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Scientists call for public action in support of research with animals.

For those who have been following the activities of "animal rights" activists, including their attacks of the homes of researchers -- and the reticence of the public in the face of such violent attacks -- a recent Commentary in Biological Psychiatry [1] will be of interest. In it, a number of scientists call on their scientific peers to actively engage in dialogue with the public about what scientific research with animals actually involves and why it is important. From the commentary: The attacks are horribly misguided. It is impossible to reconcile the willingness of these terrorists to…

What ought to be driving college admissions decisions?

Recently Inside Higher Ed had an article about a study (PDF here) coming out of the University of California on the predictive power of the SAT with respect to grades in college courses. The study, by Saul Geiser and Maria Veronica Santelices at the UC-Berkeley Center for Studies in Higher Education, followed the performance (which is to say, grades) of students at all UC campuses for four years and found that "high school grades are consistently the strongest predictor of any factor of success through four years in college". Indeed, the study found high school grades a stronger predictor…

Who's in the club? Why does it matter?

I'm recycling another post from the ancestor of this blog, but I'm adding value by adding some newish links to good stuff on other blogs. * * * * * How much does it matter that certain groups (like women) are under-represented in the tribe of science? I'm not, at the moment, taking up the causes (nor am I looking for any piss-poor "Barry Winters"-style theories as to the causes). At present, the bee in my bonnet is the effects. And this is not a hypothetical situation. This post at Thanks for Not Being a Zombie links to an article from the New York Times with some sobering statistics: Even…

Friday Sprog Blogging: dreaming of snakes.

Dr. Free-Ride: So, you know how sometimes you have nightmares? Younger Offspring: Yeah. Dr. Free-Ride: I had a nightmare the other night.* Younger Offspring: What was it? Dr. Free-Ride: Well, I was supposed to be picking up snakes with two sticks and moving them from one place to another. Younger Offspring: Why? Dr. Free-Ride: I don't know why. It was one of those dreams where, in the middle of it, you really don't know why it is like it is, but you just go with it. But anyway, it was fine until I realized that one of the snakes that I had to pick up was a cobra. Younger Offspring: Yikes!…

I will be the first to welcome our new Ape Overlords

We dropped the atomic bomb on japan today (in 1945) and that caused a lot of changes in the world. The idea of a bomb like this was so outrageous that it was actually possible to keep the project secret even though thousands of people worked for months on it, at many different locations. In one plant where nuclear material was being enriched people were told to make up whatever they wanted when asked what they were doing, as long as they avoided saying what they were doing. This was a bit risky because they didn't actually know, as mere cogs in a larger and incomprehensible machine, what…

On the Move

On the Move: How and Why Animals Travel in Groups, edited by Sue Boinski and Paul Garber is a compendium of academic research on ... well, on how and why animals travel in groups. Notice of this book is a fitting start to a series of reviews of migration-related books that is part of Migration Week on GLB. (For an overview of the Bigness and Vastness of bird migration in particular, see A Question of Migration.) Group movement is only rarely migration, though the two phenomena are overlapping subsets. An example of group movement that demands some explanation is that found in chimpanzees…

Keep an eye on the prey: You'll find the predator

In Robert Gardner's documentary film Dead Birds, the men of a highland New Guinea village guard the perimeter of the territory, watchful for men of the neighboring group who may be intent on sneaking into the gardens to capture and kill an unwitting child or woman in order to avenge a prior death. But they don't see the men sneaking through the dense riparian forest. They don't even look for them. Rather, they see the birds fly from their preferred habitat where they are foraging or resting, startled into the open by ... something. The birds belie the predator. Today, in construction…

Why the Hobbits of Flores Were Probably Not Broken People

There is a new paper out suggesting that the Flores hominids, known as Hobbits, were "human endemic cretins." From the abstract of this paper: ... We hypothesize that these individuals are myxoedematous endemic (ME) cretins, part of an inland population of (mostly unaffected) Homo sapiens. ME cretins are born without a functioning thyroid; their congenital hypothyroidism leads to severe dwarfism and reduced brain size, but less severe mental retardation and motor disability than neurological endemic cretins. We show that the fossils display many signs of congenital hypothyroidism, including…

