Rigged calculators and toxic water streams

I served as a judge for a middle & high school science competition event last Saturday. It is conducted by an organization called PJAS (Pennsylvania Junior Academy of Sciences) setup to promote science education among school students. See http://www.pjas.net. I went in for the first time last year. Thought it was a good experience and a nice opportunity to do some volunteer work for the community and so signed on this year again. There were more than 120 judges and 1200+ student participants (~600 students in the morning and another ~600 in the afternoon sessions). 

The entire state of PA gets segmented to into dozen regions, each covering multiple county/district schools. In the morning session middle school students (7 & 8th graders) presented their findings. Afternoon session was for high school students. Though it is not necessarily original research, the process gives students a good overview of how research is conducted in science. With the help of a mentor, they choose a topic (you can find a list of supported subject areas here), develop a question, pose a hypothesis, conduct tests, analyze the data, make a conclusion as to whether the hypothesis is supported or rejected, put together a presentation describing their project and present it in this forum. While individual schools may hold science exhibition like events where students give demonstrations, in this event they are required to make only a presentation using transparencies (no 3-D models/aids or show & tell allowed). This helps keep the format consistent and fairly fail proof.

Interestingly the morning session where middle school kids present, had better quality projects both last year and this year compared to afternoon session where high schoolers present. This appears to be due to couple of reasons:

- Middle school students are not required to participate in this event and so those who do are genuinely interested smart kids doing this voluntarily with enthusiasm. On the other hand several high schools make it compulsory diluting the quality of student pool. 

- After seeing middle school presentations in the morning, my expectation for high school presentations probably goes up. :-)

- With so many high school students trying to participate quality of mentoring also probably goes down.

Areas like Physics, Chemistry and Behavioral Science seem to attract a lot of participants, each with more than 70 students. Computer Science and Math had abysmal participation with just 2 each in the morning and less than a dozen in the afternoon. In the morning I went to judge a behavioral science session with 12 participants. One seventh grader in this session had bought 4 calculators, opened them up herself and rewired + with multiplication, - with division, etc. She then recruited student subjects to take a math test that will require a calculator and gave them these rigged calculators to see how quickly boys & girls recognize that there is something wrong with the calculator. This is to study gender based differences in observational skills. I thought this was a good/clever experiment for a seventh grade girl to conceive and conduct. Interestingly she found that her male student subjects found that the calculator is broken far quickly compared to her female students. I was joking that perhaps the girls didn't even need a calculator to complete the test and so never bothered to use them. :-) 

In the afternoon went to judge a session on Ecology. A high school student in this session wanted to see if a water stream used as a source for potable water is contaminated by nearby plants releasing pollutants. Very valid idea for an ecology related study. But he simply called a water testing company, sent them just one sample set and reported their test result saying the water is clean. Looks like the mentor didn't explain the need for good sample size, importance of designing and doing the tests yourself, varying variables in the experiment, etc. 

I heard about another 8th grader in the morning session who had built a scaled 3D model of a house to see how green a house can be, used enough thermal insulation & drywall material, installed multiple temperature sensors around the model, collected readings using a microprocessor, wrote FPGA code, analyzed the results using Excel (resorting to sliding window approach as the number of data points he had gathered exceeded a million overwhelming MS Excel), etc..!! So, there was a wide range in the quality of work presented. Still considering the fact that when I finished high school I hardly knew what posing a hypothesis meant, this whole exercise is commendable. 

This event has all the ingredients you need to make it very chaotic:

- It is held in a high school that most participants have never been into before (i.e. new large building, you don't know which room you need to go to, where the rest room is, etc.). 

- There are 100+ judges who are new to the school as well. 

- Presentations take place in about 50 to 60 parallel sessions in different class rooms simultaneously.

- Each room has about dozen students presenting and 2 or 3 judges. 10 mins for presentation followed by ~5 mins of Q&A. 

- Whole thing is repeated in the afternoon for high school students.

- Packets need to be put together for each judge with evaluation rubric, instruction hand outs, programs, participants list, stop watch for one lead judge to time the presentations, and so forth

- Judges/participants may not show up at the last minute.

- Winter weather

- Providing free lunch for all the judges, selling lunches for everyone else, etc.

Despite all these factors, it went off without any hitch, people showed up at the right time, judges' orientation got over as per schedule, there were enough people guiding judges/participants to the correct rooms, all the participants were ready in the correct room exactly on time, we submitted our results and left the premises earlier than expected..! Need to learn these organization skills. 

There were more than a dozen judges from LSI alone. An astute friend & colleague who accompanied me for the first time as a judge made a good but subtle observation. When we attend a presentation in the office, we usually ask follow up questions to get our doubts cleared so that we understand the contents of the presentation well. He said material the students presented were all easy to understand and so he didn't have any questions initially. His co-judge who has been doing this for the past 15 years or so, kept asking a lot of questions. Soon he realized that the purpose of co-judge's questions is not for him to understand the presentation better but to enrich the students & push/encourage them to think more. In the end he came out with a recalibrated view of attending presentations. 

