Dates have now been released for a variety of fantastic engineering experiences at universities around the country. Have a look to see if any of these capture your interest. You will find out more about engineering possibilities as well as life at university.
On Friday 21st September, Year 12 were joined by ISG Wellington House Engineers to discuss their careers in the STEAM industry.
Luisa, Alex, Magda and Tony all have different roles in the Wellington House project with ISG in structural engineering, construction management, civil engineering and project management. They spoke about the physics behind the Wellington House project, how they had solved various issues and civil engineering challenges also discussed their career paths and the skills they need – mainly communication, mathematical, problem solving and the ability to use programmes like sketch up! Thank you to the engineers for an insightful and inspiring talk.
Mr Dan Addis, one of our Joint Heads of Academic Scholarship, discusses the benefits of considering the opinions of others, as offered through our weekly Tea and T’inking club here at WHS.
It is very reassuring to read an article, listen to a podcast, or read a blog that asserts your own opinion at you. “Thank goodness! I was right all along!”
That’s the important thing isn’t it? Being right. Now, you have evidence backing your own view. You are not the only person who thinks this way. Other people important enough to be published in some medium think this way. Therefore, they must be right and you must be right. Moreover, all you see is the same information reiterated in your News feed, Instagram account, or amongst your friends. This corroborates your view. The opinion you had which was a small delicate thing is growing and hardening, becoming a wall to keep your psyche safe from thoughts that it assumes might damage it. Your confidence grows. Your surety of opinion flourishes.
In a world where fragile mental health is much more prevalent (or at least people are becoming more aware of it), this confidence in one’s opinion can be a positive thing. The community feel of shared opinion is also very intoxicating. Not only do we feel that we are right and are comforted by the presence of others with the same opinion, we also have a sense of community in a world so open it can be intimidating. The comments section of a blog post or a reddit chain can become a supportive group of like-minded friends. Positive isn’t it?
Well, I would argue no.
I’d like to refer back to the wall analogy I used earlier. Walls are fantastic for protection from outside forces that might harm us. They make us feel safe and secure. If you speak to a person without any walls to protect them, then you might recognise how valuable walls can be. But speak to a person who only has walls and no way of escaping them. Then walls become an enemy, a blight, the cause of pain, suffering and depression. The same can happen in our mind. By constantly reiterating a certain set of values and opinions, we can feel comfortable, but we can also become shut in, closeted away from information and facts that might help us grow and progress. The outside of the mental walls becomes the enemy, the dangerous, the damaging.
We approach these outside opinions in several ways. Mostly we ignore them, maligning them as idiotic or even pitying those who hold these views that cannot possibly be right. Sometimes we attack them, aggressively shouting down those who hold these views either for their stupidity or for their ignorance. We are building these walls higher and higher to differentiate ourselves from those outside.
However, there is another option: opening the metaphorical door.
Include other thoughts and ideas into discussion. Acknowledge other people’s views with openness and desire to learn. No one view is 100% correct. There are many shades of grey in most issues and having an awareness of them not only increases your knowledge, it helps you have discussions with others with opposing views.
Understandably, there are some issues with this approach. If you try to engage with someone who holds an opposing view but is not willing to compromise or discuss evenly, then it can be trying. It is tiresome to review points over and over and not reach a conclusion. In addition, it can be difficult to break this self-perpetuating cycle of distrust between opposing views.
Furthermore, the main issue is usually to do with ignorance not idiocy. The only cure for ignorance is learning, but the negativity that people of certain opinions have towards those who do not automatically agree can be suffocating. It is understandable that one might want to stay in their protective walled opinion fortress. What is needed is a safe space where you can learn information contrary to your held beliefs. A space where any question is acceptable. A space where you can discuss issues from a variety of viewpoints in a positive and constructive way.
Tea and T’inking can be this space for you. Come along challenge your preconceptions. At Wimbledon, our metaphorical walls are the socialist liberal middle class sphere that the vast majority of us inhabit. Burst that Bollinger Bolshevik Bubble, not in an aggressive manner but calmly, with a cup of tea.
