Bits & Pieces
Birllaint Obsrevatoin...
When I studied Shannon's Information Theory I learned about the built-in
redundancy in most natural languages: many letters or entire words
can be deleted without preventing the recipient of the message from
understanding its content. A classic example is the phrase “mre
mssgs r snt than ncesry to cnvey infrmtn ntendd by sndr.” This
apocryphal text that has been circulating on the Internet suggests
that our brains are quite proficient in deciphering messages of this
kind in English. A friend confirmed that Portuguese also works. Please
let us know if it works in other languages! (Thanks to Harvey Levy
for the submission.)
Aoccdrnig to extnesvie
rseeacrh conudcetd at Oxofrd Uinervtisy in Enlgnad, it deosn't raelly
mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt
tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae.
The rset can be in a toatl
mses and you usulaly can sitll raed it wouthit much porbelm. Tihs
is bcuseae we do not raed ervey ltete by it slef but the wrod as a
wlohe.
Jsut thnik a momnet abuot
all the tmie you and I watesed laernnig how to splel wrods croreclty!
Round
the world with the TOK Wheel (Thanks
to Carolyn P. Henly)
I have a large poster-sized TOK wheel that displays the sections
of the TOK diagram as layers that can be turned, so that we can line
up the various elements to demonstrate what complex of relationships
is under discussion at any given moment. We might, for instance, decide
that in discussing a chapter from Rocks of Ages by Stephen
Jay Gould, we are talking about the KNOWER-REASON-SCIENCE interaction,
and/or the KNOWER-EMOTION-SCIENCE interaction, and/or the KNOWER-PERCEPTION-HISTORY
interaction, and so on.
I have found this to be a useful way of helping students understand
that the various elements on that diagram interact with each other,
rather than existing as separate categories. I have also had students
make their own individual TOK wheels; they rely on these fairly frequently
to help them clarify an idea. An interesting sidelight is that from
time to time students come into my class from another class, and head
directly to the wheel. They use it to demonstrate what they were talking
about in a previous class. TOK travels!
Inadvertent
humor from essays submitted in the May 03 session
“...members of the clergy are skilled speakers who are trained
in the art of heretics.”
“R. Abel once wrote: ‘All seeing is seeing-as, there is
no innocent eye.’ Nietzche called this ‘the fallacy of Immaculate
Conception.’”
“Repetition can determine what we believe to be true because
it is repetitive.”
Finally, these are for
the anals (sic) of TOK:
- “...Meaning: when a person is enculturated into their particular
area, family, group, society, excreta, they were taught beliefs
that they now hold as truths.”
- “Despite this new insight, Carroll's statement is still quite
constipated.”
- “Other sources of knowledge, such as books, websites, authorities,
and the media offer only an institutional, impersonal and sometimes
biased experience and are essentially only suppositories of information.”
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