TOK Friends

Sextillions of snowflakes fell from the sky this winter. That’s billions of trillions of them, now mostly melted away as spring approaches.

“How do snowflakes form?” Dr. Libbrecht said during an online talk on Feb. 23 that was hosted by the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Conn. “And how do these structures appear — and just, as I like to say, literally out of thin air?”

The “damn thing” was the camera system for photographing snowflakes. He wanted to use the best digital sensors, ones that captured a million pixels. “The real snowflake is very, very fragile,” he said. “It’s super intricate. So you want high resolution.”

The bald eagle population in the lower 48 states has quadrupled since 2009,

There were an estimated 316,700 bald eagles in the lower 48 states during the 2019 breeding season

her organization would keep working with state and federal agencies, tribes, private landowners and others to ensure that the bald eagle population continues to increase.

international commerce confronted a monumental traffic jam with potentially grave consequences.

a vital channel linking the factories of Asia to the affluent customers of Europe, as well as a major conduit for oil.

companies can depend on the magic of the internet and the global shipping industry to summon what they need as they need it.

pledging to reverse decades of discriminatory agricultural lending and subsidy policies that have left Black farmers at an economic disadvantage and is racing to deploy $5 billion in aid and debt relief to help them.

Now the department is in the middle of a drastic overhaul, both of its personnel and of policies that it acknowledges have perpetuated inequality in rural America for years.

root out the vestiges of racism at his agency and to redress “systemic discrimination” that Black farmers had faced.

Scientists initially estimated that 60 to 70 percent of the population needed to acquire resistance to the coronavirus to banish it. Now Dr. Anthony Fauci and others are quietly shifting that number upward.

It gives Americans a sense of when we can hope to breathe freely again.

And last week, in an interview with CNBC News, he said “75, 80, 85 percent” and “75 to 80-plus percent.”

inking the different Areas of Knowledge (AOK) with different Ways of Knowing (WOK) can be quite challenging at times. I now attempted to link History with Language, Logics, Emotion and Sense Perception.

Does the way (the language) that certain historical events are presented in history books influence the way that the reader understands these events? What role does loaded language play when talking about historical events? What role do connotation and denotation play when talking about historical events? How can language introduce bias into historical accounts? How does language help or hinder the interpretation of historical facts?

recently read an interesting poem by the German poet and playwright Berthold Brecht – a poem which got me thinking. You see, this is one of the TOK illnesses, you start to see TOK everywhere, and also in poetry. Continue reading »

New cases of Covid-19 in the United States have fallen in the last two months to about 55,000 a day.

These numbers are promising, but the ups and downs and ups tell an important lesson about keeping perspective in a pandemic. Today's promising numbers would have been horrific at this time last year and are hardly as good as they need to be.

No one knows this more than the country's governors. Since the Trump White House dumped the job of handling the pandemic almost entirely into their laps, they have had to respond on the fly.

President Joe Biden's first two months in power went remarkably smoothly considering he took office amid a once-in-a-century pandemic, a consequent economic crisis and his predecessor's refusal to recognize his victory.

The doubling of the pace of vaccinations in the last two months represents tangible progress on the one issue on which Biden's first year will likely be mostly judged -- the quest to revive a semblance of normal life.

"Now is not the time to let down our guard. If we all do our part, after a long, dark year, we can show once again that we are the United States of America. ... We're going to beat this pandemic," Biden said in Ohio on Tuesday, striking the balance between caution and hope that has marked his management of the pandemic, which polls show wins the approval of a majority of Americans.

schools are increasingly faced with the question of whether they can discipline students for remarks made online about school or school officials.

In general, student speech in public schools has less protection than speech by adults in the community at large.

Tinker v. Des Moines School District decision

Family-friendly policies such as flextime, telecommuting and a compressed workweek have been seen as supporting women’s traditional roles and hence as more needed for women to take advantage of.

some studies show men’s usage has been stigmatized and discouraged – and may even hurt their careers.

Companies could overcome these stereotypes and fears by encouraging men to take advantage of these types of family-friendly policies and by proclaiming that there’s no penalty if the reason is to take on more domestic responsibilities.

that age and emotional well-being tend to increase together, as a rule, even as mental acuity and physical health taper off.

that age and emotional well-being tend to increase together, as a rule, even as mental acuity and physical health taper off.

Do people somehow develop better coping skills as they age?

Isn't there quite enough to learn about the world today? Why add to the burden by looking at the past

Historical knowledge is no more and no less than carefully and critically constructed collective memory. As such it can both make us wiser in our public choices and more richly human in our private lives.

Without individual memory, a person literally loses his or her identity, and would not know how to act in encounters with others. Imagine waking up one morning unable to tell total strangers from family and friends!

When COVID-19 struck, mRNA vaccines in particular were ready to be put to a real-world test. The 94% efficacy of the mRNA vaccines surpassed health officials’ highest expectations.

DNA and mRNA vaccines offer huge advantages over traditional types of vaccines, since they use only genetic code from a pathogen – rather than the entire virus or bacteria.

Gene-based vaccines also produce precise and effective immune responses. They stimulate not only antibodies that block an infection, but also a strong T cell response that can clear an infection if one occurs.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Vice President Kamala Harris, Attorney General Merrick Garland and Xavier Becerra, nominee for Health and Human Services secretary, have conveyed similar messages about their immigrant roots.

Polls suggest 60% of Americans support some of its policies, such as a path to citizenship for immigrants in the country illegally.

Yet this history of migration has coexisted with xenophobia: a form of prejudice against people from other countries.

Since COVID-19 emerged, dozens of colleges and universities have announced the elimination of different intercollegiate athletics teams.

But the majority of closures came at regional and local campuses that participate in the NCAA’s Division II and Division III, or the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics. Also, around 30 teams were eliminated by community colleges.

The 78 schools we examined spend around $87 million a year to keep all those teams going.

Biden is the most strongly identified Irish-American in the White House since John F Kennedy, the only other Catholic president.

rish nationalist sentiments run high in the US, especially among its large diaspora. US presidents frequently indulge these views, at least symbolically. But, in practical terms, they have had little impact on the US-UK relationship.

More than 30 million people in the US – about one in ten Americans – identify as “Irish”.

The economic orthodoxy has long been that governments should try to balance their books and leave all the heavy lifting in managing their economies to central banks.

The economic orthodoxy has long been that governments should try to balance their books and leave all the heavy lifting in managing their economies to central banks.

“we are all Keynesians now”