Tea and T’inking is a weekly club held at WHS for girls in Year 9-13 who are invited to come along, have a cup of tea, and discuss a variety of topics, opening minds and creating debate. Please see Mr Addis if you’d like to pop along to the next session.
Ava (Year 13, Head Girl) explores the Theory of Deconstruction as suggested by Derrida and discusses the confusing nature of both ideas and words.
Deconstruction is a theory principally put forward in around the 1970s by a French philosopher named Derrida, who was a man known for his leftist political views and apparently supremely fashionable coats. His theory essentially concerns the dismantling of our excessive loyalty to any particular idea, allowing us to see the aspects of truth that might be buried in its opposite. Derrida believed that all of our thinking was riddled with an unjustified assumption of always privileging one thing over another; critically, this privileging involves a failure to see the full merits and value of the supposedly lesser part of the equation. His thesis can be applied to many age-old questions: take men and women for example; men have systematically been privileged for centuries over women (for no sensible reason) meaning that society has often undervalued or undermined the full value of women.
Now this might sound like an exceedingly overly simplistic world view, and that Derrida was suggesting a sort of anarchy of language. But Derrida was far subtler than this – he simply wanted to use deconstruction to point out that ideas are always confused and riddled with logical defects and that we must keep their messiness constantly in mind. He wanted to cure humanity of its love of crude simplicity and make us more comfortable with the permanently oscillating nature of wisdom. This is where my new-favourite word comes in: Aporia – a Greek work meaning puzzlement. Derrida thought we should all be more comfortable with a state of Aporia and suggested that refusing to deal with the confusion at the heart of language and life was to avoid grappling with the fraught and kaleidoscopic nature of reality.
This cleanly leads on to another of Derrida’s favourite words: Differánce, a critical outlook concerned with the relationship between text and meaning. The key idea being that you can never actually define a word, but instead you merely defer to other words which in themselves do not have concrete meanings. It all sounds rather airy-fairy and existentialist at this level, but if you break it down it becomes utterly reasonable. Imagine you have no idea what a tree is. Now if I try and explain a tree to you by saying it has branches and roots, this only works if you understand these other words. Thus, I am not truly defining tree, but merely deferring to other words.
Now if those words themselves cannot be truly defined either, and you again have to defer, this uproots (excuse the pun!) the entire belief system at the heart of language. It is in essence a direct attack on Logocentrism, which Derrida understood as an over-hasty, naïve devotion to reason, logic and clear definition, underpinned by a faith in language as the natural and best way to communicate.
Now, Derrida clearly wasn’t unintelligent, and was not of the belief that all hierarchies should be removed, or that we should get rid of language as a whole, but simply that we should be more aware of the irrationality that lies between the lines of language, willingly submit to a more frequent state of “Aporia”, and spend a little more time deconstructing the language and ideas that have made up the world we live in today.
Louisa (Y13 Music Rep) investigates whether Classical Music is still relevant to young people of today and what can be gained from listening to it.
Classical music, once at the forefront of popular culture and entertainment, is nowadays often seen as a dying art. Frequently, classical music, an umbrella term for music spanning the baroque, classical and romantic eras, is described as an ‘elitist form of artistic expression’ that is only enjoyed by the old, the white and the rich. Its place as leading form of musical entertainment has been taken by modern genres such as pop, rock and rap that generally do not share the musical complexity of much of classical and romantic music that used to dominate concert halls.
It is clear that the interest and enjoyment of classical music has decreased over the years, most prominently in today’s youth, despite the increasing accessibility through platforms such as Spotify and YouTube. However, just because interest has lowered does not mean that “classical music is irrelevant to today’s youth” as radio 1 DJ ‘Kissy Sell Out’ publicly argued[1]. It is important that those with a platform in the music industry challenge the notion that classical music is only for a select group of elites as there is so much to be gained from being engaged with classical music, from education to in media to understanding successful music in the modern world.
An area in which classical music is of utmost importance is in education. Headlines such as “listening to an hour of Mozart a day can make your baby smarter” outlining the so called ‘Mozart effect’ frequently dominate the press. This longstanding myth of listening to Mozart as an infant correlating to intelligence has since been debunked as having little scientific merit.
