that made such synthesis impossible.
BBC News - A Point Of View: What is history's role in society? - 2 views
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ostering innovation and helping people to think analytically,
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Called simply Bronze, it celebrates a metal so important it has its own age of history attached to it, and so responsive to the artist's skill that it breathes life into gods, humans, mythological creatures and animals with equal success.
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It is remarkable to think that had Bronze been mounted say 15 years ago, the portrait of the past that it delivered would have been subtly different. History is very far from a done deal.
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-ties in with what we have been discussing
What Elvish, Klingon, and Dothraki Reveal about Real Language & the Essence of Human Co... - 1 views
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Language, Darwin believed, was not a conscious invention but a phenomenon “slowly and unconsciously developed by many steps.” But what makes a language a language? In this short animation from TED Ed, linguist John McWhorter, author of the indispensable The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language (public library), explores the fascinating world of fantasy constructed languages — known as conlangs — from Game of Thrones’ Dothraki to Avatar’s Na’vi to Star Trek’s Klingon to Lord of the Rings’ Elvish. Though fictional, these conlangs reveal a great deal about the fundamentals of real human communication and help us understand the essential components of a successful language — extensive vocabulary, consistent grammar rules but peppered with exceptions, and just the right amount of room for messiness and evolution.
Behind the Scenes at 'Pterosaurs: Flight in the Age of Dinosaurs' - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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“Most of the questions that we actually get from artists, the answer is, ‘I don’t know,’ ” Dr. Kellner said. But the more research that’s done, the closer their guess can be on an animal that’s been extinct for 66 million years.
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“Occasionally,” said Dr. Kellner, “once you have it done, everything is fine, everyone is happy. But then a year later someone makes a new discovery.
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Most people, he said, think art and science are two different worlds. “I used to think they were very separate, but they’re actually very similar. You have to be creative and you have to be observant.”
Why Ants Handle Traffic Better Than You Do : NPR - 0 views
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Could studying ants reveal clues to reducing highway traffic jams? Physicist Apoorva Nagar at the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology thinks the answer is yes. Nagar says he got interested in the topic when he came across a study by German and Indian researchers showing that ants running along a path were able to maintain a steady speed even when there were a large number of ants on the path. Nagar says there are three main reasons ants don't jam up. Number one, ants don't have egos. They don't show off by zooming past people. "The second thing is, they do not mind a few accidents, or collisions," say Nagar. So unless there's a serious pileup, they just keep going.
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The third reason, he says, is that ants seem to get more disciplined when paths get crowded, running in straighter lines, and varying their speed less. They're less likely to make unexpected moves in this sort of heavy traffic. It's the kind of steady control you see when a computer is controlling a car rather than a human. There's less variability unless it's absolutely called for. Nagar felt this kind of behavior could be explained by something called the Langevin equation, an equation physicists use when describing the movement of liquids, or how individual atoms behave in a lattice.
You Can't Educate People Into Believing in Evolution - The Atlantic - 2 views
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According to a new report by Calvin College assistant professor Jonathan Hill, many Americans do not think it's that important to have the "correct beliefs" on the origins of human life.
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"No creationist wakes up in the morning and says, 'I have really strong opinions about whether Archaeopteryx is the ancestor of modern birds,'" he said.* "Who are we as people? That’s the question that they think evolution is answering. What does it mean to be a person? What does it mean to be an animal?"
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What that means is that "debates" about evolution and creationism actually might not be that effective
The Moral Instinct - New York Times - 3 views
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It seems we may all be vulnerable to moral illusions the ethical equivalent of the bending lines that trick the eye on cereal boxes and in psychology textbooks. Illusions are a favorite tool of perception scientists for exposing the workings of the five senses, and of philosophers for shaking people out of the naïve belief that our minds give us a transparent window onto the world (since if our eyes can be fooled by an illusion, why should we trust them at other times?). Today, a new field is using illusions to unmask a sixth sense, the moral sense.
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The first hallmark of moralization is that the rules it invokes are felt to be universal. Prohibitions of rape and murder, for example, are felt not to be matters of local custom but to be universally and objectively warranted. One can easily say, “I don’t like brussels sprouts, but I don’t care if you eat them,” but no one would say, “I don’t like killing, but I don’t care if you murder someone.”The other hallmark is that people feel that those who commit immoral acts deserve to be punished.
