Austin Energy Regional Science Festival

This was my fifth year judging the projects entered in the Behavioral and Social Sciences category.  The field was crowded. Eight teams of judges were assigned to the 57 entrants. Each team chose one participant to advance to the second round of judging. Among those eight, we chose first through fifth place awards. The top three were advanced to the state competition. In addition, a select committee of judges chose Best of Fair awards from all categories. Those also advanced, of course. Various organizations, including Austin Energy, granted special prizes to outstanding projects. Although we judges adhered to the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair standards, the independents could apply their own metrics.

My Choice for 1st Place

With any large set, the elements can be sorted many ways. With years of experience, the process committee has a pretty good insight into the abstracts. So, the sets tend to be more or less even. It was the “less” side of that that I found difficult. We know that it is likely that any one group could have more projects that were superior to any projects from some other group. Yet, each conveniently chosen group in Behavioral had only one project allowed to advance to the next round.  The same method applied to other categories. On the other hand, computers and robotics were under-represented this year.

It is also clear that some schools invest a lot of resources in this. Over the past five years, I have seen interesting projects fall just a bit short for lack of mentoring. 

My choice for 2nd Place
Buried by the process

Judging begins with individuals. We then get together and seek consensus. If you advocate well for your choices, you can carry the day for your prodigies. On the other hand, social capital pays dividends; and a judge who is a psychology professor necessarily has more of it. Judging is a gestalt, not a tally.

The underlying problem is that all of these projects are winners. Eighty-five percent of success is showing up. Decisions are made by those who show up. These 2200 from 3^rd through 12^th grades in 12 counties representing 21 school districts, plus charter schools, private schools, and home schools, were the ones who did the work.  It is easy to say that the median grade is a C+, but the median grade at a science fair is really an A-minus.

A popular subject
handled with finesse
but lost in the process

Behavioral and Social Science Middle School Winners.

• 1^st Sophie Polidoro, Canyon Ridge, “How does text color affect retention?”
• 2^nd Cameron Ferweda, Canyon Ridge, “How do certain foods affect peoples' reaction time and memory?”
• 3^rdJessica Cummings, Canyon Ridge, “How does age affect how people focus on abnormalities in their environment?”
• 4^th Allie Cermak, Round Rock Christian Academy MS, “Circadian Rhythm Your Brain's Clock”
• 5^th Robinson Lopez, Dripping Springs, “Picture Perfect”

Behavioral and Social Science High School Winners.

So much talent crammed in
next to each other.

• 1^st Curtis Harrison and Nicole Deere, Vista Ridge, “The Effect of the Sensation of Fear versus Reward on Learning Capabilities, Short-Term and Long-Term Memory in Procambarus clarkii,”
• 2^nd Travis Cantwell, Veritas Academy, “The Fatigue Effect: Aural and Cognitive Exhaustion in Children with Cochlear Implants”
• 3^rd Joselyne Flores-Vivas and Aimee Heim, Vista Ridge, “Effects of Rubik's Cube Design on Speed”
• 4^th Sadaf Karim, Renaissance Academy, “How Do Fears Change By Age and Gender?”
• 5^th Kristin Hauck, Bowie High School, “The Effect of External Factors on Short Term Memory”

 The American Psychological Association gave a special award to Harrison and Deere for their work with the crayfish, Procambarus clarkii.  BioAustin recognized Cameron Ferweda’s research. Thomas Wintenburg of Vista Ridge entered a mathematics project on “Reducing the Cost of U.S. Military Bases.” He was singled out by the U.S. Air Force, Austin Energy, and the Mu Theta Alpha mathematics honor society.

Travis Cantwell's original research deserves special attention. Children with certain hearing deficits are give cochlear implants. It solves the hearing problem. The secondary consequence is cognitive fatigue. Even as a child, Cantwell noticed that his sister tired easily. We judges argued his research project back and forth. The problem was that we could not have two first places. So, push came to shove. The bottom line was that his advocate pushed when I shoved. The crayfish won. It was not fair. We should call them science un-fairs.

