al-mofhariz

Yesterday, the United States Golf Association (USGA) announced a rule change . Coming into effect in 2016, Rule 14-1B will prohibit the use of so-called "anchored strokes" in sanctioned play. Rather than try to describe what "anchoring" is, here's a helpful graphic provided by the USGA: Source: http://www.usga.org/uploadedImages/USGAHome/rules/UNDERSTANDING%20ANCHORED%20STROKES.jpg As a strategy for putting, "anchoring" has become increasingly popular—and controversial—over the last decade or so. According to ESPN , four out of the last six winners in major championships used "anchored strokes," a rate of success that has fueled speculation about what (if any) competitive advantage such a stroke might confer. I'm not a golf fan, and I don't have an opinion one way or the other. What I'm interested in is the way this issue has been both contested within the golf community and portrayed in the media. Specifically, I was struck by ho...

How much control do you have over your brain? In recent years, scientists have discovered a tremendous amount of human behavior is actually motivated by unconscious processes. At the Secret Science Club, neuroscientist Heather Berlin delves into your deepest, darkest thoughts.    She asks: -- Who’s really in control? Is there a neural basis for free will? -- How do conscious impulses and thoughts become unconscious (as in repression ) and vice-versa ( Freudian slips )?  -- What can brain imaging and neuropsychological experiments tell us about our emotions, obsessions, and compulsions?  --What is consciousness and how did it evolve? What purpose does it serve?             A cognitive neuroscientist in the departments of psychiatry and neuroscience at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Dr. Berlin researches impulsivity, compulsivity, and emotions with the goal of developing more targeted treatments for a ...

BOOK REVIEW: Audra Wolfe, Competing with the Soviets: Science, Technology, and the State in the Cold War (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). Back in 2011, AmericanScience interviewed writer and editor Audra Wolfe about her work cataloging the papers of American geneticist Bentley Glass . When asked whether the Glass papers indicated that "the 'story' we have about Cold War science is wrong," Wolfe suggested that we'd have to get back to her in a year or so. Well, it seems that we now have a chance to learn Wolfe's take on Cold War science – not from her research on Bentley Glass, which is ongoing, but from her book Competing with the Soviets , a short, textbook-style history of science and technology in the United States during the Cold War. The book examines the role that science and scientists played in maintaining state power, and how Cold War concerns shaped individuals, institutions, funding streams and research agendas. The book hits on many of ...

We asked Myrna Perez, whose work focuses on the public role of evolutionary biology during the last quarter of the twentieth century, to reflect on that topic in a post. She's currently writing a dissertation about Stephen Jay Gould; you can find out more about her work  here.   What is so compelling about returning to our evolutionary origins? Why do we think that getting back to an earlier period in human history will make us healthier, happier and more fulfilled? In Wednesday's post, Lukas explored the appeal and historic origins of “paleo-diets” in order to make the intriguing suggestion that our attraction to these evolutionary narratives reveals a kind of ambivalent anxiety about modernity.  When I think of these “cave-man diets” I’m struck by another aspect of this evolutionary origin story: namely, what they imply about human sex difference. The image of the cave-man offers a certain type of uncivilized, rugged masculinity – one that has been hemmed in ...

Joseph Knowles emerging from the woods in his "Wilderness Garb," Oct. 4th, 1913 Over the past few years, I've been following the career of a new fad called the "paleo-diet," which advises us to adopt the eating habits of the Pleistocene. I first became aware of it from a New York Times   article featuring John Durant, a 20-something office worker turned fitness guru from Manhattan who tries to live as our ancestors did before the dawn of agriculture. On his website , Durant explains that when he started working at his first job out of college, he began to notice that he often felt tired, anxious, and stressed out. He also started to put on weight and noticed that his complexion was becoming uneven. On the lookout for an explanation for what might be going on with his body, Durant came across the UC Irvine Economist Art de Vany , who had developed a so-called evolutionary fitness regimen. Durant decided to give it a try, and began to eat a diet that is high in f...

This post is a continuation of our on-going discussion here at American Science of Rep. Lamar Smith's High Quality Research Act (HQRA), which would cut the National Science Foundation's funding to certain kinds of research, especially in the social sciences. It was only a matter of time before someone dropped the p-word, "politicization," in discussions of the HQRA. It's a word that haunts these kinds of topics. The first appearance of the word in this context that I noticed was in this post by Michael McAuliff and Ryan Grim at the Huffington Post. I want to question and probe their discussion. McAuliff and Grim use the p-word in their first paragraph when they write that the HQRA "would in effect politicize decisions made by the National Science Foundation." They never define the term. They then go on to quote approvingly from a letter that Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) wrote to Lamar Smith: "This [the HQRA] is the first step on a path tha...

We asked Andrew Hogan, a historian of science and medicine whose work focuses on the observational approaches of postwar human genetics and biomedicine, what the sort of questions he asks might reveal about contemporary science.  He sent us the following guest post; you can find out more about his work  here .  Excellent coverage of the BRCA gene patenting case by Lukas on this blog  (and elsewhere ) over the past few months has recently gotten me thinking about the ways that various analogies shape the arguments and decisions made by lawyers, jurists, and government officials. Comparisons to more tangible objects seem to be particularly influential in cases that consider scientific concepts and entities, like genes, which cannot be directly seen.  After the case Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc. was heard before the US Supreme Court last month, I read through the oral arguments , previous Court decisions for this case,...

So I said earlier that I have been busy... that is an understatement!  Not only is it baseball and soccer season at my house but I have recently become more active in science leadership opportunities in my region.  My good friend, Sherrie, and I took on a new responsibility of being our Regional Directors for the Virginia Association of Science Teachers.  We have enjoyed going to meetings and really seeing what is going on at the front lines of science leadership. One of our new responsibilities was to offer a mini-conference for teachers in our region. We were able to secure many high quality teachers (from our division) for an amazing day of science! I really wanted to focus on K-2 because they are often the "lost" ones in science educational development.  We had several really good sessions for them including "thinking like a six year old" - cognitive connections and more! We also had one on Art and Science connections, Science Notebooks and taking science outdoo...

I'd like to build on Hank's post from yesterday , which looked at Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) and Smith's potential legislation,  the "High Quality Research Act" (HQRA), which would curtail research spending on certain kinds of research at the National Science Foundation. This article nicely spells out the basic contours of the story. Rep. Smith is particularly interested in cutting funding to research in the social sciences, unless it makes contributions to economic development and national security. What has mostly gone un-mentioned in recent news articles is that most of the cuts will likely effect the NSF's program in  science and technology studies (STS), a field in which I and most other authors of this blog work.  Hank did a nice job in his post of connecting this law to two long-standing themes in STS, namely the so-called Science Wars and peer review. I would like to take this issue in a slightly different direction by focusing on STS writing on democrac...