A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia
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A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia
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Re: A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia
#2This is what happens when you give children the tools to succeed by teaching them math and science in ways that directly relate to their world view. Obviously, this kid is very bright, but giving kids the tools to understand how the ideas they're learning can be applied in the real world is so satisfying. They aren't blinded by previous failures, or the current market, or what can and can't be done.
Re: A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia
#3I wonder what his parents do for a living. Just curious.
Re: A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia
#4This is what happens when you give children the tools to succeed by teaching them math and science in ways that directly relate to their world view. Obviously, this kid is very bright, but giving kids the tools to understand how the ideas they're learning can be applied in the real world is so satisfying. They aren't blinded by previous failures, or the current market, or what can and can't be done.
Maybe. It’s more like it’s what a kid’s parents do when kids can no longer be kids and are driven to start working on their college applications earlier and earlier.
There’s more to life than getting into MIT.
Re: A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia
#5we need to identify the factors that enabled this awesome kid to have the background knowledge, tools, environment etc and see how we can replicate them to find other such diamonds in the wild...
Re: A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia
#6Does anyone else approach these "teen invents x" or "wiz kid middle schooler discovers y" articles with extreme skepticism? About half the time the invention turns out to be bogus or trivial, and in the other half it comes to light the parents were behind it.
Re: A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia
#7I wonder what his parents do for a living. Just curious.
Does it matter? Watching everything through the myopic lens of "privilege" is wrong.
A kid can have an idea and parents can help. For now, the set of {kids, parents} that can do that is limited. But technology changes and becomes more accessible. What matters is the new things that become not just possible but easy and cheap.
For a previously "costly" problem that in 2012 would involve a 5 MP digital pictures + geotagging + OCR then sending the raws for GPU processing, any random smartphone from 2022 will do.
In 2012 you could have screamed "privilege!". Not in 2022.
As a kid, I'd have loved to try to hack together a app that recognizes mushrooms (or flowers, or fruits which I all found so super interesting, especially bugs and OMG they fly if I blew on them!!)
It would have been hard. I would have benefited from some help. But I would have had a lot of fun, after which I would have used the app to fill in the name for my leaf-book collection effort (I wanted to have a specimen of EVERYTHING from the garden, then from the street, then...)
I only had books and some websites and a bad camera. So I drew :) A kid now could have picture search engines like yandex to do better with a much better camera too (MACRO MODE!) and some generic photo processing software. A rich kid then could have had something similar, with an expansive Nikon camera, and photoshop (crop, filter...) and maybe some parental connections to biologists and botanists.
Is it privilege if they did? Yes. And it's wonderful because every kid has this privilege now! And they can have more fun!
Re: A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia
#8I wonder what his parents do for a living. Just curious.
Does it matter? Watching everything through the myopic lens of "privilege" is wrong. A kid can have an idea and parents can help. For now, the set of {kids, parents} that can do that is limited. But technology changes and becomes more accessible. What matters is the new things that become not just possible but easy and cheap. For a previously "costly" problem that in 2012 would involve a 5 MP digital pictures + geota…
> A kid can have an idea and parents can help.
Or... the other way around
Re: A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia
#9I wonder what his parents do for a living. Just curious.
Does it matter? Watching everything through the myopic lens of "privilege" is wrong. A kid can have an idea and parents can help. For now, the set of {kids, parents} that can do that is limited. But technology changes and becomes more accessible. What matters is the new things that become not just possible but easy and cheap. For a previously "costly" problem that in 2012 would involve a 5 MP digital pictures + geota…
I didn't take OP as a commentary on privilege, more if the parents were already working in this field/area, vs the "boy genius" narrative
Re: A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia
#10I wonder what his parents do for a living. Just curious.
Does it matter? Watching everything through the myopic lens of "privilege" is wrong. A kid can have an idea and parents can help. For now, the set of {kids, parents} that can do that is limited. But technology changes and becomes more accessible. What matters is the new things that become not just possible but easy and cheap. For a previously "costly" problem that in 2012 would involve a 5 MP digital pictures + geota…
It does when the title says "13yo kid builds e-nose". It's not about privilege, it's about being honest. Maybe the title is honest and the kid is just very bright, that's cool too!