A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia
blog.benjamin-cabe.com
blog.benjamin-cabe.com
For one, VOCs can be present in breath for other reasons besides some sort of infection in the lung, and VOCs are incredibly hard to differentiate with just a sensor. The fact that they tend to be faint in human breath even at their highest (in contrast to O2 and CO2) doesn't help. Even the most expensive PID sensors for VOCs (they get up into the several hundreds a pop) can't really tell you whether the predominant gas is acetone or alcohol or acetaldehyde or hydrogen sulfide. So you've got to figure out whether the presence of VOCs is truly an anomaly and not just a part of ketosis. In which case you will also need to measure at least VeO2 to see whether the VOCs correspond with the Respiratory Quotient.
The "e-nose" project, as described on the MakeZine article, doesn't appear to do that. It does have an alcohol sensor. But these sensors aren't particularly sophisticated. They use semiconductors with heating elements to detect the presence of gases, and there is almost certainly some overlap between the alcohol and VOCs sensors.
If VOCs are produced by pneumonia, then yes, it's conceivable that even just the VOCs sensor alone would detect this. But can this group of sensors used in the e-nose differentiate pneumonia from catabolism?
Maybe? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
After all, this thing uses AI. And maybe AI can recognize something that a human can't by simply looking at a line graph. I dunno... Such things should be tested against known inputs before being suggested to diagnose anything.
That is to say, you can treat the sensor reading as being completely meaningless and skip interpreting it as indicating VOC levels. You're just using the sensors as black boxes that produce arbitrary values with the property that exposure to organic vapor changes the output "somehow", and letting model training find some meaning in it.
You're intentionally depending on the "personality" of each gas sensor to get data measuring unknown features, so you can't expect consistency from sample to sample. Anything that was completely portable between different sensors would inherently be less powerful.
In this case you'd probably calibrate each sensor to a standard chemical sample and then use the calibration output. You could train on that, not the raw samples and then you have a model that works on all devices.
It sounds like you would need to be exceptionally careful that your meta-process didn't "find" some signal in pure noise (via re-using test sets and so on).
It sounds like you’re actually talking about ordinary levels of carefulness in this (ML) context.
It also detects alcohol from drinking a couple of beers as a dangerous increase in formaldehyde...
The linked Wikipedia article indicates mortality in immunocompromised patients can be as high as 90 percent. That sentence fits with my general impression that fungal pneumonia is both real serious shit and also typically found in people with advanced cases of other serious medical problems, like AIDS or cystic fibrosis.
It sounds reasonably plausible to me that it's feasible to detect fungal pneumonia in specific this way with some reasonable confidence level.
An example is the SCIO sensor ( https://nocamels.com/2019/03/scio-kickstarter-darling-promis... ) which was a cheap handheld spectrometer that claimed to accurately determine the nutritional information of any food you pointed it at.
One good way to debunk this is to measure raw sensor output and compute Mutual Information (which incorporates sensor noise/variability). If the sensor only produces X bits of information, no algorithm will be able to extract more classes than that. In the SCIO case it was just under 8 bits total of information. So something like a poor color sensor. You could train on apples and oranges and maybe do an investor demo, but it's not actually going to do anything useful (as the Kickstarter crowd soon learned).
New NN models are able to do more with the exact same sensor data.
How do creatures know what to eat? Evolution solved that for most creatures, so their sensors don't have to work as hard at runtime. And in other cases, some number of members of a population of creatures will die before the population learns the food is poisonous. Our sensors, and the information processing systems that manage their outputs, are remarkably efficient data processing engines that do the equivalent of approximating and predicting, often well beyond what the most advanced deep learning systems are capable of doing now.
Is there enough information content - per the Shannon entropy definition or otherwise - in DNA and/or RNA to code for the survival-selected traits that
I'm not sure that the (Shannon entropy, MIC, Kolmogorov,) information content of the samples is the limit of any given network trained therefrom? Is there anything to be gained from upsampling and adding e.g. gaussian blur (noise)? Maybe it's feature engineering, maybe it's expert methods bias, maybe it's just sensor fusion; that's the magic noise.
https://github.com/krantirk/Self-Supervised-photo :
> Given a low-resolution input image, PULSE searches the outputs of a generative model (here, StyleGAN) for high-resolution images that are perceptually realistic and downscale correctly.
