
11-year-old girl inspired by Flint water crisis creates cheap kit to test lead - MaysonL
http://abcnews.go.com/Lifestyle/11-year-girl-inspired-flint-water-crisis-creates/story?id=50559884
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jerkstate
This is cool and this kid is obviously very smart and precocious, but I bought
a lead test kit for under 10 bucks when I was concerned about the paint in my
house.

Winning a science fair, great. Scholarship, great. Breathless articles about
how this kid is changing the world? Probably setting them up for failure.

edit: valid point that testing for lead in water is a much lower threshold
than testing for lead in paint. I remain skeptical of the news coverage.

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zacharycohn
Testing for lead paint is not the same as testing for lead in water.

There are test strips for lead testing water, but they're unreliable,
unregulated, and not particularly trustworthy. The only great option right now
is to call a lab who does water testing and work with them to send in a sample
and have it tested via a method like induced plasma mass spectrometry.

Unfortunately many of these labs aren't interested in working with individuals
who will only send one or two samples. They prefer to work with companies that
will send them hundreds of thousands of samples. Even if you found one willing
to work with you, their business processes involve fax machines, invoices, and
talking to sales people on the phone.

(Related: That's why I started a company called
[http://www.testyourwaterforlead.com](http://www.testyourwaterforlead.com). We
started a company and partnered with a lab, we let you order online, pay with
a credit card, and we deal with the lab to help you avoid the hassle.)

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pilom
This seems amazing but you need to have your order form automatically redirect
to https. This is a really big deal. I almost didn't purchase because of this
just so you know. Sure I can type the extra 's' in myself but 99% of your
customers aren't going to do that. Even if you aren't worried about the
security issues because you use stripe, your customers are going to get "don't
enter credit card info on sites like this" alerts from most browsers (chrome
told me not to buy). Please enable a redirect now.

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zacharycohn
Thanks for the suggestion! It's been on my backlog, but I'll prioritize it.

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AdamJacobMuller
I've personally been moving to an "everything is on HTTPS" model now for
anything new I build. Just do a redirect for everything that comes in over
[http://](http://) to [https://](https://).

~~~
apk-d
I'm so glad this is rapidly becoming the default. Just a few years ago people
would come up with the silliest excuses to avoid migrating to HTTPS.

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alva
"while browsing the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering’s
website, a site she said she checks weekly to see “if there’s anything new.”

does anyone believe these stories? they seem to be popping up more often.

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stefanpie
I am part of this area of high school / pre college research and part of a
high school that is successful in having students reach high levels of high
school research including myself, so I can shed some insight. These kinds of
stories show up all the time and it is usually the case that they have
received some kind of outside help. But in the world of competitive high
school research, there is a lot more emphasis on making innovations which are
successful and more immediately applicable at the trade off of being something
superficial or abandoning projects or ideas that don't appear to be
immediately amazing or successful since they are easy to quickly dismiss in a
competitive environment. However, there are plenty of amazing students who go
on and win ISEF and other top competitions who collaborate with professors and
engineers and I certainly encourage collaboration like this. Although, within
my own research, I have remained independent since at my school, my research
director's and other research teachers' main field is in biology or chemistry,
leaving little domain specific assistance for me who has perused projects with
heavy electrical engineering and computer science knowledge and skills. I have
tried to reach out to professors before, but I can be hard to find someone
whose project ideas and interests align with yours (without having to travel
long distances to meet and work with them at their universities which I am
able to do). The world of high school research is fiercely competitive and
without some kind of collaboration or connections with professors and
professionals, it becomes almost impossible to reach the top and be
successful. I have managed to do this on my own but it has been a struggle and
very competitive and hard journey in which I regret not finding someone such
as a professor to work with. I sometimes worry that my research friends and
high schoolers that pursue research will abandon or forget about the idea core
values of research and collaboration in the unforgiving world of high school
competitive research. I know this has kinda turned into a rant but if you have
any questions about the world of competitive research or my own research I
would be glad to talk about it since I rarely see this subject talked about
outside of the high school research community.

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spikels
Maybe high school aged people don't need paragraph breaks but older people
like me do.

~~~
bradknowles
Paragraph breaks would be nice, yes.

But I’m willing to be more forgiving when it comes to younger people who may
not have had the opportunity yet to learn the wisdom of years.

So, for example, if you are 50 or younger, I would be likely to be more
forgiving of your response to the high schooler.