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Until recently, it was understood that some people didn’t enjoy smoking or avoided it because it was hazardous to their health. But with the discovery of the harmful effects of secondhand smoke, smoking is now treated as immoral. Smokers are ostracized; images of people smoking are censored; and entities touched by smoke are felt to be contaminated (so hotels have not only nonsmoking rooms but nonsmoking floors). The desire for retribution has been visited on tobacco companies, who have been slapped with staggering “punitive damages.” At the same time, many behaviors have been amoralized, switched from moral failings to lifestyle choices.
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RSA Animate - The Secret Powers of Time - YouTube - 1 views
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"Renowned psychologist Professor Philip Zimbardo explains how our individual perspectives of time affect our work, health and well-being."
Mathematicians and Blue Crabs - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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The math behind these formulas may be elegant, but applying them is more complicated.
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Although a definitive cause has yet to be identified, one thing is clear: Mathematical models failed to predict it.
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For instance, it was long believed that a blue crab’s maximum life expectancy was eight years. This estimate was used, indirectly, to calculate crab mortality from fishing. Derided by watermen, the life expectancy turned out to be much too high; this had resulted in too many crab deaths being attributed to harvesting, thereby supporting charges of overfishing.
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A mouse's house may ruin experiments : Nature News & Comment - 0 views
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It’s no secret that therapies that look promising in mice rarely work in people. But too often, experimental treatments that succeed in one mouse population do not even work in other mice, suggesting that many rodent studies may be flawed from the start.
Let's Abolish Social Science | The Smart Set - 2 views
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Social science was — it is best to speak in the past tense — a mistake. The dream of a comprehensive science of society, which would elucidate “laws of history” or “social laws” comparable to the physical determinants or “laws” of nature, was one of the great delusions of the 19th century.
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Economics, for example, grew ever more pseudoscientific in the course of the 20th century.
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The very term “political science” betrays an ambition to create a study of politics and government and world politics that will be a genuine science like physics, chemistry or biology.
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Biology's Holy Grail: The Species And Its Controversial Recent History | IFLScience - 1 views
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And, the basic unit of taxonomy – ‘the species’ – remains an elusive and controversial concept despite its fundamental importance to science. Yet, few people outside of biology and philosophy realise that ‘the species’ has been at the centre of a major controversy in science for much of the last 50 years.
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Taxonomy is a fundamental or ‘enabling’ science that underpins all of biology and its many related fields including medical research.
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• How does the species category compare with other scientific groups or types of things like say the chemical elements? • Does it play the same kind of role in science – conveying the same sorts of information and allowing us to make predictions about nature? • What’s the best, most objective, way to recognise a species?
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Should Manga Be Included in Child Pornography Legislation? | VICE News - 1 views
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The United Nations has rekindled the debate about sexualized images of children in Japanese manga art after its Special Envoy on Child Protection, Maud de Boer-Buquicchio, called for the east Asian country to ban certain graphic content in anime.
This Bizarre Illusion Makes Dots In Plain View Disappear | IFLScience - 1 views
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the reason you are not seeing the yellow dots is due to a phenomenon called sensory overload. As the grid around the green dot rotates, and the yellow dots remain unmoving and unchanging, the brain processes the yellow dots as unnecessary information and blanks them out. The brain, after all, does not automatically process all information, visual or otherwise, that the body’s sensory systems encounter. If it did, it would overload, so it tends to filter out information that it has repeatedly encountered without change. The Yale study suggests something else. Instead of the brain automatically removing pieces of unchanging information from view due to sensory overload, the mind is in fact perceiving the objects as contrary to the logic of real-life perceptions. The brain simply does not accept that the object can logically exist based on what information it has. Thus, they disappear from view – they become perceptual scotomas.
As the World Melts, an Artist Finds Beauty in Ancient Ice | The New Yorker - 1 views
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When the artist Peggy Weil first learned about the National Ice Core Laboratory, a few years ago, she was captivated. She contacted Geoffrey Hargreaves, the lab’s curator, and soon found herself inside a giant freezer, bundled in an Arctic-ready parka. (The temperature was minus thirty-eight degrees Fahrenheit.) With the help of lab assistants, she loaded up a cart with cannisters made of thick cardboard, each containing a small segment of a two-mile-long core from the Greenland ice sheet. Weil trundled her specimens to a cylindrical scanner and photographed them in high resolution. Eventually, she strung together eighty-eight scans, top to bottom. Then she animated them and added an accompanying score, creating a four-and-a-half-hour video, designed to be projected onto a wall.
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