Maybe no amount of feature engineering can actually add information?
The idea that a magic math technique can replace expensive sensors predates NN's by a few decades. Dozens of start-ups have gone bankrupt trying to do non-invasive blood glucose with portable sensors.
This is a very crude but at least conceptually useful rule of thumb: It's all of the above, but ultimately the analysis result is a mathematical function of an array of values produced by the sensor. Very few math functions do not have the property, that variation in the output increases with the level of variation in the input.
An aside on sparsity priors (which that article uses).. reality is actually a lot less sparse than the researcher models would have you believe. If most dimensions are not truly zero (e.g., have some small noise present) these sparsity methods fall apart. That's why you (never?) see the methods deployed in actual products.
Specifically, the support determination step usually breaks down in epsilon sparse and you also get "noise folding".
Gas sensing is really tricky. Metal oxide gas sensors respond nonlinearly to all three of gas, temperature, and humidity. Plus they drift. AI can help with the nonlinear response. Drift hasn't been solved yet, as far as I know.
There’s more to life than getting into MIT.
On the other hand, if the kid is 'coached' to look/identify, as you say, it is a sad state of affairs when kids are pushed into adulthood too soon...
We have seen this for more than a decade also with the marketing practices around sexualization of fashion for younger and younger kids...
This exactly is the issue: not all kids are geniuses and not all kids are morons, but you'll NEVER know if you treat them like you think they deserve to be treated. If you believe that kids can't understand complex things, they of course won't because you won't explain it to them.
I was one and honestly I'm really happy my parents were neglectful (in the legal sense); my peers at award dinners might have had their university and career plans set out by 12, but none of them struck me as happy or emotionally healthy people, and the older I get the more I'm thinking that turning our smartest kids into robots or sociopaths is a bad idea.
At the age of 6, I was reading at the level of a college graduate, and I started coding in elementary school; I taught my first intro to programming class when I was 11.
My middle-school standardized test scores put me in the top .03 percent and my IQ was tested to be in the mid-140s.
So I think I would count by most metrics, barely. (Nothing quite like going to dinners for the top 200 whatever and knowing you're number 199 or so ha).
I'm also a mental basketcase who developed MS in my 20s, so while I've done pretty well for myself so far, I don't have the personality, dedication, or temperament for great success. There are just a lot of things from my childhood that really make me raise an eyebrow now as an adult.
The amount of pressure is terrible, of course, but in addition to that, there's this weird push and pull where a lot of adults will say out of one side of their mouth how special you are and hold you to standards that are unreasonable for children and accept you + your contributions if they're helpful, but the minute you have your own opinion or disagree, you're a child and obviously don't know anything.
I'm a lost cause for society, intellectually speaking, but I feel concerned for the me born in 2015.
The reason I'm asking is that I see a lot of these (used to judge science fairs, worked with smart undergraduates who build their own equipment) but most of it overstates the technical advances made by the kid.
All in all, not that bad of a little hack.
What I'm most disappointed by these science fare projects is that its often found that the parents of the child are top engineers in the specific field of the projects. In this case, perhaps his mom is a Sr Engineer at a company producing artificial noses aimed at detecting pneumonia where she is in charge of developing dev-kits and SDKs that happen to include sample tensor flow models.
What annoys me is that the story is often one of a kid, against all odds, learning all of this tech out of their own gumption. Where in the same science fare, there probably was a kid who had no help from their parents, who hacked together a 'are the lights on' circuit, using hand-me-down tech components, who's getting no notice.
I'd have struggled to articulate what annoys me about stories like this, but this absolutely hits the nail on the head. I went to a school in the City of London with very elite investment-banker-parents demographics, and I can't tell you the number of stories like this. One comes to mind where one kid won a contest for designing a stockpicking algorithm, and it turned out - of course - that his mum was a fund manager at Goldman, specialising in that exact same area. I don't know what the point of it is. Is there not more to life than gaming university applications?
I was so discouraged by finding out the other children who liked web development and coding had outside help, and I had a really hard time understanding why things like Synapse could get a PC Mag review, but I'd be accused of being a liar if I talked about my own projects, because that's what happens when you're a kid working without an adult. Without an appropriately credentialed adult vouching for you, people accuse you of stealing your work, lying, being an arrogant snob, etc.
