6 ms·

My guess, 1 He found/was given an off the shelf fungal sensor designed to detect pneumonia 2 He hooked it up to a raspi 3 He trained a small tensorflow model t

• danachow 5y ago
  No that’s the point - there wasn’t evidence that any of 1, 2, or 3 was ever done. Some mime guy puts together a gas sensor and tinyml setup - the kid makes some report on the hypothetical ability to use to diagnose fungal pneumonia in reference to some papers in the literature, but I don’t see actual evidence of an actual experiment.
• samhw 5y ago
  > there probably was a kid who had no help from their parents, who hacked together a 'are the lights on' circuit, using hand-me-down tech components, who's getting no notice. I'd have struggled to articulate what annoys me about stories like this, but this absolutely hits the nail on the head. I went to a school in the City of London with very elite investment-banker-parents demographics, and I can't tell you the number of stories like this. One comes to mind where one kid won a contest for designing a stockpicking algorithm, and it turned out - of course - that his mum was a fund manager at Goldman, specialising in that exact same area. I don't know what the point of it is. Is there not more to life than gaming university applications?
  • dekhn 5y ago
    What bothers me the most is there was another kid who didn't win, who did real scientific work, and will go on to be a great scientist, but will never get the attention, credit, or funding that the first kid did.
    • samhw 5y ago
      Precisely. You can definitely see the downstream effects of this, too, with lots of academics who see great success by publishing total tripe in well-packaged books (see: Malcolm Gladwell, the entire field of social psychology, etc).
    • Mezzie 5y ago
      I cannot over-emphasize how utterly demoralizing things like this are to those children. The kids who are smart enough to do real work are also smart enough to figure out that nobody will care. I was so discouraged by finding out the other children who liked web development and coding had outside help, and I had a really hard time understanding why things like Synapse could get a PC Mag review, but I'd be accused of being a liar if I talked about my own projects, because that's what happens when you're a kid working without an adult. Without an appropriately credentialed adult vouching for you, people accuse you of stealing your work, lying, being an arrogant snob, etc. ESPECIALLY if you're self-taught or were taught by adults society doesn't think much of. It's believable that the Pages taught Larry to code when he was wee, but obviously I couldn't have learned anything from my parents since one was a high school dropout and the other was the son of a factory worker. How could THEY have known anything?
      • dekhn 5y ago
        Note that Larry Page's parents did more than just to code. They embedded him from birth in the academic system so that he was prepared, at Stanford, to recognize the importance of, and capitalize upon the organic value of web content. He was also exposed to the Grateful Dead, which probably helped build a healthy dose of capitalism and libertarianism. Similarly, I was raised in an academic environment exposed early to computers (4th grade) in a gifted and talented program that many other students didn't have access to. That same program was literally "grad school prep in elementary school" which meant that when I got to grad school, it wasn't like I was in some sort of foreign country; I was home. And when I finally got to google, eveyrthing there felt normal and natural since it was just an extension of grad school, but with more money and better sysadmins. That said, I guess if you don't get a leg up as a kid and go on to be successful through grit you can always appreciate that your hard work and determination paid off?
• javajosh 5y ago
  The MC knows what the crowd wants to see. If there is some contest, they will make sure the most attractive person wins. This is what the crowd wants, and the losers have no reasonable basis to protest and if they do they'll be (falsely) accused of being poor sports. Most attractive people don't know what's really happening, and assume their win is real. The thing is, I get it. There's a wholesome excitement around the idea of discovery and you want to do your part and not be a wet blanket. And it's a white lie that is good for society - if not for the ego of the hero. You want there to be a new discovery, that came out of nowhere, because that's the better story. It's the kind of Myth that a good society runs on, and needs, even if it's false, because the real out-of-nowhere discovery stories happen too infrequently to be of use. The best thing to do, really, is to give the kid a medal, and shut up about it not being real, and hope to high heaven he isn't misled by the easy victory.
  • samhw 5y ago
    "Attractive"? Do you mean this in some kind of figurative sense? If not, then I'm really not at all sure that that's how science fairs are decided.