Thank you, Michael Behe

By request, I'm bringing over this old post on the outcome of the Dover trial. What it reveals to an astonishing degree is how delusional and disconnected from reality the Discovery Institute gang are. Michael Behe has previously commented on his testimony in the Kitzmiller trial. He felt good about it; in fact, he thought it was exhilarating and fun. I haven't the foggiest idea how the Judge will rule, but I think we got to show a lot of people that ID is a very serious idea. Hmmmm…I wonder, what did the judge think of his testimony? Do you think there might be a way to, you know, find…

A warm-up for the David Kirby-Arthur Allen debate

In a warmup for his "debate" later today in LaJolla, CA with Arthur Allen, David Kirby spews the usual pseudoscience again. I can't believe he's still making the long debunked "autism has the same symptoms as mercury poisoning" statement with a straight face, and then continuing to parrot the same old "mercury in thimerosal in vaccines causes autism" and the same fallacy of equating correlation with causation by claiming that, because autism increased in the 1990's at the same time when more vaccines were being added to the childhood vaccination schedule. I'm not sure why the video is cut…

Denialists Against Corrections

About a week ago, the World Meteorological Organization put out a statement to correct the erroneous claims in the media that global warming had stopped (emphasis theirs): GENEVA, 4 April 2008 (WMO) - The long-term upward trend of global warming, mostly driven by greenhouse gas emissions, is continuing. Global temperatures in 2008 are expected to be above the long-term average. The decade from 1998 to 2007 has been the warmest on record, and the global average surface temperature has risen by 0.74C since the beginning of the 20th Century. The current La Niña event, characterized by a…

Non-Science Fridays: Amateur anthropologist edition

I read a couple of critiques of Going Tribal (Or Tribe depending on whether you watch via the BBC or the Discovery Channel) lately that piqued my interest. The first was by The Times and the other was from Short Sharp Science(S^3). For the uninitiated, the Times gives a pretty good, if rather snarky, synopsis of a show: Parry lands in remote spot, meets suspicious tribal elders, gets injected with jumba-wamba juice, trips out, vomits and defecates wildly, is accepted into the tribe and finally goes home refreshed and confident in the knowledge that the world's indigenous peoples are, like,…

Vaccines and Autism

The Washington Post reported yesterday on the vaccine court proceeding that starts today. Almost 5000 families will make the case that vaccines caused their children to develop autism. I don't think the families have a good case. To start off, the large majority of findings would suggest that there is not link. There are, however, some very good reasons why these studies could be wrong and that's what's keeping the theory alive. Let's look at a couple of arguments that people like to make and what I think about them. Con - The IOM said that overall there was no link. While this is true,…

The Case of the Missing Blood

Prologue: Deep within a middle-aged woman, somewhere betwixt her brain and heart a microscopic sentry scans a vast network of blood vessels, monitoring the flow of red corpuscles like a forest ranger looking for smoke. He has a worried look on his face. The number of cells passing by his station has steadily declined for some time now; the glow around him turns from its usual scarlet to a pallid pink. He grimly flips open a nearby cabinet door and with one last glance over his shoulder presses a button. Suddenly the entire universe flips on its side, flinging him across the room. The…

Help Ben Goldacre out...he's being sued again

If I lived in the U.K., I don't know if I could blog. After all, the U.K. has some of the most plaintiff-friendly libel laws in the world, far more so than here in the U.S., in that in a libel case it is up to the defendant to prove that what he wrote is true, not the plaintiff to prove it false and defamatory. Just go back to 2000 and the most depressing exhibition of that very principle, namely disgraced pseudohistorian David Irving's libel suit against Professor Deborah Lipstadt for having referred to him as a Holocaust denier (which he undoubtedly is) in her book Denying the Holocaust:…

Hypocrisy and the Big Three bailout

Detroit's my hometown. I was born in the city, spent the first ten years of my life within the city limits, at least until my parents moved to the suburbs. Given that, I've been watching events unfold with regard to the impending bankruptcy of GM and Chrysler (and, less likely but still possible, Ford) with increasing dismay. The economic devastation that would be visited upon Detroit were even one, much less all three, of the Big Three to fall would be beyond imagining. On the one hand, my disgust at the mismanagement at the top that wants to see the heads of the Big Three executives on a…

