Education – Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog

Regeneron High School Science Talent Search 2019

curiouscat — Fri, 19 Apr 2019 17:21:38 +0000

$3.1 million in prizes was awarded through the Regeneron Science Talent Search 2019, including $2,000 to each of the top 300 scholars and their schools. The top award was for $250,000. If you want to watch the video without knowing the winner, watch it before reading the rest of this post.

Every year the accomplishments of high school students provide amazing hope for the future. I am glad for the organizations that highlight the efforts of these students and provide awards for a few of the most amazing accomplishments. The top 40 students all get at least $25,000 (with the top 10 getting more).

Ana Humphrey, 18, of Alexandria, Virginia, won the top award of $250,000 for her mathematical model to determine the possible locations of exoplanets — planets outside our solar system — that may have been missed by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope. The second place award and $175,000 went to Samuel Weissman 17, of Rosemont, Pennsylvania for his project analyzing the genetic makeup of HIV in two patients on long-term anti-retroviral therapy to understand why they continued to have “reservoirs” of treatment-resistant HIV-infected cells. The third place and $150,000 went to Adam Ardeishar, 17, of Alexandria, Virginia, for his project combining a classic previously unsolved math problem called the “coupon collector problem” with extreme value theory.

To learn more and see about applying next year see the Society for Science site.

Protecting Cows with Lion Lights

curiouscat — Sun, 21 Oct 2018 17:24:08 +0000

It is wonderful to see what great things people accomplish to improve their lives using sensible, and fairly simple, engineering.

15 Year-Old Kenyan Prodigy, Richard Turere, Who Created “Lion Lights”

He fitted a series of flashing LED bulbs onto poles around the livestock enclosure, facing outward. The lights were wired to a box with switches and to an old car battery powered by a solar panel. They were designed to flicker on and off intermittently, thus tricking the lions into believing that someone was moving around carrying a flashlight.

The astonishing aspect of this is that Turere installed the whole system by himself, without receiving any training in electronics or engineering.

This is a great video which includes good examples of the value to experimenting, learning and adapting. Iteration is a critical skill when developing solutions. Try out prototypes and learn from what happens. Use that knowledge to develop new solutions or modify the existing solutions and experiment some more. Continue to iterate and improve.

This is another great example of people using their initiative, creativity and engineering talent to create appropriate technology solutions to create solutions that improve their lives. It is great to see how these efforts continue over time, this BBC article follows up on Richard Turere several years after his initial success:

What happened to the boy who chased away the lions?

The Lion Lights system is now in 750 homesteads in Richard’s community and beyond, with the innovator making small tweaks and improvements to each version.

Lion Lights 2.0 costs $200 (£150) to install. Half of the money usually comes from NGOs while the rest is provided by the herder.

This version has 16 different flashing light settings and Richard’s latest update is a homemade wind turbine for days when clouds limit the solar power potential.
…
But while his idea has travelled, support for Richard as a young innovator and the implementation of his own Lion Lights has stalled in recent years. He thinks Kenya could do more to help young innovators like himself.

“There are many young people in Kenya with brilliant ideas, better even than mine – they just need support,” he says.

They need someone to be there to tell them, “this idea is really nice., let’s develop it to help communities”.

The efforts of so many great young people to create solutions that make the world a better place are inspiring.

14 Year Old Signs $700,000 MOU for a Drone to Detect and Defuse Land Mines

curiouscat — Sat, 14 Jan 2017 18:21:26 +0000

Harshwardhan Zala, from Gujarat, India has signed an agreement worth Rs. 5 crore (US$733,940) to explore the possibility of commercial production of a drone created by him which can help in detecting and defusing landmines.

Harshwardhan started work on the prototype of the landmine-detecting drone last year after reading in newspapers about high army casualties due to landmines. Aerobotics7 is the company founded by the 14 years old.

Harshwardhan Zala, 14-year-old trends for Rs 5 crore deal at Vibrant Gujarat Global Summit 2017!

Explaining more about the drone, the zealous 14-year-old said, “The drone is designed to send out waves that cover eight sq. mt area while flying two feet above the surface; the waves detect land mines and communicate their location with a base station. The drone also carries a bomb weighing 50 gram that can be used to destroy the landmine.” Harshwardhan Zala’s proud father Pradhyumansinh is an accountant with a plastic company in Naroda, and his mother Nishaba is a homemaker.

