A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia • Hacker News Board

Re: A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia

#101

Post by DoreenMichele » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 6:17 PM UTC

ravenstine wrote: post #54

Hmmm... I'm skeptical. Not necessarily because I don't think that pneumonia could be detected by testing VOCs in breath, but because I'm currently working on a project that uses sensors to do breath analysis and my amateur research has informed me that it's fairly hard to get right (which is why my primary goal is to identify deltas rather than achieve numerical accuracy). For one, VOCs can be present in breath for o…

He was specifically looking to identify fungal pneumonia not just any old kind of pneumonia.

The linked Wikipedia article indicates mortality in immunocompromised patients can be as high as 90 percent. That sentence fits with my general impression that fungal pneumonia is both real serious shit and also typically found in people with advanced cases of other serious medical problems, like AIDS or cystic fibrosis.

It sounds reasonably plausible to me that it's feasible to detect fungal pneumonia in specific this way with some reasonable confidence level.

Re: A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia

#102

Post by zht » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 6:17 PM UTC

daenz wrote: post #87

Great on Caleb for this accomplishment! >No door is ever closed. You can do anything! I am a thirteen-year-old kid, and I can do this—if I can do it, anyone can! Although he may have similar opportunities to his peers, he (understandably) doesn't yet realize that he has a "spark" that not everyone is fortunate enough to cultivate. Age is not strictly the limiting factor to being capable of reaching a high potential.

not to mention a stable home life and parents who have the ability/time/resources to provide a kid an environment to be curious about this stuff

Re: A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia

#103

Post by samhw » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 6:17 PM UTC

jboy55 wrote: post #93

dekhn wrote: post #90

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 ove…

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 t…

> 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?

Re: A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia

#104

Post by javajosh » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 6:17 PM UTC

jboy55 wrote: post #93

dekhn wrote: post #90

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 ove…

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 t…

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.

Re: A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia

#105

Post by jboy55 » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 6:18 PM UTC

ravenstine wrote: post #54

Hmmm... I'm skeptical. Not necessarily because I don't think that pneumonia could be detected by testing VOCs in breath, but because I'm currently working on a project that uses sensors to do breath analysis and my amateur research has informed me that it's fairly hard to get right (which is why my primary goal is to identify deltas rather than achieve numerical accuracy). For one, VOCs can be present in breath for o…

Well one thing is the teen in question probably has little to no exposure to a cohort of humans who have fungal pneumonia to test this on.

Re: A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia

#106

Post by pcmoney » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 6:19 PM UTC

mwcampbell wrote: post #99

> No door is ever closed. You can do anything! This is obvious nonsense. Limitations are real, and I think it's better to be honest about them. Edit: I was wrong to post this shallow dismissal; see below.

I agree but there is a self fulfilling aspect to thinking that way.

It is better to believe anything is possible and be wrong than to impose limitations on ourselves.

Most great accomplishments seem impossible at first.

Re: A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia

#107

Post by sam0x17 » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 6:19 PM UTC

mrits wrote: post #57

alexk307 wrote: post #2

This 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.

Sometimes you give the children these tools and they decide to do something they are more interested in. It is important to realize that not all children are interested in sciences.

That said, every single kid who I knew growing up who had access to these sorts of opportunities but did something "more interesting" has ended up regretting it in adulthood. This probably isn't true across the board, but among the people I know it definitely is.

Re: A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia

#108

Post by kartben_ » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 6:21 PM UTC

wesleywt wrote: post #78

cmaneu wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you watch the video linked in the article?

Specific, sensitivity, limits of detection and limits of quantitation is more important than a video.

Interestingly, those are all very good points, all of which are being covered ...in the video.

Re: A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia

#109

Post by samhw » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 6:21 PM UTC

javajosh wrote: post #104

jboy55 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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 t…

"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.

Re: A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia

#110

Post by throwawaymanbot » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 6:25 PM UTC

mwcampbell wrote: post #99

> No door is ever closed. You can do anything! This is obvious nonsense. Limitations are real, and I think it's better to be honest about them. Edit: I was wrong to post this shallow dismissal; see below.

No post body was provided.