Wednesday 9 December 2009

Thursday 3 December 2009

Tuesday 1 December 2009

Emotional intelligence, Toondoo

Emotional Intelligence toon

Digital media, Toondoo

Here is the link for the fabulous toondoo.

Cartoon strip generator

Assignment help, Good TOK

Last week I was trying to give you advice on how to spot good TOK opportunities. These opportunities can be used in your TOK presentations or within your TOK essays due in January 14th (Chemists and Physicists), or 15th (Biologists). Where to begin?:

Firstly - finding inspiration. As your critical thinking skills develop you will begin to read about or follow on media such as youtube and ted.com more thought provoking material. Watch out for dogmatic statements people make (over confident in the self assuredness of the claim), watch out for so called conspiracy theories, pseudo-science and ethical disputes. My friend Nicola in her book "a new you" talks about all of us activating our "scooby ears" - it's that internal alarm going off - "how do they know that"?

Have a look at www.youtube.com and my "scooby ear" videos are stored under user: ultimatefrizbee - watch one or two and ask yourself - why is this here? How does it raise questions or challenge a certain viewpoint or paradigm? Then attempt to make the issue interesting.

Start reading broadsheet or alternative newspapers once a week. Try www.thefirstpost.co.uk remember whilst the articles here often challenge the consensus they are still open to further critical analysis by you.


Secondly. When you find a source/claim/issue that is intriguing,dogmatic or sounds spurious (lacking substance or truthfulness), work yourself your own angle of enquiry. Use the socratic method we have learnt. Ask the 4 wives and a husband type questions. Why, What,Who, Where and How?

Using my last post as an example:

Hollow Earth theory:

Example Good TOK questions:

Who is making such claims? Who else?
What is the theory challenging? What evidence do we need to get nearer to the truth claim behind this theory? What evidence can disprove or prove such a theory?

Where can I find counter-evidence, counter claims? Where is this theory being published? Where is the substatiated proof?

How can we know if the Earth is hollow? How can we ever know the full extent of the history of our planet? How satisfied should we be with our current understanding of our planet?

All these questions lead to more questions and therefore good TOK. However you still need to find some creativity yourself in how you present your questions, make them relevant, thought provoking and occassionally amusing. Why not? My hollow earth theory could mean ten years from now we are on an expedition inside the earth hunting Wooly Mammoths and Spacemen and wondering why we all found the theory stupid in 2009!

Friday 27 November 2009

teepee and northern lights. (Light escapes from internal sun?)






This is a picture mail I received today after TOK. We discussed the hollow earth theory. Theories like this offer us good TOK, critical thinking opportunities.

Take a look at this:
What evidence do we need to believe this theory? Are we too quick to dis-believe due to our own biases? Are these biases the same as those who believed the earth was flat or those that believed powdered baby milk is better than natural mothers milk? People also believed these things right? So how do we know the earth is not hollow? You been inside?

Hollow earth theory

Thursday 12 November 2009

Tuesday 10 November 2009

Thursday 1 October 2009

Glossary, September

Glossary for TOK



Acquaintance: To know something about someone because you know them well e.g. you may know your friend is tired because you recognise their moods.

Authority: To know something because someone you regard as important has told you so. e.g. A historical fact by a famous historian.

Empathy. To know something by being able to put yourself into that situation in your imagination, "to walk in another mans mocassins".

Empirically. To know something by testing and using your 5 senses. e.g. Plants transpire water through their leaves - you test by placing a plastic bag over the plant and collecting the water vapour. You see the evidence, you can also touch it.

Experience. To engage in new discoveries for body and mind. Empriricists believe all knowledge must be based on the test of experience.

Faith:To know without empirical evidence. e.g. to know their is an interventionist God.

Instinctive: Hard wired mental and physical responses, capabilities and actions. e.g breathing, fight or flight responses.

Logically. To know via sound reasoning, it can be deductive or inductive logic.

Memory: To know something because you remember the event or instance.

Metaphysical: Questions in philosophy concerned with big problems, e.g. What is the meaning of life, Why am I here, Is there a God?

Paradigm. A collective way of thinking.

Paradox. A logical conclusion that is unsatisfactory. See Xeno's paradox

Philosophy. Simply put, a love of learning, knowledge and wisdom.

Plato. Early Philosopher, the first to write down and record philosophical ideas in Ancient Greece.

Sagacity. To act wisely, like a sage, with vision and creative imagination.

Practice. To know something by trying to learn over and over again, many times. e.g. to know how to juggle.

Serendipity. A chance occurence and opportunity that is acted upon with sagacity.

Socrates. Original Greek Philosopher.

Socratic method. A questioning technique whereby a moral opinion is obtained from the person under question. This opinion is then exposed by deconstructing the root of the belief.

