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Showing posts from September, 2022

A New Leaf for the Looking Glass 2026/27

Dear all, Upon inheriting the Looking Glass from our predecessors, we identified a number of key issues. Firstly, there were simply not enough articles being published, due both to a lack of submissions from the school community and limited responsiveness from the previous Academic Team. Secondly, the Looking Glass had not been advertised or explained effectively enough to the wider school community. As a result, we plan to implement a more consistent and engaging stream of articles on the Looking Glass. As part of this initiative, we are looking to recruit a select group of keen writers from across the lower school who would be willing to produce one high-quality piece of writing, discussion, or media each month for publication on the Looking Glass. We believe this will be hugely beneficial both to the school community, which will gain access to a wider range of opinions and viewpoints, and to prospective writers, who will be able to reference their experience contributing to the Look...
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The Art of Judging

  HUSAYN MERALI (Y13) This article was submitted as part of the WBGS Fuller Research Prize Competition 2022. To stereotype a person is to reduce a person to a set of characteristics that are impersonal; often offensive, untrue and built on foundations of hearsay. Such judgments are often conceived at first sight - yet built upon decades of indoctrination and hundreds of years of othering and subordination. These judgements vary in range according to the damage it presents - a mere second glance at someone to ascertain their suitability as a mate or a friend is vastly different to the bigoted racism that expresses itself through overt hatred. However, the danger of such pigeonholing only occurs in the extremes - the suggestion that having stereotypes in its totality are conclusively wrong is an overgeneralization which is not only unfair but also hypocritical - we make such judgements with such regularity that they are necessary, commonplace and are required to negotiate this world ...
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Dark Matter

  VISHVA MEHTA (Y13) This article was submitted as part of the WBGS Fuller Research Prize Competition 2022. Dark matter is a component of the universe which makes up approximately 30.1% of the matter-energy composition of the universe. Its existence was determined from its gravitational attraction rather than its luminosity that visible matter (makes up 0.5% of the Universe) has.  During the 1920s, the very first astronomer to imply the existence of dark matter was Jacobus Kaptelyn. Later on, Jacobus and an astronomy pioneer hypothesised the existence of dark matter in 1932. A year later, an astrophysicist called Fritz Zwicky who was studying  a galaxy cluster called the Coma cluster (a galactic supercluster which contains more than 1,000 galaxies) made a similar conclusion by using the virial theorem to obtain evidence of unseen matter which he referred to as ‘dunkle materie’. The virial theorem relates the total kinetic energy of a stable system of discrete particles to...
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Cryptography

  SALMAN CHEEMA (Y13) This article was submitted as part of the WBGS Fuller Research Prize Competition 2022. What is cryptography? All around the world people use the internet for shopping, socialising and research. But how is our data protected when we use the internet? To ensure that your data is kept private, a process called cryptography is used. Cryptography is the process of securing data by scrambling important information into unreadable code. How does cryptography work? When you send a message across the internet, the message is often encrypted. The way this works is that your message is encoded so that it is unreadable. When the intended recipient receives your message, the encrypted message is converted back into the original message using a process known as decryption. Decryption works the same way as encryption but is the reverse process. Both the sender and the recipient use an encryption key to decode the encrypted message back to its original form. This key is a str...
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