Duke TIP Navigator

The official magazine of the 4th–6th Grade Talent Search

The Ethics of Self-Driving Cars

Philosophers like to make up stories, especially when they’re talking about ethics and morality.

These “thought experiments” are helpful tools to think through a problem. They help clarify what you really think about something.

If you’re debating whether or not lying is wrong, for instance, it can be helpful to consider a case in which someone wants information from you that they will use to hurt someone else. Would it be wrong to lie then? Or is lying okay if it prevents someone from getting hurt?

There are lots of famous thought experiments from the history of philosophy. But self-driving cars have made one of them especially famous. That’s because the engineers programming these new cars have to provide an answer to it.

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What Is Time?

Let’s start with a basic assumption: Time is made up of an infinite number of moments.

You can break a day into hours, hours into minutes, minutes into seconds, and so on. So if you go keep going, you’ll eventually get singular moments—tiny little slivers of time. And time as we know it is just all those little slivers arranged one after another. It’s like Legos, except it’s made out of time instead of physical blocks.

That’s a common way of thinking about time. But way back around 490 BC, a philosopher named Zeno said it led to a paradox—a way of thinking about time that contradicts itself.

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Video Games Are Changing How We Tell Stories

Humans have told stories for a long time. Like, a very long time—so long that some people say it’s what makes us human in the first place.

The basics of storytelling are pretty familiar. You have a beginning, a middle, and an end. You start at the beginning, you have some kind of conflict, and then you come to a resolution. We all learn our lessons and feel some kind of way about them, depending on whether the story is happy or funny or sad.

But video games have the ability to do things differently.

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A Small Big Data Primer

A philosopher in ancient Greece has a thought about the nature of reality and writes it down. A rice farmer during China’s Tang Dynasty records the number of rows in his rice fields. An eighteenth-century writer documents her experiences travelling to a foreign country in a book. In each instance, data was created. And for centuries, not much changed. Then, innovations in data computing and storage during the late 1800s and early 1900s laid the foundation for some changes—some big changes.

In just a few short decades—a blink of an eye on the scale of human existence—our ability to store and process data has skyrocketed. Today, it’s increasing exponentially. Mobile phones, smart watches, Google searches, GPS systems in vehicles, parking meters, social media accounts—all these things are leaving behind a stream of “data exhaust,” so much so that virtually every action we take today creates data. To put things in perspective, we’re now creating more data in roughly a year than had been previously created in all human existence.

This is big data. But what does this mean for our society? How will we store it, understand it, and act on it? And will we use this tool for good?

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Finding Your Passion

Adventures in STEM, Classroom

What’s your favorite subject? What do you want to be when you grow up?

Those are pretty common questions. They’re also questions that seem like they should be easy to answer. Of course you know what you like to do…right?

Not necessarily. And that’s okay!

Here’s a secret I learned after years of high school and college and graduate school and working: very few people have any idea what they really like to do. Even adults. And only the very, very luck have found a way to do what they like best every day—whether as a job or a hobby.

So how do you become one of the lucky ones?

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In Defense of Watching Paint Dry

Have you ever committed—I mean really committed—to watching paint dry? Have you ever turned off your various Internet-enabled devices, cleared your calendar, put in some ear plugs, and plopped yourself down in front of a freshly painted wall on a lazy Sunday afternoon?

No?

Me neither.

To liken something to watching paint dry, after all, is to dismiss it as dull, uninspiring, and predictable. Your mom might use the phrase to describe a particularly boring conference call at work, or your sports-averse friend might use it to describe the basketball game you made him watch last night.

But what might you gain from watching paint dry?

Patience, for sure. And maybe even a trance-like meditative state. But also an appreciation for color. And maybe even a roundabout interest in abstract art. [Read more…]

The Future of Space Travel

Humans have been fascinated with space for centuries—millennia, even. Early astronomers like Ptolemy, Aristotle, Copernicus, and Galileo studied the stars and theorized about the nature of the universe beyond our atmosphere, and as technology has advanced, so has our ability to understand space—even explore it.

The late 1950s saw the launches of the first satellites into Earth’s orbit, some even carrying dogs and primates. In the early 1960s, the first humans quickly followed suit, and by the end of the decade, President Kennedy’s promise had held true: we were walking on the surface of the moon. That’s a ton of progress in space travel took place in an incredibly short amount of time—and seemingly so long ago. But the last time a human left low Earth orbit (LEO) was more than forty years ago, so it can sometimes feel like space exploration has slowed down. But is this really the case? [Read more…]

What Is It Like to be a Hedgehog?

Can you imagine what it’s like to be something other than a human being—say, a bat, or a hedgehog? Like, really imagine it?

Philosophers have long debated these kinds of questions. Human brains and minds work in certain ways, and we understand the world from that point of view. Is it possible to understand it differently, or are we limited to our own subjective viewpoint? We explore those questions with the help of our friend Winsome the hedgehog.