Phillips Curve

long time without an update, i wonder what we are busy with? :) anyway it is hard to maintain this blog when we know that they are hardly any readers. so minion-readers, publicise the blog with your fellow ki-mates. spread the love man. come to think of it, it is really a vicious cycle. never mind, i shall be more proactive now.

(oh and deathnote, you totally took t-lympho's first art entry!)


this is the phillip's curve, created by A.W. Phillips during the 1960s.

what?

• curve created from data gathered on the relationship between inflation and unemployment in UK between 1861 and 1967.
• curve shows an INVERSE relation between inflation and unemployment, i.e. as unemployment decreases, inflation increases (higher wages for all!).

but...

• governments understood the curve as there being a trade off between unemployment and inflation

so?

• governments allowed inflation rates to increase, hoping that unemployment rates would then decrease.

HOWEVER!

• the philips curve broke down.
• 1970s: many countries experienced increased inflation together with increased unemployment instead.

questions/usage

• correlation =/= cause (if two variables are correlated, it does not mean that they cause each other, i.e. fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc)
• in this phillips curve case, there could be 3 types of explanations for the correlation -
• 1. A cause B
• 2. B cause A
• 3. C cause A & B.
• definitely for use in social science.

sources

• wiki: phillips curve
• theory of knowledge by Richard van de Lagemaat

\ \ / / bam.

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.

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 (:

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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)

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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.