111–120 of 188 posts
> 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 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.
Damn, the courage it must've taken to scold a child on a internet website -- how did you summon it? Do you have a patreon I can donate to
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…
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…
Then to get past the 'parents doing all the building' we ran an outlaw class where the siblings and parents could compete...but it's the same kind of dynamic.
I don't immediately see the issue with the parent helping a child with tech they're familiar with...helping my son 3d print and sell fidget spinners had lots of little life lessons wrapped up in it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Damn, the courage it must've taken to scold a child on a internet website -- how did you summon it? Do you have a patreon I can donate to
Fair point. It would have been better for me to keep silent and just let the thought pass.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Does this mean that each sensor cluster has to be trained independently?
You're intentionally depending on the "personality" of each gas sensor to get data measuring unknown features, so you can't expect consistency from sample to sample. Anything that was completely portable between different sensors would inherently be less powerful.
I 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…
May I ask why?
You see it all the time, unironically: "How a 23 year old couple bought their dream home!" and it ends up in the article their parents literally paid for it.
Or Bill Gates. There is the classic: "How to become as rich as Bill Gates: Choose your grandparents carefully."
I see it elsewhere in this thread: "Ugh. And MY 13 year old just wants to play video games!" And that is unfair to themselves, and unfair to their kids.
You see it everywhere. So many musicians, artists, writers, PEOPLE succeed in part because they just don't need to make money. Because they already have it.
And then they act like it was all done themselves and while they are not bad people for having money, and they are sincerely talented, that isn't the whole story. The whole story is that they didn't ever really even need to succeed to live a comfortable life, and that is a HUGE advantage over other people.
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Allow me to tie this to my own experience:
First, I want to acknowledge that I am extremely privileged in my own ways. I grew up in a wonderful home with a great family. We were educated, and kind, and loved reading and were encouraging. The rural place I grew up in wasn't a fancy high-tech metropolis, but I did not experience any violence in my community which counts for a lot.
I went to a private university on a big scholarship. It was cheaper than any state school I could have gone to. My first two years where I was in the dorms and was paying with student loans, I was very active in the student volunteer community, and the computer science club.
But once I left the dorms, that was IT. I needed to 100% support myself, rent/food/etc. I spent my days working manual QA for a software company, 40/hr week, while attending school at night.
And my life changed. I didn't make any new friends and lost the ones I had. I was never around for the "college stuff." Every waking moment became toil, either through work or through school.
While my peers were doing research studies for natural language processing, or participating in CS contests, or building relationships, or falling in love, or actually doing well on homework and tests, or any number of productive things, I was plugging 3g WIFI dongles into and out of laptops for $15/hr. I was running test cases for 8 hours a day, then going to class from 6-9, then doing homework until I went to sleep, then getting up in the morning and doing it again.
And the deficit I had in my education followed me for a LONG time. Still follows me today.
So yes, I do think we should interrogate situation people were in when they achieved something. Because sometimes people don't really achieve anything other than spending their parent's money.
And there are circumstances where something that seems like a big achievement was really just an inevitability.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reason why no engineer has made this yet, is because the medical data was not available to them. The innovation is in the data, not in the ML.
You are wrong. The kid GREW FUNGUS IN ARTIFICIAL LUNGS using a sterile field made out of a plastic bin with dish gloves cut into it. He didn't need medical data. Anyone could have done this- anyone with the intelligence and creativity that this kid has.
Fabrication of data is not very useful if you have to gather data for validation anyway.
For some, doors are not only closed, but they are also slammed in their faces with full force
I am not skeptical of the kid being able to do this. Good for them! I'm sure they will grow up to be an inquisitive and brilliant member of society. However, like many, I feel like this article could be papering over... something. OK I'll just say it: Privilege. And hey! Not every kid with privilege ends up being brilliant! And he may not be privileged! But it is a lot easier to succeed when you have it. And my probl…
It is, and very American-centric. Plenty of innovative people are born in poorer countries with much less resources at their disposal. Indeed quite a lot of American top scientists are immigrants from not exactly rich places.
Of course, even they are sort-of privileged by the fact that they weren't born blind, on in a period of outright war, or didn't get cancer at the age of three. But this is already stretching the meaning of "privilege".
Katalin Karikó, one of the main brains behind mRNA, grew up in shabby Communist Hungary and her lab equipment at her home university was likely worse than what a median high school in the U.S. has at its disposal. (There wasn't much convertible currency east of the Iron Curtain to buy top stuff, and not enough capacity to manufacture it locally.)