All Things TOK

"As web companies strive to tailor their services (including news and search results) to our personal tastes, there's a dangerous unintended consequence: We get trapped in a "filter bubble" and don't get exposed to information that could challenge or broaden our worldview. Eli Pariser argues powerfully that this will ultimately prove to be bad for us and bad for democracy. "

"It was April, 1972. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N. J. The home in the 1950s of Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel. Thomas Kuhn, the author of "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" and the father of the paradigm shift, threw an ashtray at my head."

Errol Morris returns to Princeton to discuss his concerns about what he sees as Thomas Kuhn's postmodernism in "The Structures of Scientific Revolutions."

"The alteration of photos for propaganda purposes has been with us as long as photography itself; it is not an invention of the digital age. But while digitally altered photographs can easily fool the eye, they often leave telltale footprints that allow them to be unmasked as forgeries. There are many famous altered photographs, from a Matthew Brady photograph of Abraham Lincoln's head composited on to John Calhoun's body to the endlessly altered photographs from Soviet Russia. An entire book, "The Commissar Vanishes," by David King, is devoted to Soviet whims about who should be included (or deleted) in photographs. In the series shown above, Stalin is accompanied by three officials, then two, then one, as they successively fall out of favor and are cropped and airbrushed into non-existence. (In the end, in a painting based on the photograph, he stands alone.) We understand Stalin's intentions by removing comrades, but what is the purpose of these Iranian missile photographs? They are clearly altered. The question remains: Why, and to what end?"

"At one point in "The Wizard Of Oz," Dorothy (Judy Garland) picks an apple and the tree she picks it off protests: "Well, how would you like to have someone come along and pick something off of you?" Dorothy is abashed and she says, "Oh, dear - I keep forgetting I'm not in Kansas," by which she means she's now entered an alternate universe where the usual distinctions between persons and objects, animate and inanimate, human beings and the natural world that is theirs to exploit do not hold. In Kansas and, she once assumed, everywhere else, trees are things you pick things off (even limbs) and persons are not. Persons have an autonomy and integrity of body that are to be respected; trees do not. A person who is maimed has a legal cause of action. A tree that has been cut down has no legal recourse, although there may be a cause of action (not, however, on behalf of the tree) if it was cut down by someone other than the owner of the property it stood on. All this seems obvious, but what the tree's question to Dorothy shows is that the category of the obvious can be challenged and unsettled. I thought of this scene on the last day of my jurisprudence course when we came to the chapter on animal rights and the rights of objects . The question of the day was posed by Christopher Stone's landmark article "Should Trees Have Standing? - Toward Legal Rights For Natural Objects" (1972), and was answered, it would seem, in Genesis 1:26, when God gave man "dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth." The dominion of man over animals and nature is established theologically, and it is established again in the modern period by classical liberalism's privileging of individual rights exercised by beings endowed (by either God or nature) with the capacity of choice. From Locke to Mill to Berlin to Rawls, the centrality of the

"Does It Matter Why He Did It? January 14, 2011 There's been no evidence to link today's toxic political environment with Jared Loughner's decision to use his gun last weekend. But the question persists: what has the aggressive rhetoric - peddled by mainstream candidates and media outlets and not just militant fringe groups - done to our society? The New Yorker's George Packer says the particular motivations for Loughner's rampage aren't the point."

"Political Rhetoric in the Wake of the Tucson Shooting January 14, 2011 After the shooting in Tucson last weekend, pundits across the political spectrum took a renewed look at the hyperbolic and oftentimes violent rhetoric that marks our modern political discourse. Brooke looks at the way the media responded to this tragedy."

"A long-standing idea that human languages share universal features that are dictated by human brain structure has been cast into doubt. A study reported in Nature has borrowed methods from evolutionary biology to trace the development of grammar in several language families. The results suggest that features shared across language families evolved independently in each lineage. The authors say cultural evolution, not the brain, drives language development. At the heart of both studies is a method based on what are known as phylogenetic studies."

"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."

