Is Knowledge Created or Invented?

There seems to be some controversy concerning whether areas of knowledge are created or invented. I believe that this poses many questions and only leads to more confusion.

Math is an area of knowledge which I believe is invented. Geometry, for example, is represented through equations and proofs created by people. However, I believe that this poses a new question: if math was created by people, then does that mean people can also manipulate math to prove whatever they want it to prove? I believe that the fact that mathematical formulas were invented led to many new discoveries. These mathematical formulas allow us to use math in our everyday lives.

Another area of knowledge that is invented is history. History is an area of knowledge invented by humans because they keep records of important events. People keep records using books, biographies, autobiographies, movies, and pictures. The fact that people do this only proves the fact that history is created by humans. This also leads to another question: can history be manipulated to the extent that it only records what the historians see fit to document?   History is an area of knowledge that people will continue to develop because new books and sources are going to be produced by people as new events occur in the future.

by Javier R.

Why are people so ignorant and so selfish these days? Words can’t express how I feel about ignorant people. I remember reading something online, a picture to be exact and the interpretation of it. It featured an old lady sitting and holding a cup begging for money while a group of schoolchildren passed by and spit on her. The other kids just stood there and laughed and pointed out at the poor helpless lady.  I believe the setting of the picture took place in Thailand in a poor village. In the article I read, the photographer expresses his thoughts about the whole situation with the old lady and kids. The photographer said that he was angry that the kids would do such a thing, especially to an old lady. If you look at my point of view, all children should treat their elders with respect regardless if they are just acquaintances or if they are family. No one should have the right to disrespect any elder.  In this case, the kids going to school actually have the advantage of an education; they should know better. Also, their parents should serve as educational models.  They’re supposed to teach their kids right from wrong. How can they treat the old lady like this? After she was spat on, the photographer then gave the old lady a napkin to wipe off the spit and she thanked him. Another photographer took a picture of his partner caring for the old lady and in the background you can still see the kids playfully walking off and not really caring about anything. Seeing young children behave this way is unbelievable. I really think it’s absolutely atrocious! Everyone is looking for a way to survive, so why make other people’s lives more miserable and difficult? People like that need to take a look at their morals and reevaluate their priorities.

by Sandra L.

The problem with extra terrestrial activity is that everyone believes that aliens do not exist. This isn’t true because there has to be another race outside from ours based on reasoning and probability rates. The chances are really high that there has to be another Earth out there somewhere in the universe; so why can’t there be a high chance that there are other forms of life? This question has been researched and discussed many times, but I just want to get it out in the open. The fact that people don’t believe in “aliens” is based on the idea that they believe aliens will either hurt them or find another way to take over our world based on the pieces of fiction that are created with this idea in mind. However, an alien is basically a life form outside from our planet Earth. On another note, they have also found microorganisms on the moon Titan, but there are theories which believe that an asteroid came off of Earth and landed on the moon. The fact that people can’t believe that there is other life is what makes us scared to find other life in general. Therefore we see that as humans try and not perceive what is exactly right in front of us, they begin to become biased in their opinion. Imagine if creatures from another world were being invaded by humans.  Wouldn’t they have the right to call us aliens? An alien can be seen in different ways, but we should still not loosely throw that word around.
by Nicholas

“Shutter Island: Questioning the Insane” (Spoiler Alert)

A few weekends ago, a couple of friends and I went to see Martin Scorcese’s Shutter Island. From watching the trailers, I thought it was going to be another scary, sci-fi movie, but it turns out I was wrong. The movie involved a detective investigating a case with his partner at an island institution where they imprisoned the mentally insane who were dangerous to society. By the end I was very confused because although the main character “saw” his partner jump off a cliff and die, he never found his body. When he went back to the institution asking for him, the head of the institution responded with: “What partner, you never came with a partner”. Then they began telling him that he had gone insane a couple of years back after murdering his wife.
From my point of view, my emotions tell me he was not insane when he got to the island. While my friends believe differently, I believe they changed his memory, rewriting everything he could remember. But is it possible to really do that? In his case, he had no option, if he didn’t agree that what they were stating was the truth about his insanity, he would never be set free.
The film made me wonder if we can really trust anything around us? What if what I’m living now is all a big lie. How can we trust our emotions and logic?
I believe that the main character’s madness started with paranoia. As the doctors kept trying to convince him of what “really” happened, his memory and the “memory” that they were trying to impose upon him sort of crashed. I also believe that this kind of manipulation could happen in real life.  For example, some people deny the Holocaust, but we have testimonials from others who lived through it, and we know it really happened. In Shutter Island, they changed his memory just like the people who tried to rewrite history by denying the Holocaust.
by Luz T.