ESPECIALLY if you're self-taught or were taught by adults society doesn't think much of. It's believable that the Pages taught Larry to code when he was wee, but obviously I couldn't have learned anything from my parents since one was a high school dropout and the other was the son of a factory worker. How could THEY have known anything?
Similarly, I was raised in an academic environment exposed early to computers (4th grade) in a gifted and talented program that many other students didn't have access to. That same program was literally "grad school prep in elementary school" which meant that when I got to grad school, it wasn't like I was in some sort of foreign country; I was home. And when I finally got to google, eveyrthing there felt normal and natural since it was just an extension of grad school, but with more money and better sysadmins.
That said, I guess if you don't get a leg up as a kid and go on to be successful through grit you can always appreciate that your hard work and determination paid off?
I can't claim to be completely without privilege: I'm about as well-off as you can get and still be considered from a disadvantaged background: My mother dropped out of high school and ran away at 15 (ironically her family included engineers and at least one MSU professor), so while I never had the money, my socio never really matched my economic, class wise. It's more that if you were any lower on the ladder than I was, you just didn't have a computer or MAYBE you might have something like the 5 free hours of AOL in the late 90s. A computer with hours of internet access in 93 required some privilege.
There were a couple of G+T things I did, but I got the money we did scrounge for those from my dad, and once he married my stepmom that stopped because she believed very strongly in gender roles (she wanted me to like clothes shopping and makeup like my sisters and her female relatives) and she also wanted to live in the middle of nowhere.
> That said, I guess if you don't get a leg up as a kid and go on to be successful through grit you can always appreciate that your hard work and determination paid off?
Eh, I'm not going to be successful, because doing so would require neglecting either my own health or that of my family. I have MS, and that just explodes the ability to do any kind of career planning.
That has its own silver lining, though, because I can say whatever the hell I want. Which is its own kind of freedom: I have a 'get out of hustle free' card. It's almost like skipping from being 25 to 65: I had to do a lot of reckoning with my own mortality, what I was worth if I wasn't able to have a high powered career, what did I actually want out of life, etc.
No.
A lot of parents are getting their kids phony medical diagnostics just so they can get extra time on exams. [0]
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2019/03/16/fake-lea...
does it? I'm not in the US, so I wouldn't know.
And a lot go undiagnosed as well because the parents don’t care/are ashamed/don’t know how to navigate the system.
Obviously, also throw in hand-selected medical specialists who diagnose you and prescribe extra time on the exams, great photos of your child at the local soup kitchen, a clutch summer internship with the local congressperson's office.
The entire college game is comprehensively stacked against the poor. Throw in the abandoning of test-based systems towards "leadership evaluation" acceptance methods and you get even more invested into gaming this process by the wealthy.
The thing is, I get it. There's a wholesome excitement around the idea of discovery and you want to do your part and not be a wet blanket. And it's a white lie that is good for society - if not for the ego of the hero. You want there to be a new discovery, that came out of nowhere, because that's the better story. It's the kind of Myth that a good society runs on, and needs, even if it's false, because the real out-of-nowhere discovery stories happen too infrequently to be of use.
The best thing to do, really, is to give the kid a medal, and shut up about it not being real, and hope to high heaven he isn't misled by the easy victory.
Then to get past the 'parents doing all the building' we ran an outlaw class where the siblings and parents could compete...but it's the same kind of dynamic.
I don't immediately see the issue with the parent helping a child with tech they're familiar with...helping my son 3d print and sell fidget spinners had lots of little life lessons wrapped up in it.
This time around (by which I mean, my son was in cub scouts and doing the derby) I helped my son by showing him some basics of woodworking and how to make something that looked right and rolled properly, but beyond that it was all him. He didn't win any races, but wasn't bummed about it at all.
Following that, I bought a bunch of pine blanks, read a few papers on how to make faster cars (those nail axles are REALLY DUMB), bought Fusion 360, designed a car, and flip-milled it on my personal CNC, over a period of a year (it's never raced). it amuses me to no end that imposter syndrome and OCD drove me to be a well-compensated software engineer with enough free time to build his own pinewood derby racecar in his own time on his own terms.
I’m looking at 6 of the cars now, I really should mount them in a display or something.
One of the boys is learning chassis fab and welding and the other is learning Industrial Design…so I guess it was a good experience.