    • javajosh 5y ago
      • samhw 5y ago
        I'm afraid I don't follow you
        • deleted 5y ago
          [deleted]
• Damogran6 5y ago
  We ran into this in Cubscouts with pinewood derby...the solution we had was a build day where the kids could go from raw block to finished car with our help and tools (belt sander with used up belt, parent or leader running the scrollsaw for the younger kids...paint at the Cubmaster's house and the parent doesn't have to worry about spraypaint) Then to get past the 'parents doing all the building' we ran an outlaw class where the siblings and parents could compete...but it's the same kind of dynamic. I don't immediately see the issue with the parent helping a child with tech they're familiar with...helping my son 3d print and sell fidget spinners had lots of little life lessons wrapped up in it.
  • dekhn 5y ago
    Heh... at "build day" only the son of the person with the tools was allowed to use any of them. I ended up building a real clunker and felt terrible for years when it lost every race to better-engineered systems. I didn't get any real parental help. This time around (by which I mean, my son was in cub scouts and doing the derby) I helped my son by showing him some basics of woodworking and how to make something that looked right and rolled properly, but beyond that it was all him. He didn't win any races, but wasn't bummed about it at all. Following that, I bought a bunch of pine blanks, read a few papers on how to make faster cars (those nail axles are REALLY DUMB), bought Fusion 360, designed a car, and flip-milled it on my personal CNC, over a period of a year (it's never raced). it amuses me to no end that imposter syndrome and OCD drove me to be a well-compensated software engineer with enough free time to build his own pinewood derby racecar in his own time on his own terms.
    • Damogran6 5y ago
      I was cubmaster for 3 years and felt a little bad that my two boys didn’t get near the attention the other kids got…til the last year I helped them with weight distribution, lubrication and axle alignment. The Wife and I ran in Outlaw and had the family been eligible would have taken 4 of the top 7 times. (I think the boys got 2nd and 4th) I’m looking at 6 of the cars now, I really should mount them in a display or something. One of the boys is learning chassis fab and welding and the other is learning Industrial Design…so I guess it was a good experience.
• worldvoyageur 5y ago
  Best science fair I ever saw was at a remote construction site near Qinshan, China in 1999. Many Canadian engineers lived on a camp by the site, building two nuclear reactors [1]. The camp also had a school for the engineer's children, literally one room with a teacher and about twenty children from grade 1 to grade 8 [2]. It was a good school, the teacher excellent and the kids clearly loving it. The older kids got a lot out of helping the younger ones. There was excellent quality recent school work in evidence on the walls. Though I did occasionally pop by the school when I'd visit the site, I usually didn't. On one of my site visits I was asked if I wanted a detour from the project site to check out the school science fair. I later figured out that the minor scheduling difficulties I had around that particular visit was so that I'd be there on the day of the science fair. Every student had a project. There were a few of the usual suspects, like the baking soda volcano and potato battery. However, those were the exception. Most of the projects were astounding, well beyond what I'd seen as an engineering undergrad in university. The kids, standing proudly in front of their project and the bristol board explanations, knew very well how to explain the project and had a deep understanding of how it had come together. They'd definitely done the work and were justifiably proud. That said, the majority of the projects were such that they could only have been the product of many evenings and weekends over months of father[3]/child working together. I'll assume that work on the next science fair would have begun the day after the science fair I saw wrapped up. 1. Qinshan III, units 1 and 2; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qinshan_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qinshan_Nuclear_Power_Plant. 2. High school was a boarding school back in Canada. 3. I'm pretty sure that all the engineers were male, for I'd be remembering a female engineer, but the school kids were a balance mix of boys and girls.
  • lowbloodsugar 5y ago
    I have friends where the dad works, and the mom runs the household, but the mom is just as good an engineer (or better). Since you're acknowledging and explaining the issue with [3], perhaps just using "parent" would have been better.
    • worldvoyageur 5y ago
      I appreciate the observation. While I understand the logic of using parent, as a general rule I'm uncomfortable deliberately substituting words with less information when a word with more information is available. It'd be like seeing a flock of geese fly over and saying birds. If you weren't really sure they were geese, or thought maybe a few were not geese, then maybe you write 'birds'. However, if you saw geese and it would have been striking and obvious if one or more of the birds was not a goose, then more information is given saying geese rather than birds. If there had been a female engineer at the site, working or at home, I'm pretty sure I'd have known. This was rural China in the late 90s. A live in nanny would have been available at very low cost. Plus, the hunger for engineers willing to live at a camp site in rural China for months at a time was such that had there been any engineer spouses, they'd have had to make a very deliberate decision NOT to work.