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High Schooler Is Awarded $100,000 For Research
wired_LAIN writes "A teenager from Oklahoma was awarded $100,000 in the Intel Science Talent Search competition for building an inexpensive and accurate spectrograph that can identify the specific characteristics of different kinds of molecules. While normal spectrographs can cost between $20,000 and $100,000 to build, her spectrograph cost less than $500. The 40 finalists' projects were judged by a panel of 12 scientists, all well established in their respective fields. Among the judges were Vera Rubin, who proved Dark Matter, and Andrew Yeager, one of the pioneers of stem cell research."
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
/.'s Spectrograph needs fixed.
I guess
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
I bet! Mom & Dad never helped at all!
Needs a thousand more students like her! Way to go!
We will finally be able to identify the elusive Unobtainium!
I just found the box to change my sig. Um.... [timeless witticism].
I want to see how she did it.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Is she single? because that is hot.
My blog
The summary is incorrect. The actual cost, as stated in the article, is less than $1000, which is a bit more than $500.
Nitpick: That should probably read "provided evidence for the existence dark matter."
As an ex science fair participant, I cannot begin to say how cool this is.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Yeah, you're totally much smarter than her!
Does she keep the rights to her invention, or does somebody else get ownership of them? This sounds like a potentially valuable invention.
That's okay, I guess. Personally, I really liked the totally rad volcano that used baking soda and vinegar to actually erupt!
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Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Strap this thing on a rocket. $500 million to send a probe to mars? I bet we could do it for $250,000, maybe be less if it leaves on a tuesday.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
$100,000 is hardly "wealthy," and moreover if you RTFA, you'll see that it's a $100,000 scholarship. So she can maybe take a couple of free years at a good university, but it's hardly like she won the latest super lottery or something. It would have been nice to see more details on what she actually built, too.
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Er.. what?
Slashdot: the only place where you can make a crappy joke and have it be misinterpreted as a statement of intellectual superiority
I just found the box to change my sig. Um.... [timeless witticism].
Stem cell researchers don't slice up kids. They also don't slice up embryos that otherwise would have been developed and brought to term.
In any case, I have two thoughts on this:
One, good teachers and money can't make stupid kids smart, but they sure as hell can enable really smart kids to shine. I wonder how this ties in with Bill Gates' recent announcements concerning the state of science and math education in American schools.
Two, I notice a complete lack of representation by the "soft" sciences. Is it because the people writing the grants share the same disdain for disciplines that lack explanatory power as everyone else, or is it because it's easier to set up a biology program than a sociology program? I suspect a little of both--you probably need far more social context than an 18-year-old will have to pursue studies of voter demographics (not to mention the data acq is probably beyond their capabilities).
But some of that context used to be handled by education as well--you had to read the classics, you had to study some philosophy, you had to know history. My aero engineer friend has really never done any of that, so he's an engineer who doesn't know what "empiricism" means. Is this also a failing by our educational system? Isn't such education necessary to be a good researcher?
Not personally, but having competed at the oklahoma state science fair, as well as the Intel ISEF (but not the Intel STS), I have heard her name a few times when being presented an award. It's pretty neat to see things like this happen, and, having won awards at Intel ISEF before, something of this magnitude would surely be quite a surprise. I wish her the best; her future certainly looks bright!
Yeah, I think you're an idiot.
How did she perform the calibration? Is the calibration source traceable back to some standards somewhere?
If not, what does it mean to be accurate?
That means that if we can catch Vash the Stampede, we can manufacture 120 million spectrographs!
So now he's giving awards to the very same kids he would have preferred to slice up and use for research just a few years ago?
Sounds to me like you are losing your objectivity.
No scientists (including Yeager) are proposing the forcing of parents to terminate their pregnancies just to produce more research material.
From her biography on sciserv.org:
"Her Littrow spectrograph splits light, like a prism, and uses a camera to record the resulting Raman spectra - a specific vibrational fingerprint of the molecular compound being investigated. Using a laser as her light source, Mary tested several household objects and solvents and compared her results to published wave numbers. Despite the shortcomings of the inexpensive laser, she found she could make relatively accurate wavelength measurements with her homemade device."
And as you tread the halls of sanity, You feel so glad to be, Unable to go beyond. I have a message, From another time..