Above: DJs including William Orbit and DJ Tiesto have famously remixed classical music, including Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. Does this make the original more relevant?
However, there is evidence behind the notion that classical music has a positive effect on brain development and wellbeing. A study undertaken in 2014 by Zuk, Benjamin, and Kenyon found that adults and children with musical training exhibited cognitive advantages over their non-musically-trained counterparts. Adults with prior musical training performed better on tests of cognitive flexibility, working memory, and verbal fluency; and the musically-trained children performed better in verbal fluency and processing speed. The musically-trained children also exhibited enhanced brain activation in the areas associated with ‘executive functioning’ compared to children who had no previous musical training.
An additional study at the National Association for Music Education as well as researchers from the University of Kansas, found that young participants in music programmes in American High Schools associated with higher GPA, SAT and ACT scores, IQ, and other standardized test scores, as well as fewer disciplinary problems, better attendance, and higher graduation rates
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/classical/features/radio-1-dj-kissy-sell-out-classical-music-is-irrelevant-to-todays-youth-2282561.html 23/03/18
These scores can have great impacts on future quality of life as they directly contribute to which collage one is able to attend as well as future jobs leading to income.
Another important use of classical music is in modern day media. Film music is a genre that directly stems from classical music. Its widespread use in movies and television means classical music is constantly permeating our daily lives and it would be naïve to pretend it is irrelevant.
Film music serves several purposes in films including enhancing the emotional impact of scenes and inducing emotional reactions in viewers. The effects are widespread and particularly evident when watching a scene without the accompanying music. For example, watching the famous shower scene from Hitchcock’s Psycho without Herrmann’s music makes the scene appear almost comical and certainly lacks the fear and suspense the scene is meant to evoke.
The film music industry is very successful especially among younger generations, with film music scoring the highest number of downloads of instrumental music. Similarly, the videogame music industry has recently taken off in terms of popularity and recognition within the music community. Videogame music has striking similarities to both film music and elements of classical music with the main difference being it must be able to repeat indefinitely to accompany gameplay. The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra recently announced that it was to play a PlayStation concert to celebrate videogame music. James Williams, director of the RPO describes the planned concert as “signpost for where orchestral music is expanding”.
Whilst the music itself is not classical, it uses many elements of classical composition and is significantly influenced by it. It is arguably the most similar genre to music of the classical era in the modern day. This shows how it is not always obvious where derivatives of classical music can appear in the media of young people, yet the stigma is still very present. James Williams argues that if classical music rebranded to ‘orchestral music’ to include film and videogame popular music, it would help to destigmatise the term. Classical music is vital as the basis of these new and expanding genres of music that are very popular among younger generations.
Within society, there are many other instances in which classical music is used and very relevant, although not in its original context. In advertising, classical music and derivatives of classical music are widely used in order to promote specific product and target specific groups of people. A 2014 study from North Carolina State University shows how the correct musical soundtrack in an advert can “increase attention, making an ad more likely to be noticed, viewed, and understood; enhance enjoyment and emotional response; aid memorability and recall; induce positive mood; forge positive associations between brands and the music through classic conditioning; enhance key messages; influence intention and likelihood to buy”.
The brain has evolved to encode emotional memories more deeply that non-emotional ones and memories formed with a relevant, resonant musical component are stored as emotional memories. This means that adverts with suitable music are more likely to be remembered and acted upon. Clearly, regardless of whether or not classical music is actively listened to by young people, it plays a very active part in our society and therefore cannot be labelled as being irrelevant.
Above: Film music for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone being performed in real time alongside the movie.
Despite classical music being stereotypically more popular within older social circles, it is still very relevant for today’s youth, whether in or out of its traditional context. Claims that the popularity of classical music is decreasing can be disproved if the definition of classical music is expanded to include similar genres such as in film, videogames and advertisement which are all very popular and relevant, in addition to the huge benefits classical music has on the cognitive development of young people. Therefore, it cannot be argued that classical music is irrelevant to today’s youth.
