Tag: extended essay

Extending Wednesdays

The Derveni Papyrus

Howard Burton

Today’s Extending Wednesdays topic comes from the History section of Ideas Roadshow’s Extended Essay Guide, where University of Michigan classicist Richard Janko describes the Derveni Papyrus, a half-burned manuscript found on an ancient funeral pyre in northern Greece in 1962.

This makes it the oldest surviving European book, with the common consensus being that the funeral took place sometime in the 4th century BCE.  While that alone would certainly justify historical interest, that turns out to be only the tip of the iceberg, because by far the most fascinating thing about the Derveni Papyrus isn’t its age, but rather what it actually says. Make sure to watch the video called The Derveni Papyrus.

The story of the Derveni Papyrus is a fascinating combination of archaeology, mythology, science, politics and sociology with no one clear professional consensus that has emerged to date.  Professor Janko, for his part, believes that it strongly supports the view of a “culture war” between rival camps of “traditional religion” and “modern science” in Classical Athens. 

Given this breadth of impact combined with its narrow focus on a particular manuscript, an associated extended essay could go off in many intriguing directions, from a history of the manuscript itself, funeral practices in the classical world, the technology of deciphering ancient manuscripts, cultural tension in ancient Athenian society, and many other topics.  

Related Ideas Roadshow content includes the clips Ancient Culture Wars?, Divining the Date, Idealizing Democracy and Putting the Pieces Together, the compilation videos Classical Greece, Being a Historian and History and Politics, and the eBook and hour-long video The Derveni Papyrus.

If your school does not have an institutional subscription to Ideas Roadshow’s IBDP Portal yet you can now sign up for an individual subscription. Annual individual teacher or student subscriptions cost only $75 and provide unlimited access to all resources. School-wide subscriptions are affordably priced based on the number of DP students in your school.


Extending Wednesdays

Phantom Limb Pain

Howard Burton

Today’s Extending Wednesdays topic comes from the Biology section of Ideas Roadshow’s Extended Essay Guide which you can find in the EE section of Ideas Roadshow’s IBDP Portal, where Duke University neuroscientists Jennifer Groh and Miguel Nicolelis highlight how the intriguing phenomenon of “phantom limb pain” can be used to probe a wealth of issues related to the structure of our brains. 

Excerpt from the clip Suddenly Painful featuring Prof. Jennifer Groh

While Professor Groh focuses on the mysteries underlying what “spontaneous neural firing” really means, her fellow neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis invokes phantom limb pain as direct support for his belief that the brain actively constructs our representation of the world around us rather than simply recording sensory inputs, as biologists long believed:

“Interestingly enough, if you now change the framework and you put the brain in the centre of the picture, you find a completely different explanation for phantom limb pain. If you appreciate that the brain has an internal model of the body, which it has developed over the years, now what happens when you lose part of it? Suddenly, the brain has an internal model that is mismatched to the body and it is this mismatch that generates the illusion that you still have a part of yourself that has disappeared.”

Possible areas of investigation for an Extended Essay include an analysis of the history of phantom limb pain, competing scientific explanations, current and future experiments and implications for our general understanding of brain structure. 

Related Ideas Roadshow content includes the clips Suddenly Painful, Constantly Testing, the compilation video Examining the Brain and the enhanced eBooks and hour-long videos Knowing One’s Place: Spatial Processing and the Brain and Minds and Machines.

If your school does not have an institutional subscription to Ideas Roadshow’s IBDP Portal you can now sign up for an individual teacher or student subscription. Annual individual subscriptions cost only $75 and provide unlimited access to all resources that are part Ideas Roadshow’s IBDP Portal.


Extending Wednesdays

Chinese Characters

Howard Burton

Today’s Extending Wednesdays topic comes from the English A: Language and Literature section of Ideas Roadshow’s Extended Essay Guide (which you can find in the Student EE section on the homepage of Ideas Roadshow’s IBDP Portal) where UCLA Professor of Contemporary Chinese Cultural Studies and Chinese literary translator Michael Berry discusses the impact of the decision by the Chinese government to simplify Chinese characters in an effort to raise literacy rates.

