Thoughts on Theme 1

Week 44

This first week was divided into two different topics whereas one of them was more in line with our education where we looked at research papers and journals to find out what is “good” and “high quality” information. We learned about Impact factors that is a measurement to evaluate how “good” or how “important” a journal is. And we had to find a journal which had an impact factor with a value over 1, as this was considered a “good” journal. And from these journals we had to choose a paper that we thought was interesting. These papers however do not have impact factors, but only the journal. So to say that a certain paper is of good quality or not is a little bit harder when we don't have a grading system for it. Another thing about journals is that they have to be around for a while to have good values, since it takes at least a year for an impact factor to be calculated, and if a journal has been around longer it’s also more probable that its been cited more and thus gained a higher impact factor. For me this was the first time on KTH that we got to read some research papers that were connected to our field of study, and this was very nice and i do think that I will have use for this in the future when I’m going to write my master thesis. The instructions as how to find these papers could have been a lot better tho as I spend quite some time just getting a feel for the system.

The second part was more philosophical based and talked about what is knowledge and can we ever truly know something? And for this we read a “short” book from Bertrand Russel that was called “The Problems of Philosophy (1912)”. A book that even thou quite old, had information about the way we perceive things that I found is still relevant for today’s society. I thought that even though it was a lot to take in, in such short time, and that we should probably have read it several times to get a deeper understanding, It was very interesting. I’m still not quite sure as where this fits into our education, but it makes us maybe pause a little and ask ourselves more questions.