The poster session in the last week was really great. I have never taken an STS class before this semester and therefore was really interested in what the poster session would be like and see what kinds of projects students were working on. A few of them really caught my eye. One of the most fascinating ones to me was the one on time. This project was about how we think of time currently, as 24 hours in a day, and time zones are all constructed by humans. I guess that I always sort of knew this but it was never fully explained to me the way it was in this project. I learned that not all states have to participate in day lights savings and that there are things called leap seconds, that happen about eight times every ten years and are seconds that are added on to the universal clock to keep the time “correct”.  Also, that during the industrial revolution the universal clock was created so that people connecting from different coasts, or traveling coast to coast by the newly created railroad system, knew what time it was on the other coast. This makes a lot of sense to me because before this, it did not really matter what time it was in other places because there was no way to connect with people quickly. But as technology advanced, it became more important to know what time it was in different places in order to communicate.

The project on paleo diets was also really interesting. I’ve had many different friends who have tried this diet and who have recommended it to me. This project talked about some of the negative aspects of the paleo diet, which included not getting the full amount of nutrients one needs to survive and just having initial weight lost that is not necessarily sustainable. I feel like this project is really relevant to our campus because so many people participate in different fad diets throughout the year, and this project helped debunk myths about the paleo diet to help people make more informed decisions before starting a paleo diet. Another project that I felt was really relevant to college life was the project about computers/screens and how they are changing our brains. This project talked about how our brains are changing as a result of the amount of time that our generation and younger generations spend in front of screens. It talked about how our attention spans are changing, and becoming shorter and shorter. I asked whether or not that means that we are all becoming ADD and the answer I received is that yes, most of the current generation and younger generation could be considered to have some level of ADD, but because almost all of us have it, researchers may not call it ADD because than most people would be diagnosed. I couldn’t help but think of the young boys I babysit at home and how they all have ipads or ipods and use it to play games and read all the time. Its not necessarily a bad thing that our brains are changing because of the screen time, but it is something to be considered.