On one of my site visits I was asked if I wanted a detour from the project site to check out the school science fair. I later figured out that the minor scheduling difficulties I had around that particular visit was so that I'd be there on the day of the science fair.
Every student had a project. There were a few of the usual suspects, like the baking soda volcano and potato battery. However, those were the exception. Most of the projects were astounding, well beyond what I'd seen as an engineering undergrad in university.
The kids, standing proudly in front of their project and the bristol board explanations, knew very well how to explain the project and had a deep understanding of how it had come together. They'd definitely done the work and were justifiably proud.
That said, the majority of the projects were such that they could only have been the product of many evenings and weekends over months of father[3]/child working together. I'll assume that work on the next science fair would have begun the day after the science fair I saw wrapped up.
1. Qinshan III, units 1 and 2; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qinshan_Nuclear_Power_Plant.
2. High school was a boarding school back in Canada.
3. I'm pretty sure that all the engineers were male, for I'd be remembering a female engineer, but the school kids were a balance mix of boys and girls.
While I understand the logic of using parent, as a general rule I'm uncomfortable deliberately substituting words with less information when a word with more information is available.
It'd be like seeing a flock of geese fly over and saying birds. If you weren't really sure they were geese, or thought maybe a few were not geese, then maybe you write 'birds'. However, if you saw geese and it would have been striking and obvious if one or more of the birds was not a goose, then more information is given saying geese rather than birds.
If there had been a female engineer at the site, working or at home, I'm pretty sure I'd have known. This was rural China in the late 90s. A live in nanny would have been available at very low cost. Plus, the hunger for engineers willing to live at a camp site in rural China for months at a time was such that had there been any engineer spouses, they'd have had to make a very deliberate decision NOT to work.
Also I noticed that they typically employ a very common pattern in which the headline makes a truly big claim (e.g. "10 year old invents cheap way to purify any water source"), then afterwards it turns out that this claim is far from accurate (e.g. the child did not invent it himself, had massive help and while the solution technically works it is in not feasible at all in the way the headline suggests).
Once it is noticed that the claim is false in the way it is presented the article then gets defended by pointing out that a child that young coming into contact with such a project is still impressive, which is again technically true but ultimately comes off as a dishonest deflection.
Sometimes very bogus, even totally fake
example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otjvUz7qKXc ('free energy' device, "invented" by a kid, debunked by electroboom)
It's to improve the pipeline of kids excited to go into science by making science accessible, rewarding, and prestigious.
His vocabulary rivals that of a 20 year old software engineer. It's pretty impressive.
I’d be pissed too. You don’t mess with the router without warning people using it ;)
I’m with her on this one. Not announcing the outage before it happens is kinda disrespectful.
Basic sysops rule: either create redundancy (which is hard to do in a consumer space outside of Mac Pro machines as 99.99% of laptops carry only a single LAN port and in towers, about 3/4) or warn your users before doing maintenance.
It runs almost all the time, but sometimes I need to update settings, etc. which needs reboots the load balancer that distributes everything from.
:-)
Honestly, I think your kid should break out the SLA and check what compensation they get paid for prime time outages.
With that said, I doubt your 13 year old daughter client is actually paying for that level of service, so... ;-)
I am not a lawyer so feel free to go to court claiming that 100% uptime is the limits of mathematics or that the world will not end if <insert social media platform of choice> is not accessible for 5 minutes on a tuesday afternoon. Its a losing case every time, best just to settle up the case quietly with an extra scoop of icecream or some robux and cut your losses.
That's the 2020 equivalent of your parents picking up the phone while you're online on dialup.
Harboring resentment for your teenager for being moody is like the frog and the scorpion. it is in their nature!
Not to say isn't maddening, mind you.
It all turned out well and now he's happily studying economics (yeah, my apple didn't land anywhere near the tree). Everyone matures at their own pace, and computers, as I'm sure all of us know from our own history as geeks, are easy to impress people with. If you're really into biology, animals, astronomy, etc. what can you show people to wow them? Not much that hasn't been seen before. But any 13 yo can download and learn how to use the latest professional CAD software, the same IDEs pros use to make AAA games, or the same backend AI services used by major companies. And they are encouraged to do so! I can't imagine there's a lot of "Learn CRISPR at home!" tutorials out there. That makes a big difference.
