Shock waves in the human sciences! Six more of Brian Wansink’s published papers are being retracted, Cornell University announced September 20 , bringing the total to 13, and the professor has resigned in disgrace. It is not just scientific peers who are affected as Brian Wansink’s flawed methodology is exposed and his papers are withdrawn from journals. Millions of ordinary […]
Read more “Absurd.” “Archaic.” These are surely not descriptions most of us would apply to the world’s most celebrated prize in science. The Nobel Prize, conferring millions of Swedish krone (more than a million American dollars) and everlasting fame upon its recipients, honours the year’s highest achievements in knowledge. Yet even as it grips our imaginations, could […]
Read more “Alone we go fast, together we go far.” So goes the proverb quoted by a leading neuroscientist involved in a major new project bringing together 21 labs in Europe and the United States for research on the brain. The international team aims to discover “where, when, and how neurons in the brain take information from the outside world, make sense of it, and work out how to respond.” What’s interesting for the Theory of […]
Read more Can we define and measure happiness – put statistics to an emotion? Can we rank countries of the world quantitatively for the degree to which their people are happy? The fifth annual World Happiness Report , released by the United Nations on March 20, 2017 has subject matter likely to appeal to students. For Theory of Knowledge teachers, […]
Read more Where do new ideas come from? Is it inevitable, I wonder, that in trying to talk with students about using ways of knowing creatively I’m inclined to turn to individual stories of “getting ideas”? Today I’d simply like to share two or three resources for raising discussion of creativity in class. The first is a very short […]
Read more Rarely does a 14-minute talk hit so many ideas we explore in Theory of Knowledge or treat them so engagingly. In his 2015 TED talk “The forgotten history of autism”, Steve Silberman hands us a splendid case study of failures and successes in the pursuit of knowledge, and the features that distinguished them. He treats central concepts such as classification (of conditions, […]
Read more 300 people are dead as the result of one disastrous failure with “shared knowledge”: in Baghdad, a bomb detector costing tens of thousands of dollars failed to sense a terrorist bomb. Was this tragedy a failure in technology? No. It was a failure in knowledge. Who claimed, and who believed that the device really could detect […]
Read more The image is striking. A woman walks through the streets of Beijing dressed in a strange gown with a long–orange–cape trailing along the ground. But wait. What is the gown made from? Well, strange to say, what at first glance might seem like ruffles, are actually plastic cones or horns. The woman is called Kong Ning and her creation […]
Read more What an excellent summary of how science works! You’ll be missing out on a splendid resource if you don’t read these two articles on “Real Scientific Literacy” offered just last week (free, on his blog) by neurologist and science writer Dr. Steven Novella: Real Scientific Literacy , The Ness, Neurologicablog, January 12, 2016. Real Scientific Literacy, Part II , The Ness, Neurologicablog, January […]
Read more “Scientific truth is a moving target,” wrote the editors of the Public Library of Science (PLoS) a decade ago. “But is it inevitable, as John Ioannidis argues …that the majority of findings are actually false?” In the decade since the editors posed this question, the psychological sciences have been shaken by further challenges to their credibility, including some widely reported controversies. It was August of this […]
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