The history of Taekwondo is generally assumed to be short, merely back to World War Two. This, in fact, is not the fact. The history of Taekwondo stretches not just through the millenniums, but through the various martial arts imported into Korea. A couple of thousand years ago, when Korea was still divided into three kingdoms, young men were selected for special training in warfare. This training consisted of all aspects of military training, including archery, equestrian sports, combat strategy, and so on. These men were the cream of the crop, muchinahito.net selected because of their high athletic and mental abilities. These young warriors were called the Hwarang, and they specialized in a martial art called Subak. The various styles of Subak were combined to give high training in footwork and fistwork. The most popular of the Subak arts was called taekkyeon. During the middle ages martial arts training moved into the background. Post was generated by GSA Content Generator DEMO!

This was because of Chinese Confucianism. Society became more concerned with manners, learning how to be polite and get along, and the practice of the martial arts was more confined to backyards. Then World War Two arrived, along with the Japanese influence. The Japanese stamped out anything resembling Korean culture, and any traces of Taekyyeon or Subak were ruthlessly suppressed. While this was cruel and oppressive, there was a bright side, for the Japanese introduced their own martial arts to Korea. Koreans embraced the hard core principles of Karate joyously. The martial arts flowered, and were represented by nine Kwans, or houses. Eventually, after the war, the nine kwans were brought together under the Taekwondo name. Still, the Koreans strived for their own cultural identity, and the Japanese forms, and even the accompanying Chinese influences, were neglected for new forms. These new forms, though sometimes lacking in power, were easier to learn, and taekwondo began to be taught to the world. Currently, Taekwondo is one of the most popular martial arts on the globe, being learned in over 123 countries, and having over 30 million practitioners. The final step in this history of Taekwondo is beginning. Koreans are beginning to search for the power and beauty of their original arts, and even appraising the heavy duty influences of the Japanese inspired kwans. Ultimately, the Korean martial art of taekwondo will reabsorb the power of the Japanese forms, the unique concepts of the Chinese arts, and create a link with the original Subak arts that were taught so long ago.

‘Phrenology’ has an old-fashioned ring to it. It sounds like it belongs in a history book, filed somewhere between bloodletting and velocipedes. We’d like to think that judging people’s worth based on the size and shape of their skull is a practice that’s well behind us. However, phrenology is once again rearing its lumpy head. In recent years, machine-learning algorithms have promised governments and private companies the power to glean all sorts of information from people’s appearance. Several startups now claim to be able to use artificial intelligence (AI) to help employers detect the personality traits of job candidates based on their facial expressions. In China, the government has pioneered the use of surveillance cameras that identify and track ethnic minorities. Meanwhile, reports have emerged of schools installing camera systems that automatically sanction children for not paying attention, based on facial movements and microexpressions such as eyebrow twitches. Perhaps most notoriously, a few years ago, AI researchers Xiaolin Wu and Xi Zhang claimed to have trained an algorithm to identify criminals based on the shape of their faces, with an accuracy of 89.5%. They didn’t go so far as to endorse some of the ideas about physiognomy and character that circulated in the 19th century, notably from the work of the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso: that criminals are underevolved, subhuman beasts, recognizable from their sloping foreheads and hawk-like noses.

However, the recent study’s seemingly high-tech attempt to pick out facial features associated with criminality borrows directly from the ‘photographic composite method’ developed by the Victorian jack-of-all-trades Francis Galton - which involved overlaying the faces of multiple people in a certain category to find the features indicative of qualities like health, disease, beauty, and criminality. Technology commentators have panned these facial-recognition technologies as ‘literal phrenology’; they’ve also linked it to eugenics, the pseudoscience of improving the human race by encouraging people deemed the fittest to reproduce. In some cases, the explicit goal of these technologies is to deny opportunities to those deemed unfit; in others, it might not be the goal, but it’s a predictable result. Yet when we dismiss algorithms by labeling them as phrenology, what exactly is the problem we’re trying to point out? Are we saying that these methods are scientifically flawed and that they don’t really work - or are we saying that it’s morally wrong to use them regardless?