IB Theory of Knowledge - an ongoing list of interesting finds

In his piece, published in The Guardian, photojournalist Souvid Datta visits refugee camps, the front line, and spends time with Yazidi female fighters.  An insightful look at the effects of ongoing conflict via an artistic storytelling medium. Consider how images and their accompanying captions such as these help to shape the common understanding (shared knowledge) of these events and how they help to shape personal knowledge of the world around us. Photo Essay   (excerpts below) Kurdish Peshmerga soldiers unleash heavy tank fire on Isis fighters lurking in the remains of a recently liberated town near the Khazir river. Kurdish Yazidi women from the Sun Force battalion train in Snuny, near the Syrian border. Two years ago, many of these women were abducted by Isis and kept as sex-slaves during the systematic massacre Isis perpetrated against the Yazidi people. On their escape they enlisted within the Peshmerga's growing minority of female forces, preparing to fi...

In this feature article, Forbes tackles the Fake News phenomenon, having been inspired by the viral story about a Santa Claus actor who held a dying child in his armsb - a powerful holiday story.  As "some of the world’s most prestigious and reputable news outlets took a moment this week to carry the heartwarming story," including CNN, BBC, the Washington Post, and NBC , and ran them alongside articles that highlight to citizens that they need to verify information to protect themselves from "fake news," the article poses questions about these reputable publications and the irresponsibility of reporting . An important question is brought up about the justifications offered after the fact - that it really was the fault of the publication who published the original story, as they should have done the fact-checking, or the "due diligence," themselves. The others simply assumed the story had already been verified, but the concerning result is that via what...

"Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus studies memories. More precisely, she studies false memories, when people either remember things that didn't happen or remember them differently from the way they really were. It's more common than you might think, and Loftus shares some startling stories and statistics, and raises some important ethical questions we should all remember to consider." Elizabeth Loftus: How reliable is your memory?

"Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, posed this famous question: If you put a cat in a sealed box with a device that has a 50% chance of killing the cat in the next hour, what will be the state of the cat when that time is up? Chad Orzel investigates this thought experiment." Schrödinger's cat: A thought experiment in quantum mechanics

"What's so special about Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man? With arms outstretched, the man fills the irreconcilable spaces of a circle and a square -- symbolizing the Renaissance-era belief in the mutable nature of humankind. James Earle explains the geometric, religious and philosophical significance of this deceptively simple drawing." Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man of math

"Physicist Werner Heisenberg said, “When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first.” As difficult as turbulence is to understand mathematically, we can use art to depict the way it looks. Natalya St. Clair illustrates how Van Gogh captured this deep mystery of movement, fluid and light in his work ." The unexpected math behind Van Gogh's "Starry Night"

Could it be true that the greatest writer of the English language is as fictional as his plays?  A look at stylometry - characteristics of literary authorship . "Some people question whether Shakespeare really wrote the works that bear his name – or whether he even existed at all. Could it be true that the greatest writer in the English language was as fictional as his plays? Natalya St. Clair and Aaron Williams show how a linguistic tool called stylometry might shed light on the answer." Did Shakespeare write his plays?