Hello all,
I am a first-time poster, so please bear with me ...
As a recent graduate from the DP, I am interested in anything that comes through the media that relates to any part of the DP. So, I have a link for those interested in the ethics and social science components of TOK in this post.
This URL links to a news article that originally came from DiscoverNews and was posted on the msnbc.com web site around noon, Pacific Daylight Time, on July 31. MSNBC, for those that don't know, is one of the four national media networks in the United States; FOX, ABC and CBS being the other three. The article reports that two researchers from the University of Vermont created software that measures people's happiness by analyzing posts from blogs and Twitter.com. The rest of the article goes on at some length about the methods used for collecting and synthesizing data and the possibilities of this new tool.
The ramifications of such software are apparent to anyone that's studying or has studied the ethics component of TOK. So along with the link, I pose a question to the IB community: Is this development worth following for use in future TOK curricula? At the very least, it might be an interesting discussion topic for current events. What do you think?
Stefan Brewer
IB Diploma Graduate, May 2009