This decision by the Chinese government to simplify Chinese characters in a way that wasn’t done in some other parts of the Chinese-speaking world effectively created a laboratory to study a number of intriguing effects related to a sudden change in the structure of a language.

“Chinese characters are made of radicals, and radicals do have meaning in and of themselves.  And sometimes, when a character is simplified, some of the radicals will be taken out, reducing the nuance and overall level of meaning.”

Possible areas of investigation for an extended essay include an analysis of the impact of simplifying Chinese characters on literature, pronunciation, and literacy rates, as well as more general evaluations of how language can be used as an objective measure of sociocultural continuity.  Further topics include the distinction between languages and dialects and the use of the structure of language as political propaganda.  

Related Ideas Roadshow content includes the clip Character Development, and the eBook and hour-long video China, Culturally Speaking.

Your school has not subscribed yet? Visit our website – HERE – to learn more about Ideas Roadshow’s IBDP Portal which offers an extensive database of authoritative video and print resources explicitly created to meet the needs of both teachers and students throughout the Diploma Programme.



Extending Wednesdays

The Drake Equation

Howard Burton

Today’s Extending Wednesdays topic comes from our Extending Ideas in Mathematics video, where renowned astronomer and former longtime SETI director of research Jill Tarter discusses the famous equation that Frank Drake developed in the 1960s to help us best assess the likelihood of extraterrestrial intelligence in the universe. 

This intriguing topic naturally straddles a vast number of different fields, encompassing mathematics (through its pioneering use of statistical arguments), physics (through associated measurement and observational techniques), biology (definitions of life and intelligence), philosophy (the epistemic validity of such statistical techniques) and social and cultural anthropology (the validity of extrapolating the notions of intelligence and civilisation based upon our own experiences). 

While this wide variety of possible angles of attack might well raise suspicions about the likelihood of developing a suitably refined research question, more direct and focussed possibilities associated with this general topic include:

  1. An analysis of the current state of our knowledge of the specific parameters of the Drake equation
  2. An examination of its degree of recognition throughout the scientific community
  3. To what extent the biological category of “extremophiles” have changed the basic definition of life, together with specific examinations of extremophiles
  4. The rapidly evolving state of our understanding of exoplanets and related astronomical techniques for detecting them
  5. An assessment of how the prospect of extraterrestrial life influences the way we look at our own

Related resources that are part of Ideas Roadshow’s IBDP Portal include the clips A Cosmic Perspective, Frank Drake’s Agenda, Fermi’s Paradox, Hunting Exoplanets, Technology as a Proxy, and the hour-long video SETI: Astronomy as a Contact Sport plus the accompanying eBook with lots of additional reference materials.

  If your school does not have an institutional subscription to Ideas Roadshow’s IBDP Portal you can now sign up for an individual teacher or student subscription. Annual individual subscriptions cost only $75 and provide unlimited access to all resources that are part Ideas Roadshow’s IBDP Portal.


Extending Wednesdays

Improving Democracy

Howard Burton

Today’s Extending Wednesdays topic comes from the Global Politics section of Ideas Roadshow’s Extended Essay Guide for Students, where Stanford University political scientist and classicist Josiah Ober highlights some possible ways that our standard democratic practices might be improved, citing the work of fellow Stanford political scientist James Fishkin – below you can find an overview of related resources that are part of Ideas Roadshow’s IBDP Portal.

Those interested in exploring the general theme of democracy can move in various directions spurred on by Professor Ober’s reflections. 

Students curious about Professor Fishkin’s deliberative polling techniques and where they have been directly applied, are referred to the clip Making Better Decisions as well as the references at the end of Chapter 9 in the associated eBook Democratic Lessons: What the Greeks Can Teach Us.  

Those motivated to more concretely compare and contrast democratic practices of Ancient Greece with those of our own day are directed to the clip, A Two-Way Street, as well as chapter 5 of the eBook and matching hour-long video.  Meanwhile, in our Extending Ideas in Global Politics video, the segment with Professor Ober concerns how social media might be best harnessed to improve our current democratic structures by bringing them more in line with some aspects of ancient Athenian practices. 