Tuesday 29 September 2009

Tuesday 9 June 2009

Wednesday 1 April 2009

Truth, Loss of newsprint

Newspapers and truth

Tuesday 10 March 2009

Language Instinct lost - Feral children

Reason - Game theory

Natural Sciences - Western medicine

Prescription Drugs Kill 300 Percent More Americans than Illegal Drugsby David Gutierrez (NaturalNews) A report by the Florida Medical Examiners Commission has concluded that prescription drugs have outstripped illegal drugs as a cause of death.An analysis of 168,900 autopsies conducted in Florida in 2007 found that three times as many people were killed by legal drugs as by cocaine, heroin and all methamphetamines put together. According to state law enforcement officials, this is a sign of a burgeoning prescription drug abuse problem. "The abuse has reached epidemic proportions," said Lisa McElhaney, a sergeant in the pharmaceutical drug diversion unit of the Broward County Sheriff's Office. "It's just explosive." In 2007, cocaine was responsible for 843 deaths, heroin for 121, methamphetamines for 25 and marijuana for zero, for a total of 989 deaths. In contrast, 2,328 people were killed by opioid painkillers, including Vicodin and Oxycontin, and 743 were killed by drugs containing benzodiazepine, including the depressants Valium and Xanax.Alcohol directly caused 466 deaths, but was found in the bodies of 4,179 cadavers in all.While the number of dead bodies containing heroin jumped 14 percent from the prior year, to a total of 110, the number of deaths influenced by the painkiller oxycodone increased by 36 percent, to a total of 1,253.Across the country, prescription drugs have become an increasingly popular alternative to the more difficult to acquire illegal drugs. Even as illegal drug use among teenagers have fallen, prescription drug abuse has increased. For example, while 4 percent of U.S. 12th graders were using Oxycontin in 2002, by 2005 that number had increased to 5.5 percent.It's not hard for teens to come by prescription drugs, according to Sgt. Tracy Busby, supervisor of the Calaveras County, Calif., Sheriff's Office narcotics unit. "You go to every medicine cabinet in the county, and I bet you're going to find some sort of prescription medicine in 95 percent of them," he said. Adults can acquire prescriptions by faking injuries, or by visiting multiple doctors and pharmacies for the same health complaint. Some people get more drugs than they expect to need, then sell the extras."You have health care providers involved, you have doctor shoppers, and then there are crimes like robbing drug shipments," said Jeff Beasley of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. "There is a multitude of ways to get these drugs, and that's what makes things complicated."And while some people may believe that the medicines' legality makes them less dangerous than illegal drugs, Tuolumne County, Calif., Sheriff's Office Deputy Dan Crow warns that this is not the case. Because everybody reacts differently to foreign chemicals, there is no way of predicting the exact response anyone will have to a given dosage. That is why prescription drugs are supposed to be taken under a doctor's supervision."All this stuff is poison," Crow said. "Your body will fight all of this stuff."Tuolumne County Health Officer Todd Stolp agreed. A prescription drug taken recreationally is "much like a firearm in the hands of someone who's not trained to use them," he said.While anyone taking a prescription medicine runs a risk of negative effects, the drugs are even more dangerous when abused. For example, many painkillers are designed to have a delayed effect that fades out over time. This can lead recreational users to take more drugs before the old ones are out of their system, placing them at risk of an overdose. Likewise, the common practice of grinding pills up causes a large dose of drugs to hit the body all at once, with potentially dangerous consequences."A medication that was meant to be distributed over 24 hours has immediate effect," Stolp said.Even more dangerous is the trend of mixing drugs with alcohol, which, like most popularly abused drugs, is a depressant."In the case of alcohol and drugs, one plus one equals more than two," said Tuolumne County Sheriff's Office spokesperson Lt. Dan Bressler.Florida pays careful attention to drug-related deaths, and as such has significantly better data on the problem than any other state. But a recent study conducted by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) suggests that the problem is indeed national. According to the DEA, the number of people abusing prescription drugs in the United States has jumped 80 percent in six years to seven million, or more than those abusing cocaine, Ecstasy, heroin, hallucinogens an inhalants put together.Not surprisingly, there has been a corresponding increase in deaths. According to the Drug Abuse Warning Network, the number of emergency room visits related to painkillers has increased by 153 percent since 1995. And a 2007 report by the Justice Department National Intelligence Drug Center found that deaths related to the opioid methadone jumped from 786 in 1999 to 3,849 in 2004 - an increase of 390 percent.Many experts attribute the trend to the increasing popularity among doctors of prescribing painkillers, combined with a leap in direct-to-consumer marketing by drug companies. For example, promotional spending on Oxycontin increased threefold between 1996 and 2001, to $30 million per year.Sonora, Calif., pharmacist Eddie Howard reports that he's seen painkiller prescriptions jump dramatically in the last five years."I don't know that there is that much pain out there to demand such an increase," he said. The trend concerns Howard, and he tries to keep an eye out for patients who are coming in too frequently. But he admits that there is little he can do about the problem."When you have a lot of people waiting for prescriptions, it's hard to find time to play detective," he said. Still, the situation makes Howard uncomfortable."It almost makes me a legalized drug dealer, and that's not a good position to be in," he said.Sources for this story include: http://www.nytimes.com;/ http://www.uniondemocrat.com/

Wednesday 18 February 2009

Tuesday 17 February 2009

Brazil

Language