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.
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. 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.)
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.
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:// to https://.
Service looks awesome, but I wish you guys would use HTTPS on the checkout page (or even better, the entire site!). Let's Encrypt can give you a certificate for free: https://letsencrypt.org/getting-started/
Yup! There are a number of great cities that offer free lead testing services. Unfortunately, it seems to be the exception - not the norm. And often these aren't the places that need it the most.
Also, using city provided services can 6-8 weeks to get results. In an experiment I did with one city's free testing service, you had to call them to place your order. I got a voicemail. It took 4 months to get a call back.
We provide results in less than 2 weeks from when you ship your water sample off to the lab.
Another option: I sent my home water to a labs (http://www.karlabs.com/) they were happy to work with individuals and even have a test kit to facilitate.
Where I live, it's easy. Don't try calling a lab -- call an environmental testing service instead. IIRC the cost was about $40 when I took the sample myself.
A cheaper kit would be nice if I wanted to take a bunch of samples to estimate how far from the tap the lead source was, though.
I bought a lead test kit for under 10 bucks when I was concerned about the paint in my house.
Hmm. Of her device, the article says:
The result is Tethys, a sensor-based device designed to detect lead in water faster than other techniques currently on the market.
So have you considered the possibility that her device works differently (and perhaps better) than yours? You seem to be basically knocking her innovation, based on the fact that you once used a device that was "similar" in some way.
Have you considered the possibility that is doesn't? and that a successful product on the market deserves more benefit of the doubt than a kid's science fair project?
Usually what happens in these stories is that a kid makes something that is a pale imitation of current standards, and the parents use their industry connections to get a PR blast about their awesome kid, that gets the kid a leg up in college or getting a job, and the 'invention' is forgotten.
> Usually what happens in these stories is that a kid makes something that is a pale imitation of current standards, and the parents use their industry connections to get a PR blast about their awesome kid, that gets the kid a leg up in college or getting a job, and the 'invention' is forgotten.
I think what more often happens is one of the parents are almost entirely responsible for the project, and the kid understands it well but had little to do with its creation/invention/discovery.
If not, then it's quite a coincidence that most of the kids in these stories just happen to have a parent who works in the same field their project was exploring.
Then the parents use their connections to generate news stories about it. It works because these are harmless fluff pieces, and anyone casting doubt on the work of a supposed child is viewed as a cynical curmudgeon, so they mostly go uncontested.
That gets them into a better college, then the project is forgotten and the kid does average from there on out.
I remember a particularly egregious example of this from a few years ago, something about a 9-year-old raising millions of dollars and digging thousands of water wells in Sub-Saharan Africa. Clearly this is BS, but what kind of monster would point out the absurdity of that?
These stories are pretty much always PR tactics by wealthy and/or connected parents to boost the profile of their kid.
I think what more often happens is one of the parents are almost entirely responsible for the project, and the kid understands it well but had little to do with its creation/invention/discovery. If not, then it's quite a coincidence that most of the kids in these stories just happen to have a parent who works in the same field their project was exploring.
I don't understand, why can't the parents be helping and mentoring their kids, without necessarily doing the work for them?
I'm a son of two voice actors, and have done some voice acting myself as a 12-year-old. No, it wasn't a coincidence, but I also guarantee you that my parents didn't act on my behalf! I just, you know, learned from them.
Right, neither was I a great voice actor, I never did any characters more important than "Student #4". And I think it's reasonable to be skeptical of the story. But the argument presented above is absurd.
Reminds me of [1]. It's tech's equivalent of the crazy mother pushing her children into beauty pageants. It should not be applauded (in many circumstances).
A lead paint test kit is not the same product as a lead water test.
Lead based paint has 5000 ppm (parts per million) of lead [1]
Water is considered unsafe at levels over over 15 ppb (parts per (billion) [2]
So her test kit is orders of magnitude more sensitive than a lead paint test kit, it's not even in the same ballpark. (if you're standing at home plate and her test kit is at first base, then the lead paint test kit would be over 5000 miles away)
Sure, I'd be happy to, I thought LoC was only used as a unit of measurement on Slashdot.
The LoC holds around 24M cataloged books [1] in its collections.
So the difference between a lead paint detection kit and this project is like the difference between the LoC and a single bookshelf of 72 books.
Or, if you prefer bigger numbers, the LoC has around 540 miles of shelf space [2], so if you laid out all the shelves end to end, it's like the difference between the shelves of the LoC versus shelves that span 180 million miles (greater than the distance between Mars and the Sun [3])
Usually what happens in these stories is that a kid makes something that is a pale imitation of current standards, and the parents use their industry connections to get a PR blast about their awesome kid, that gets the kid a leg up in college or getting a job, and the 'invention' is forgotten.