Further Reading:
This is your brain on music – Daniel Levitin, Dutton Penguin, 2006
https://www.gramophone.co.uk/blog/editors-blog/the-relevance-of-classical-music
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2009/apr/02/classical-music-children
Have a listen to Barber’s Adagio for Strings, and the remixes by Orbit and Tiesto, below:
Barber: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3MHeNt6Yjs
Rachel Evans, Director of Digital Learning and Innovation at WHS, looks at the links between Art and Artificial Intelligence, investigating how new technology is innovating the discipline.
What is art? We might have trouble answering that question: asking whether a machine can create art takes the discussion in a new direction.
Memo Akten is an artist based at Goldsmith’s, University of London where much exciting work is taking place around the intersection of artificial intelligence and creative arts.
Akten’s work Learning to see was created by first showing a neutral network tens of thousands of images of works of art from the Google Arts Project. The machine then ‘watches’ a webcam, under which objects or other images are placed, and uses its ‘knowledge’ to create new images of its own. This still is from the film Gloomy Sunday. Was it ‘thinking’ of Strindberg’s seascape?
I have been fascinated by this artwork since I first saw it and have watched it many times. The changing image is mesmerising as the machine presents, develops and alters its output in response to the input. It draws me in, not only as a visual experience, but for the complex response it provokes as I think about what I am seeing.
Akten describes the work as:
An artificial neural network making predictions on live webcam input, trying to make sense of what it sees, in context of what it’s seen before.
It can see only what it already knows, just like us.
In 1972 the critic John Berger used the exciting medium of colour television to present a radical approach to art criticism, Ways of Seeing, which was then published as an affordable Penguin paperback. In the opening essay of the book he wrote “Every image embodies a way of seeing. […] The photographer’s way of seeing is reflected in his choice of subject. […] Yet, although every image embodies a way of seeing, our perception or appreciation of an image also depends on our own way of seeing.” When Akten writes that the machine “can see only what it already knows, just like us” he approaches the idea that the response of the neural network is human-like in its desire to find meaning and context, just as we attempt to find an image which we can recognise in the work it creates.
If the artist is choosing the subject, but the machine transforms what it sees into ‘art’, is the machine ‘seeing’? Or are we wholly creating the work in our response to it and the work is close to random – a machine-generated response to a stimulus not unlike a human splattering paint?
Jackson Pollock wrote “When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing. It is only after a sort of ‘get acquainted’ period that I see what I have been about. I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own.” Is the neural network performing this role here for the artist, of distancing during the creative process, of letting the ideas flow, to be considered afterwards?
Is the artist the sole creator, in that he has created the machine? That might be the case at the moment, with the current technology, but interestingly Akten refers to himself as “exploring collaborative co-creativity between humans and machines”.
I find this fascinating and it raises more questions than I can answer: it leaves me wanting to know more. It has prompted me to delve back into my own knowledge and understanding of art history and criticism to make connections that will help me respond. In short – encountering this work has caused me to think and learn.
In the current discussions in the media and in education around artificial intelligence we tend to focus on the extremes of the debate in a non-specific way – with the alarmist ‘the robots will take our jobs’ at one end and the utopian ‘AI will solve healthcare’ at the other. A focus for innovation at WHS this year is to open up a discussion about artificial intelligence, but this discussion needs to be detailed and rich in content if it’s going to lead to understanding. We want the students to understand this technology which will impact on their lives: as staff, we want to contribute to the landscape of knowledge and action around AI in education to ensure that the solutions which will arrive on the market will be fair, free of bias and promote equality. Although a work of art may seem an unusual place to start, the complex ideas it prompts may set us on the right path to discuss the topic in a way which is rigorous and thoughtful.
So – let the discussion begin.
Take a watch of the video below to see/hear more about our wonderful STEAM space at Wimbledon High School…
Huge congratulations goes to Sophia (Year 11), Katrina (Year 11) and Rin (Year 12) for winning a Game Concept BAFTA for their innovative new idea, Tea & Tartlets. You can view the full story on our Wimbledon High website here.
Look out for more news about the RRS Sir David Attenborough, a new polar research vessel, which launched in July. Year 5 will be finding out much more about the RRS Sir David Attenborough and it’s R.O.V Boaty Mc Boatface in their Ice Worlds topic this term.