Greenland Melting: A Photo Essay

It is nearly a magical sight to wake up to the gentle snowfall on Christmas morning. When the snow is still falling two days later, the magic starts to fade. Eventually, while poking at several inches of ice, buried beneath ten inches of snow, in hopes of finding your car, what was once magic soon becomes kicking and cursing: "&#%!@* MELT ALREADY!" But that’s the story in Colorado, at least. Elsewhere, say atop the sheet of ice covering Greenland, you might hear similar expletives, with a different tone. "&#%!@* MELT ALREADY!?" Because, as feared, Greenland is melting... but far more…

New Carpet Concerns

A colleague of Janet, over at Adventures in Ethics and Science, recently asked ScienceBlogs if certain chemical compounds in new carpeting could increase the risk of allergies for her young child. My father has been working in environmental safety for most of my lifetime. When I first brought my son home, I pestered him endlessly with questions about making my home a safe environment. Usually I was overreacting, but it was always reassuring to have that expert opinion at hand. Unfortunately, not everyone is lucky enough to have a chemist for a father. So, in hopes of reassuring Janet's…

The Half Truths of the Anti-Meat Lobby

I've always been conflicted about vegetarianism. I have known many vegetarians and vegans in my life and it is a lifestyle choice that I can respect for its intent. I genuinely dislike factory farming of any food product, animal or plant. We take it for granted that our supermarket shelves will be stocked with mountains of flesh for consumption, and I hate to think of all the meat that is wasted. Last night I skimmed a Facebook post fervently discussing vegetarianism. The author posted a huge list of claims, from its health benefits to supposed evolutionary ties, and I wanted to take some…

Thank You, Antivaxxers, and Let the Deconstructing Begin

Deconstructing David Kirby. This is the title of one of two follow-up posts that Dr. Rahul Parikh wrote after reviewing Dr. Paul Offit's Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure and getting the usual treatment by the usual "anti-vaccine/pro-vaccine-safety/mercury militia" suspects: A smackdown by the likes of David Kirby himself, Kirby being the author of the book Evidence of Harm, whose very subtitle proclaims that mercury in vaccines has something to do with a supposed "autism epidemic," and that this is a "medical controversy." Since its publication…

Kiwi Lime Pie (with Bonus Cocktail)

The mojito is quite possibly a perfect cocktail. Fussing with it never seems to generate significant improvements, but driven by the need to seem unique and creative, bars keep offering variations with pomegranate, green tea, lychee, or whatever else the flavor of the month happens to be. After impulse-purchasing some kiwis and throwing them into a mojito pie for the ScienceBlogs Pi Day contest, I can't say I'm any better than a bartender shilling $12 cocktails to jaded foodies. But the kiwi and lime blend seamlessly together in a refreshingly tart custard, and hey, they were on sale. You'll…

Navigenics to add gene sequencing to its personal genomic service

Navigenics has announced in the industry publication In Sequence (subscription only) that it plans to add gene sequencing to its personal genomics service. This would make it the first of the "Big Three" personal genomics companies (Navigenics, 23andMe and deCODEme) to offer analysis of rare as well as common genetic variants. The move into sequencing has always been inevitable for the personal genomics industry. Currently all three of the major players in the affordable personal genomics field (as opposed to Knome's high-end service) use chip-based technology to analyse up to a million…

It's Getting Kind of Hot Out There....

Oh boy, it was a real scorcher in our nation's capital today... at least by April standards! With temperatures in some locales surpassing 90 degrees, several area daily high temperature records were broken. As I sweated through the day, I got to thinking: where are all of those oh-so-clever political cartoonists and global-warming-denying Republican politicians who just a couple of months ago were incessantly using February's record-breaking snows to "mock" the idea of global warming? (Bueller...? Bueller...? Bueller...?) The fact is that this is largely an irrelevant*** question (well,…

Beyond Victory: What 2006 Means for the Democrats and for Science

With the election results almost completely finalized, it's time to reflect on what they mean. Make no mistake about it, Tuesday demonstrated a true mandate for the Democrats. The Democrats achieved a majority in both the Senate and the House, picking up 6 seats and 29 seats, respectively. The Democrats did not lose any seats in either house. In total votes, the Democrats had a 13.4% advantage over the Republicans in Senate races and 5.6% advantage in House races (this shows that, in the Senate in particular, the 2 seat advantage that the Democrats hold hardly does them justice). The main…

Irreducible complexity, again?