[missing video – removed ]

The video has Harshwardhan speaking a bit of English but mainly some other language that I don’t understand. If I understand right, his drone is 98% accurate at identifying mines (where the current solutions are 92% accurate – and much more dangerous for those having to walk around testing). His solution is 17 times faster and 22 times cheaper than the current solutions. Once the mine is detected by the drone through an infrared sensor, a 50 gram detonator will complete the task of defusing it (blowing it up).

This video shows a bit of the drone itself (non-English audio)

And here is a short video of Harshwardhan discussing Arduino from 2015 on a channel he helped create, The Kids Edutech (Intelligent Young Makers From India):

PISA Science Education Results Show Singapore, Japan and Estonia Leading

curiouscat — Wed, 14 Dec 2016 15:41:11 +0000

The most comprehensive comparison of student achievement in math and science around the globe is completed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The 2015 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) focuses on science understanding of 15 year olds (the 2012 report focused on math).

2015 results for the science portion (rank – country – mean score)(I am not listing all countries):

1 – Singapore – 556
2 – Japan – 538
3 – Estonia – 534
4 – Taiwan – 532
5 – Finland – 531
6 – Canada – 528
7 – Vietnam – 525
8 – China – 520*
9 – Korea – 516
13 – Germany – 509
13 – UK – 509
23 – USA – 496
26 – Sweden – 493 (this is also the OECD average)
56 – Mexico – 416
61 – Brazil – 401

* I am merging several distinct Chinese locations reported in the official report.

The 2015 PISA include 72 participating countries and economies. From the PISA report:

On average across OECD countries, 25% of boys and 24% of girls reported that they expect to work in a science-related occupation. But boys and girls tend to think of working in different fields of science: girls envisage themselves as health professionals more than boys do; and in almost all countries, boys see themselves as becoming information and communications technologies (ICT) professionals, scientists or engineers more than girls do.

International Science Research Scholar Grants

curiouscat — Tue, 24 May 2016 14:52:04 +0000

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome Trust, and Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation have announced the International Research Scholars Program which aims to support up to 50 outstanding early career scientists worldwide. The program’s aim is to help develop scientific talent worldwide.

The new international competition is seeking top early career researchers from a wide variety of biomedical research fields. Applicants must have started their first independent research position on or after April 1, 2009. Awardees will be invited to participate in research meetings with scientists supported by the funders. These meetings facilitate the exchange of ideas, stimulate new research, and provide an opportunity for collaborative endeavors within the international scientific community.

Awardees will receive a total of $650,000 over five years.
Applications are due June 30, 2016.
Awardees will be notified in April 2017.

HHMI and its partners have committed a total of $37.4 million for the International Research Scholars Program and will award each scientist who is selected a total of $650,000 over five years. The competition is open to scientists who have trained in the U.S. or United Kingdom for at least one year. Additionally, eligible scientists must have run their own labs for less than seven years, and work in one of the eligible countries.

Although Nieng Yan had several grants when she started her lab at Tsinghua University in 2007, she barely had enough money to pay her eight lab members. “In China, there is a limit on the percentage of a grant that you can use to pay people — your graduate students, your postdocs, your technicians, your assistants — to a decent level,” she explains. After struggling to balance her budget for several years, Yan’s scientific achievements and potential landed her an international grant from HHMI in 2012. “The amount of money provided by Hughes is relatively small compared to other programs, but it has the advantage that you can freely decide what to do with it,” says Yan. In fact, HHMI’s science officers encouraged Yan to use her five-year International Early Career Award (IECS) to cover the cost of paying her lab team, explaining that the money could be used in any way that assisted her research. Today, Yan has 15 people working in her lab helping to elucidate the structures of proteins that move molecules in and out of cells. The protein channels and transporters they study are mutated in a number of diseases — including diabetes and cancer — and understanding how they work could help in the development of drugs that block their ill effects. For example, the team recently solved the structure of GLUT1 – a glucose transporter that is often overexpressed in malignant tumor cells. Their data may provide clues for how to inhibit the transporter and perhaps even reveal a way to use it to deliver chemotherapeutic drugs. Photo Credit: Kevin Wolf (AP)

Countries that are not eligible for this competition include the G7 countries (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, United Kingdom and United States), as well as countries identified by the U.S. Department of Treasury, Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) as being subject to comprehensive country or territory-wide sanctions or where current OFAC regulations prohibit U.S. persons or entities from engaging in the funding arrangements contemplated by this grant program. For this program, such sanctioned countries or territories currently include Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Syria, and the Crimea region of Ukraine.

