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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

#61

Post by Ataraxiaist »

foolinaround wrote: post #5

we 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...

We seem to have a strange anti-intellectual bias in our culture when it comes to children.

I mean I was not pushed hard as a kid to play guitar or play football/wrestling but I was pushed. It took quite a bit of time before I really fell in love with playing guitar. It is hard to fall in love with something when you suck at it. I needed to be pushed. Sports were fun at the time but we completely overstate the value of organized sports IMO.

I don't know why we see playing a musical instrument as something different than learning scientific instruments. We expect the kid to just naturally be driven in science from day one and pushing them is seen as something morally off.

It reminds me of the crazy hockey parent that pushes their kid way too hard in hockey. While some kids might end up hating hockey, a huge % just end up being really good hockey players compared to the average person. People tend to fall in love with things they are good at.

I am childfree but if I did have a kid I would be a science version of the hockey parent and let the chips fall as they may. The risk/reward is just massive for the kid.

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

#62

Post by honkycat »

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 problem with this article is this: We are constantly papering over how much of a difference a good education can make, and how little opportunity to get that quality of education there is in the United States.

You often see people bemoaning their lot in life: "Ugh. When Mark Zuckerburg/Bill Gates/insert CEO was my age, they already started Microsoft!"

And my reply to this sentiment is this: How many hundreds of thousands of dollars did your parents spend on your pre-university education? I'm willing to bet it wasn't in the hundreds of thousands.

I see this kid is from LA. Sometimes all it takes is being in the right zip code to have access to... science fairs? My school didn't even have AP classes! I thought science fairs were something that only happened on TV.

I realize this is a bit petty, and it 100% comes from my childhood where I went to a poor rural school where I was a poor student, and so-fucking-desperately wanted more, and then moved to the city, and succeeded, flourished once I got access to a better quality of education. But pretending it isn't there feels dishonest.

It feels like an onion article headline: "Kid with everything going for him, despite all odds, tremendously succeeds"

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

#63

Post by rocgf »

bb123 wrote: post #6

Does 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.

Yes, always, since it's exaggerated more often than not.

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

#64

Post by efdee »

Brajeshwar wrote: post #23

Cool. And, I have a 13-year and she is still, literally, crying over spilt milk, hacked Roblox merchandize, how done the steak is, why her monitor is tilted wrong, and why I din't warned her before rebooting the primary router.

You rebooted the router? Without prior warning?

That's the 2020 equivalent of your parents picking up the phone while you're online on dialup.

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

#65

Post by blitzar »

Brajeshwar wrote: post #55
mschuster91 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and why I din't warned her before rebooting the primary router. Basic sysops rule: either create redundancy (which is hard to do in a consumer space outside of Mac Pro machines as 99.99% of laptops carry only a single LAN port and in towers, about 3/4) or warn your users before doing maintenance.

Well, I do have backups. This is India, so I even have a backup for the backup. I have three ISPs load-balanced, and not experienced any downtime since the beginning of the Pandemic (early 2020). I do realize them going down but we never realize until I looked them up. It runs almost all the time, but sometimes I need to update settings, etc. which needs reboots the load balancer that distributes everything from. :-)

And you cant do this durring a) the school day when the primary end user is not home or b) wake up at 2am and reboot it while the primary end user is asleep?

Honestly, I think your kid should break out the SLA and check what compensation they get paid for prime time outages.

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

#66

Post by MisterBastahrd »

bb123 wrote: post #6

Does 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.

The international science fair is a good example. I grew up with a couple of people who would participate every year, and every year it was obvious from their academics and being in the same classrooms and social circles as them that they didn't come up with this stuff. Their projects were gigantic, expertly researched, and featured technology that no high school student in the pre-internet age would have been able to source or use independently. One of them had a single mother with a PhD in the field, the other had a science teacher mother and a father with an MS in biomedical engineering... in the same field.

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

#67

Post by Brajeshwar »

blitzar wrote: post #65
Brajeshwar wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I do have backups. This is India, so I even have a backup for the backup. I have three ISPs load-balanced, and not experienced any downtime since the beginning of the Pandemic (early 2020). I do realize them going down but we never realize until I looked them up. It runs almost all the time, but sometimes I need to update settings, etc. which needs reboots the load balancer that distributes everything from. :-)

And you cant do this durring a) the school day when the primary end user is not home or b) wake up at 2am and reboot it while the primary end user is asleep? Honestly, I think your kid should break out the SLA and check what compensation they get paid for prime time outages.

Yes, lesson learnt and we have agreed to the new agreement -- no more primetime outages -- planned or otherwise.

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

#69

Post by somebodynew »

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 responses contains some hidden information that could help to discriminate between vanillin and eugenol. With enough different sensors, there's quite a bit of information to be found in mining their undefined behavior.

That is to say, you can treat the sensor reading as being completely meaningless and skip interpreting it as indicating VOC levels. You're just using the sensors as black boxes that produce arbitrary values with the property that exposure to organic vapor changes the output "somehow", and letting model training find some meaning in it.

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

#70

Post by alexk307 »

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.

Of course, no one should be forced to make things. But a lot of kids are naturally curious and can look at things in ways that are not obvious to adults.
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