;)

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s0rce
There is very little in the article about how the technology actually works,
other than some vague indications it relies on carbon nanotubes, which so far
haven't really been useful for anything, outside of academic curiosities.
Testing your water is actually easy, you collect some and send it to an
analytical lab that uses standard processes and understands possible
interference.

edit: the video shows a bit more, the nanotubes appear to have been chemically
treated with compounds that show an affinity for lead, not much information
beyond that. This seems like quite a feat to accomplish at home. My experience
in grad school with high school students working in our lab was that you
needed access to the university facilities to do well at these competitions.

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thowarray
Ok, another wunderkind story. At the age of 11:

* Knows how to program Arduino

* knows how to write Android Apps

* has a working understanding of chemistry

* is able to infuse carbon nanotubes with chlorine and build a disposable sensor from this.

* understands marketing enough to promote her product via the app stores (there really is no other reason for using a smartphone instead of three colored LEDs to display results).

Is anyone really buying this?

Here's a more likely story:

* Parents see scientific curiosity in her daughter, as well as the will to help people.

* Parents see a fear of lead in water and therefore a market for testkits

* Parents see that testkits already on the market suffer from being unreliable in untrained hands/too difficult to use.

* Parents have the idea for a better, "digital testkit", but that turns out to be way more expensive than anything that is already on the market.

* Parents then spoonfeed the idea to her daughter. They do the work, she gets the credit (and probably thinks that she did most of the work).

* The media picks the story up because "awwwww ... smart kid", resulting in free marketing for what would otherwise be a totally overengineered/overpriced product.

~~~
skocznymroczny
I've seen a few similar stories. "11 year old kid creates artificial brain".
Translation: 11 year old kid copy pastes and runs tutorial code for OpenCV
image recognition.

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WalterBright
I attempted to build many science projects as a kid, but failed repeatedly
because of my poor fabrication skills, lack of proper tools, and no money.
Particularly frustrating were my attempts to build a gas liquifier outlined in
"The Amateur Scientist".

Not exactly a science project, but my brother and I finally managed to
construct a go-kart out of scrap. It would do about 40 mph, and was enormous
fun.

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gvb
The article is aggravatingly short on details. It looks like the MIT sensor
this is based on is:

[http://news.mit.edu/2016/wireless-wearable-toxic-gas-
detecto...](http://news.mit.edu/2016/wireless-wearable-toxic-gas-
detector-0630)

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techtofixpeople
Flint did not suffer from lack of lead detectors! The EPA knew for some time
before but largely failed to act. Saying this girl is changing the world is
like saying that SAT/ACT tutors in silicon valley are enabling disadvantaged
kids.

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nkkollaw
Has nothing to do with the article, but what is go.com and why are some
websites hosted as a subdomain of go.com..?

I don't get why anyone would want to do that.

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hiharryhere
Disney own it. It's a hangover from the late 90s dot-com era, when portals
were the hotness.

I'm guessing lots of people have it as their default homepage from the old
days so they keep it running.

~~~
nkkollaw
Yes, I know that much, but why would a major site not redirect to a regular
.com domain?

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nickporter
Looking at the videos, it seems to be some kind of carbon nanotube sensor that
checks the resistance of the water its dipped in. This is hooked up to an
arduino and the data is pushed to a smartphone via bluetooth.

Not sure how she made the carbon nanotube detector, but I think people figured
out a way to do it with a microwave oven? Seems dangerous, but very cool.

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caseydurfee
All the truthering in this thread is a bit much.

Some of the nastiest bullying I've observed (and experienced) in my life has
been from smart people towards even smarter people that they resented. I'm
getting more than a whiff of that here.

I don't know if this girl is a Mozart, but there sure are a lot of angry
Salieris in these parts.

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terminado
How it works:

[https://youtu.be/7UR6epdce-o?t=40](https://youtu.be/7UR6epdce-o?t=40)

Disposable cartridge consisting of briefly outlined carbon nanotube
component...

How does a regular person make one of these nanotube cartirdges?

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GenericsMotors
_The lead-testing industry hates her!_

Next article: Meet the single mother of 10 who discovered this simple and
effective alternative to vaccination! _Doctors don 't want you to know!_

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ucaetano
I wonder what the school principal will think it is to justify calling the
police and having her arrested!

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gozur88
I guess it depends on whether or not she deliberately made it look like
something for which she ought to be arrested.

~~~
dominotw
funny that your comment is downvoted but the parent comment is not despite
both being equally off topic.

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avgkol
The spelling bee and now this .Indian parents keep pushing their kids .. I
know first hand

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Feniks
America is truly an inspiration to us all...