We've had a creationist named "biasevolution" babbling away in the comments. He's not very bright and he's longwinded, always a disastrous combination, and he tends to echo tedious creationist tropes that have been demolished many times before. But hey, I'm indefatigable, I can hammer at these things all day long. He brings up irreducible complexity (IC), Behe's ever-popular contribution to the creationism debate. Behe's version of the idea was published in 1996, so we've had almost 20 years to refute it -- successfully! -- so it gets a little old seeing it brought up again and again. If you…

Creationist genetics

Reading through Good Math, Bad Math, I saw a classic example of creationist foolishness: a fellow who insists that math will vindicate the Bible by proving that π = 3. It reminded me of this old post where a creationist had the thread jumping in her need to prove that the story of Jacob and Laban actually demonstrated a valid form of biblical genetics. So here it is; the original comments are also amusing. It's not just the US that is infested with creationists; take a look at Canadian Christianity. Like their southern brethren, they seem to be greatly concerned about homosexuals and…

Yawn! Yawn! Yawn! Yawn! Yawn! Contagious Yawn!

It's been a pretty long stressful week around here, and not just because of Pepsipocalypse and the resulting fallout. But, well, I'm back, and I have an awesome paper to tell you about. When I saw it I just KNEW it had to be blogged. Mythbuster Adam Savage sets the yawning in motion in Mythbusters attempts to start a yawning epidemic across the globe Did watching that video make you yawn? Chances are it did, and you can thank contagious yawning for it. What is contagious yawning? Contagious yawning is a very well-dcoumented phonemenon wherein yawning is triggered by the perception of others…

Developmental Genetics Comes to Life

During the early part of the twentieth century, biological research was somewhat disjointed. Naturalists studied organisms and populations in the wild; geneticists were working out the mechanisms of heredity; and other researchers were figuring out how animals develop from a fertilized egg to an adult. One important union occurred when the naturalists and geneticists came together to study the genetics of natural populations. This led to the field of population genetics, which is still providing us with insights into the mechanisms of evolution today. Another major advance occurred when…

Ernst Mayr -- Playa' Hater

No, Dr. Mayr did not dislike the beach. That's just how all the kids are saying, "You ain't down with the shit I'm doing." Anyway, read this post attacking the physicists for calling us stamp collectors on a blog with a very cumbersome name. MissPrism puts a throw-away link at the end of the post to Roger Lewin's 1982 interview with Mayr (available here if you have a subscription to JSTOR). I actually like MissPrism's post better than Lewin's article, so you're not missing much if you can't get access to the Mayr interview. I have some quotes from Mayr, and my responses, below the fold. Both…

Not a racist or a sexist, no sir, certainly not!

I have been down the rabbit hole. I got sucked down into a prolonged web search on the matter of pre-WWII eugenics, which is more than a little squicky, but was fascinated to discover a thriving community of correspondents which reminded me precisely of the various flavors of blog commenters today — that is, opinionated, sometimes pretentious, and often liberally sprinkled with asses. I started picking out names and searching for their contributions. In particular, I focused on someone named R.B. Kerr, who had at least a 25 year history of writing letters and articles for eugenics journals,…

Topi or not Topi ...

Go to any bar and you'll see a lot of males standing and sitting around not mating. I'll bet you would have guessed that the reason they are not mating is that no females will mate with them for one reason or another. But there is the distinct possibility that they are very inconspicuously resisting mating opportunities. It turns out that males can do this .... avoid mating without conspicuous resistance ... more easily than females. For obvious reasons. This could be why what has become (inappropriately) known as "reversed sexual aggression" often goes unnoticed, and a recent study of the…

Universe lets age clue slip

If you don't know someone's age, over time they may let out clues that tell you when they were born based on what they remember, or things they claim to have done. This can be very inaccurate. My wife said something the other day that would cause anyone to infer that she was at least ten years older than she is, but it turns out the TV show she was referring to came to her home as syndicated re-runs. (My own personal memory of the recently deceased Soupy Sales is a similar example.) The Universe You can always ask a person his or her age, but you have to infer the age of inanimate…

Goldilocks, a Very Cold Winter Night, And a Strange Sense of Empty-ness

So we arrive at the cabin, and something seems amiss. With each new clue uncovered, we are at first disturbed, then aghast, and finally, astonished. None of it made very much sense until we found the note. Wow. The note. A repost ... reposted for a reason (see next post) The reason we were there at all was to drop off an old refrigerator and to check on things. There are two cabins, one semi-heated for winter, the other closed down, and into the second of these we would haul the fridge, staying for the night in the first. Someone noticed a bag of cans, mostly soda, and some beer bottles…

Integrate. Annotate. Federate.