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In Suspect Terrain

According to most geologists, plate tectonics explains the major features of Earth’s surface. Continental land masses floating on the magma mantel crash into each other over hundreds of millions of years. This forms mountains, and therefore valleys, of course. The mountains wear down. Their rocks are ground fine, mixed with vegetation and animal remains, and become topsoil. Several times, oscillations of glaciers moved forward and retreated, carving valleys, forming rivers and lakes, and then melting. In their reversals, they left behind huge boulders and other “exotic” materials.  Geologist Anita Harris used to believe that, also. Over the course of her career, she came to doubt that the story is so simple.  Plate tectonics has a place. It does explain some facts. It does not explain everything.

Like medieval astronomers adding epicycles to fit their ever-better measurements with astrolabes, the modern geologists posit smaller, localized land masses that bump into continents in order to explain mountain ranges and other features that would contradict plate tectonics.

I confess that my geology is weak. I do not have it in my head. I rely on websites such as this one from the University of California at Berkeley to remind me which came first, the Silurian, Ordovician, or Cambrian.

It did not detract from the book. I read through almost all of it with only a few stops.  The bigger picture is easy to perceive.

John McPhee’s biography of Anita G. Harris is also a geological travelogue through the eastern United States. Harris was born in Brooklyn. The sands of Coney Island have garnet in them. McPhee and Harris travel through the Alleghenies, down into Ohio, across into Illinois.  The book opens with an eastward journey and then treks back.  That meandering narrative has islands of detail about  Harris’s career, and her marriages to other geologists.

(You can find a list of her 32 papers in 25 years papers here.) 

Like Irons in the Fire, about modern cattle rustlers, and The Curve of Binding Energy, a biography of John Wheeler, In Suspect Terrain immerses the reader in McPhee’s experience of a new subject.  He is an able student, and an engaging teacher.

Geology is not easy. One of my criminal justice instructors said that cops at a crime scene do not spend enough time with dirt and glass.  So, I took a geology class. It was a “local lab” course with a lot of outside work in our own neighborhood. For the semester project, we went to a quarry and assembled collections of fossils.  (Someone gave me a trilobite. I never found one on my own.)  I thought that I would learn the local rocks and minerals like the stars in constellations. Nope. Geologists keep tons of rocks labeled in cases because of the enormous inventory of types and kinds.  You can learn the easy ones: igneous, metamorphic, sedimentary… obsidian, marble, limestone, granite, flint, … After that, you have to love categorizing and cataloguing. It is as bad as biology. Contrary to physics and mathematics, geology is a study that rewards maturity, rather than intuition. Anita Harris’s woe is the armies of young geologists lured by the Siren song of plate tectonics.

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Syriaphobia: the latest fad in collectivism

It has been claimed that at least one of the terrorists of Paris November 13 hid among Syrian refugees to gain entrance into Europe. On the basis of that, some (Republican) governors of American states have declared that they will not accept Syrian refugees sent to them by the federal government. But immigrants to America have been associated with crimes since 1492. Immigrants also bring enterprise, initiative, invention, and, most of all, descendants.

 

Michael Ansara,
perhaps best known for his role 
as Cochise in Broken Arrow, 
was also Star Trek's Kang, 
above as "Soldier" 
from The Outer Limits.

In the wake of the French Revolution, Federalists and Republicans both supported and opposed the immigration of French refugees, depending on who was referring to whom.  To the Federalists, the French Revolution was the expression of everything evil in democracy.  However, many of the refugees were aristocrats, fleeing the Terror.

(And that is another point for another essay: Terrorism, as we understand it today, was invented by a native government. The Reign of Terror was not imported from Arabia.) 

Those aristocrats were worrisome for the Republicans whose sympathies were with the Revolutionaries. However, the Revolutionary government of France sent spies. Its envoys interfered in American politics,  attempting to influence our foreign policy. For all of that, and more, see the website of the Office of the Historian of the U.S. Department of State here. 

 

Anousha Ansari, entrepreneur,
ISS astronaut
and co-founder of the
Ansari X-Prize.

Long established as proper Bostonians, the English in America were appalled by the Irish immigrants of 1848. They lived like animals, bred like animals -- and bred crime. Or so the English of Boston claimed. Among the consequences of Irish in America was the cliché of the Irish cop, established following the War Between the States, and enduring even today. Another cliché was the Irish army sergeant. 

