Showing posts with label World Wednesday. Show all posts
Showing posts with label World Wednesday. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 4, 2012

World News Wednesday: The Higgs Boson

Something very exciting has happened out in France and Switzerland. Scientists working for CERN on the Large Hadron Collider (the world's largest and most expensive terrestrial science apparatus) announced that they were pretty darn sure that they'd found the Higgs Boson, which was a major objective of having constructed the LHC. Just how sure? There's less than a billionth of a percent chance that they're wrong.

This is huge news for a number of reasons. For one thing, it means that the LHC didn't just fail to destroy the world as half the internet predicted for a few years back, but it also achieved it's main operational goal - finding the subatomic particle responsible for giving other particles mass. This finding has essentially confirmed a large section of physics theory.

It's not often that I get to report about science and world news on the same day.

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

World Wednesday: Luka Magnotta

So, a few of you abroad might have heard by now about government offices in Canada receiving human body parts by mail a short while ago. Before long, the victim was identified, and shortly after that, a suspect was pretty clearly identified. His name was Luka Magnotta, a model and gay porn actor who filmed his murder of Jun Lin, a Chinese national studying at a university in montreal, and the subsequent dismemberment.

Now, I'm not going to tell you where to find the video, but I'm sure you could if you looked hard enough. I haven't watched it, and I don't intend to. What I find interesting, however, is that a number of high school teachers are on suspensions from their positions at the moment because they DID view it... along with their classes. The general narrative on these stories is that the teacher puts it to a vote, the class votes unanimously (or dissenters, if the minority, are allowed to abstain), and then they watch the video before discussing it as a class.

My question is, if you were an instructor, of any subject, do you feel there is anything to be gained by your students watching the video? And if so, do you feel that the same objective you couldn't be met by simply discussing the circumstances of the video?