My path into biology was looking into a microscope and seeing a world of non-computer state machines that behaved like cellular automata. and then my path led back to computers because real biology is much harder than CS.
And I think some kids get into astronomy if I demo my telescope showing them planets and stars. But I don't really push kids too hard in one or another direction; my parents thought I should learn german so I could excel at organic chemistry
go slugs
Ha! This is HN, I should totally know better than to throw stuff like that out there. I admit, as I wrote the crispr line, in the back of my head I wondered if it was true or not and just went with it because I thought it sounded witty. I stand corrected!
Of course, the electronic nose itself is a work of plumbing too, where some existing gas sensors are put on a pcb.
In short, nothing seems really new here, but the application is interesting. I guess it's always interesting when people start looking for correlations in data and get some positive results, so from that point of view it is noteworthy.
The artificial nose is the TinyML model which trains on the sensor data (CO, NO2, ethanol, VOCs) to detect arbitrary scents by their signatures in those four categories.
The fungal pneumonia detector wires up a whole API with azure etc. and trains the model specifically to recognize pneumonia, based on an actual science experiment which grew and measured the fungus in artificial lungs.
As far as I'm concerned, both Caleb and Benjamin had brilliant ideas, executed them fantastically, and created something that may be truly useful. A $40 sensor that can detect disease just by breathing on it is more of a tangible contribution to humanity than many software engineers make in their life and almost certainly more than 99% of us did before the age of 14.
The innovation is in the data, not in the ML.
can't you kind of say this about all ML? That the main driver in ML is 99% the quality of the training data and 1% the specific details of the neural networks used?
But back to the topic, I bet the kid didn't even invent their own neural network topology, but just pulled a predefined network from a library, perhaps without even knowing it. Which is ok, because that is how most people use ML.
Fabrication of data is not very useful if you have to gather data for validation anyway.
What matters isn't making new things, it's making new things that work, and bringing them all the way to completion.
The vast majority of innovation isn't exciting discovery, it's coming up with tests to convince yourself you actually did what you thought you did and sharing those results with regulators. That's the difference between Theranos and GRAIL.
I just built a tardigrade detector neural network; nobody has done that exact thing before, and now i'm talking to the world's leading tardigrade researcher because my tool might be helpful in answering an unanswered important tardigrade question.
But thousands if not millions of individuals worked over hundreds to thousands of years to bring us that tardigrade detector; all I did was take advantage of that to label 100 images! I've tried being an ML researcher; my conclusion is the best models are distilled from postdoc tears, and we merely retrain those models without pain.
But that doesn't take away from the fact that its a cool project and the kid did a great job in coming up with it and executing on it! Its definitely far beyond what most people achieve, nevermind 13 year olds.
Mentioning Microsoft Azure IoT Central in the article and the video is odd, because you definitely don't need that to complete this project. It seems to be a feature that the Microsoft employee added to the GitHub project their self [1].
Caleb mentioned in the video that a co-worker of his aunt authored the research paper about detecting bacterial pneumonia from VOC levels. Everything else feels like a Microsoft marketing hype train that went off the rails.
[0]: https://makezine.com/projects/second-sense-build-an-ai-smart...
[1]: https://github.com/kartben/artificial-nose/blob/master/firmw...
However, like many, I feel like this article could be papering over... something.
OK I'll just say it: Privilege.
And hey! Not every kid with privilege ends up being brilliant! And he may not be privileged! But it is a lot easier to succeed when you have it.
And my problem with this article is this: We are constantly papering over how much of a difference a good education can make, and how little opportunity to get that quality of education there is in the United States.
You often see people bemoaning their lot in life: "Ugh. When Mark Zuckerburg/Bill Gates/insert CEO was my age, they already started Microsoft!"
And my reply to this sentiment is this: How many hundreds of thousands of dollars did your parents spend on your pre-university education? I'm willing to bet it wasn't in the hundreds of thousands.
I see this kid is from LA. Sometimes all it takes is being in the right zip code to have access to... science fairs? My school didn't even have AP classes! I thought science fairs were something that only happened on TV.
I realize this is a bit petty, and it 100% comes from my childhood where I went to a poor rural school where I was a poor student, and so-fucking-desperately wanted more, and then moved to the city, and succeeded, flourished once I got access to a better quality of education. But pretending it isn't there feels dishonest.
