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If you asked me four months ago what I would be doing this summer, chances are you would receive one of three responses:

1) "It's only January! There's two feet of snow on the ground and you're asking me about summer?"

2) "I'm not sure yet, but ideally I would like a paid internship in Philly."

3) "Well I applied for a bunch of journalism internships..."

Note that what I'm actually doing is not found in any of the above responses. Go figure. However, I'm more excited about this summer's current potential than any other plans I could have made. 

    My name is Jenna Pfeiffer and I am a rising junior at Bryn Mawr College. I am an anthropology major and a biology minor. Upon entering Bryn Mawr I was certain I was majoring in biology, yet as I studied anthropology it dawned on me that I could study both disciplines simultaneously as each focused on human life in unique ways. I am incredibly excited to start working with Dr. Grobstein and Mr. Wilfred Franklin as well as my peers at the K-12 Pre-College Science Education Fellowship at Bryn Mawr College because I think it is a valuable outlet to studying the ways in which students learn about science and mathematics as well as their responses to both disciplines.

 For my final project I chose to create and "altered book" using Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the actual book that I read for this course. One concept that really captured me by the end of our discussions was the idea of framing, and what in our lives actually is framed. I enjoyed writing my final essay on this topic and I wanted to continue this thought process with my project. My altered book has within it a representation of what I got out of the class and from each of the literary kinds that we covered. This is unlike my posts on Serendip because they are more abstract and include more image representations- they also are more of what I think of as a summary rather than a conversation about the course.

 William and Alice James:

Unsurprisingly Unable to See Eye-to-Eye

Music is without a doubt a universal language that transcends time, generations, and cultures. It makes for good entertainment, interest, and constructive pursuit that enriches the lives of whomever it touches. Some researchers believe that our natural, almost universal predisposition to the enjoyment of and emotional reaction to music is hard-wired into us – that it has always played a pivotal role in helping humans develop their minds and relationships with others. One writer suggests, “ Babies are born with musical wisdom and appetite, music facilitates well-being and returns people to well-being from mental and physical impairments – it is deep in our genetic structures” (1).

In her book, The Female Brain, Louanne Brizendine describes the stages that the female brain goes through during life, citing brain structure and chemistry as the departure for differences between the male and female brains. Most of the misunderstanding of female psychology, Brizendine notes, stems from the misconception held by scientists during most of the 19th and 20th centuries - “that women are essentially small men in psychology and physiology”. She says that it is important to make the distinction between male and female psychologies because physiological sources for these differences do exist, contrary to the reality that they are usually just brushed off as mere deviations during studies.

 Kate Gould

Professor Grobstein

Neurobiology

27 April 2010

Rifts in Time

Pharmaceutical companies have been grappling with the placebo effect since the 1950s, when its surprising powers were discovered. As long as a patient is under the assumption that he or she is receiving a drug, a sugar pill or saline injection can alleviate illness and cure disease—sometimes, with close to the same level of efficacy as the actual drug. The science behind the placebo is shaky, and there are studies being conducted, but what seems to be of more concern to scientists is the placebo’s detriment to drug trials. Martin Enserink, in Science, discussed in his report on the placebo the recent failure of a new drug by Merck, MK-869, an antidepressant.