"It was once a staple of public school cafeterias that blended the indulgent and the nutritious, satisfying parents and children both. But chocolate milk is uncontroversial no more. Dozens of districts have demanded reformulations. Others have banned it outright. At the center of these battles are complex public health calculations: Is it better to remove sugary chocolate flavorings at the risk that many students will skip milk altogether, missing out on crucial calcium and Vitamin D? Or should schools instead make tweaks - less fat, different sweeteners, fewer calories - that might salvage the benefits while minimizing the downside?"

"And this is how the Civil War comes to life for a roomful of fourth-graders in Northern Virginia, 150 years after the nation's deadliest armed conflict began. Agner's reenactment of the landmark naval Battle of Hampton Roads - a tactile lesson the vet­eran teacher dreamed up this year - drew her Fairfax County class into a chapter of American history that has long provoked education debate. The war's sesquicentennial, starting Tuesday with the anniversary of the attack on Fort Sumter in South Carolina, provides a "teachable moment" for schools everywhere. But how and when students learn about slavery and secession, blue and gray, Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, Bull Run (or Manassas) and Appomattox varies enormously from state to state, school to school and even teacher to teacher. This year, Virginia learned anew the sensitivity of Civil War education when the state Board of Education withdrew approval of a fourth-grade textbook - "Our Virginia: Past and Present" - that asserted thousands of African Americans fought for the South. Most historians reject that claim. Last year, the Texas State Board of Education voted to require eighth-graders to study the inaugural address of Confederate President Jefferson Davis alongside President Abraham Lincoln's first and second inaugurals and his Gettysburg Address. That was one of many controversial revisions to Texas standards. Jeremy A. Stern, a historian who reviewed state academic standards this year for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, said differences in the timing and scope of Civil War education across the United States are dramatic. Often, he said, the war is not taught systematically until middle school. "

"In 1990, Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr. and his colleagues at the University of Minnesota published a striking finding: About 70 percent of the variance in IQ found in their particular sample of identical twins was found to be associated with genetic variation. Furthermore, identical twins reared apart were eerily similar to identical twins reared together on various measures of personality, occupational and leisure-time interests, and social attitudes. Bouchard's study, along with many others, has painted a consistent picture: Genes matter. The studies say nothing about how they matter, or which genes matter, but they show quite convincingly that they indeed do matter. Genes vary within any group of people (even among the inhabitants of middle-class in Western society), and this variation contributes to variations in these people's behaviors. Let's be clear: Twin studies have received much criticism. Even though the proliferation of advanced statistical techniques (such as structural equation modeling) and the implementation of additional controls have allayed some of the concerns, they haven't allayed all of the them. Even so, the findings from twin studies should not be understated; it counters many a prevailing belief that we are born into this world as blank slates, completely at the mercy of the external environment. Because our psychological characteristics reflect the physical structures of our brains and because our genes contribute to those physical structures, there are unlikely to be any psychological characteristics that are completely unaffected by our DNA. "

"Apart from the most rabid fundamentalists among us, nearly everyone admits that the Bible might contain errors -- a faulty creation story here, a historical mistake there, a contradiction or two in some other place. But is it possible that the problem is worse than that -- that the Bible actually contains lies? Most people wouldn't put it that way, since the Bible is, after all, sacred Scripture for millions on our planet. But good Christian scholars of the Bible, including the top Protestant and Catholic scholars of America, will tell you that the Bible is full of lies, even if they refuse to use the term. And here is the truth: Many of the books of the New Testament were written by people who lied about their identity, claiming to be a famous apostle -- Peter, Paul or James -- knowing full well they were someone else. In modern parlance, that is a lie, and a book written by someone who lies about his identity is a forgery. Most modern scholars of the Bible shy away from these terms, and for understandable reasons, some having to do with their clientele. Teaching in Christian seminaries, or to largely Christian undergraduate populations, who wants to denigrate the cherished texts of Scripture by calling them forgeries built on lies? And so scholars use a different term for this phenomenon and call such books "pseudepigrapha." You will find this antiseptic term throughout the writings of modern scholars of the Bible. It's the term used in university classes on the New Testament, and in seminary courses, and in Ph.D. seminars. What the people who use the term do not tell you is that it literally means "writing that is inscribed with a lie.""

