YIS TOK

"Right-wing political forces in Japan, encouraged by the government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, are waging a campaign of intimidation to deny the disgraceful chapter in World War II when the Japanese military forced thousands of women to serve in wartime brothels. Many mainstream Japanese scholars and most non-Japanese researchers have established as historical fact that the program allowed Japanese soldiers to sexually abuse women across the Asian warfront - based on widespread testimony from the "comfort women." Now a political effort to treat these events as wholesale lies concocted by Japan's wartime enemies is gaining traction, with revisionists trying to roll back the government's 1993 apology for the coercion of women into prostitution. The Abe government, intent on stoking nationalistic fervor, was rebuffed earlier this year in its effort to have revisions made to a 1996 United Nations human rights report on the women Japan forced into sex slavery. But, at home, the right wing continues to hammer away at The Asahi Shimbun newspaper, seizing on the paper's retractions of articles published in the 1980s and 1990s that turned on limited aspects of its coverage to deny the larger historical truth of the "comfort women" program."

"Using examples from vacations to colonoscopies, Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman reveals how our "experiencing selves" and our "remembering selves" perceive happiness differently. This new insight has profound implications for economics, public policy - and our own self-awareness."

"This is a powerful example of how our biases can blind us. But not in the way Dr. Tyson thought. Mr. Bush wasn't blinded by religious bigotry. Instead, Dr. Tyson was fooled by his faith in the accuracy of his own memory."

"Autism is a poorly-understood neurological disorder that can impair an individual's ability to engage in various social interactions. But little 5-year-old Iris Grace in the UK is an excellent example of the unexpected gifts that autism can also grant - her exceptional focus and attention to detail have helped her create incredibly beautiful paintings that many of her fans (and buyers) have likened to Monet's works. Little Iris is slowly learning to speak, whereas most children have already begun to speak at least a few words by age 2. Along with speech therapy, her parents gradually introduced her to painting, which is when they discovered her amazing talent."

"This experiment is designed to test whether you can spot the difference between a fake smile and a real one It has 20 questions and should take you 10 minutes It is based on research by Professor Paul Ekman, a psychologist at the University of California Each video clip will take approximately 15 seconds to load on a 56k modem and you can only play each smile once"

Such devastating mistakes by eyewitnesses are not rare, according to a report by the Innocence Project, an organization affiliated with the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University that uses DNA testing to exonerate those wrongfully convicted of crimes. Since the 1990s, when DNA testing was first introduced, Innocence Project researchers have reported that 73 percent of the 239 convictions overturned through DNA testing were based on eyewitness testimony. One third of these overturned cases rested on the testimony of two or more mistaken eyewitnesses. How could so many eyewitnesses be wrong?

"In recent years anthropologists have begun to point out that sensory perception is culturally specific. "Sensory perception," Constance Classen, the author of "The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch," says, "is a cultural as well as physical act." It's a controversial claim made famous by Marshall McLuhan's insistence that nonliterate societies were governed by spoken words and sound, while literate societies experienced words visually and so were dominated by sight. Few anthropologists would accept that straightforwardly today. But more and more are willing to argue that sensory perception is as much about the cultural training of attention as it is about biological capacity."

"Canadian photographer Christopher Moloney loves movies. For his latest photo series, "FILMography" Moloney explores his love of film in a really unique way.  Through careful analysis, he recreates iconic scenes from his favorite flicks, in their real world locations. How he does it though, is brilliant. Check it out."

A Gallery of "provocative artworks" that can be used for an additional exemplar gallery for the TOK Gallery Project.

"So, what sort of things should we be teaching if we wanted to foster "ethical literacy"? What would count as a decent grounding in moral philosophy for the average citizen of contemporary, pluralistic societies? What follows is in no way meant to be definitive. It's not based on any sort of serious empirical data around people's familiarity with ethical issues. It's a just tentative stab (wait, can you stab tentatively?) at a list of things people should ideally know about ethics, and based, on what I see in the classroom and, online, often don't."

"Today, the spot where this happened is marked with a small plaque bearing the name of Georges Loiseleur, who "died for France". A 19 year old, Rene Dova, who was killed in the same incident is also remembered. Across the city there are about 500 of these memorials dating from the week of fighting exactly 70 years ago, when Parisians won back their lost honour and threw off the Nazi yoke. The earliest ones were put up spontaneously by families or comrades. Later, a law of 1946 set out strict rules about proof of merit, and about appropriate language. Thus, while the first plaques use emotional phrases like "lachement assassine par les Boches" (victim of a cowardly murder by the Hun), the later formula "Mort pour la France" reflects an official appropriation of the act of memory. Each memorial evokes a personal story from the liberation of Paris. But time is passing, and the memory of what actually happened at each of these 500 spots is fading."

"You've been saying it in the wrong context forever and now it's time to stop."

Researchers have long contended that the epicenter of global warming is also farthest from the reach of humanity. It's in the barren landscapes of the frozen North, where red-cheeked children wear fur, the sun barely rises in the winter and temperatures can plunge dozens of degrees below zero. Such a place is the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia, translated as "the ends of the Earth," a desolate spit of land where a group called the Nenets live.

When neuroscientist Andrew Newberg scanned the brain of ''Kevin'', a staunch atheist, while he was meditating, he made a fascinating discovery. ''Compared with the Buddhist monks and Franciscan nuns, whose brains I'd also scanned, Kevin's brain operated in a significantly different way,'' he says. ''He had far more activity in the prefrontal cortex, the area that controls emotional feelings and mediates attention. Kevin's brain appeared to be functioning in a highly analytical way, even when he was in a resting state.''