Gee, I built a mass spectromoter at my High School science fair 12 years ago. My family didn't have 500 bucks to blow on a science fair project so I had to do it for under $50 and whatever handouts I could get for free from local college professors. Funny, all I got was first place at the county science fair. Though, 100,000 bucks would have been much nicer, and actually paid for the second year of the ivy league school I had to drop out of because I couldn't afford it.
I'd probably find her very cute. Just as cute as the girls I chased (fruitlessly) in high school, and more nerdy.
I think she and the other contest winners should be put into a forced breeding program. We need more genes like hers in the pool.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
After having spent a lot of time flying in airplanes with kids, I find they are doing a bang-up job strongly encouraging this behavior themselves.
so the amount she'd be getting is $45,000, after taxes. Oh Wait! this is not the lottery. Never mind.
At least not everyone from oklahoma is as dumb as i am. wait i mean uhhhh look a pterodactyl!
she got ripped off.
1. Build Spectrograph for $500
2. Sell for $10,000
3. Profit!
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
"Ninth Place: Meredith MacGregor, 18, of Boulder, Colo., for her research on the fluid dynamics of the "Brazil Nut Effect""
Here in Brazil, we just call them nuts.
Slashdot: the only place where you can make a crappy joke and have it be misinterpreted as a statement of intellectual superiority
What do you expect with a subject line of "Um"? It's the Slashdot hint code for "Hey everybody, I'm an asshole! Now read this!"
OK, it was grade school, not high school, but still...
All the boys worked on mathematics based tasks, and
all the girls were working on physical sciences, or
at least more applied problems.
Well, there's that one well rounded kid that applied
mathematics to the triangulation of geosynchronous
satellites, but the other guys were heavy math geeks.
... the costs of keeping a CEO and board of directors.
... and thought to myself, "$500 would build you one hell of a Spirograph, but your older brother is still just going to throw the gears at you like a ninja star."
- "Sweet merciful crap!" Homer J. Simpson
Maybe I'm crazy, but it seems rare that these kinds of kids keep improving at the same rate. Is it politics that are involved in working in organizations that cause this drop off in rate of improvement? Or maybe I just expect too much. Perhaps the problems are just too hard beyond this level.
Well, in fact its not that easy.
For example, your cheap diode laser is temperature dependent. As the (anti)stokes raman lines are energy shifts from the baseline, using a normal laser will give you different callibrations for different energies. So you want a temperature stabilized one (e.g. thermoelectric cooling with feedback loop).
Now you got 1k instead of 500.
Same goes for the prisma. You really want a grating, for good results. $2k.
Then every single one has to be calibrated and tested.
And then you actually want to make profit.
The barely existing economy of scale doesnt really help much.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Oh yea? I made a rocket out of supplies I got from turning in cerial box tops.
Why not? Life is cheap and death comes to us all.
It's worse thab that. By spending time doing stem cell research he has sacrificed time spent sowing his wild oats and has therefore prevented kids from even coming into existence. Now that's evil.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Her spectrograph records Raman spectra. In the industry we're more apt to use IR, NMR, and UV. Maybe the invention of an affordable tabletop unit will advance the application of Raman technology.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
Could you have made that troll any MORE obvious? Love, Chandler
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
COULD you have gotten your 90's television reference any more wrong? No Family Guy writer job for you!
designed a new kind of extremely sensitive lie detector for Dick Cheney. Unfortunately, he wasn't actually allowed to test the device.
To be fair, so are most other subject lines.
My brain exploded when I got to "Loop homology is difficult to compute, but Mitka showed that in many cases it is isomorphic to the Hochschild cohomology of the fundamental group."
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
You're right. Although a little off-topic, I don't know why your comment was modded as flamebait or considered trolling. It's not even very controversial. Perhaps it's because people are defensive about their own divorces and cannot accept the fact that it's one of the worst things to do to your children?
Its PUSH not LIFT!! ;-)
Many of the kids have parents who are Doctors. Obviously smart people breed smart children. And children's mental development is heavily influenced by their parents.
How you can make an association to divorce is incredibly way off base! Perhaps, according to your theory, you are a child of a divorcee?
Live forever, or die trying.
I won't list her website here (it's on the Hackaday site) - can someone cache it and then provide a link?
I think its rather interesting to note that 6 out of the 10 students have parents with Doctorate level degrees. The school they go to likely has very little to do with their excellence. It's more likely their parents encouraged them to seek out knowledge.
Tricorder
Table-ized A.I.
Of the 10 prize awards there was 6 girls and 4 guys.
Surprising.
Maybe she should enter the MacGyver Contest. Is there such a thing?