"What is it that makes a face look beautiful? What are the differences between very attractive and less appealing faces? For every historical period and every human culture, people have always had their own ideal of beauty. But this ideal has never been constant and is still subject to changes. In our research project we adopted an empirical approach and created prototypes for unattractive and attractive faces for each sex by using the morphing technique. For example, the prototype for an unattractive face ("unsexy face") was created by blending together four faces that had previously been rated as very unattractive. The "sexy face" was created by blending together four of the most attractive faces, respectively (see report). In order to find out the characteristic differences between attractive and unattractive faces, we presented pairs of one "sexy" and one "unsexy" image for both sexes to test subjects. The task was to report which facial features were perceived to be different between the two faces. For the results see the list below. "

"Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it. ~ Confucius The word "beauty" is the most overused, misunderstood, poorly defined word in the English language. What makes a woman beautiful? The Holy Grail of beauty has never been completely understood. The cliché, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder," is incorrect in my opinion. Perception is the key. It is "perception of beauty" that is in the eye of the beholder. Each of us, however, has a different perception of beauty. We all have different tastes, likes and dislikes, and this affects our definition and perception of beauty with regard to the American woman. As a plastic surgeon, it is my job to counsel people about this perception of beauty because so many misconceptions exist."

war - a state of usually open and declared armed hostile conflict between states or nations (2) : a period of such armed conflict (3) : state of war kinetic - of or relating to the motion of material bodies and the forces and energy associated therewith - Merriam-Webster.com

"For many years, scientists have thought that the first Americans came here from Asia 13,000 years ago, during the last ice age, probably by way of the Bering Strait. They were known as the Clovis people, after the town in New Mexico where their finely wrought spear points were first discovered in 1929. But in more recent years, archaeologists have found more and more traces of even earlier people with a less refined technology inhabiting North America and spreading as far south as Chile. And now clinching evidence in the mystery of the early peopling of America - Clovis or pre-Clovis? - for nearly all scientists appears to have turned up at a creek valley in the hill country of what is today Central Texas, 40 miles northwest of Austin. The new findings establish that the last major human migration, into the Americas, began earlier than once thought. And the discovery could change thinking about how people got here (by coastal migrations along shores and in boats) and how they adapted to the new environment in part by making improvements in toolmaking that led eventually to the technology associated with the Clovis culture. "

"FaceResearch.org allows you to participate in short online psychology experiments looking at the traits people find attractive in faces and voices. Register to participate in experiments if this is your first time at FaceResearch.org or login if you have been here before. Make your own average faces with our interactive demos! In addition to participating in facial attractiveness experiments, you can also complete lifestyle and personality questionnaires about characteristics that may be associated with face and voice preferences and see how you compare to others. We post all our study results after we have finished collecting data. You can also learn about our computer-graphic technology and read about some of the findings of our previous studies."

"An online poll conducted in the '90s set Vitaly Komar, Alex Melamid and David Soldier on a quest to create the most annoying song ever. After gathering data about people's least favorite music and lyrical subjects, they did the unthinkable: they combined them into a single monstrosity, specifically engineered to sound unpleasant to the maximum percentage of listeners. The song is not new, but it resurfaced on Dial "M" for Musicology. Amazingly, this "most unwanted music" contains little dissonance - that would have been too easy. For the most part, they seem to have tried to assemble these elements in a listenable way. Komar & Melamid and David Soldier's list of undesirable elements included holiday music, bagpipes, pipe organ, a children's chorus and the concept of children in general (really?), Wal-Mart, cowboys, political jingoism, George Stephanopoulos, Coca Cola, bossanova synths, banjo ferocity, harp glissandos, oompah-ing tubas and much, much more. It's actually a fascinating listen, worthwhile for the opera rapping alone. (We didn't think that was possible either.)"

"Teri Horton is a 74-year-old retired truck driver with an eighth grade education. She likes to gamble a bit, and now she thinks she has hit the jackpot. Not in a casino, but in the high-stakes world of modern art. Teri isn't the kind of person who knows-or cares-much about art. But as CNN's Anderson Cooper reports, she has caused a stir in the upper reaches of the art world because of a painting she bought years ago, a painting she now believes is the work of the famous abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock. If Teri's painting is by Pollock, it would likely be worth tens of millions of dollars. Not bad, considering she bought it as a gift for a friend and only paid $5 for it in a thrift shop in San Bernardino, Calif."