Following on to yesterday's post, where I wrote about the four functions that traditional publishers claim as their space (registration, certification, dissemination, preservation), I want to revisit an argument I made last week at the British Library. In my slides, I argued that the web brings us at least three additional functions: integration, annotation, and federation. I wanted to get this argument out onto the web and get some feedback... Let's start with integration. The article no longer sits on a piece of dead tree, inside a journal formatted by date and volume and page number. It…

Culture clashes and conference etiquette

Here I am on ScienceBlogs, thanks to the loose definition of "science" that lets in "information science" and the even looser definition of "information science" that includes whatever it is I do. And yesterday I found myself wondering whether I had any business being here--although the thought was more along the lines of "Holy cr*p! What's going on here?" The situation had nothing to do with this blog--and a lot, I think, to do with culture clashes along the lines of that half-century-old notion of the Two Cultures. The trigger The trigger was a cluster of conversations taking place on…

Chapter 2: Variation Under Nature

Here's a project for a playful biology grad student with some time on his or her hands. Take chapter 2 of the Origin of Species, 'Variation Under Nature', and modernize the language. Toss in a few figures and some contemporary citations. Give the result a title like 'A routemap for biodiversity research 200 years after Darwin', put your name on it and submit to Trends in Ecology and Evolution. I'm not promising anything, but you might get lucky. In his first chapter on domestic species, Darwin spent a lot of time worrying about questions that, thanks especially to molecular genetics, we now…

Too clever by, hmmm, about 5% a year

Coblogger John Sides quotes a probability calculation by Eric Lawrence that, while reasonable on a mathematical level, illustrates a sort of road-to-error-is-paved-with-good-intentions sort of attitude that bothers me, and that I see a lot of in statistics and quantitative social science. I'll repeat Lawrence's note and then explain what bothers me. Here's Lawrence: In today's Wall Street Journal, Nate Silver of 538.com makes the case that most people are "horrible assessors of risk." . . . This trickiness can even trip up skilled applied statisticians like Nate Silver. This passage from his…

Experts and accountability

My buddy Janet always makes me think, which is one of the things I like about her (that, and her cookies). Today, she wrote about a recent PLoS Biology article about the vaccine-autism debate (Orac has also covered it, of course). I especially like Janet's take on expert status and accountability. Let's examine these issues from a doctor's perspective (and speaking of credentials, "Janet" is also Dr. Stemwedel, a professor of philosophy and ethics, and former physical chemist, so she's not making this stuff up). Who is an "expert"? Dr. Stemwedel addresses this problem head-on, questioning…

The Charge of the Clueless Brigade

Last week Kyoto came into effect. Apparently that was the signal for columns by a whole bunch of pundits who have two features in common: 1. they are manifestly ill-equipped to understand the science and 2. they are utterly certain that there is no such thing as global warming. Our first pundit is Michael Duffy in the Daily Telegraph informs us: The truth is we have no control over global warming, and in any case it's not a problem at all. The myth holds that carbon dioxide in the upper atmosphere is increasing, due mainly to industrial activities, and this…

Sarah Hershberger and Zija MLM

Like many cases of children with cancer whose parents tried to deny them curative therapy in the past that I've written about, I've become intensely interested in the case of 10-year-old Amish girl with lymphoblastic lymphoma. Her name is Sarah Hershberg, and, in a rare instance of the state actually stepping in to protect the life of a child whose parents choose quackery over effective therapy, the court actually named a guardian to make medical decisions for her, leading the quacks and quack apologists to lose their minds. Sadly, the Hershbergers have reportedly fled the country, although,…

NCCAM and "pragmatic trials." Again.

I'm not alone in pointing this out, but if there's one thing about research and clinical trials into "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) that has become very apparent to me over the years, it's that the more rigorous the study the less likely it is to show an effect. In normal research, the usual progression in clinical research goes from small pilot and observational studies to small to medium-sized randomized studies, ultimately culminating in large randomized, double-blind studies that are tightly controlled to eliminate as many potential biases and confounders as possible, as…

What are tumor suppressor genes?

