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Scandal at America's top science fair

karlstack.com

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Re: Scandal at America's top science fair

#191

Post by eigenket »

gumby wrote: post #186
eigenket wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not exclusively. It has elements from Hebrew and Aramaic (of course) as well as from various Slavic languages. A big chunk of it derives from High German but not all.

What tokai said was OK: English is also classified as a Germanic language even though it includes a lot of French words, not to mention Hindi etc. For that matter, a German word like „Dolmetsch“ doesn’t make German a Turkic language.

I think calling something a Germanic language is a bit different to calling it a German language.

I completely agree with your point about a "Germanic language" but I disagree about "a German language".

Re: Scandal at America's top science fair

#192

Post by Reubachi »

navigate8310 wrote: post #51
_lvbh wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is college that important when you’re already rich af? There are other channels to get in without risking reputational ruin.

The boy cones from an Indian background which is highly competitive and looks down on it's own people if they are not "successful" career wise

He comes from a rich caste family, which is on the opposite side in regards to "introspection and external perception".

Indian society is unlike any other and cannot be simplified, even within the individual castes.

Of course I do not know this individual and their mindset concerning "motivations", but I find it very unlikely that these "mistakes" are due to entrenched group morays shared among poor/dalit castes.

Re: Scandal at America's top science fair

#193

Post by isef_researcher »

uneekname wrote: post #10

I was a finalist at the 2017 ISEF and it was quite an experience. A lot of super smart kids there and we all had fun living it up in Los Angeles. There was a stark contrast between those of us who had designed our projects completely ourselves, and those who had significant mentors/lab affiliations. No hate to high schoolers getting valuable STEM experience at local universities, but Regeneron should do more to diffe…

Not saying this phenomenon of having connections isn't true, but also, kinda unrelated to the issue here, no?

This kid plagiarized & had serious research misconduct. The fact that he has connections via his sister & dad is not the problem imo.

Re: Scandal at America's top science fair

#194

Post by isef_researcher »

georgeburdell wrote: post #110
uneekname wrote: post #10

I was a finalist at the 2017 ISEF and it was quite an experience. A lot of super smart kids there and we all had fun living it up in Los Angeles. There was a stark contrast between those of us who had designed our projects completely ourselves, and those who had significant mentors/lab affiliations. No hate to high schoolers getting valuable STEM experience at local universities, but Regeneron should do more to diffe…

I never judged ISEF, but it was highly predictable that the kids with university mentorship made it from my circuit to there. Felt really unfair to the smart self-motivated kids who didn’t have connections. IMO the fairs should take a much harder stance on this, as it defeats the spirit of such competitions.

People with connections have a leg up, but it's really not that hard to do it yourself. My parents were not researchers, we did not have connections, but I literally could emailed prof after prof showing my enthusiasm & knowledge I had gained already from my research until one decided to take a chance on me. I ended up publishing research with that connection I built which probably made a big difference for my college & grad school admissions. Most people just don't try this or give up too early or just didn't do the work to research on their own.

Re: Scandal at America's top science fair

#195

Post by neilv »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #170
neilv wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Cub Scout Pinewood Derby that I saw -- in which the kid is to carve a model car out of a block of wood at home, to race at an event -- they had wisely issued extra kits ahead of time, for those parents who would get a little too enthusiastic about helping Junior, and had separate races among the parents' cars. Of course, the stakes were much smaller than an award or school admission that potentially makes/breaks…

Do you need to have a child to get in on the parents segment of your cub scout's pinewood derby race? Asking for a friend.

I had the same thought. :) I don't know what they're doing now. (I saw it when my mom led a Cub Scout pack, decades ago.)

If you wanted to organize some competitions in your city, the track I saw would be easy to build. You might want to design it to break down for storage in someone's garage, and to fit in the back of a couple SUVs. Maybe get city approval to host events as a block party or at a park. Or pre-arrange to donate it to a parish that hosts Scouts and has room to store it and occasionally set it up in their school gym or coffee&donuts hall.

Today, you also have more RC vehicle competitions, and (over-media-ified) generations of battling homebrew robots.

Re: Scandal at America's top science fair

#196

Post by isef_researcher »

notjoemama wrote: post #33

In reading this, I am reminded of a YouTube video by CGP Grey about how anger is more viral than any other emotional reaction online, including love. But then I think, isn't this one of those times where at least some level of annoyance is justified? Except, there's nothing I can do about it. Does making more people aware, that can't do anything about it, improve the situation? Or is awareness pointless because of ho…

There is a reason to increase awareness - to put pressure on Society for Science to take action. So far they still have not made a public statement, have disabled their YouTube comments etc, and seem to just be waiting for this all to blow over.

Re: Scandal at America's top science fair

#197

Post by isef_researcher »

thriftwy wrote: post #72
pstrateman wrote: post #16

That's not only scientific fraud, it's real felony fraud. Maybe community service equivalent to 50,000.00 at federal minimum wage would sort him out.

The child is nothing to be blamed for, it is a 100% problem of the organizers. For a 17 years old, even throwing together such work is already an worthwhile result. Teens is a golden age of compilation and remixing.

If his project was just shoddy scientifically, that wouldn't be an issue. I'm sure 90% of the projects are like that. He committed deliberate fraud, stealing other people's work (including past kid winners!), and won 50k for it. That's not "throwing something together" it's deliberate cheating.

Re: Scandal at America's top science fair

#198

Post by isef_researcher »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #63

This is pretty similar to some fraud in professional science that's more common than it should be. A few people have started to make it a hobby to detect copy-and-pasted and altered images in published research: Fabrication discovered in prominent Alzheimer's research: https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabricatio... "Sleuths" uncovering fraud and getting retractions for thousands of papers: https://ap…

[flagged]

Re: Scandal at America's top science fair

#199

Post by sickofparadox »

rerdavies wrote: post #146
fransje26 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Dutch youth is spending an average (!) of 5 hours and 45 minutes per day on digital media. I was wondering if something like that was at play. Well, here are some hard statistics. Thank you for that. > That's some serious amount of time It's a worrying and disturbing amount of time. Now, the question is: is more time wasted on digital media than was wasted on TV in the past? And secondly: does the current TV time c…

And thirdly: would anyone complain if children were spending 5 hours and 45 minutes a day reading books? Watching television was much more toxic than digital media. Network television spoon fed content targeted at a lowest common denominator to everyone, that content was consumed passively. It was horrible. Digital media allows active selection of content, and provides access to much higher quality information, if yo…

There has to be a name for this absolutely divorced from reality whataboutism. At best, kids may spend one of those ~6 hours watching edutainment, but it is far more likely to be entirely spent scrolling on Twitter, Tiktok, or Instagram for microdoses of engagement dopamine.
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