Funding Sources for Independent Postdoctoral Research Projects in Biology

curiouscat — Sun, 25 Oct 2015 14:53:52 +0000

Here is a nice list of funding sources for independent postdoctoral research projects in biology.

Some examples:

Banting Postdoctoral Fellowships. Eligibility: Canadian citizens, foreign citizens – so about everybody
Starting Grants, European Research Council, Europe. “ERC grants are open to researchers of any nationality in the world, any scientific field, any age.”
Max Planck Research Group, Germany – “The Max Planck Society is committed to support Open Access on all levels. We therefore ask applicants to highlight in their list of publications all items which are freely available in an open access repository or on a journal’s website.”
Research Fellowships for Young Scientists, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science – “Young researchers in all fields of the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences are eligible to apply.” “This fellowship program is Japan’s core program for cultivating young Japanese researchers. However, there is no nationality requirement for applications.”
NSF Postdoctoral Fellows. For at least some, maybe all, “be a U.S. citizen (or national) or a U.S. permanent resident, i.e., have a “green card,” when applying; “
Research Associateship Programs, The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, “Citizenship requirements for the NRC Research Associateship Programs vary depending on the sponsoring federal laboratory.”

Directory of select science and engineering scholarships and fellowships for undergraduates, graduates and faculty on our blog.

MudWatt: Make Power From Mud!

curiouscat — Sat, 11 Apr 2015 15:04:41 +0000

Keegan Cooke and Kevin Rand created MudWatt kits as a way to engage kids/students with science. From the website:

We want to show kids this brighter side of STEM, to empower them to become the great problem solvers of tomorrow. Because let’s face it, there are plenty of problems in the world that need solving.

Unfortunately, our experience in school wasn’t unique. In 2011, less than one-third of 8th graders in the U.S. were deemed proficient in science. Today, 70% of the fastest growing careers are in STEM fields. The supply of STEM education is not meeting the demand.

Most of the world’s mud contain microbes that produce electricity when they eat. That is the engine driving the MudWatt. Colonies of special bacteria (called shewanella and geobacter) generate the electricity in a MudWatt.

The electricity output is proportional to the health and activity of that bacterial colony. By maintaining these colonies in different ways, you can use MudWatt to run all kinds of great experiments. Thus the MudWatt allows kids to engage with science, using their natural curiosity to experiment and learn. Engaging this too-often-neglected human potential will bring joy to those kids (as kids and as grown-ups) and benefit our society.

With standard topsoils, typical power levels are around 100 microWatts, which is enough to power the LED, buzzer, clock, etc..

2014 Ranking of the World’s Best Research Universities

curiouscat — Sat, 28 Feb 2015 15:36:52 +0000

Shanghai’s Jiao Tong University produces an annual ranking of research universities. The methodology values publications and faculty awards (Nobel and Fields) which belies the focus on ranking research not for example the quality of education provided.

You could argue one measure does partially address teaching as the Nobel and Fields prizes to alumni are created to the institution (that is separate from a measure of faculty that receive those honors). I would agree it partially measure the education though it also measures the ability of that school to attract the absolute best candidates (whether they would have been just as successful going elsewhere is a fair question).

Results from the 2014 rankings of top 500 universities with the number of schools by country:

location	Top 100	% of World Population	% of World GDP	% of top 500
USA	52	4.5%	22.2%	29.2%
United Kingdom	8	0.9	3.5	7.6
Germany	4	1.1	5.0	7.8
Canada	4	0.5	2.4	4.2
France	4	0.9	3.8	4.2
Japan	3	1.8	7.8	3.8
Australia	4	0.3	1.5	3.8
China	0	19.2	11.7	8.8
Netherlands	4	0.2	1.3	2.6
Sweden	4	0.1	0.8	2.2
Switzerland	5	0.1	0.8	1.4
South Korea	0	.7	1.7	2.0
India	0	17.0	1.9	0.2

The top countries for top 100 and top 500 schools are listed above, but I skip over many after the top 7 or 8 to include a few countries I like to watch, see the ranking site for the full list. Country population and GDP data were taken from the World Development Indicators 2013, by the World Bank.