I hear that people tend to forget bad moments of their lives and decide to focus on the good moments. When I was working on a research project about pain in the hospital I was amazed to discover that people that are in great pain tend to forget it once that pain goes away and time passes. For the research that we were trying to do, we wanted to know in how much pain the people in the hospital were. Whenever the patient was discharged and asked about their pain a month or so later they would always answer that their pain wasn’t that bad. My mentor wanted to gather the real pain that was being felt in present time because people would forget about it and report pain levels lower than they actually were. He came up with the idea of setting up random times when we would have to call a patient to their hospital room and ask them about their pain. The idea that people forget about the bad moments and only remember the better ones was a little shocking to me because I always thought that the bad moments had a great impact on our lives and were not be easily forgotten. Later, I thought about the events in my life. I knew that I have had many moments of stress, worry, and unhappiness but those memories seemed to be buried and difficult to recall. The moments when I was happy were easier to remember.
So what does this mean? Do we program ourselves to live through a painful situation and then delete it or deemphasize its effect on us? There is a recall bias when we try to go back to a moment of pain. We make bad situations seem not so bad. We dwell on positive things and filter out the negative. Yet, does this help us grow as a person or does this limit us? We cannot learn anything if everything we experience and remember is happiness because that makes us live in an illusion of greatness. Do we need to remember the bad events equally as the good events in order to compare and learn from them? I think that having the ability to have a way to forget about certain unwanted events is something good at certain moments were the pain only helps to destroy.

by Erica R.

While I finished reading Siddhartha, it seems that the idea of “oneness” intrigued me very much. To be able to transcend time and be everyone and everything in all tenses of time, past, present, and future is simply amazing. In a sense, I don’t think Hesse literally meant that though. I saw this scene metaphorically in that “oneness” is really just open-mindedness. By being open minded, we can understand like Siddhartha did about everything around him. Perhaps we may not literally transcend time and be everyone/thing at once like he did, but we can understand like Siddhartha did. By having this worldly feeling, he was able to rise above the pain of the “child people” and embrace everything with welcome arms. Though, I would love to ask Siddhartha this question: would you even love death, famine, and misfortune? I think this is the question that plagued and eventually blocked those who tried to find enlightenment in the story. They were limited in their perception of the world as it is colored by good and evil that they lost that balance in which open-mindedness grants. His father couldn’t understand the evil, the samanas couldn’t accept the material world, Kamala couldn’t love, Kamasawmi only understood business, Govinda couldn’t understand Siddhartha’s enlightenment, and Siddhartha at one point didn’t understand his body. All these barriers that blocked these characters for enlightenment, but because one obtained open-mindedness, we saw that one achieve enlightenment; that oneness by Siddhartha. Everything comes in shades of colors and grays that all come back to white and black, but the world and that oneness exist as combination of both. This is what we need more of in our world.

by Cristina L.

Curie Metro High School Students Honored With Once-In-A-Lifetime Opportunity to View Rare Original Print of the Declaration of Independence on Friday, April 16.
April 16, 2010

Pearson Foundation’s National Tour Will Honor Chicago Public Schools Educators With Independence Awards for Leadership in Social Studies Education Chicago, April 13, 2010 — As a city that is renowned for playing a pivotal role in this country’s history — past and present –, Chicago is being honored with a rare chance to view one of the few remaining copies of the original Declaration of Independence. Starting with a kick-off preview at Curie Metro High School on Friday, April 16, the document will be in town for two days this week with a full day of free public viewing for the community on Saturday, April 17 at North Grand High School. Curie High School students were selected for this special visit in honor of their high level of participation in the National Student/Parent Mock Election during the past presidential election.

photo by Jaime R.

AVATAR
By: Pedro U.

In the era of shattering box office records, Avatar takes the winning prize.  But it is more than just another high budget blockbuster film. Avatar is innovation at work from beginning to end. At this point, I believe it has already become the landmark film that will define the possible ways of enjoying films. By this I mean it has expanded a genre that had not gathered much attention in the past: the 3D genre. Before Avatar there were quite a few other 3D films, which had their 2D counterparts, and audiences preferred the latter because 3D was something not virtually appealing to the majority. Often we have seen much anticipated films not live up to expectations, but Avatar not only lives up to expectation but it over exceeds it. As a result, I expect to see many more 3D films opening in theatres with higher audience attendance rates.
It is the year 2154 and we follow the trajectory of paraplegic ex-Marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) as he is informed that his twin brother has died and that he might be required to fill in for him on a mission to Pandora, the Earth-like moon of the planet Polyphemus. The purpose of the mission: collect a very valuable mineral called Unobtanium. The problem is that the largest reserve of the mineral lies beneath a multi-story sized tree, which is the home colony of the Na’vi, Pandora’s natives. Jake is given his brother’s avatar, a being created from the DNA of the Na’vi and human DNA so he can explore the world Pandora and hopefully get the Na’vi to relocate. While exploring Pandora in his avatar form, Jake runs into trouble with the inhabitant creatures and encounters a female native named Neytiri (Zoë Saldana) who happens to be the princess of the Na’vi. Jake is allowed within the Na’vi community and is taught to be like the natives. Eventually, he realizes that he cannot carry out his mission as he becomes attached to the people and the land.
As I mentioned before, Avatar built a lot of reputation due to heavy word of mouth, but it wasn’t all good criticism at first. Many thought it would be a major failure at the box office and a disappointment to science-fiction audience members. I will not lie; I also believed the same. I was skeptical about going to see a computer-generated film about so-called “blue Indians” and their magical world. But as the film progresses it develops very interestingly and you cannot help but enjoy it. Another thing to mention is that the film was shot using a 3D Fusion Camera system, which James Cameron actually co-developed. Now, the film doesn’t exploit the use of the 3D element as previous films have, meaning it doesn’t utilize it just because it can. In a sum of words, the 3D genre was just waiting for a film like Avatar to come along.
James Cameron has expressed interest in a future installment to Avatar in the form of a sequel to which I say “please do so”. Usually, I would not recommend for a sequel to a monumental film such as Avatar, mainly because if we have learned anything from past sequels is that they don’t even come close to resembling the original one. In this case I think an exception should be made because there is so much to learn from the Na’vi, Pandora, the aftermath after the first film, and countless other reasons. Although the storyline may not be the freshest story we have ever heard (think back to a 1995 Disney film, and no I didn’t mean Toy Story), James Cameron has created a completely new world just like Peter Jackson in The Lord of the Rings trilogy and George Lucas in Star Wars. I think for the most part we are safe in the hands of a gifted director like James Cameron.

