January 2018 – Teacher Portfolio

Teacher Portfolio – PSh

The Story of My Learning Starts Here

“To approach the spiritual in art one will make as little use as possible of reality…..” Mondrian

psh@gapps.uwcsea.edu.sg Uncategorized January 4, 2018January 4, 2018 0 Comment

“To approach the spiritual in art one will make as little use as possible of reality, because reality is opposed to the spiritual.,”

Piet Mondrian gravitated towards abstraction believing that painting could simultaneously embody nature and spirituality. As a result he began to pare down his paintings, reducing panoramas to broad sweeps of sky, water and land and minimising detail. As he noted: “The emotion of beauty is always obscured by the appearance of the object.” He also started to keep direct sunlight out of the landscapes, preferring the charged atmospherics of twilight, when the temporal and the spiritual start to blend.

When Mondrian encountered cubism he finally saw the way to break with representation altogether. Unlike Braque and Picasso, however, he was interested not in showing the third dimension but in using “lines and colour combinations on a flat surface, in order to express general beauty with the utmost awareness”.

The limits of Science and the idea of limits in Arts

psh@gapps.uwcsea.edu.sg TOK January 4, 2018January 4, 2018 0 Comment

(I).. tried to answer the question of how many tree species there are in the Amazon (about 16,000) and how abundant each of those species are (anywhere from dozens to billions of individual trees). Our estimates were respectable enough to be published in Science, but in retrospect one of our main findings seems almost preposterous. What the models tell us is that several thousand of the tree species that grow in the Amazon are so rare that scientists will never find them.

The math is straightforward. If you are one of the species that the models estimate has a population of fewer than 1,000 individual trees in the Amazon, then the probability of finding you among all 390 billion trees in the basin is so infinitesimal that it’s hardly worth calculating. For a boots-on-the-ground example, a couple of months ago I was in a remote area of Peru where I spent practically every daylight hour surveying trees. In two weeks I looked at about 2,000 trees. According to the numbers in our paper, the chance that I encountered one of the rarest species is about one chance in 200,000.

A colleague of mine calls this our “dark biodiversity” problem. Just as the astrophysicists’ models tell them that half of all the matter in the universe is invisible to science, so our models seem to be telling us that a large portion of Amazonian biodiversity is invisible to science—that is, lives and dies at densities below our capacity to see it. The numbers are pretty unforgiving. If instead of two weeks in Peru I had stayed on for 20 years—no weekends, no holidays, no sick days, just tree after tree after tree—my odds would have improved to about 1 in 4,000. Where does it all leave us? Back in a dark wood, apparently.

Ars is undoubtedly longa, but at least when artists set their sights on the horizon they have some small chance of actually reaching it. Scientists never do. Every day we look out at horizons that we’ll never possibly reach, and beyond them we can see a thousand more. Because even invisible species have genomes, and pollinators, and extinction risks. As Chekhov put it: “Science has a beginning but not an end, like a recurring decimal.”

From: Nautilus

……data is merely the raw material of knowledge.

psh@gapps.uwcsea.edu.sg Uncategorized January 4, 2018January 4, 2018 0 Comment

At Harvard, Carrie Grimes majored in anthropology and archaeology and ventured to places like Honduras, where she studied Mayan settlement patterns by mapping where artifacts were found. But she was drawn to what she calls “all the computer and math stuff” that was part of the job.

“People think of field archaeology as Indiana Jones, but much of what you really do is data analysis,” she said.

Now Ms. Grimes does a different kind of digging. She works at Google, where she uses statistical analysis of mounds of data to come up with ways to improve its search engine. Ms. Grimes is an Internet-age statistician, one of many who are changing the image of the profession as a place for dronish number nerds. They are finding themselves increasingly in demand — and even cool.

“I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians,” said Hal Varian, chief economist at Google. “And I’m not kidding.”

The rising stature of statisticians, who can earn $125,000 at top companies in their first year after getting a doctorate, is a byproduct of the recent explosion of digital data. In field after field, computing and the Web are creating new realms of data to explore — sensor signals, surveillance tapes, social network chatter, public records and more. And the digital data surge only promises to accelerate, rising fivefold by 2012, according to a projection by IDC, a research firm.

Yet data is merely the raw material of knowledge. “We’re rapidly entering a world where everything can be monitored and measured,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist and director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Digital Business. “But the big problem is going to be the ability of humans to use, analyze and make sense of the data.”

Photo: Carrie Grimes, senior staff engineer at Google, uses statistical analysis of data to help improve the company’s search engine.

Did World War I end in October 2010?

psh@gapps.uwcsea.edu.sg Uncategorized January 4, 2018 0 Comment

World War I ended over the weekend (4th Oct 2010). Germany made its final reparations-related payment for the Great War on Oct. 3, nearly 92 years after the country’s defeat by the Allies. That’s not to say that Germany has been paying its dues consistently over the decades; the country defaulted on its loans many times and the current payouts have only been happening since the 1990s. What took Germany so long to pay for the war? Didn’t World War I end long ago? Does this mean we’re all survivors of the Great War?

Not quite. Germany’s last $94 million payment issued on Sunday isn’t a direct reparations settlement but rather the final sum owed on bonds that were issued between 1924 and 1930 and sold to foreign (mostly American) investors but then never paid. The story of German reparations involves several payment plans, years of inflation, broken promises, canceled debts and a man named Adolf Hitler who flat out refused to give anyone anything.

From: Time Magazine