Extended Essay

[ib_princess]

3 hours ago, licia said:

Do you have to choose your RQ now when you're graduating in 2018? I chose mine in the end of may and I'm graduating in 2017.

Anyhow. What subject are you planning on writing yours in? Biology? Psychology? Another idea could be: "To what extent do stress levels affect the hospitality industry?"

Aaaand, take it easy. Don't stress out. I know, I hate when people tell me not to – but it will work out! 

 

Thank you so much, for your reply, Iicia! xx 

My school wants us to be over and done with our EE, that's why they're stressing that we get it done by May 2017  Yeah, the subject I' m planning to write my EE is on Psych  

Thank you so much for your help! xx

[licia]

1 hour ago, ib_princess said:

Thank you so much, for your reply, Iicia! xx 

My school wants us to be over and done with our EE, that's why they're stressing that we get it done by May 2017  Yeah, the subject I' m planning to write my EE is on Psych  

Thank you so much for your help! xx

Ahh nice! I just submitted my final draft of the EE in psychology yesterday, I investigated whether female's perception of their physical appearance affected their self-esteem. But hit me up if you need some tips 

[fardnikIB]

Hi,

I'm currently a DP1 student about to begin planning my EE.

So far, I've come up with a question:

To what extent does an AVM stroke affect the ventricles ability to secrete cerebrospinal liquid?

Is this too specific? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!

 

[ibbiogod3]

Hi guys what do you think about my history ee topic:

To what extend were crusades motivated primarily by religious factors?

[robertg99]

Help- i need to choose between 2 topics/ questions for my CAT 3 LangLit EE

the possibilities i have are:

- comparing the speeches of obama and wayne le pierre about gun control, and how the rhetoric is used

- analyzing the rhetoric of Barack Obama on his speeches

thanks 

[2tatster2]

Hey, guys! I've just found out about IBSurvival because I've been horrendously putting off my research on my EE...I'm in need for advice! When I first started thinking about my topic, I decided to focus on Science, Technology, and Society from World Studies. (which I can't find any other threads on this subject)

My VERY basic research question is - How directly do technological advancements influence local economic systems?

My focus was going to be about Facial Recognition technology however, my TOK teacher decided my subject was too new in development to be able to research about. So I decided to focus on the electronic payment systems, such as Apple Pay, PayPal, and possibly Bitcoin. My teacher then gave us deadlines for our sources and evidence. I was still iffy on exploring my topic because my sources had focused more on the economics of the electronic market, which my teacher warned us not to do, research on something that we have no experience on. (Our school does not have an IB ECON class plus I have no past experiences with economics)

If I were to start researching, would my focus be on the societal influences Apple Pay/Paypal/Estsy/ any online transactions have? To what extent should I include economics in my EE? I feel the need to address the economics because that's what my research question but I do not want to lose focus on the other subject. 

Thank you! Nice to meet all of you! 

Edited May 7, 2017 by 2tatster2
forgot to finish a parentheses

[Hans1512]

I was wondering if choosing to write an extended essay on how the length and slope of a line effects the time it takes for a ball to get from one position to another. This has already been solved and is known as a Brachistochrone. Could this still be considered viable? If so how could I format my RQ.

Thanks

[Goose]

Hey guys

I know I want to do something on machine learning but I'm still trying to decide what to do.

My current idea goes something like this: 

"How can machine learning be used to convert handwritten text into digital text?"

Thoughts?

[Nomenclature]

12 hours ago, Goose said:

Hey guys

I know I want to do something on machine learning but I'm still trying to decide what to do.

My current idea goes something like this: 

"How can machine learning be used to convert handwritten text into digital text?"

Thoughts?

To be fair, you are probably not going to find many people on this board who wrote a CS EE. Machine learning is a program learning something that wasn't explicitly coded (the process can be outlined in the code, but the machine has to make the actual adaptations based on user input). I don't know about your topic, but if that's valid and you want to talk about the algorithms allow computers to learn that the curly "2" I'm writing is a "2" after seeing it a certain amount of times then I'd say it's valid. I've never spent any time with this topic, but I'd imagine you'd be writing about how the computer first references a dictionary, makes certain decisions on letters/words it is having trouble identifying based on the dictionary, and then adds the letters to an internal database so that it can better identify them next time.

My best advice is to talk to your CS instructor. Ask if the topic is suitable, what are his/her thoughts/advice?, would he/she recommend you continue or find a new topic?, etc. 

Also do a tiny bit more research to make sure you aren't in over your head. Even if you're a computing genius, it's easy to pick a topic that will spiral into discussions that are above any high school (or even undergrad university) student's level, which is something you probably want to avoid.

Best of luck!

[Vioh]

14 hours ago, Goose said:

I know I want to do something on machine learning but I'm still trying to decide what to do. My current idea goes something like this: "How can machine learning be used to convert handwritten text into digital text?" Thoughts?

I didn't write my EE on CS, nor did I take it as a subject in IB, so take my words with a grain of salt. First of all, your topic is too broad, because it's basically about the entire of the OCR technology. Also, the difficulty depends on what learning algorithm you are choosing to focus on. Some learning algorithms are nuanced, but difficult to understand. Some are naive, but very easy to implement. Last year, I took the machine learning course on Coursera, taught by professor Andrew Ng, and there we got to implement a little program to recognize handwritten digits. From what I remember, it was fairly straight-forward, but only if one understood the theory and the maths behind it. And it was A LOT of maths, from statistics/probability to calculus to linear algebra. On top of those, you will need to learn about things like gradient descent algorithm or neural networks in order to fully understand the codes. So honestly, I think this topic is just too difficult for a high school project. In fact, I think you should avoid anything to do with visual recognition based on machine learning.