There is little change in top 100 since 2008, which I think is a good sign, it wouldn’t make much sense to have radical shifts quickly in this type of ranking. The USA lost 2 schools in the top 100, UK lost 3, Germany lost 2, Switzerland gained 2, Netherlands gain 2…

There is more change in the top 500 where changes are more sensible (there is probably not much separating schools ranked in the 300’s from those in the 500’s so variation and strong pushes (from countries like China) can have an impact. China gained 14 more schools in the top 500. China’s GDP also increased from 6.6% of global GDP to 11.7%.

University of Wisconsin – Madison is 24th, it was 17th in 2008 My father taught there while I grew up.

Top 10 schools (same schools as 2008 with slight shifts of where a couple are ranked):

Harvard University
Stanford University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology(MIT)
University of California at Berkeley
University of Cambridge
Princeton University
California Institute of Technology
Columbia University
University Chicago
University of Oxford

I find this whole ranking interesting (even with the limitations). They did an alternative ranking this year removing the Nobel and Fields factors and while it changes the results some, it doesn’t change a huge amount (less than I would have guessed). If it were me I would like to add more of those awards rather than eliminate them, but I understand the sense behind remove them. This is especially true if you want to help emerging institutions.

I don’t think China really think China has the 2nd most top 500 schools for research but that is what this list shows. I think China is making great progress but is really quite a bit behind the top countries. Their lack of top 100 schools partially reflects this. I do believe China could be in 2nd place in 10 or 15 years, but that have to continue the good things they are doing and do more beyond that.

The USA remains in very strong position. The strong university research success is one of the primary reasons the USA’s economy is so relatively strong. And the strong economy provides a great deal of funding to keep the USA’s research position strong. Never-the-less I do expect the USA’s relative advantage in this area to continue declining – mainly due to other countries (including China most significantly) investing heavily in science and engineering research. The anti-science attitudes of many powerful political people in the USA hurts; but all they have done is decrease the advantage the USA holds, they haven’t managed to ruin the USA’s strong position yet.

Since this effort is partially to spur and measure Chinese schools you can see why there would be pressure from the Chinese universities to help, which removing Nobel and Fields factors does do.

I repeat my prediction from back in 2008 (as would most, I would imagine) that China and India will have much greater representation 10-20 years from now (those gains will have to come at the expense of others and I would imagine Europe and the USA will show declines).

My thoughts from 2008 on some things I wish they would adjust.

Some method of valuing company creation (by “alumni”, even people that do so before graduating, and faculty) – giving larger value the greater the economic gain provided by the company. Also other ways of valuing economic value creation.
Split credit for Nobel and Fields winners among where they are when they won, where they did the research and where they are now (I can imagine this would be a huge hassle still I think it would be interesting – and it seems we should be able to devote a few people to making developing some really interesting data I think many people would find interesting). Now all credit goes to where they are when they win. They also give credit to the schools the award winners received degrees from (which I like).
Add some additional awards to the calculations – there is a problem in that many awards are geographic or country specific still ideally add more.
Additional examining of the citation importance – I like what they are doing, I just would like to see more in that area.
Include more journals in the count of output of articles – again I can understand the difficulty, I just would like to see that added, ideally.

Using The Building of Robots to Engage Students in Learning

curiouscat — Sat, 07 Feb 2015 14:22:39 +0000

Fundi bots has a mission to use robotics training in African schools to create and inspire a new generation of problem solvers, innovators and change-makers. I believe strongly in this type of effort. We waste so much human potential by killing students design to learn. Instead we need to create systems that not only don’t kill that desire but allow it to flourish.

Fundi Bots focuses on the technological process of building robots as a way for students to look at the world around them from a practical, solution oriented perspective. By guiding students through problem identification, brainstorming, collaboration, construction, programming, final deployment and system feedback, we show them how the problems around them can be solved through a technological approach and persistent reductive analysis.

Fundi Made is an effort to create professional grade electronics right in our Fundi Spaces, and deploy the products in five core market segments; home-automation, agriculture, energy, security and health.