Thus, in more than one way, we learned a thing or two in exchange for our Saturday. :-) 

-sundar.

Book Review: The Faith Instinct by Nicholas Wade

I think I picked up Nicholas Wade's "The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why it Endures" when I was browsing through discounted books at a Border's book store on its way to closure last year. It turned out to be a very good work by the author who is a science reporter forNYT. In the book Wade doesn't come across as a strong theist or atheist but simply as someone studying the evolution of religion and making observations. Books by authors like Dawkins, while arguing vigorously about the negative effects of religion on civilizations, usually gloss over the reasons as to why human beings seems to have an innate desire to have and practice religion. This book seems to fill that gap. His basic tenet is that religions are memes that served purposes such as social cohesion, a way to impart morality, help in trading of goods, etc. that confers evolutionary advantages to the population that practice it. So, it tends to stick around in successful population and has evolved over the centuries so as to remain relevant. In several sense it is more like a  business that modifies and adapts to changing circumstances and needs of the population it serves. In his own words, "Many of the social aspects of religious behavior offer advantages--such as a group's strong internal cohesion and high morale in war--that would lead to a society's members having more surviving children, and religion for such reasons would be favored by natural selection. This is less true of the personal aspects of religion. Religion may help people overcome the fear of death, or find courage in facing disease and catastrophe, but these personal beliefs seem unlikely to enable them to have more surviving offspring, natural selection's only yardstick of success. Rather, the personal rewards of religion are significant because they draw people to practice it, without which the social benefits could not have been favored by natural selection." 

He starts off with a chapter discussing the works of moral psychologists on trolley experiments and such. I always found them quite intriguing and have talked about it with family and friends. You can see the Wiki version if you haven't heard about these thought experiments before: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem

He then moves on to discuss different aspects of religion such as music, dance and trance that was a big part of primitive religions, and how the behavior evolved over time towards the formation of the three big Abrahamic religions. There are lot of interesting little pieces of information buried in the discussions of research on three contemporary hunting and gathering societies--the !Kung San, the Andaman Islanders, and Australian Aborigines. For example there is a group of Melanesian islands near Papua New Guinea inhabited by Trobriands who practice what is called Kula exchange system. Though individual islanders don't interact with all the other islands, they do trade with islands adjacent to them. When they do, there is a practice of exchanging very prestigious gifts that may have no practical value as well as trading commodities that are needed for their survival/living. The prestigious gifts are of two kinds, something like a necklace and a decorated arm band, where the necklace is given to the island on the left and the armband to the right..! These exchanges may take place couple of times a year and the gifts may get enhanced while they are in possession of an island. Though the islanders never seems to have understood that they are a part of a big ring of couple of dozen islands, as per their religious practices they know they are supposed to honor the gift exchange practice. So, an islander who is old enough may see the same gift coming back to the island couple of times in his lifetime though he may not understand the mechanism involved (similar to Americans participating/using financial products without understanding all the details of how say a CDO works). But this religion based prestige gift exchange that revolves in opposite directions ensures that trust is established for accompanying commodities trading..! 

In later chapters he discusses as to why religion bothers itself so much about regulating sexual practices of its followers. Though it may not make much sense to imagine an omnipotent God being bothered by what goes on inside individual bedrooms, from a very practical business point of view, it makes all the sense to regulate these practices to ensure the number of followers of a religion continues to increase so that the religion can thrive. He argues that this self-preservation motivation prompts religions to oppose abortion, gays and encourage child-bearing and so forth. Sects that do not follow this model, Shakers being a prime example (they expect everyone who is a Shaker to remain celibate), tend to decline over time. He also discusses the high entry price some religions stipulate on its followers. For example, Mormonism insists that all its followers donate 10% of their earnings and considerable personal time to proselytizing for the church. This model helps ensure that those who get in can be trusted as motivated followers that in turn ensures cohesion among Mormons. 

He concludes discussing the kind of civic religion that is in vogue in US (where there is no state sponsored church or religion) for the past few decades. There is reference to God in presidential oath (that wasn't there in the original constitution), oath of allegiance, and in all public speeches and even in bringing backing to the US treasury bills without explicitly referring to any specific God but sort of keeping the references to a generic version. :-) Thus, as long as it continues to slowly evolve and perceived to be providing a service that helps the economy and social cohesion, religion may not go away for a long time. One thing I found a bit disappointing is the lack of effort spent to discuss Hinduism, while even Confucianism is discussed a bit more. Though it is practiced by 1/6th of the world's population, it is always a footnote in the thoughts of western scholars. Reminded me of The Simpsons TV show where in an episode Reverend Lovejoy lovingly points out as to how people of various religions in the town came together to help Ned Flanders, an ardent Christian. Pointing out Christian, Muslim, Jewish neighbors standing next to each other, he turns to Apu next and says "Miscellaneous". When Apu protests saying there are a billion people on this planet practicing Hinduism, the Rev. brushes him aside with a patronizing "Oh, that's super". It seems to satirically but correctly sum up the Western view of Hinduism. :-)

Book is only 285 pages long. Pick it up if you can and let me know what you think.
-sundar.