Table-ized A.I.
Does anybody know? Obviously she is knowledgeable and creative, I'm just asking because there was a similar story a while ago about a kid winning a science competition for a beowulf cluster made from Xboxes. He did a nice job putting it together and wrote a good paper about the process and potential uses, but there were already several complete tutorials on building beowulf clusters, specifically from Xboxes, when he did his project. That annoyed me a bit, and I'm sure if somebody else has already completed a similar project and is now seeing this girl receive $100k they're not too happy.
it's seventh grade gym locker room all over again.
Here is my question.
How much do their parents make?
In other words did these children have oppertunities available to them that are not available to the average child?
My gut feeling is that they did.
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I'm not sure where you got that info from, but assuming you are correct, that means that at least 6 out of the 10 had a parent who have PhDs, which would put their IQ in the top 10% region. And that says nothing about the other 4, or their partners. I somehow doubt that they were janitors.
Their parents may have encouraged them to seek out knowledge, but if the children didn't have the mental hardware in place courtesy of their genetic code (and appropriate nutrients available to build that hardware to the genetic spec), they would not be able to do much with that information. Without that mental hardware it gets to become an exercise in pointlessness to even try - much like trying to instruct your dog to talk (he'll happily sit there and yip back at you all day, for his whole life), or to get SETI@home working on your HP-48GX.
The desire of parents to encourage their progeny to seek out knowledge is probably at least in part genetic. Most desires are hardwired. For example, young males hardly need parental encouragement to surf for porn, for example. It's something they do in spite of their upbringing.
But yeah, I totally agree that the school they went to has very little to do with their excellence. Basically,
smart kid + computer/ISP/google + desire to enter such a competition + access to enough money + luck (being in right place at right time) = contestant
Things are really made for the autodidact in this day and age.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
It seems that you are knowledgable about this sort of thing, so let me ask if you would...
How is her 'project' an improvement on the original design? Sure, she uses a funky digital camera as a photodetector, but is that it? I mean, a light source, a prism, an angle measure, a detector... That's sooo 1911.
How is what she did any different than going to a local library, dusting off a decades-old Britannica, and putting together what you see on a schematic?
Let's see, her rig costs $500. Most rigs cost $20-100k. See gets $100k. She can build 200 rigs for $100k, then sell them at, say $30k, for a profit of $5.9 million.
Stupid underpants gnomes.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Baking Soda and Vinegar was great eh? Wait til you find out what compressed air does when combined with Steam, and that it runs continuously... http://www.newpath4.com/enginewow.htm and http://www.newpath4.com/imitationenergy.htm . At first it looks like just another perpetual motion idea. Look closer. Gravity = Inertia of motion = place some air compressors under the car body = LEVERAGE of the outer extended body weight which multiplies the pressure on the air compressors to re-compress the air. hehehehehe There's some other links over on http://www.newpath4.com/sitemap.htm . When someone decides to give me $100,000 I'll be a-building you one. At first it might look like an old Model-T but in a few years being the first model it will be worth a lot more than you paid. It will be a Physics engine not a chemistry class engine that runs once.
Genetics is something to consider, but environment factors -- particularly access to research materials, textbooks to gain such knowledge, and inspiration -- are also important.
Even if you were this smart growing up, would you have had access to a lab capable of researching microRNA repression or the fabrication of 3-D microcubes? Would you have even had access to the books to have even heard of loop homology and Hochschild cohomology or Ducci sequences?
I certainly wouldn't have had access to any of this. While I doubt I could have ever achieved anything they did even with the right environment, without that environment I doubt that any of them could have either.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
No we do not! The articles says "Masterman's invention -- made of lenses, a laser, aluminum tubing and a camera"
Everyone knows that the so called "aluminum tubing" can ONLY be used for uranium separation centrifuges! These tubes are the reason we are in Iraq!!!
Last time I checked, /. was not a dating agency.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
So which probe is going to win its managers the most karma: the $500M project staffed by PhDs and covered in gold foil or the $250k probe staffed by highschool kids and covered in tin foil?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
It is nice to see all this chatter regarding the Intel STS winner. I just wanted to provide a little more info. While the students projects and accompanying research paper get them into the final round of the competiton, it is not the only factor in determining the winners. The students are interviewed by the judges on all aspects of science, to determine their knowledge beyond their project subject, their critical thinking skills and their ability to communicate. They are also judged on how they interact with the public, from seasoned scientists to precocious five year olds.