I'm trying to raise money for the The Leukemia &amp Lymphoma Society, and I promised to do a few things if we reached certain goals. I said I'd write a post explaining what tumor suppressor genes are, while wearing a pirate hat and nothing else, if we raised $5000. Shiver me timbers, I did! And it's cold! If you want more, go to my Light the Night fundraising page and throw money at it. I'll write about microRNAs and cancer when we hit $7500. Note that we're also getting matching funds from the Todd Stiefel Foundation, so join in, it's a good deal. There's a basic principle in…

The battle over NCSE

It's still going on. Jerry Coyne repeated our common criticism that the NCSE spends too much effort promoting Christianity; then Richard Hoppe fires back, complaining that his comment was held in moderation (Coyne has been sick for a while, you know…I wish people would have more patience), and then repeating the common and misguided defense that NCSE is not an atheist organization. We know. We've both agreed on multiple occasions that the NCSE should not be an atheist organization. But still we get this same tiresome objection. NCSE's main remit is defending the teaching of evolution in the…

Choosing choice

Our dear friend Red State Rabble has managed to start a fight with the Cato Institute. Or at least with their Neal McCluskey (not, as I first thought, with Casey Luskin). Cato is defending their latest attempt to justify publicly funded vouchers for private schools, and RSR responds by rightly noting that such vouchers would cause creationist schools to "spring up like mushrooms after a summer shower." McCluskey says that vouchers would promote school choice, and that if people were choosing creationist schools now, those schools would already exist. What he seems not to realize is that…

Apolo Ohno Physics

It is winter Olympics time and time for physics. The event that I always gets me thinking about physics is short track speed skating. It is quite interesting to see these skaters turn and lean at such high angles. All it needs is a little sprinkling of physics for flavor. Check out this image of Apolo (apparently, it is not Apollo). How about I start with a force diagram? I know what you are thinking...Fcent....what force is that? Yes, I am going to use the centrifugal force in this case - but remember that sometimes fake forces are awesome. In short, if I want to pretend like Apolo…

Holiday in Wingnuttia

Hillary has lost it. First, she signs on with John McCain's idiotic plan to eliminate gas taxes for a while. This is stupid, because it won't actually cut prices (the price of a good like gasoline is dominated by how much customers are willing to pay, and fiddling with the tax won't change demand, just how much money oil companies get and how much goes to the government). It's also stupid because it will starve the government of funds it uses to maintain roads, and infrastructure maintenance is always good, and is especially important as a form of counter-cyclical spending in a recession.…

Physics of Linerider III: Air Resistance

There is no air resistance in line rider. Sorry to spoil the suspense. To test for the presence of an air resistance force, a track was created that let the rider fall.  (note the markers on the side. These are used to keep track of how the origin is moving). Below is the y position of the rider as a function of time:  In this situation, the rider falls about 100 meters. A quadratic line is fit to the data…

Anchoring

In the last few months, the globalized world has endured two very different crises. First, there was the ash cloud over Europe, which paralyzed air travel for millions of passengers. Then, there is the leaking oil well in the Gulf of Mexico, which continues to spew somewhere between 5000 and 60,000 barrels of crude into the ocean every day. While these disasters have nothing in common, our response has been plagued by the same fundamental problem. In both instances, officials settled on an early version of events - the ash cloud posed a severe danger to plane engines, and the oil well wasn't…

Thinking About Tomorrow

The lure of instant gratification is hard to resist: when we want something, we want it right now. Of course, maturity and reality demand that we learn to wait, that we postpone our pleasures until tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. And so we stash money in our savings account, and forgo the SUV for the sake of climate change and don't eat the entire pint of ice cream. We resist the tug of immediate delight for the sake of even more delight in the future. That, at least, is how we're supposed to behave. The problems arise with a mental process known as delay discounting, which refers to our…

The Tiger Woods Effect

Success is intimidating. When we compete against someone who's supposed to be better than us, we start to get nervous, and then we start to worry, and then we start to make stupid mistakes. That, at least, is the lesson of a new working paper by Jennifer Brown, a professor at the Kellogg school. Brown demonstrated this psychological flaw by analyzing data from every player in every PGA tournament from 1999 to 2006. The reason she chose golf is that Tiger Woods is an undisputed superstar, the most intimidating competitor in modern sports. (In 2007, Golf Digest noted that Woods finished with 19…