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"Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the role of animals in humankind's search for knowledge. Since the Greek physician Galen used pigs for anatomical studies in the 2nd century, animals have been used by scientists to further human knowledge. Yet few, if any subjects in this country, raise such violent feelings and passions as animals and their place in our society. With the growing politicisation of animal rights, it is a subject which is increasing in intensity. Do animals have rights and do our needs permit us to use them still to enhance our own lives in the twentieth century? Is it still necessary to experiment on animals for the good of humankind? Or is that morally unacceptable and barbaric - particularly in the light of new research into animal consciousness? With Colin Blakemore, Professor of Physiology, Oxford University, President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Fellow of the Royal Society and targeted in the 1980s by animal welfare activists protesting at his research methods; Dr Lynda Birke, biologist, teacher at Lancaster and Warwick Universities, and previously worked for 7 years in animal behaviour at the Open University."

"What is mathematics? It's neither physical nor mental, it's social. It's part of culture, it's part of history. It's like law, like religion, like money, like all those other things which are very real, but only as part of collective human consciousness. That's what math is. For mathematician Reuben Hersh, mathematics has existence or reality only as part of human culture. Despite its seeming timelessness and infallibility, it is a social-cultural- historic phenomenon. He takes the long view. He thinks a lot about the ancient problems. What are numbers? What are triangles, squares and circles? What are infinite sets? What is the fourth dimension? What is the meaning and nature of mathematics? In so doing he explains and criticizes current and past theories of the nature of mathematics. His main purpose is to confront philosophical problems: In what sense do mathematical objects exist? How can we have knowledge of them? Why do mathematicians think mathematical entities exist forever, independent of human action and knowledge? "

A great little interview on the current situation between China and Tibet and why it remains unresolved. Outlines knowledge issues and current problems well for TOK oral presentations.

"One of our true superstars of nonfiction." That's how David Foster Wallace described Lewis Hyde. In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, Lewis Hyde talks about his book, "Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art." This classic text introduces us to the playful and disruptive side of imagination embodied in trickster mythology. Lewis Hyde is the author of the acclaimed "Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art." He talks with Steve Paulson about the meaning of the word "trickster." His book explores the cultural history of such infamous Trickster figures as Loki and Monkey."

"Children are Hard-Wired with Universal Grammar Another important contribution of Chomsky to the science of language is the focus on language acquisition by children. Now, children can't memorize sentences because knowledge of language isn't just one long list of memorized sentences, but somehow they must distill out or abstract out the rules that go into assembling sentences based on what they hear coming out of their parent's mouths when they were little. And the talent of using rules to produce combinations is in evidence from the moment that kids begin to speak. "

"Miller eloquently encapsulates the combinatorial nature of creativity and the constant borrowing and repurposing that takes place as we build upon what came before and recombine existing bits of knowledge and ideas to create what we call "our" ideas. And your way, is it really your way? […] What, moreover, can you call your own? The house you live in, the food you swallow, the clothes you wear - you neither built the house nor raised the food nor made the clothes. […] The same goes for your ideas. You moved into them ready-made."

"VANDALS have struck a painting that depicts South African President Jacob Zuma with his genitals hanging out. Two men defaced the picture with gobs of paint, as Mr Zuma and his African National Congress sought a court order yesterday to have the painting removed from an art gallery. The case is spiced with freedom of expression on the one hand and the right to dignity on the other. It took centre stage after the painting by Brett Murray went on display in a Johannesburg gallery this month and was reported on in local media. Mr Zuma, who has a reputation for promiscuity, took the depiction of him with his private parts exposed very personally and compared himself to a rape victim. Mr Zuma himself was put on trial for rape, and acquitted, in 2006. "The portrayal has ridiculed and caused me humiliation and indignity," Mr Zuma contended in an affidavit filed yesterday with the South Gauteng High Court in Johannesburg. Presiding over the hearing in a courtroom a few kilometres from the gallery, Judge Fayeeza Kathree-Setiloane said the full three-judge bench should hear the case because the national interest and constitutional issues are at stake. South Africa's constitution protects the right to dignity as well as to freedom of expression. She said the hearing would recommence tomorrow. Mr Zuma and the ANC sought to have the painting, titled "The Spear," removed from the Goodman Gallery and to stop the newspaper City Press from displaying a photo of it on its website. Just before the hearing was scheduled to begin, two men wielding cans of red and black paint calmly walked up to the painting hanging on a gallery wall and took turns defacing it. "Now it's completely and utterly destroyed," said Iman Rappetti, a reporter for a South African TV channel who happened to be on the scene at the time as her camera rolled. Her channel showed a man in a tweed jacket painting a red X over the president's genital area and then his face. Next, a man in a hoodie smeared bl

