Tuesday, November 27, 2018

War of 1812 in Four Minutes: Burning of Washington - why did the British burn the White House - why is it almost forgotten?

How Heaney in his poem Punishment links the bog mummies of Denmark to the tarred and feather women of the Northern Ireland conflict.

                                     

Bog body poems - from Wikipedia 

Bog bodies inspire four poems in this volume: "Bog Queen", "The Grauballe Man", "Punishment", and "Strange Fruit". In his previous volume, Wintering Out, Heaney published the first of his bog-body poems, "Tollund Man". Heaney was inspired to write these poems after reading PV Glob's book, The Bog People, an archeological study of Iron-Age bodies discovered in the bogs of Northern Europe. In his essay "Feeling Into Words", Heaney explains that he found this book during a time when writing poetry had shifted for him "from being simply a matter of achieving the satisfactory verbal icon to being a search for images and symbols adequate to our predicament".[3] 
The bog bodies of Glob's book became such symbols for Heaney, who writes, "And the unforgettable photographs of these victims blended in my mind with photographs of atrocities, past and present, in the long rites of Irish political and religious struggles".[4] In these poems, Heaney draws connections between the past and present.

Monday, November 19, 2018

Lifeline appeal by Kate Powell for the Down's Syndrome Association - BBC...



Knowledge Questions may include ... How can we know the extent of our responsibility to the less fortunate in our societies? In the Keynesian view, society (through its government raises taxes to fund programmes for education and medical support) but this view is not shared by others who say only charities should bear this burden. What do you think?

Thursday, October 25, 2018

Quantum Entanglement & Spooky Action at a Distance

   



Does quantum entanglement make faster-than-light communication possible?

What is NOT random? http://bit.ly/NOTrandoVe

First, I know this video is not easy to understand. Thank you for taking the time to attempt to understand it. I've been working on this for over six months over which time my understanding has improved. Quantum entanglement and spooky action at a distance are still debated by professors of quantum physics (I know because I discussed this topic with two of them).



Does hidden information (called hidden variables by physicists) exist? If it does, the experiment violating Bell inequalities indicates that hidden variables must update faster than light - they would be considered 'non-local'. On the other hand if you don't consider the spins before you make the measurement then you could simply say hidden variables don't exist and whenever you measure spins in the same direction you always get opposite results, which makes sense since angular momentum must be conserved in the universe.



Everyone agrees that quantum entanglement does not allow information to be transmitted faster that light. There is no action either detector operator could take to signal the other one - regardless of the choice of measurement direction, the measured spins are random with 50/50 probability of up/down.

https://www.youtube.com/user/1veritasium


Thursday, September 20, 2018

Why Starbucks Failed In Australia or Why did Starbucks fail in Australia or How can we know the extent to which local factors impact international brands?

Why Coincidences Are Meaningless - Richard Dawkins

First Order and Second Order Knowledge Questions - resources from 8 websites.

         Image result for what is a knowledge question tok
                                                                                                                                                                     1.     http://theoryofknowledgestudent.com/what-is-a-knowledge-question

2.
https://educationblog.oup.com/tag/knowledge-questions
3.
https://blogs.osc-ib.com/2016/02/ib-teacher-blogs/dp_tokglobal/knowledge-questions/
4.
https://toktrump.wordpress.com/2015/01/09/the-really-easy-guide-to-knowledge-questions/
5.
https://www.ibmastery.com/blog/knowledge-questions-in-international-baccalaureate-subjects

6.
https://www.theoryofknowledge.net/knowledge-and-knowers/knowledge-questions/
7.
https://www.tokresource.org/knowledge-questions/

8. TOP diagram above from this excellent website

http://hillsboroibdp.weebly.com/tok-basics.html


My thanks to all the authors of these various websites. I thought it helpful to index them here in one place and my sincere appreciation for all the work these TOK teachers put into their blogs and websites. All of these resources are in the public domain.







Sunday, September 16, 2018

TOK ESSAY AND PRESENTATION - how to prepare....



ABOVE - Michael Dunn - simply brilliant explaining Knowledge Questions
Below - 
How to prepare the TOK ORAL PRESENTATION


TOK ORAL PRESENTATION 










Wednesday, May 2, 2018

The Opium War - Lost in Compensation l HISTORY OF CHINA





Interesting video but are some of the still images what Edward Said called 'Orientalism'?