It feels like an onion article headline: "Kid with everything going for him, despite all odds, tremendously succeeds"
Much better use of money than a super-car or many other options. Not that I have any right to say what people can do with their money.
It is, and very American-centric. Plenty of innovative people are born in poorer countries with much less resources at their disposal. Indeed quite a lot of American top scientists are immigrants from not exactly rich places.
Of course, even they are sort-of privileged by the fact that they weren't born blind, on in a period of outright war, or didn't get cancer at the age of three. But this is already stretching the meaning of "privilege".
Katalin Karikó, one of the main brains behind mRNA, grew up in shabby Communist Hungary and her lab equipment at her home university was likely worse than what a median high school in the U.S. has at its disposal. (There wasn't much convertible currency east of the Iron Curtain to buy top stuff, and not enough capacity to manufacture it locally.)
But there is massive inequality and poverty in the United States. Here is an example: In my home town, the poverty rate is 12%-13%. In the US state of Georgia it is 17%. In the Czech Republic, which has about the same population as Georgia, it is 10%.
So your assertion that "her lab equipment at her home university was likely worse than what a median high school in the U.S." is questionable. There are plenty of people living in horrible conditions in the US. Our scores in mathematics are 30th amongst developed nations.
Our cities are full-to-the-brim with a homeless population that we have abandoned to the streets that our cities and citizens do not have the wealth to address due to all of the money going to 1% of the population. In fact, our homeless population is almost to 0.2% of the total population, coming in at around 500k people.
Also, the assertion "other people have it worse" is not useful. I can be critical of our current society and also realize I have a privilege living where I do. I can see the impoverished system I grew up in, compare it to the opportunities afforded other people, and say: "Hmm. Maybe we can improve society somewhat."
I still believe that Karikó's equipment was fairly bad, because I was alive in the 1980s and I remember the shortages of everything. Late stage Communism was all about stuff shortage. Either something was really plentiful (but usually of questionable quality), or very hard to acquire. This included school equipment. The first home computers spread some 10 years later than in the West and we regarded them almost as godly objects.
Given the tools available now, I'm not surprised a smart 13yo could build something like this. Especially if the sensor itself is an off-the-shelf component with device drivers and such already available for it.
This is obvious nonsense. Limitations are real, and I think it's better to be honest about them.
Edit: I was wrong to post this shallow dismissal; see below.
It is better to believe anything is possible and be wrong than to impose limitations on ourselves.
Most great accomplishments seem impossible at first.
If only a goal of education was to get kids to feel like this! Of course, not everyone is equally bright, but without the above attitude, they will not even try, not even try to be interested, because they think they are too dumb, which is a tragedy.
A kid can have an idea and parents can help. For now, the set of {kids, parents} that can do that is limited. But technology changes and becomes more accessible. What matters is the new things that become not just possible but easy and cheap.
For a previously "costly" problem that in 2012 would involve a 5 MP digital pictures + geotagging + OCR then sending the raws for GPU processing, any random smartphone from 2022 will do.
In 2012 you could have screamed "privilege!". Not in 2022.
As a kid, I'd have loved to try to hack together a app that recognizes mushrooms (or flowers, or fruits which I all found so super interesting, especially bugs and OMG they fly if I blew on them!!)
It would have been hard. I would have benefited from some help. But I would have had a lot of fun, after which I would have used the app to fill in the name for my leaf-book collection effort (I wanted to have a specimen of EVERYTHING from the garden, then from the street, then...)
I only had books and some websites and a bad camera. So I drew :) A kid now could have picture search engines like yandex to do better with a much better camera too (MACRO MODE!) and some generic photo processing software. A rich kid then could have had something similar, with an expansive Nikon camera, and photoshop (crop, filter...) and maybe some parental connections to biologists and botanists.
Is it privilege if they did? Yes. And it's wonderful because every kid has this privilege now! And they can have more fun!
Or... the other way around
May I ask why?
You see it all the time, unironically: "How a 23 year old couple bought their dream home!" and it ends up in the article their parents literally paid for it.
Or Bill Gates. There is the classic: "How to become as rich as Bill Gates: Choose your grandparents carefully."
I see it elsewhere in this thread: "Ugh. And MY 13 year old just wants to play video games!" And that is unfair to themselves, and unfair to their kids.