Part 1 of a 4-part series examining what happens when science is used for marketing (using brain-training software as the central example). Almost all of the programs that tout their ability to train your brain are limited in scope. Most train your ability to perform simple cognitive tasks by having you perform them repeatedly, often adapting the difficulty of the task over time to keep it challenging. Some determine which tasks you perform well and which need improvement and adjust the tasks based on your ongoing performance. The simplest ones, though, simply track how much you improve and inform you that such improvements have made increased the fitness of your brain. Such task-specific training effects can be really useful-if you want to enhance your ability to do Sudoku, by all means practice doing Sudoku. But what pitches for those programs regularly imply is that playing their videogame or using their training will enhance your ability to do other tasks that weren't specifically trained. For example, this advertisement for Nintendo's Brain Age implies that by using their game, you will be better able to remember your friend's name when you meet him on the street. The idea that playing games can improve your brain is pervasive, and it taps what Chris Chabris and I have called the "illusion of potential." A common myth of the mind is that we have vast pools of untapped mental resources that can be released with relatively minimal effort. This common intuitive belief underlies the pervasive myth that we only use 10% of our brains, that listening to Mozart can increase our IQ [pdf], and even the belief that some people have "discovered" psychic abilities. We devote the last main chapter of The Invisible Gorilla to this belief and its ramifications, and we recently wrote a column for the NY Times discussing how popular self-help books like The Secret and The Power capitalize on this mistaken belief. The marketing for some brain training programs

"You probably think of Marcel Proust as the author of the massive seven-part autobiographical novel, "In Search of Lost Time." But did you know that Proust can also be considered a scientist? That's the argument that Jonah Lehrer makes in his book, "Proust Was A Neuroscientist." Next time on To the Best of Our Knowledge, Lehrer explains how Proust made discoveries about the human brain long before science did, as we explore the cultures of arts and science. Also... Richard Holmes on the discovery of the beauty and terror of science during the Romantic era."

"Things go better with "biting the wax tadpole"? That doesn't sound right, does it? Yet that's the literal translation of Coca-Cola that Chinese shopkeepers came up with...a set of characters pronounced "ke-kou ke-la." In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge we'll explore the exotic world of foreign languages. We'll hear the confessions of a language fanatic. Also, six-word memoirs. "One life. Six words. What's yours?""

"Economics aspires to be a science. But in this it does not succeed. Neither does finance. This despite the fact that there is an annual, optimistically named Nobel Prize in "Economic Sciences." Financial crises keep happening-the list is long. Could they be avoided if economics and finance were science? To paraphrase financial observer James Grant: science is progressive, but finance is cyclical. But why should this be? Do we not learn from experience? Does economic knowledge not increase? And how about having computers, vast amounts of data and information, and new mathematical models to guide lending and investing decisions?"