Rating: Four Stars

DOUBT
By: Pedro U.

Definition: The state between belief and disbelief. This film adaptation of the John Patrick Shanley play of the same name does not lie when it tells us its content will check us in doubt. Our emotions become so tangled and for most of the film we are only left to our own criticisms and beliefs.
The film is opens in a 1960s Catholic Church in the Bronx, New York. Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) delivers a sermon on doubt, pointing out how it can be equally comparable to certainty in terms of its significance and relevance. The issue in the storyline arises when a teacher, Sister James (Amy Adams), becomes aware of the odd behavior of one of her students, Donald Miller (Joseph Foster), after he is called to Father Flynn’s office. She cannot hold back and decides to look for guidance and an explanation from her superior, Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep). Unfortunately for Sister James, she finds nothing more than and a seed of doubt waiting to flourish. It becomes apparent that a confrontation between Father Flynn and themselves is inevitable, yet the cause is not fully justified.
The manner in which the screenplay was written is very skillful. All along we know the subject matter of the film and the main argument being made, but the screenwriters have managed to keep it discrete for the purpose of building up the tension and mystery of the plot. At one point in the film we are given all the pieces of ”evidence” from the explanation delivered by Father Flynn. Of course we do not know whether these statements are certain, but they are necessary in the film’s interaction with the viewer.
I found myself going back and forth trying to come up with an answer, but at the same time I was afraid that I was going to commit an error in being led by my emotions. Substantial evidence is not the strong of the film while moral values and perception are. The film requires a tremendous effort from the viewer. Do not expect to be given scenes and explanations immediately because you will need to construct your own if you don’t want to sit there aimlessly for about an hour.
The acting was superb, especially from Philip Seymour Hoffman. As a stage performer, he knows the importance of speech and line delivery and this is shown skillfully through his character. Meryl Streep embodied the doubt that mesmerized all of us throughout the film and she even has a shocking confession in the end to make us almost laugh from the hysteria.
Having watched all of the films nominated for Best Picture in 2008, I can say that this was the best by far. Slumdog Millionaire took the prized award home that year and I believe this was a mistake on the part of the Academy. In the future I will write a review on Slumdog explaining why, in spite of its integrity, it cannot compare to Doubt.

Rating: Four Stars

Hitting Back
by Javier C.
For the past two weeks in my ToK class, we have been watching videos and discussing the Dalai Lama’s ideology. Everything we talked about seemed like something we have talked about in the previous classes or was similar in a way. Then my ToK teacher mentioned how odd it was that the Dalai Lama advocated and recommended “hitting back” when confronted by an aggressor. At first it didn’t strike me as odd at all because it seems like common sense, but when my teacher reminded me that Buddhism advocates peace, harmony, and non-violence, that’s when it struck me as odd too. At first it seemed that the Dalai Lama was contradicting himself and showing his human side, but after thinking about it I came to the conclusion that perhaps what he meant by “hitting back” was a counterforce to an aggressive force. The best example I could come up with was one that is taught to me in all of my years studying martial arts. I was taught that the best way to fight was to strike back, not to retaliate, but to block or prevent any further damage inflicted on oneself by disabling the aggressor. Practitioners of any form of martial arts carry a huge responsibility on their shoulders. Just because we have the power and knowledge to hurt someone doesn’t mean we should go looking for trouble. We must not let down our guard either and pretend that no one is going to hurt us so we must build our defense and learn how to use our strikes to defend ourselves with causing so much damage. We must be like those who study ninjutsu. They are thought to affect the opponent with no direct combat that would hurt him or oneself. That is how we should hit back.