You see it everywhere. So many musicians, artists, writers, PEOPLE succeed in part because they just don't need to make money. Because they already have it.
And then they act like it was all done themselves and while they are not bad people for having money, and they are sincerely talented, that isn't the whole story. The whole story is that they didn't ever really even need to succeed to live a comfortable life, and that is a HUGE advantage over other people.
---------
Allow me to tie this to my own experience:
First, I want to acknowledge that I am extremely privileged in my own ways. I grew up in a wonderful home with a great family. We were educated, and kind, and loved reading and were encouraging. The rural place I grew up in wasn't a fancy high-tech metropolis, but I did not experience any violence in my community which counts for a lot.
I went to a private university on a big scholarship. It was cheaper than any state school I could have gone to. My first two years where I was in the dorms and was paying with student loans, I was very active in the student volunteer community, and the computer science club.
But once I left the dorms, that was IT. I needed to 100% support myself, rent/food/etc. I spent my days working manual QA for a software company, 40/hr week, while attending school at night.
And my life changed. I didn't make any new friends and lost the ones I had. I was never around for the "college stuff." Every waking moment became toil, either through work or through school.
While my peers were doing research studies for natural language processing, or participating in CS contests, or building relationships, or falling in love, or actually doing well on homework and tests, or any number of productive things, I was plugging 3g WIFI dongles into and out of laptops for $15/hr. I was running test cases for 8 hours a day, then going to class from 6-9, then doing homework until I went to sleep, then getting up in the morning and doing it again.
And the deficit I had in my education followed me for a LONG time. Still follows me today.
So yes, I do think we should interrogate situation people were in when they achieved something. Because sometimes people don't really achieve anything other than spending their parent's money.
And there are circumstances where something that seems like a big achievement was really just an inevitability.
My father? A smart, but not affluent, guy who thought hard on things. He's the one that actually invented the device...but I learned a few things along the way.
Parents absolutely help children become high achievers, but it doesn't always mean it was attached to their day job. Having attentive parents is a privilege.
note: As for the device, it was just a little car powered by a weight.
>No door is ever closed. You can do anything! I am a thirteen-year-old kid, and I can do this—if I can do it, anyone can!
Although he may have similar opportunities to his peers, he (understandably) doesn't yet realize that he has a "spark" that not everyone is fortunate enough to cultivate. Age is not strictly the limiting factor to being capable of reaching a high potential.
I see robust e-nose as being a huge development that would change how we see the world.
Did you ever measure a smell? Can you tell whether one smell is just twice strong as another? Can you measure the difference between two kinds of smell and another? It is very obvious that we have very many different kinds of smells, all the way from the odour of violets and roses up to asafetida. But until you can measure their likeness and differences, you can have no science of odour. If you are ambitious to find a new science, measure a smell.
— Alexander Graham Bell, 1914
For some, doors are not only closed, but they are also slammed in their faces with full force
I was merely saying that the knowledge and facilities to paint, to play baseball or program should be accessible, and kids must be exposed to the fact that they exist... then, the kids pick per their inclination?
what children need to learn first and foremost is to be good people, create the desire to help others and contribute to society.
once they have that, they drive themselves to learn what they need in order to achieve that.
this kid here had the drive to solve a problem because they had experienced it themselves. it doesn't matter how they solved it and how much help they got, what matters is what drove them to solve the problem in the first place.
if we can create that drive then any of the above, whether it is art, sports or programming will happen based on the kids motivation.
I mean I was not pushed hard as a kid to play guitar or play football/wrestling but I was pushed. It took quite a bit of time before I really fell in love with playing guitar. It is hard to fall in love with something when you suck at it. I needed to be pushed. Sports were fun at the time but we completely overstate the value of organized sports IMO.
I don't know why we see playing a musical instrument as something different than learning scientific instruments. We expect the kid to just naturally be driven in science from day one and pushing them is seen as something morally off.
It reminds me of the crazy hockey parent that pushes their kid way too hard in hockey. While some kids might end up hating hockey, a huge % just end up being really good hockey players compared to the average person. People tend to fall in love with things they are good at.
I am childfree but if I did have a kid I would be a science version of the hockey parent and let the chips fall as they may. The risk/reward is just massive for the kid.