"Although Xuanyao's history teachers have taught her a lot about Japanese atrocities, she said, they are reluctant to talk about the Great Leap Forward. And they never mention the deadly Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. "Studying Chinese history is very important because it helps increase our knowledge and our patriotism," said Xuanyao, 16, dressed in purple jeans and a matching backpack. "I wasn't taught anything about Tiananmen. But what the Japanese did, particularly the Nanjing massacre, is unforgivable. Remembering this is very, very important for our national pride." China has criticized Japan in recent weeks for whitewashing its militarist history, focusing in particular on a junior high school textbook recently approved by Tokyo. A wave of anti-Japanese protests swept the world's most populous nation. A close look at China's corresponding textbook, "Chinese History -- Textbook for Junior High School," however, finds several areas where China's official history appears to have gaps of its own. "Yes, what Japan did in World War II is horrible," said Sam Crane, Asian studies professor at Williams College in Massachusetts. "But the embarrassing fact for the Communist Party, and one that is not taught in Chinese schools, is that the party itself is responsible for many more deaths of Chinese people than those caused by Japanese militarism." Historians and China scholars say an underlying theme in many Chinese textbooks is the country's victimization at the hands of foreign powers, particularly the Japanese. Although this is true, they say, China tends to underplay the long periods that it dominated its neighbors."

"People can talk. Other animals can't. They can all communicate in one way or another--to lure mates, at the very least--but their whinnies and wiggles don't do the jobs that language does. The birds and beasts can use their signals to attract, threaten, or alert each other, but they can't ask questions, strike bargains, tell stories, or lay out a plan of action. Those skills make Homo sapiens a uniquely successful, powerful and dangerous mammal. Other creatures' signals carry only a few limited kinds of information about what's happening at the moment, but language lets us tell each other in limitless detail about what used to be or will be or might be. Language lets us get vast numbers of big, smart fellow primates all working together on a single task--building the Great Wall of China or fighting World War II or flying to the moon. It lets us construct and communicate the gorgeous fantasies of literature and the profound fables of myth. It lets us cheat death by pouring out our knowledge, dreams and memories into younger people's minds. And it does powerful things for us inside our own minds, because we do a lot of our thinking by talking silently to ourselves. Without language, we would be only a sort of upright chimpanzee with funny feet and clever hands. With it, we are the self-possessed masters of the planet. How did such a marvelous adaptation get started? And if it's so great, why hasn't another species come up with something similar? These may be the most important questions we face in studying human evolution. They are also some of the least understood. But in the past few years, linguists and anthropologists have been making some breakthroughs, and we are now beginning to have a glimmering of some answers."

"RESEARCHERS say they have solved a conundrum about human perception that has stumped philosophers and scientists alike for three centuries. Irish politician William Molyneux first posed the question in a letter to the great British thinker John Locke written 323 years ago. Imagine, Molyneux wrote, that a man blind from birth who has learned to identify objects - a sphere and a cube, for example - only through his sense of touch is suddenly able to see. The puzzle, he continued, is: "Whether he Could, by his Sight, and before he touch them, know which is the Globe and which the Cube?" For philosophers of the time, answering "Molyneux's question", as it became known, would resolve a fundamental uncertainty about the human mind. Empiricists believed that we are born blank slates, and become the sum total of our accumulated experience. So-called "nativists" countered that our minds are, from the outset, pre-stocked with ideas waiting to be activated by sight, sound and touch. If a blind man who miraculously recovered his sight could instantly distinguish the cube from the globe it would mean the knowledge was somehow innate, they argued. More recently, this "nurture vs. nature" debate has found its counterpart in modern neuroscience."

Isn't this kind of like the reading we had...with the Uncertainty of Knowledge assignment? It talks about how science theories can be true because we believe them to be true, but because time changes and everything is different all the time, they are always easy to be proven wrong, and subject to change. That is like what you said about scientific theories being subject to future questioning. What we perceive to be an atom may not be what Socrates perceived as an atom, or some scientist from year 3000 perceives it. Science is always changing and therefore I agree that the laws that are made are always "refinable".

Well known Harvard academic, Marc Hauser, is questioned about the veracity of some of his research publications.

This could be helpful for this year's TOK Essay Title #2: How important are the opinions of experts in the search for knowledge? Also, makes you realize that just because someone has a PhD and tenure at Harvard doesn't mean you can always trust what they say!!!

"BUSINESSES in nearly every industry were caught off guard by the Great Recession. Few leaders in business - or government, for that matter - seem to have even considered the possibility that an economic downturn of this magnitude could happen. "