Many had enlisted in the North and South in order to obtain military experience that they could take home to fight Great Britain. Many more stayed here. And their descendants supported terrorism for over 150 years. With the founding of Sinn Fein in 1905, evermore American money flowed into the conflict. 

We worry today about Arab Americans and Islamic Americans supporting terrorism now, but no one was concerned when “professional Irish” in America paid for revolution in Ireland and terrorism in the United Kingdom. 

Like Boston and New York,
Cleveland was a center of Finnianism.

They were not alone. In the 1930s and 1940s, both Nazi Germany and Communist Russia maintained huge networks of supporters. It is also quite likely that the USSR insinuated its agents into the stream of European refugees from World War II. Similarly, communist agents probably were among the Vietnamese. We know that China sends its operatives in as students. Disturbing as that is to consider, actual harm is harder to prove.

Homegrown socialists, whether Fascist, Bolshevik, or others were common enough. Our coinage of the era should appear shocking to any thinking person today. It was not an accident: many progressives and intellectuals of the late 19th through mid-20th centuries were collectivists. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the clones were named after great collectivists of the times, Polly Trotsky, Lenina Crowne, and Benito Hoover, and others. In our time, the political leaders charged with defeating ISIL actually share many of its philosophical foundations: mysticism, revelation, altruism and collectivism, and ascetisim.

Fasces on American dime 1917-1945. German half mark and US quarter dollar.

Among the spies for the USSR was Samuel Dickstein, a US Congressman and New York Supreme Court justice. Meanwhile Prescott Bush, scion to the presidents of our time was able to get out of being implicated in a Wall Street Coup against President Roosevelt.  The German-American Bund pushed the Nazi Party line here at home. It only resulted in more anti-German sentiment.  Unlike the Japanese, the Germans were not put in concentrations camps - it was a possibility. In the movie Wings, about World War I, when the comic German, Arnold Schwimpf enlists with his buddies, the recruiting sergeant (an Irishman) says, "If you ask me, all you Dutchmen ought to be locked up until this thing is over." Those were heady times.  And America survived.

Civilization will survive ISIL.

Ayn Rand used the term “muscle mystic” (likely invented by Nathaniel Branden) to explain people who worship brute force. They thought that seizing factories would make them productive. They saw goosestepping rows and columns followed by arrays of tanks and mobile artillery, and accepted that whoever brandished them must be strong. In fact, reality and reason required that the Nazis and Communists would fail. So, too, is ISIL's program ultimately unworkable.

According to the news reports now about the Paris bombings, this murder of 180 people was carefully planned and executed over months.  Over 700 million people live in Europe, about 68 million of them in France. A million years will not be enough time for the terrorists to kill everyone they dislike.

Meanwhile, immigrants to Europe and the USA and everywhere else bring valuable human capital away from ISIL.

Yes, some may be criminals, as were the boys at Five Points, the Purple Gang, and the Mafia. It is a fact of human population distribution, however, that there must be at least as many Kennedys, Reagans, Einsteins, Fermis, Scalias, and Ayn Rands. And the creative work of good people outlasts  the destruction by evil people. 

It is an axiom of criminology that "crime knows no neighborhood." In other words, no place, no population is especially criminogenic. Crimes are committed by individuals who make bad choices. That is why Dr. Martin Luther King's dream was a world where a person is judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. The basic error, the fundamental fallacy, is considering masses of people as collectives. Including or excluding groups, tribes, ethnicities, etc., is the wrong way to consider the question. In point of fact, US immigration policy requires each legal immigrant to prove their case on their own merits. That is appropriate. 

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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

Austin Energy Regional Science Festival 2014

Bright young minds are always fun to be around. This was my third year judging the junior high school and senior high school entrants at our regional science fair.  This time, I also judged both upper and lower elementary school participants. My area is behavioral and social sciences.  I worked closely with a dozen other professionals as we judged about 70 junior and senior contestants. It is a learning experience for everyone. 

