The Politically Incorrect Science Fair

Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "Science fairs have reached new levels of intensity, and students are turning to trendy topics like stem-cell research and intelligent design to get a leg up, the Wall Street Journal reports. 'Serene Chen says she might not be at Harvard now were it not for her application essay, which described her fetal-stem-cell research on the characteristics of Down syndrome. "If you say you studied something like 'random molecule,' it's obscure, but when you say 'stem cells,' people really perk up," says Ms. Chen, 20, now a sophomore. ... Of a 2002 project involving marijuana muffins for pain management in Santa Cruz, Calif., Mission Hill Middle School science teacher Sherri Kilkenny says, "It got all this attention, but it was very average at best." '"

Comments

Interesting

[azureice]

I'll be attending my second Intel ISEF this year, but I have yet to see anything that controversial. I've heard of controversial 4th dimension calculus projects, but never stem cells. I'm sure something like stem cell research would attract a lot of attention. I think it's a good thing if we start seeing these kidns of projects though. Some people might be offended by it or against it, but it's pushing science in the right direction of exploring the unknown, and it's good to see students picking up on this.

From someone with first hand experience....

[yamamushi]

As a student who has been competing the Intel Science Fair for the past 4 years, I can say from experience that there are some very BS topics out there. Projects that have no scientific merit, Judges that don't understand what you are talking about so give you a random score depending on their level of intelligence (if you confuse the smart ones you get a low score, but the dumb ones give you high scores). Then there are the projects that couldn't have possibly been done without the help of professionals (their parents are doctors, their teachers doing research for them, etc.). I wrote small operating system 2 years ago, and had the misfortune of having a judge point to a random line in my source code and ask "What does this line do?". When I couldn't answer him (20,000 line+ source), he gave me straight 2's (highest being 6, lowest being 0), which knocked me out of competing at state. San Antonio boasts one of the largests Science Fairs in TX, however they need to get their act straight and get some good judges instead of the one's they've had in the past. For anyone that's interested, I'm doing my project over Buffer Overflows on MINIX 3.0 this year (which supposedly eliminates the threat of Buffer Overflows).

Re:Intelligent Design: why is it lumped with scien

[cutedinochick]

Just curious - why do you think anti-intellectuals are "liberals"? I thought it was the other way around. All the scientists I know (and being a paleo grad student, I've attended a lot of professional meetings, including the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology meeting in 2004 which occurred during the presidential elections, so a lot of anger happening there) are very liberal, and we also have discussions during these meetings about ID (creationism) and what we can do about it as educators. I guess you'd call me a liberal because I'm pro-choice and things like that, and I'm giving a talk at my old high school on paleontology and also introducing the topics of ("controversial" to religious people) evolution, plate tectonics, and radioactive dating, because none of these are really taught in school and hey, if you're going to talk about biology and geology, these are unavoidable, as they form the backbone of these sciences.

And isn't the president's administration for the teaching of ID in schools? (shocking, I know) I don't think you can lump all liberals as being anti-intellectual, even if you know some who are, and if you're going to lump either of them as that, I'd have to go with conservatives. But then again, my parents are extrememly conservative and wanted me to get married and have kids right out of high school instead of going to college, so I may just be biased.

However, you're right about ID not being science, of course, as it only tries to fill in the gaps with God and so uses the lack of physical evidence as its basis, which is very non-scientific. We know more about evolution than we do about why gravity works (I've heard it said, but even if not, we still don't know everything about gravity), but you don't see people filling in those holes with "God did it."

most won't become scientists

[surlygrad]

I went to a super competitive prep school, where everyone had Ivy on the brain. I remember two girls my age on the student newspaper. They both worked very hard at it, and when we were seniors they fought each other, practically to the death, over who got the top editor spot. The loser got the next rung. Both went on to Yale. Yale has one of the best college newspapers in the country, the Yale Daily News. I remember looking them up in college to see if either had continued in journalism; the answer was no. The girl who became the editor in chief? She became an investment banker as soon as she graduated. My point is, these kids in the science fairs, like those two girls, are just doing whatever it takes to get into college, and may not have any real interest in being scientists.

Plus ca change

[Flying pig]

Back in the 60 when radioactivity was good and uranium was the wonder fuel of the future, I spent a year of out of school chemistry working on chemical separation of short lived isotopes from uranium.

Once I'd actually been accepted by Cambridge, I never went near chemistry again. (The joke was that after all that I passed the exam with enough points not to proceed to oral interview, so I never got to talk to anyone about my "research project". And, anyway, when I got there I found that what I was doing was just low grade industrial stuff, and real research wasn't anything like that at all.)

Re:"Science" fair?

[jcr]

There is not enough evidence to support EITHER theory.

What's your next guess?

First of all, ID is not a theory, it's a leap to a conclusion based on nothing more than wishful thinking.

The theory of evolution is the model which best fits the available evidence. That species evolve over time is not in reasonable doubt. The questions are largely matters of detail: when and where did this species first diverge from its ancestors? What ecological niche did it fill? What factors resulted in selection for particular mutations?

-jcr