[dekhn]

Does anybody have a link to what the kid actually did? I skimmed the video, looked at the diagram, read the original MAKE article, and it seems like the kid did a science project and it doesn't actually diagnose pneumonia. Am I missing something important?

The reason I'm asking is that I see a lot of these (used to judge science fairs, worked with smart undergraduates who build their own equipment) but most of it overstates the technical advances made by the kid.

[jboy55]

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 to give true/false signals based on the input

All in all, not that bad of a little hack.

What I'm most disappointed by these science fare projects is that its often found that the parents of the child are top engineers in the specific field of the projects. In this case, perhaps his mom is a Sr Engineer at a company producing artificial noses aimed at detecting pneumonia where she is in charge of developing dev-kits and SDKs that happen to include sample tensor flow models.

What annoys me is that the story is often one of a kid, against all odds, learning all of this tech out of their own gumption. Where in the same science fare, 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.

[samhw]

> 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]

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.

[Mezzie]

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]

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?

[Mezzie]

I used Larry as an example because we're from the same city, ironically. My grandparents (the ones I knew anyway) are from the class that repaired electronics; we're the mechanics to their automotive engineers. My grandfather (born in 1919) was obsessed with televisions and repaired them as a side business, so the tools were all around for my dad when he started buying broken microcomputers and fixing them so he could play games. Which in turn taught him enough of the basics (ha) of BASIC and meant that when I was a kid and had basic coding questions he could help. But since we all learned on our own over 3 generations, our facility with tech doesn't 'count'.

I can't claim to be completely without privilege: I'm about as well-off as you can get and still be considered from a disadvantaged background: My mother dropped out of high school and ran away at 15 (ironically her family included engineers and at least one MSU professor), so while I never had the money, my socio never really matched my economic, class wise. It's more that if you were any lower on the ladder than I was, you just didn't have a computer or MAYBE you might have something like the 5 free hours of AOL in the late 90s. A computer with hours of internet access in 93 required some privilege.

There were a couple of G+T things I did, but I got the money we did scrounge for those from my dad, and once he married my stepmom that stopped because she believed very strongly in gender roles (she wanted me to like clothes shopping and makeup like my sisters and her female relatives) and she also wanted to live in the middle of nowhere.

> 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?

Eh, I'm not going to be successful, because doing so would require neglecting either my own health or that of my family. I have MS, and that just explodes the ability to do any kind of career planning.

That has its own silver lining, though, because I can say whatever the hell I want. Which is its own kind of freedom: I have a 'get out of hustle free' card. It's almost like skipping from being 25 to 65: I had to do a lot of reckoning with my own mortality, what I was worth if I wasn't able to have a high powered career, what did I actually want out of life, etc.

[samhw]

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).

[908B64B197]

> Is there not more to life than gaming university applications?

No.

A lot of parents are getting their kids phony medical diagnostics just so they can get extra time on exams. [0]

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2019/03/16/fake-lea...

[TuringNYC]

University applications have such a compounding effect on things the rest of your life that paid-gaming of university admissions might well be the highest ROI investment for many wealthy.

[drekipus]

> University applications have such a compounding effect on things the rest of your life

does it? I'm not in the US, so I wouldn't know.

[lowbloodsugar]

But also please be aware that some of them aren't phony.

[flir]

That kid a few years back who fed buckets of soil bacteria on plastic waste and selected for the buckets that ate the waste best was pretty cool. I really hope that wasn't fake.

[908B64B197]

Most of them aren’t.

And a lot go undiagnosed as well because the parents don’t care/are ashamed/don’t know how to navigate the system.

[TuringNYC]

Dig deeper into some of these stories and you realize they also knew someone at the newspaper. Or a very expensive college applications specialist (i.e., $20k+) orchestrated the entire thing from concept to connections to media feeding, etc. Throw in a back-story professionally written and you've got top college acceptances!

Obviously, also throw in hand-selected medical specialists who diagnose you and prescribe extra time on the exams, great photos of your child at the local soup kitchen, a clutch summer internship with the local congressperson's office.

The entire college game is comprehensively stacked against the poor. Throw in the abandoning of test-based systems towards "leadership evaluation" acceptance methods and you get even more invested into gaming this process by the wealthy.

[javajosh]

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]

"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.

[worldvoyageur]

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.

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]

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]

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.

[danachow]

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.

[Damogran6]

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]

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]

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.

[jacquesm]

One contest I'm aware of accidentally had the organizers kid win the contest. Who would have thought it possible? I feel really bad for the one that actually deserved to win.