Sure, but what's wrong with that? It's a little unrealistic to expect an 11 year old girl to productize an invention and bring it to market -- she'd have to team up with a schoolmate who is a budding patent attorney to have any hope of doing so without outside funding.
The nice thing about stories like this is that it helps gives inspiration to other young budding scientists.
* You teach the child dishonesty (taking credit for someone elses work can terminate your academic career).
* In this particular case, the child becomes the face of a marketing campaign (that's her actual contribution: selling a product).
* Stories like this one put pressure on other children because their parents buy it hook line and sinker and want the same for their children.
> Usually what happens in these stories is that a kid makes something that is a pale imitation of current standards, and the parents use their industry connections to get a PR blast about their awesome kid, that gets the kid a leg up in college or getting a job, and the 'invention' is forgotten.
That's almost what happened with Theranos, but we forgot to forget the "invention".
Have you considered the possibility that is doesn't?
The thing is, I wasn't making any assertions (or counter-assertions) about the original storyline. The person I was responding to did, in the form of, basically, "But there was already a similar-sounding product on the market, wasn't there? Therefore this kid couldn't possibly have come up with anything all that novel or interesting."
Which to my ears sounds like an unsupported inference.
Oh, I wasn't, outside of my small town. I did extremely well on standardized tests, is all. But I still got the "You need to go cure cancer" comments. Youthful insecurity made me latch on to any source of validation, and soon you have someone who lives under the premise that they have to be extremely successful to be a worthy human being.
My nephew was just born with a trisomy similar to Down syndrome. If I can make his life better, I will count mine a success.
I believe it. I had a home lab when I was a child. The Web didn't exist yet, but I read the scientific publications that were available at the library. It used to be common enough that there were books published about how to set up a lab and do research at home, like there were about setting up a home dark room for photography. (More recently I met someone who even had his own NMR (second hand, non-superconducting, but still) at home, was doing sophomore ochem lab activities at home at age 13, and left for university by age 15.)
It takes a child of remarkable interests and aptitude to win a national competition, of course. That's why you're reading about her specifically. It also takes unusually supportive parents. A sizable minority of American families with children could afford a home lab, equipment, and supplies if a child were so inclined and the parents encouraged it, but I suspect it's rarer for parents to OK funding it than other costly-but-more-common extracurricular activities or adult hobbies. Half of the battle is just having parents who understand you well enough to support what you want to do.
Agreed. As a child of the 80s, one of my favorite things to do was have my mom drop me off at the local university library. I used to just sit in the reference section and devour information. Of course, I never had any mentors or really even anyone with a bachelors degree in my life. So, my comprehension was very low. But, it didn’t stop me from dreaming and reading and thinking. I can only imagine how amazing it must be to be a curious kid in the 2010s.
On the other hand, I think it requires natural and insatiable curiousity. For instance, myy kids, while quite smart, certainly don’t have the same thirst.
I guess it is a little disappointing, at first. But, as a parent, you learn to embrace your children’s interests and help them in the direction they choose to go.
Although you can force and manipulate them into doing things (and, sometimes it makes sense to do so), at a certain point one realizes that motivation is very personal. That is, you can setup the environment to encourage interest. But, if there’s still no interest, even incidental, the outcomes won’t match the expectations.
For a silly example, imagine a parent with a passion for collecting dust. They try every trick to make their children also enjoy it. But, whatever they try, the kids would rather play baseball. What does the parent do? They can make everyone miserable by continuing to force dust into every aspect of life. Or, they can learn to enjoy baseball.
Fortunately, a very curious parent can easily learn to enjoy things that they normally wouldn’t enjoy.
I realize I wasn't clear as didn't meant "isn't it disappointing to be unable to share a specific thing" but more "isn't it disappointing to see your children having a narrower field of interest/curiosity than yourself" (which I also can see happen in your example btw, you're able to enjoy basketball yet they still don't get dust the slightest)
If you're at all willing, I'd love to interview you for a project I'm working on about precocious kids and how to parent them. I'm joseph.flaherty@gmail.com. Can be a lightweight email interview.
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.
I believe them, because I see the amount of support these kids get (highly educated + available parents & teachers, with large budgets). I have a coworker who graduated high school not so long ago, and her high school had an industrial design studio with better equipment (laser cutters, 3D printers, CNC machines, metal lathes, etc.) than the design studio I work in. My own high school, in comparison, had maybe 20-30 computers for about 1000 students.
