Tiananmen Square Protests 1989

shall do a quick one before i get back to what i was doing. i.e. playing with worms.

Tiananmen Square Protests 1989
(my all-time favourite eg even though i never got the chance to use it)

• better known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre
• Tiananmen Square is in CHINA! (ki students like t-lympho aren't very good at geography)

what?

• series of demonstrations by students, intellectuals & labour activists
• they were critical of the ruling Chinese communist party
• and called for a full-fledged democracy in China

consequences

• there was a military crackdown on the protesters - the military was told to get rid of everyone from the square by 5 am the next morning, and "use violence if necessary".
• indiscriminate firing by soldiers
• students were beaten with heavy sticks

made famous

the tank man

• made famous by the western media
• refers to the young unarmed man standing at the centre of a street, halting the tanks' progress to the military crackdown.

* watch "The Theatre of Massacre" and be amazed.

of significance

1. death tollS
   government - 200 to 300
   new york times - 300 to 400
   chinese student association - 2000 to 3000
   


2. history was deleted inside mainland china
   - strong government censorship:
   ~ media forbidden to report anything related to the subject.
   ~ china gov worked with various internet search engines (google, yahoo) to censor sites
   - this part of history literally disappeared from china
   - in 2006, an American program showed 4 students (Peking Uni, where most of the original student activists were from) the picture of the Tank Man - and none of them could identfy what was happening.

questions/uses of example

• what is history? how is history written?
• objectivity in history - is it tainted by bias?
• ethics of inquiry

sources

• frontline - the tank man & tiananmen massacre
  watch the videos here, they are really good!
• wiki - tiananmen square protests 1989

arial is totally getting on my nerves. lol.

\ \ / / bam.

The Four Color Theorem

Theorem: A plane separated into regions can be colored by no more than four colors such that regions which share a common boundary do not have the same color.

Conjecture first made by Francis Guthrie

1879: Alfred Bray Kempe provided a proof for the conjecture and received great acclaim

1890: Percy John Heawood showed that Kempe's proof was wrong.

1976: Four color conjecture becomes four color theorem for a second time. Four Color theorem proven by Appel and Haken, using a computer.

Hence, the first computer assisted proof was born. The four color theorem cannot be verified by other mathematicians without the use of a computer.

Point.

Is it ok for mathematicians to put their faith in computers? Can such proofs be accepted? (By the way, Mathematicians have already accepted it.)

Small point.

Mathematicians can make mistakes. Maths can't be true all the time. (see what happened to Kempe)

Sources:
http://www.mathpages.com/home/kmath266/kmath266.htm
http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/HistTopics/The_four_colour_theorem.html.
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Four-ColorTheorem.html

:Noted:

Rock-A-Bye Baby

Language as innate and universal? (Think Chomsky's Universal Grammar)

"Motherese" : baby talk i.e. the singsong way non-infants talk to infants

• cross-cultural (cognitive psychologist Greg Bryant of the University of California, Los Angeles, discovered that the Shuar people of South America - non English-speaking - got the gist of what North American mothers were trying to say 75 percent of the time when the latter spoke in motherese)
  
• across species? - resembles special vocalisations (grunts and girneys) used by rhesus monkeys around their infants (as demonstrated by University of Chicago biologists Dario Maestripieri and Jessica Whitham)

Thanks to: Leitzell, K. (2007). "Understanding Baby Talk". Scientific American Mind, 18:6. New York: Scientific American.

Bah-Baah Bah Baah Bah-Baah Baaaaah

Translation: Mary had a little lamb.

Moo.

Nazi Data Detected: ACCESS DENIED

Ethics of Inquiry
aka
Should I Squash a Mouse to Find Out the Exact Sound Made By A Mouse Being Squashed


Who: Nazis and prisoners

What: Nazi experiments which contributed to the Great Cause of knowledge construction, but which regretfully (to the experimentees' regret, of course, not the experimenters') involved the sacrifice of a few guinea pigs along the way

When: 1942

Where: Dachau concentration camp

Why: To determine the most effective method of rewarming for military use

How:
1. Create conditions cold enough to decrease body temperature rapidly.
2. Rewarm when body temperature falls below X degree Celsius / Fahrenheit.
3. Observe and record which method of rewarming is the most effective.

So what?
Usage of Nazi data by Air-Sea Rescue Services of the U.S. Armed Forces --> Justified?


