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

blog.benjamin-cabe.com

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

#121

Post by dekhn »

Damogran6 wrote: post #114
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…

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 cl…

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.

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

#122

Post by javajosh »

samhw wrote: post #109
javajosh wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No post body was provided.

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

#123

Post by donio »

causi wrote: post #94

Is the headline being a straight-up lie a valid reason for flagging? The kid did not diagnose pneumonia. He came up with an idea for a design that might hypothetically detect pneumonia.

Unfortunately there is no other way to signal trash submissions. "Not upvoting" is not really a sufficient signal when enough people get baited by the headline.

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

#124

Post by 908B64B197 »

samhw wrote: post #103
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…

> 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 num…

> 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...

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

#125

Post by samhw »

javajosh wrote: post #122
samhw wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Quoted post unavailable.

I'm afraid I don't follow you

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

#126

Post by samhw »

dekhn wrote: post #113
samhw wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 num…

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.

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).

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

#127

Post by worldvoyageur »

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…

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.

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

#128

Post by jkaptur »

somebodynew wrote: post #69
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…

It looks like the principle is that a machine learning model trained on the combined output of four different kinds of gas sensors can discover correlations between unintentional characteristics of the sensors. For example, the manufacturer of an ethanol or nitrogen dioxide sensor is not going to specify anything about how it responds to vanillin, but it seems plausible to me that the relationship between their respo…

> With enough different sensors, there's quite a bit of information to be found in mining their undefined behavior.

It sounds like you would need to be exceptionally careful that your meta-process didn't "find" some signal in pure noise (via re-using test sets and so on).

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

#129

Post by mrtnmcc »

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…

In my experience, "AI can extract more information from sensors" is mostly a myth.

An example is the SCIO sensor ( https://nocamels.com/2019/03/scio-kickstarter-darling-promis... ) which was a cheap handheld spectrometer that claimed to accurately determine the nutritional information of any food you pointed it at.

One good way to debunk this is to measure raw sensor output and compute Mutual Information (which incorporates sensor noise/variability). If the sensor only produces X bits of information, no algorithm will be able to extract more classes than that. In the SCIO case it was just under 8 bits total of information. So something like a poor color sensor. You could train on apples and oranges and maybe do an investor demo, but it's not actually going to do anything useful (as the Kickstarter crowd soon learned).

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

#130

Post by Fordec »

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…

From working on the environmental sensor side of things, I'd concur. The VOCs will be able to be picked up, but the cross talk will be huge across other VOCs that don't themselves indicate pneumonia. There isn't one VOC, there's thousands. False positives are written all over this. This is the very same approach Theranos went. On a science level, sure, technically possible maybe. You'll even get boolean outputs. But on an engineering and regulatory level, you're in for a world of pain without the spectral tech that is still 2-5 years away before this is worth basing human lives on.
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