This is the month of school starting. Where will you sit in the class at the front with the curious and compliant students, or in the back with the rowdy and distracted ones? That's what I remember - I always got to sit in the front, attentive and compliant.
How will the teacher regard you - will it be based on your compliance behaviour in class or on your IQ and your intelligence "potential" ? Is there some relationship?
The Intelligence Quotient - IQ - the standardized set of tests designed to assess human intelligence, coined by the psychologist William Stem in 1912. Divide a person's mental age score by the person's chronological age. The resulting fraction was multiple by 100 to obtain the IQ score.
This instrument used in the education system must lead to significant bias by practitioners. Giving IQ tests, looking at the results, and then what? Doesn't it influence behaviour? I don't think teachers ignore the results and are consistent with each student? It doesn't seem likely to me - so how is it that such a bias and discrimination system persists? We apply it in all kinds of placements - educational, job applications, and more. In the 20th century in the U.S. it was used extensively for placement in the armed forces.
To me this seems like a quick decision method - a short-cut is how I consider it.
In the 1920s, the U.S. Eugenics Movement wanted a test like this to filter out and eliminate the undesirables that were considered the feeble-minded. Sterilization occurred in the 1920's in the thousands. The practice only lost its momentum when the horrors of Nazi Germany were revealed.
But this can't quell the significant amount of effort put into this area by scientists and researches. It must be a compelling mystery. It has gone on for centuries now with more kinds of intelligence tests and competing intelligence tests. I haven't figured out what is there to be learned by tests like this or is it a compelling curiosity in the end?
It seems that way doing goggle searches. Who is the smartest person in the world? Stephen Hawking is identified as the smartest person in the world and his IQ is listed as 160-170. There are other people designated "the smartest people" who have no IQ listing. So how did we get to deciding they are the smartest people? These articles reference their accomplishments in science mostly.
See a list of the smartest people HERE. As you scroll down, you will be constantly harassed with the pop-up IQ Test: What Is Your IQ? Remember it is an intelligence test and not an irritability test.
There's the highest IQ score - 228 - Marilyn von Savant. Then there's another person Ainan Celeste Cawley with a score of 263.
You can find out the country with the highest IQ - Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea are the highest scoring countries. Canada is not in the top 10. Our score is 99, below the U.K. and above the U.S.
We've only touched the surface of the history of intelligence measurement and surprising facts about IQ scores.
But enough of this on Labour Day weekend - the great celebration of the transition from summer to autumn.This leads directly to these two images that have the sense of transitions and portals. These are in the Abstract Thoughts Series.
Being Canadian, this is the morning we wake up to Sonny and Cher's 'I Got You Babe' coming from the clock radio next to the bed. If anyone mentions Deja Vu, I start to sing the first bars of the song. So here we are at Groundhog Day. The synopsis of the movie is wonderfully written at Wikipedia 'here'. The most interesting section for me is on Time loop duration speculations.
Time loop duration speculations
Estimates regarding how long Phil supposedly remains trapped in the loop, in real time, vary widely. During filming, Ramis, who was a Buddhist, observed that according to Buddhist doctrine, it takes 10,000 years for a soul to evolve to its next level. Therefore, he said, in a spiritual sense, the entire arc of Groundhog Day spans 10,000 years. In the DVD commentary, Ramis estimated a real-time duration of 10 years. Later, Ramis told a reporter, "I think the 10-year estimate is too short. It takes at least 10 years to get good at anything, and allotting for the down time and misguided years he spent, it had to be more like 30 or 40 years." In 2005, Rubin said, "Ultimately it became this weird political issue because if you asked the studio, 'How long was the repetition?', they'd say, 'Two weeks'. But the point of the movie to me was that you had to feel you were enduring something that was going on for a long time ... For me it had to be—I don't know. A hundred years. A lifetime." In 2014, the website WhatCulture combined various time duration assumptions and estimated that Phil spent a total of 12,395 days—just under 34 years—reliving Groundhog Day.
Danny Rubin was author of the story and co-wrote the screenplay with Harold Ramis. He wrote a book on writing the movie - How to Write Groundhog Day. Here is the hilarious promo page:
Buy it today! What if tomorrow never comes?
Screenwriters
How and why did the original screenplay change?
Philosophers
Was this comedy influenced by Nietzsche’s theory of eternal recurrence?
Fans
How long did the time loop last?
New Screenwriters
Seven acts? It had seven acts?
Psychologists
Was the structure really based on Kübler-Ross’ stages of death and dying?
Lovers
Was it always a romantic comedy?
Guys
Which movie star with the initials A.MacD. sat on the screenwriter’s lap?
Buddhists
How much will this book cost?
Danny Rubin seems to be truly thankful and happy for this experience. I checked out his blog called Blogus Groundhogus.The latest entry is February 2015, so I'll assume that is sufficiently recent to indicate things.
Our Koi looks like it is entering a portal gate. This was a reflection of a bridge at the Jacksonville Florida Zoo and Botanical Gardens. And of course, we continue the heart theme.