It can be upsetting to read these things if one feels that they'd have thrived in such a supportive environment, but instead only had indifferent teachers/a school with little budget/etc and had to do without such support. But it's not a reason to doubt the veracity of any of it, or hate on the kids; these kids are sharp and hardworking and doing their best, they just happen to also be much more privileged than average.
> My own high school, in comparison, had maybe 20-30 computers for about 1000 students.
I had some old college-level comp sci books I was getting rid of (C++ by Stroustrup, etc.) and thought I would call a the magnet tech high school in the local inner city. The books were old editions, but why not ask? A teacher was indeed interested and even personally came to my home and picked up the books. He told me that if I had any old computer equipment - anything at all, even if it didn't boot - they could use that too. This is the tech magnet high school. What opportunity do those kids have? How much talent is lost? It's sickening.
I think you hit just the right note here. Yes, recognize that the child is benefiting from economic privilege and readily-available mentors that aren't available to most children, but at the same time, recognize that these kids are hard-working and smart (and above all, they're kids).
It looks interesting, and the articles are accessible to an intelligent 11 year-old without being written to appeal to that age group. It's easy to forget how stifling it is to be young and have so much of what you're given to read tainted by pedagogical writing style.
Of course your reaction isn't unusual either. As people get older they learn not to talk about interests that are too specific until they know people well.
It's difficult to imagine because there has been a not widely acknowledged rise over the last twenty years of incredibly well-resourced parents who spend all of their available time, energy and money on their children.
Elite education (Ivies, Stanford, MIT, Chicago, Hopkins) historically was almost entirely the playground of the already rich. From the 70s onwards, it became a competitive game for the working upper middle class to send their children there. This elite stamp was necessary for their children to at least maintain working upper middle class status but ideally they'd collide with one of the already rich kinds and enter the wealth not labor class.
As income inequality has grown, admission to these institutions have grown even more valuable and parents have dedicated even more resources to giving their children a shot.
The result is that the children of well educated professionals end up in incredibly well resourced environments at home and in their schools. For context, the neighborhood this girl lives in has a median family income of 109,000 dollars, is 91% white and has only 2% of its population living below the poverty line.
Kids are good at deep, intense fixation. For awhile, I was obsessed with aerogels, for reasons I still don't fully understand, and did occasionally stop by the local university library to read up on them.
Does anyone have a link to the article on the lead detector ?
To comment on your question, my favorite past time as a child was walking the aisles of a hardware store or Radio Shack hoping to find a tool or device I had never seen before. If the store had a parts catalog, I would take it home and read every page. The girl in the article is doing the same only in a different format.
It is bizarre that an activity one child finds so fascinating and gratifying is seen as painfully dull and pointless by another child.
Indian parents in america are in mad rush to get their kids into top schools. They start "college prep" at 5 yr old ( eg: http://northsouth.org/public/main/home.aspx/), spelling bees, kumon ect .They know simply acing tests is not enough anymore. They know what other parents are also doing. Hard to get a leg up by simply studying more.
I won't be surprised if we see more of the indian child prodigies in coming years when bulk of indian immigrants kids hit that age.
I have looked up the site of this department - it looks very sparse , unless you can log in that is (it has a news section, to be fair). I guess one needs some fairy dust, sometimes.
this forum seems to really hate anyone who is slightly pessimistic / realistic. I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm just saying that the likelihood of an 11 year old organically doing something like this is very low, compared to say, her parents putting some strong wind in her sails.
My science fair project was heavily guided by two instructors. I doubt that any significant high school science fair project is done without any outside assistance at all. Getting help from experts in the field should be seen as a good thing, not a reason to dismiss the project.
Creating an independent research project doesn’t mean you can’t ask for help. Parents, teachers, experts and other students may offer to help you on your project. Figuring out what kind of help is fair — and what type of help is not — can be tricky. Below are several stories from Science News for Kids that help offer guidance on that issue.
Many students find a mentor to help them refine what questions to ask and how to answer them. Ideally, a mentor should never tell you what to do (even if you ask). Instead, a good mentor will help you find information that will inform your decisions on what to do and how to do it. For example, this story from Science News for Students gives examples of the proper roles played by mentors. This article discusses the advantages of working with a mentor. Meanwhile, we feature in this story the rewarding example of a young student who had the courage to contact an outside expert in the topic he was researching.
When does the reductionism stop? If my dad hadn't been an eager early adopter of modems and desktop computers I doubt I'd have the same interest in computing I do today.
So the head of a science department should be snubbed because they're supported by a team doing work for them? Since when did science become A Pursuit Of The Lone Hero?
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.
* 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.