Sandwich

I think we are always suspicious of people different from ourselves. However, certainly in my country and my part of society, I think racism is pretty dead. I think people have come to see that there are much bigger differences than skin colour - you know, I'm a lot more similar to people I know of any given race who're from a similar middle class background to me than I am to people of my own ethnic background who are in a different class to me. Maybe not in every way but in many ways which are important to me. I think that your skin colour used to carry a lot of other differences with it which made it just a very obvious symbol and a way to recognise somebody different from you - and some people reacted with anger and suspicion. As I said, to me it's social class which is the real divide more than race.

I would say that people in my country are very tolerant (relatively speaking) of race, perhaps depending on which part you're from - multiculturalism tends to be more of an urban than a rural theme.

I think it IS stupid to ignore race and say "we are all the same" because a lot of things CAN be generalised by race and shown to be true. Largely because race often carries with it a basketful of culture and even in people who're naturalised to a country, the culture of your parents or grandparents and so on can often carry down. Pretending otherwise seems silly to me - it's a hell of a lot more likely that an Indian person will like curry than a native Brit because it's likely their family have it as a frequent meal. I mean, this is ignoring the fact that the British also madly love curry But you know what I mean. These little assumptions are fine, in my opinion, and they help inform our behaviour so actually we can get on better and be accepting of differences. I think the real thing with assumptions is to use them fairly and test them before you act on them. Without assumptions we'd be blind and foolish, but then making assumptions into truth is the basis of prejudice. It's about using your assumptions wisely - to sketch out a truth but then to edit it based on actual evidence before acting on it. This applies to all sorts of things, not just racism.

Sasha A, on May 24, 2012 - 11:00, said:

It seems to me that you have misunderstood somewhat the whole idea of the TOK presentation which is to discuss things in the context of TOK. For instance you have misinterpreted what is meant by reason, emotion and perception and are approaching the areas of knowledge from a completely wrong angle when actually you need to be focussing on the ways of knowing and how they interact.

I strongly suggest you read these posts and hopefully you'll realise that you're sort-of doing the equivalent of sitting in an English Literature exam then writing an essay explaining the finer rules of grammar and listing vocabulary. It's completely not what the subject is about. Or sitting in a Spanish B oral exam and explaining about Spanish culture but speaking the whole time in English - completely misinterpreting the idea of it. So in a similar vein, what you're talking about ARE issues but they're not TOK issues and you've somewhat missed the point. Hopefully that analogy makes sense.

Is this a good TOK Presentation title? / How do I pick my Presentation title?!
ToK Presentation Guide

TOK is not a platform to discuss current affairs and interesting issues. TOK is a platform to discuss TOK which you must then somehow relate to an issue but really the point is to talk about the ways of knowing and show you know how they are used.

We used to have teaching in IB1 - reading through the green TOK textbook - but none of it was actually useful to any of the assessments or really anything. I honestly don't know why the school paid actual money for those.

In IB2 we changed teachers and had a more discussion-based type lesson which was a bit of a dead end in that none of us were really interested in discussing anything, but was a lot more useful as the teacher knew a lot more about what they were doing! Also to be honest, a lot more interesting to listen to the teacher trying to have discussions than it was to sit and take it in turns to read out of the textbook. Discussion is much more similar to how you end up having to write the TOK essay or give the presentation than any textbook stuff is.
It's just hard to keep discussion focused on TOK. It tends to meander into discussing the actual issues instead as they are often quite interesting.

I agree TOK is very badly structured but it is a bit of a non-subject so I'm not sure how you could structure it better, if at all.

Well what are your WOK and AOK? And how exactly do you intend to link this topic with Theory of Knowledge/make this into a suitable TOK topic?

Frizzy, on May 24, 2012 - 09:48, said:

You might get more volunteers if you just had it so that people shouldn't drink caffeinated drinks for a certain number of hours prior to you doing the experiment. Drinking no caffeine at all would be extreme. Also 8-9 days! Even if you do just three or four repeats, should only take you 3-4 days max, no?? You'll get more people willing to help you if you make it a bit more realistic, perhaps.

Doing some preliminary research into the way in which caffeine is metabolised and eliminated should allow you to make more sensible decisions about what is necessary to control for and what isn't.

Frizzy, on May 24, 2012 - 00:50, said:

You've got to examine the kinetics of caffeine. At what point does it reach maximum concentration in the blood? 5 mins after or 30 mins after consumption? And of course drinking the coffee over 5 minutes will give a higher maximum blood level than drinking the same drink over 10 mins and so on.

As for the double bluff, then that's a good idea but the 'gold standard' would actually be a randomised blind trial. Essentially none of them should actually know the strength of the coffee they're getting. Ideally YOU should also not know the strength of the coffee (double blind) which can be done by random number allocation on the behalf of a third party - essentially a 'perfect' trial has it so that the experimenter and the subject are both ignorant of the type of drug and so neither can report or measure things based on their own perceptions of what should happen. That way you have a control group receiving a placebo but nobody has any clue who is in which group so they can only go on what is literally happening to them. Telling people how much coffee you're giving them is actually a bad idea if you want to remove any individual bias and wouldn't go down well in an actual clinical trial of a drug! Not everybody needs to receive a placebo dose, just one person (or more depending on the size of the cohort).

Also you may wish to consider whether it's worth doing a reaction test in a non-caffeinated state to take as baseline and see whether caffeine causes improvement from baseline, then compare data for that as it may be more meaningful - we all have significantly different reaction times anyway, so it would allow you to control for that and be sure you were looking at the exact effects of caffeine.