The Austin Energy Regional Science Festival website is here

I had the opportunity to review the works of several young scholars whose research made the awards. Among them were third, fourth, and fifth place middle schoolers Will Pasquarette ("How does the type of music affect the ability to recall a memory?"), Dara Christensen ("How does the sense of smell affect your memory?"), and Mark Holstrum ("Notetaking").  I also judged for seniors Katelynn Marsan ("Effects of Biased Verbal Instructions on Student Performance") and Saloni Gyani ("Alteration of Memory and Perception through Optogenetics"), who took first and second place honors.  Ms. Marsan also garnered a special Superintendent's Award. Ms. Saloni was recognized for a special award by the American Psychological Association.

But "85% of success is showing up," said Woody Allen.  Of the nearly 3,000 entrants, I saw only a few who were unprepared. Still, they showed up, saw the process, learned from their peers, and discovered what is expected. The requirements are not trivial. Students, parents, and teachers are responsible for many significant and official forms and filings; and more often, it is the adults, not the kids, who failed to address the details.  

This year about 800 junior and senior high schoolers
and 2000 elementary schoolers participated.

That speaks to several levels of challenge. Cream rises, and the winners are usually obvious by inspection; but the distance from first to fifth is short, and the gap from fifth to "thanks for showing up" is even narrower. One of the outstanding entrants in one of my sessions was bumped down twice by successive rounds of review by other judges. Nothing was wrong with the student's work. Others were judged to be better.  

Also, it is a fact that schools with fewer resources field fewer contestants. That said, one of my teams was shocked to find that one  student needed to know more about statistics, so she sent emails to all of the mathematics and science teachers in her school, and got no replies. She got better responses from UT graduate students: several of them showed her the math that she needed to teach herself.  

Public school, private school,
and home-schooled students all competed.

Another barrier is that sociology is considered the idiot child of the science family with the S in STEM being redundant of TEM. The truth is that social science education includes the scientific method as a rubric, expressly, consciously (even self-consciously), and repeatedly. Moreover, social scientists are taught the evolutions of the paradigms that brought us to our current state. The physical sciences seldom teach the scientific method explicitly. Worse, they deliver a product that is wrapped for consumption as if it were always this way. From Ampere to Gauss to Maxwell to Heisenberg, it is a straight line. They never learn the original statement of Ohm's Law - or that it was rejected by the scientific community for personal reasons.  (See "Is Physics a Science?" here on NecessaryFacts.)

So, while physics and astronomy, the chemistries and the engineerings all enjoy the benefit of judging by degreed professionals, the standards are not so strict in behavioral and social sciences.  

It is true that any literate and intelligent person can follow the judging forms.  The questions we ask and the answers we listen for are easy to understand.  The difficulties come from differentiating among the honored winners, first through fifth, and distinguishing them from the very many worthies who also showed up.  

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ELI THE ICE MAN: Science and Technology

In this Presidential election year, the major party candidates drop hints about creating jobs by fostering technology and innovation.  Sociologist Anthony Giddens defines and delimits their thinking when he cites “innovation centers” near universities such as Cambridge.  Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice even mentioned Austin as a magnet for people from around the world with advanced university degrees.  But it is at once more complicated and simpler than that.  Basically, the nature of innovation defies planning, a harsh reality for all the planners running for political office.

Electrical technicians know the mnemonic ELI the ICE man.  In an inductive (L) circuit the measured voltage (E) sine wave precedes the measured current (I): E Leads I.  In a Capacitive circuit, the sine wave of current (I) precedes the measured sine wave of voltage (E): ICE.  Thus, Eli the Iceman.  So, too, with technology and science, does one or the other lead to simplify the analysis.  In fact – in reality for both non-trivial circuits, as for economic systems – isolating one or the other is a convenience of analysis.  No formula exists for creating innovation centers or every town with a college or university could boast of having one. 

It is a principle of Austrian economic theory that entrepreneurship is ineffable.  Yes, it helps to know accounting, and marketing, and organizational development, and to have motivation, being willing to work hard for 18 hours a day, and to know how and when to delegate responsibility, and all that and more.  Ultimately, the pieces do not add up.  The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  Case studies show people who fail despite having all of these, and others who succeed despite lacking one or more of them.

“Laissez nous faire!”  According to historical legend, the phrase stems from a meeting in about 1680 between the powerful French finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert and a group of French businessmen led by a certain M. Le Gendre. When the eager mercantilist minister asked how the French state could be of service to the merchants, and help to promote their commerce, Le Gendre replied simply "Laissez-nous faire."  Wikipedia here. 

