An Abundance of Talent: the 2015 Austin Energy Regional Science Festival

For the fourth time, I served as a judge for behavioral and social sciences in our local science fair.  Again, I met an array of talented and motivated teenagers.  They were intelligent (of course), actively curious about the world around them, willing to step out from the crowd and put themselves in the scales to be judged.  They asked interesting questions and pursued the answers wherever the data took them.  But they were, after all, children.  Some of them assumed far too easily that an experiment that does not validate the hypothesis is therefore a failure.  They never heard of Karl Popper.  That failing is not theirs, but of their mentors – or the lack of them. 

Middle school (junior high) presentation
on noise levels in the school building

 I am pleased and proud to have argued for the first place winner in senior high school  behavioral and social sciences. (See all of the Awards here.) One of the judges said that when he challenged her on a point of mathematics, she did not have the answer.  I responded with some history: last year, she asked every one of the mathematics and science teachers in her high school for help with statistics and she got no replies to her emails. So, she went to the university; and some UT doctoral candidates tutored her in statistics.  So, too, this year, did she seek and find outside help in order to extend and expand her work in statistical methods.  Personally, I was the one who was challenged.  I got an A-minus in my undergraduate class in statistics.  After reading her abstract this year, I downloaded several tutorials: she knew more than I did.

 

Middle School enquiry into which advertising
message draws the most responses

We expect a lot from kids. The German word for “teenager” is Halbstark: half-strong.  That speaks to the core of the problem in a way that the Latin “adolescent” (becoming adult) does not.  My daughter had a mole on her wrist; and she would show me how it moved around as she grew.  For them, life is an intense process.  We judge them as if they were adults.  As a geometer would say, it is obvious by inspection that they are not. Yet, objectively, nothing less is fair to them in the intellectual pursuit of science.

 

Classical, country, dub step, meditation, or pop:
does any help you concentrate on a task?

“If you all were graded on a 100-point scale, 91 would be failing.”  As often as I said it, I could see that it did not sink in, not this year, not in the previous years. This year, I asked one panicked entrant if any other display was clearly head and shoulders better than hers.  The person with the neighboring display chimed in: “The right answer is ‘No.’” 

 

Middle School entry: What is Your "Pawsonality"?
Can a psychological profile predict your preference for a pet?

It is not just kids at science fairs.  I enter and I judge museum quality exhibits at numismatic conventions.  (“Four out of five? How dare they!”)  In the West Wing episodes that bridge the first and second seasons, President Jed Bartlett says that decisions are made by those who show up.  In this context, the future of science, engineering, and technology belongs to – and will be claimed by – those who enter the competitive field of scientific research.

 

Another middle school entry on the Stroop Effect.
This took second place.
The value in this for the learner is figuring out how to
create a novel experiment and enter it in a competition.

The best of them do it alone; but they all deserve mentoring.  That 9-point gap between first and last could easily be closed by a working technician, engineer, or scientist who made the time to volunteer with a school starting in August or September. It is not a matter of showing them how, but of asking science-talented pupils those tough questions early on. 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

ELI the ICE Man

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

The Austin Energy Regional Science Festival 2014

Teaching Science Through Science Fiction

Raymond Loewy

Today's Google Doodle celebrated the 120th birthday of Raymond Loewy, the father of industrial design. 

Raymond Loewy is called “the father of industrial design” for a reason.
He took ugly consumer items — pencil sharpeners, refrigerators — and made them beautiful.
He designed cars that were a decade or more ahead of their time.
He created kitchen appliances, crockery and furniture,
and did design work for Greyhound, the U.S. Postal Service and NASA.
(The website cataloging his work is here.) 

"I waited for the S-1 to pass through at full speed.
I stood on the platform and saw it coming from the distance at 120 miles per hour.
It flashed by me like a steel thunderbolt, the ground shaking under me,
 in a blast of air that almost sucked me into its whirlwind.
Approximately a million pounds of locomotive were crashing through near me.
I felt shaken and overwhelmed by an unforgettable feeling of power,
by a sense of pride at what I had helped to create.
I had, after all, contributed something to a great nation
that had taken me in and that I loved so deeply.
And I had come a long, happy way myself from my start in fashion advertising.
I had found my way of life."

Every artifact speaks to us, reflects us.  Loewy delivered the 20th century.  He was not alone but his sense of vision brought form to thousands of common items.  And they inspired a century of material progress that nurtured and rewarded the common (and largely unstated) belief that we can and will make a wonderful future.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS
The Genius of Design
Space is the Place: Come to the High Frontier
Jack Kemeny Knew: We Shall Have Computed
The Cure for a Failing Empire
The Science of Liberty

The Simple Origins of Complexities

A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram (Wolfram Media 2002)..

“Three centuries ago science was transformed by the dramatic new idea that rules based on mathematical equations could be used to describe the natural world.  My purpose in this book is to initiate another such transformation, and to introduce a new kind of science that is based on the much more general types of rules that can be embodied in simple computer programs.” 

For example:

1. All squares are white.
2. Start with a black square.
3. A cell is made black when it or either of its neighbors were black on the step before.

Or, for example:

1. All squares are white.
2. Start with a black square.
3. A cell is black if either of its neighbors was black on the step before.
4. A cell is white if both of its neighbors were white on the step before.

 Beginning with rules like these (and hundreds of others approximately no more complex), fantastic images, patterns, random and pseudo-random runs evolve. 

We know that truth is self-supporting.  No truth in biology can contradict a truth in chemistry, physics, psychology, or economics.  If they are, indeed, truths, statements support each other.  Here, too, the simplicity suggested by Stephen Wolfram has been explored by Benoit Mandelbrot.  Fractals of the form

z_n+1 = z_n² + c

produce complex geometries based on reiteration of a basic pattern.  These fractals are related the Julia sets, which are also complicated yet generated from simple initial conditions expressed by terse functions.

Julia set (in white)
for the rational function associated to
Newton's method for ƒ:z→z3−1.
Coloring of Fatou set
according to attractor (the roots of ƒ)
(Wikpedia)

Wolfram is associated with two major websites, Wolfram Science and Wolfram Mathematica.  Both offer you the opportunities to download samples, purchase home editions or professional tools.  Wolfram Mathematics was one of the supporters of the television series NUMB3RS.  Having written a couple of fractal programs for the IBM-PC and DEC VAX many years ago, I had some identification for Wolfram when I saw them go by in the credits for NUMB3RS.  My interest this time was sparked by an off-hand comment from Fred Bartlett, a consulting engineer whom I know from Objectivist discussion boards.

Wolfram Science -

Wolfram Mathematica: Professional, Home, and Student editions.

Stephen Wolfram's personal website.His Wikipedia biography.
Sorry now that I was so close and never knew...