Thanks to: http://www1.umn.edu/ships/ethics/research.htm#Nazi


T-lymphocyte does not wear weird mushrooms.
T-lymphocyte wears cool mushrooms.

One does not have to be smart like SuperBananaBomb, Deathnote and T-lymphocyte to figure out the brilliance behind T-lymphocyte's pseudonym.

Just refer to one's biology textbook.

david's favourite - induction

"induction rests on the assumption that the course of nature will continue uniformly."

- David Hume, scottish philosopher.

\ \ / / bam.

nothing in mind

"there is nothing in the mind except what was first in the senses."

- Aristotle, greek philosopher.

(i'm pretty sure no one needed that aristotle link)

\ \ / / bam.

maths in reality or reality in maths?

"mathematical reality exists on an abstract plane, and its objects are as real as those in everyday life."

- G. H. Hardy, mathematician.

\ \ / / bam.

stanford prison experiment + further...

well. it's finally time for us to start writing on the blog. haha since it's the first contribution afterall, i guess i shall choose to start with something easy and familiar, plus something a bit further!

since deathnote wants to start with math and t-lymphocyte (please ask it to explain its nick -.-") wants to use aesthetics as a starting point, i shall begin with social science! a few points will be here and there, but i think examples are pretty flexible, so use them where you need them (:

-----

in the social science module in ki, one of the common topics studied is the comparison between social science and natural science. (essay questions on social science will usually ask if social science can be considered as a science!)

i think one of the points that we will first think of is experimentation! i think like i get this image that you can't actually put these little humans in a box and control their environment and their actions like the sims (i really like to kill my sims whenever i can.)

in natural sciences, scientists have to conduct tests, and have control groups. but for social sciences, social scientists run into problems...


* ethical constraints
many experiments cannot be carried out due to ethical reasons, such as when there may be negative effects on participants who take part in the study.

e.g. Stanford Prison Experiment
the stanford prison experiment was conducted in 1971 by researchers led by Philip Zimbardo, at stanford university. its purpose was to study the human responses to captivity and how captivity would affect the behaviour of both the guards and inmates in prison.

the experiment went out of control. seemingly normal undergraduates started to display genuine sadistic tendencies when they played the roles of prison guards. they humiliated the inmates in various ways (like denying trips to the washrooms and prisoners being forced to sleep naked on the floor!), and most of the inmates also seemed to internalise their roles as prisoners.


* humans change, they are not static or uniform.
in social science, it is difficult to replicate experiments - unlike in natural sciences.

e.g. BBC Prison Study (Haslam & Reicher, 2003)
a partial replication of the stanford prison experiment was done with greatly different results, the "guards" did not internalise their roles, and on day 6 (coincidences?), there was a Prison Break. after that, the "prisoners" even started to dominate the "guards"!

sources:
wiki: stanford prison experiment
official site of the stanford prison experiment
wiki: the experiment (BBC)

-----

well use your imagination to present these examples more effectively, like in short paragraphs or something. you are definitely not required to write one entire page describing the process of the stanford experiment! this example can also be used to describe the process of "scientific" experiments in social science, or how variables cannot be fully controlled etc. the sources will provide lots more information so read them!

examples are flexible!

\ \ / / bam.

t-lymphocyte wears weird mushrooms

- why are you not doing that too?
(deathnote and superbananabomb have good taste)

deathnote's woodpecker: hi.

superbananabomb: this is a ki website. i bet you knew that too! WAHAHAHA.

(deathnote: i bet they didn't know that. we are so smart!)

t-lymphocyte: dogs are furry. and so are teddybears.

superbananabomb: trust me, we're NOT a bunch of lunatics. they are pretending.

deathnote: i like spongebob.

t-lymphocyte: does your mum soak it in saltwater?

superbananabomb: woodpecker's cursor says censored.

deathnote: no

t-lymphocyte: i cannot remember.

superbananbomb: there's no undo.

PUNCHLINE TIME!

the world is going to explode.

...

well, if you didn't get any of that, that's because you're m.i.s.s.i.n.g. t.h.e. p.o.i.n.t.(s).
that's what you're here for.

ki-lla provides you with points and examples for your ki essays.
the catch is you have to find them.

we shall give you a headstart -

the above conversation is littered with counterexamples for the argument that pragmatism is not a sufficient condition for truth. (pragmatic theory of truth) i.e. there are some truths that are true even though they sound completely useless to you.

we are smart.