If you examine the broad history of science and technology from the steam engine and thermodynamics through electricity and its opening up the physics of quantum mechanics, to the atomic age, the space age, the post-industrial revolution of the information age, and the immediate promise of 3-D printing and nanotechnology, it is obvious that government programs to “create” high-technology centers can only (at best) replicate the successes of the previous generation.  Note that according to Moore’s Law a “generation” in technology is 18 months, not 30 years. 

Sometimes, so-called “pure science” does lead to new inventions. The theories do not grow out on their own, but only explain known facts.  From the medieval siege weapons and clock towers that were explained with the theory of “impetus” through Galileo, to Newton, Watt, Henry, Marconi, Einstein, and to our own time each invention made possible a better understanding which was expressed as a theory.  But the “theory” that was accepted was only a replacement for a paradigm.  Each paradigm at first suggested new inventions and then was discarded when further discoveries could not be explained in those terms.

Previously on "Necessary Facts"
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Great Scientific Experiments
Browne on Kuhn
Is Physics a Science?

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

“Everyone” knows this book, even those who have not read it.  “Paradigm shift” is an idea within our common culture. This month, I made the time to read it (third edition) cover-to-cover and make notes, both marginalia and on eight pages from a notepad.  The Wikipedia summary (here)  is accurate.  What I took away – and what you find – is necessarily different. 

In the Postscript answering his critics (and supporters), Kuhn points out that his thesis resonates with similar ideas from other fields, such as art and politics.  Those other fields informed his view of science.  That thesis may appear to have been assimilated broadly considering the common understanding of paradigms today. But having completed classes in sciences several times since I first read the book for a community college seminar in 1976, we still do not learn about science this way. 

Standard textbooks in physics – Sears and Zemansky (and the successors), Tipler, Halliday and Resnick – and the professors who lecture from them, do not admit to the existence of paradigm shifts. They deliver the intellectual development of electricity and other topics in the traditional mode.  In the freshman lab, we have the electroscope, but not as a Leyden jar to collect electric fluid.  Kuhn’s claim that Maxwell’s Equations and even Ohm’s Law were not accepted on their merits finds no voice in the typical college classroom. 

Kuhn cites "Resistance to Ohm's Law" by Morton L. Schagrin (American Journal of Physics, July 1963, Volume 31, Issue 7, pp. 536. ) The abstract at American Association of Physics Teachers here  says:

“It is argued that the usual account of the discovery and subsequent rejection, or criticism, of Ohm's law is both a misleading and an inadequate explanation. A close logical examination of Ohm's experimental work reveals a conceptual structure quite different from that of the electrical science of his time. As a result of this analysis, it is claimed that the conceptual shift in Ohm's experimental work was the basis for the reaction of his contemporaries.”

Kuhn also points out that while art evolved past representation, painters today still create realistic portraits, still lifes, and landscapes.  No physicist or chemist investigates phlogiston.  Kuhn also identifies the fact that debates in social science are rooted in incommensurable paradigms.  Here on Necessary Facts is a list of about 30 different theories of crime. 

Some can be reconciled to each other, especially in context.  Most cannot. Also here on Necessary Facts is Rom Harre's Great Scientific Experiments. Some reflect paradigm shifts; others reinforce Kuhn's suggestions about "normal science." Some of them - Robert Norman on the dip of the magnetic field; and Konrad Lorenz on imprinting - offer contrary evidence that does not decide between rival paradigms.

Those cannot invalidate the facts cited here.  Kuhn is clear about his commitment to objective reality.  He argues against interpreters who accuse (or praise) him for subjectivism and relativism.  We do perceive differently, but we do perceive something, not just anything.  Moreover, the supposed weakness in circularity and tautology, are only identifications: A is A, as another philosopher put it.  Kuhn is clear that not just anything can be an identification. Between the perceptions, he says, are gaps, or lacunae, or nothing: conceptual and perceptual voids against which or contrasted with which we perceive.

Last night coming home from work on the bus, I sat next to a man reading The Iliad.  The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is that kind of book: if you have not read it (for some years passed) you deserve the opportunity.

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