Students with a more historical bent might wish to examine how societal perceptions of ancient Athenian democratic practices changed drastically over time from a dangerous mistake to a heroic precedent.   In A Notable Exception, Professor Ober describes why he believes that ancient Athenian society provides a striking counterexample to Robert Michels’ so-called “Iron Law of Oligarchy”, while in Idealizing Democracy, historian and fellow classicist Richard Janko maintains that our idealized version of classical Athens stops us from looking objectively at its weaknesses. 

Additional Ideas Roadshow content relevant to generally explore the theme of democracy include the clips Democratic Misconceptions, Measuring Democracy, Rhetorical Insights, The Importance of Dialogue, The Merits of Dissent, Thinking It Through and Winning Ideas; the compilations Examining Democracy, Probing the Political and Tyranny of the Majority, and the hour-long video and matching eBook with University of Cambridge political scientist John Dunn Democracy: Clarifying the Muddle.

Extending Wednesdays

Bilingualism and Dementia

Howard Burton

Introduction

Welcome to the first of our Extending Wednesdays posts, where each week we’ll feature a different extended essay theme from Ideas Roadshow’s IBDP Portal. 

While Ideas Roadshow’s IBDP Portal highlights over 130 themes and concepts to help students launch their extended essay investigations through the combination of our comprehensive Extended Essay Guide and 7 Extending Ideas videos, many subscribers have suggested that it would be very helpful to be regularly presented with specific ideas to get the most out of our database.  So that’s what these posts are all about.  

Each post briefly describes a particular extended essay concept suggested by our resources, while explicitly designating all the additional Ideas Roadshow resources on our Portal to assist those interested in giving the topic a closer look. 

Bilingualism and Dementia

Our first Extending Wednesdays topic comes from the Extending Ideas in Psychology video where renowned York University psychologist Ellen Bialystok highlights her groundbreaking work on the link between bilingualism and dementia.

In Chapter 6 of the Ideas Roadshow eBook called The Psychology of Bilingualism, Professor Bialystok describes her findings that show that, on average, being bilingual delays the first signs of dementia about four to five years compared to monolinguals.

Professor Bialystok is internationally known for her pioneering work on how bilingualism impacts the brain, a notion that inherently relies on how our brains are shaped by our experiences, a concept known as “neuroplasticity”.

Her many experiments on attention and multitasking have led her to conclude that bilinguals typically have a more developed frontal lobe structure than monolinguals, the part of the brain that is associated with planning and so-called “executive control”.  

But understanding how this fits with dementia is not so clear.

“The puzzle is that dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, is initially a memory disorder.  It’s not a disease of executive control. How does an experience that boosts the front part of the brain protect us from a disease that initially strikes the middle part of the brain, since the memory disorders that are the first symptoms of Alzheimer’s come from the hippocampus in the medial temporal lobe?

“The theory, yet to be confirmed, is that because the front part of the brain is typically more developed for bilinguals than monolinguals, it’s better suited to provide compensation for deterioration that arises elsewhere.  This increased ability for executive control comes in as a kind of ‘cognitive reserve’.” 

Possible areas of investigation for an extended essay include an examination of the current state of the theory of “cognitive reserve, a comparative examination of studies linking dementia to bilingualism, an analysis of research methods associated with such studies, suggestions for further investigations that might help distinguish between competing theories and interpretation, various other specific avenues of psychological research linking language with memory, and the use of fMRI and other brain diagnostic tools for psychological research. Given the natural overlap of many of these themes with neuroscience, some may be appropriate for a literature-based EE in biology. 

Primary Ideas Roadshow resources includes the clips Improving Multitasking, Measuring Brain Activity, Metalinguistic Awareness, Reducing the Mess and Taking the Right Path, the compilation videos Extending Ideas in Psychology and The Science of Language, the hour-long video The Psychology of Bilingualism and the eBook, The Psychology of Bilingualism.

If your school does not have an institutional subscription to Ideas Roadshow’s IBDP Portal yet you can now sign up for an individual subscription. Annual individual teacher or student subscriptions cost only $75 and provide unlimited access to all resources.
School-wide subscriptions are affordably priced based on the number of DP students in your school.