If you still want to do something about machine learning, I would recommend looking into building a Naive Bayes classifier that can be used to classify text-written materials. It's a hard topic, but I think it's appropriate for a high school project, since it's mostly just about counting words, string manipulation, and things like that. Let's say that you have a bunch of news articles on different topics, and you want the machine to learn how to classify these articles into different categories (like sports, science, politics, etc.). Then Naive Bayes classification is a learning algorithm that will help you to do that. It's based on Bayes' theorem which is covered in IB maths. So you pretty much have all the mathematical tool that you will need. The only hard part is to think about where you can get the training data to test your classifier. You can also look at other learning algorithms, like the k-nearest-neighbor (kNN) algorithm or the Rochio algorithm. But these would require you to know a bit about the vector space model (still, most of the mathematics required are covered in maths HL). In general, I think instead of researching on the use of machine learning on OCR technology, an easier option would be to look into how to use it to solve text-classification problems.

Note that you should carefully read the EE guide for CS. And like @Nomenclature I think it's best if you ask your supervisor's opinions. Because from what I've heard, doing EE in CS is completely different from doing the IA for CS, where you just simply develop some application for a customer. Anyway, good luck!

[somhes18]

My subject area is focused on human rights.

Question: To what extent has urban gentrification in South Africa created a modern-day apartheid?

I will use human rights theories to look at both perspectives.

Feedback?

[astonky]

@somhes18 Are you writing your essay for geography? I don't know how human rights theory will fit in here, as technically speaking human rights should be the same for all people of South Africa (correct me if I'm wrong). Though I am not familiar with this topic, I think it may be easier to focus on social and economic inequality rather than considering human rights theories.

As such, you may want to consider rewriting your research question to something like the following: To what extent has urban gentrification in the city of Port Elizabeth amplified social and economic inequalities?

I think this would make it easier to focus your writing,as it could to be broad to focus on urban gentrification in the whole of South Africa.

[somhes18]

13 hours ago, astonky said:

@somhes18 Are you writing your essay for geography? I don't know how human rights theory will fit in here, as technically speaking human rights should be the same for all people of South Africa (correct me if I'm wrong). Though I am not familiar with this topic, I think it may be easier to focus on social and economic inequality rather than considering human rights theories.

As such, you may want to consider rewriting your research question to something like the following: To what extent has urban gentrification in the city of Port Elizabeth amplified social and economic inequalities?

I think this would make it easier to focus your writing,as it could to be broad to focus on urban gentrification in the whole of South Africa.

Thank you so much. This is actually very helpful and I will definitely be taking this advice! I originally thought I had to use human rights theories because of the human rights syllabus but I know realize it was an old syllabus which became Global Politics. Thank you again!

[Guest]

Hey everyone, 

I am doing my extended essay in social and cultural anthropology and have struggles coming up with a good and narrow research question. I know that I want to talk about homosexuality/ same sex marriage in the Netherlands and how liberal everything seems, but in fact there a still tons of people who curse with 'gay', make fun of people and still people look weird at same sex couples. So basically I want to talk about the paradox of being liberal in terms of rules and system, but not being liberal in our minds. Do you guys have any tips or ideas how I can come to a good question? Thank you so much!! 

[Nona]

Hey guyys,

I'd be glad if you could give me your opinion on my EE's RQ. 

As a little background, I am doing my EE on history and particularly on this wonderful Finnish lady called Aurora Karamzin (any good info about her is also welcomed). She is a nice person and all that, but she hasn't done as much as I though she had and as my supervisor does not let me change my topic, I was wondering if this sounds like an okey RQ:How did the three month stay in Paris in 1848 change Aurora Karamzin's life? I've kind of got the facts, but there aren't that many sources though....

Thanks already!!  

 

[Bastor]

I'm just starting to think about my topic/question.

I know I want the subject to be history? Would a question like this one be usable?

"How did morality, religion, and views of sex affect how syphilis was seen in 15th century Europe?"

Obviously I can change it as I start actually developing my essay but is this a good starting point?

[jana333]

Well mine was initially 

How do the authors of The Great Gatsby and Their Eyes Were Watching God use characterization and common themes as a means of criticising the authors societal structure? but now i have to change their eyes to another book since we did it in class, and in order for it to be a comparative i need the second book to be from another language. 
Any suggestions? 

[Shin Kuroi]

ahh, um...

i'm a bit unsure of what mine is, but...

 

i was thinking of "How does Hirohiko Araki interpret moral differences with the conflicting goals and personalities of the protagonist, Johnny Joestar, and the antagonist, Funny Valentine, in Part 7 of his ongoing Manga series 'JoJo's Bizarre Adventure'?

 

but i am unsure of if that is a good question or not...

 

it's going into the art category, but I am really nervous and uncertain of how I should conduct research or anything like that.

any help will be greatly appreciated.

[Uly]

Hi i want to do my EE on the civil war and was thinking about going into the topic of The industrial revolution after the war. Thoughtss??

[Nomenclature]

3 hours ago, Uly said:

Hi i want to do my EE on the civil war and was thinking about going into the topic of The industrial revolution after the war. Thoughtss??

I'd call it the Second Industrial Revolution as some cursory research on my part revealed that to be the term preferred by historians as most generally view The Industrial Revolution to have ended by the 1840's. I think it's really interesting. You're avoiding modernity, and it's certainly a topic more off the beaten path. Well done. Loads of potential.

P.s. Certainly don't read all of it as it's more indirectly related to your topic, but I can recommend the first few chapters of Amanda Foreman's A World on Fire. I think it will offer you some good, in-depth information about some things that you'll really want to have a solid basis in for your essay: the southern and northern economies, imports and taxation, and development in the U.S. And it reads really fast.

Edited November 7, 2017 by Nomenclature
Added note about book