2004's Science Talent Search Winners Are In

Slate is running an article about this year's Science Talent Search (concentrating on things like whether the participants are "weirdos"); there are better descriptions of the top entrants' projects at this results page. Congratulations to the winners!

Beware my fate!

[Anonymous Coward]

I won my senior year in high school and now all I do is post on /.

dammit.

[hot_Karls_bad_cavern]

Now i feel old AND stupid. Thanks a lot you insensitive clod!

Damn, overlooked again : (

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess fart lighting is too controversial for the judges

Say what?

[Caedar]

"Like any company eager to burnish its brand, Intel had produced a brochure with the finalists' bios and a description of their projects--from Boris Alexeev of Athens, Ga. ("Minimal Deterministic Finite Automata--DFAs--for Testing Divisibility"), to Ning Zhou of Plymouth, Minn. ("Quantitative Trait Loci Modulating Corpus Callosum Size in the Mouse Brain")." Did they supply a dictionary with that brochure, as well?

Talent Search, Eh? ]]

[Anonymous Coward]

<British Accent>
Oh, that is bloody fucking terrible. This is the worst -- you are the worst scientist I have ever seen. Listen, do the world a favor and keep this... this thing away from us all. Kill yourself. Move far, far away and just hurl yourself off a cliff. Your parents ought to be ashamed of having you. Just... just take this 'cure for cancer' and get the hell out of my studio!

Now, where's the hot scientists?
</British Accent>

Ugly photos

[FooAtWFU]

The photos of those kids are ugly. Not because the kids are ugly... but whoever ran their pictures through whatever JPEG compressor they used obviously knows as much about photo manipulation as I do about brain surgery.

That said, looks like some rather spiffy stuff there.

Re:Help from parents...

[AndroidCat]

Breeding will out.

Maybe not. Try a test with twins. One raised by PhDs, the other raised in a trailer park by Family Feud rejects.

I wish...

[Lakedemon]

... that somebody would give me between 20.000 and 100.000 $ for each theorem I proved. These kids are lucky...

Re:Beware my fate!

[Walt Dismal]

I feel for you, brother! When I was in kindergarden, I invented and patented the magneto-ionic shaving rotisserie. Not only do you get closer shaves, your chicken is moist and tender. But that's not all. In grade school I experimented with human pheromone technology, but I had to move on to other research after my English teacher got pregnant. In high school, I invented a graphic user interface and windowing system for PCs, though my research notes mysteriously disappeared. My good pal Bill Gates helped me search for them but then had to go off to college at Harvard. Out of high school, I decided to take a year off before moving on to university. In my first job, at Tasty Freeze, I invented the banana split. I am now fabulously wealthy and do not need Science Talent Searches. But I have advice for all you youngers and future winners reading Slashdot. And that advice is: Get a Life.

Re:Insulting indeed

[deglr6328]

here here! On top of that, she spelled the first place winner's name incorrectly!! It's supposed to be Herbert Mason Hedberg [google.com]. Her perseveration on issues of name pronounceability and it's supposed correlation with project title comprehensibility(idiotic) seemed to border on being almost racist. And the section where she says "It had blank pages at the back, labeled "Notes," and I scribbled, though not very scientifically: "nice pants suit," "acne," "looks like she's got a real stage mother," "storytelling champion!!!!"" is an absolute joke and completely discredits her as a journalist. Those kinds of comments about kids coming from a supposed adult are juvenile, irrelevant and insulting, as you note. This woman is supposed to be an expert on raising kids [randomhouse.ca]? ha!

Why New York dominates Intel Talent Search

[Yeechang Lee]

Here's a slightly rewritten version of a posting I made on Slate's Fray forum about the article in question.

------

Although I never competed myself, I did graduate from Bronx Science [bxscience.edu], one of the several schools--Stuyvesant and lately Ward Melville on Long Island are the others--that have historically dominated the Intel (formerly Westinghouse) Science Talent Search.

New York State dominates the contest because of two key reasons:

• Awareness. Most of the country outside the New York metro area is barely aware of the Intel contest, although it is unquestionably the closest thing to a Nobel Prize or Rhodes Scholarship for high school students. That includes the most competitive non-New York City public schools around, such as Palo Alto and Gunn High Schools (CA), Princeton HS (NJ), and Thomas Jefferson (VA). (Thanks to affirmative action, Boston Latin (MA) simply isn't as elite as it used to be.) Most of the non-New York metro schools represented this year won't have another entry for years, if ever; for example, the finalist this year from Redwood City CA (where I happen to live, actually), who didn't finish in the top ten, is the first northern California finalist in three years! Science, Stuy, and (again, lately) Ward Melvile make sure they have solid competitors every single year.
  
• Scale. Science and Stuy each have 2500-3000 students. The elite Northeastern and other private schools--whose student bodies are perhaps of the Science/Stuy caliber--are by comparison simply far too small to consistently produce competitive entries; the Nightingale-Bamford (NY) Intel finalist of a few years back won't be repeated anytime soon. Also, many of them are located too far away from the research universities that often provide the necessary facilities and mentorship.
  

Science was the most competitive environment I've ever experienced, and that includes the Ivy League school I graduated from and the bulge bracket investment bank I joined after college. There's a reason why in a little more than 60 years it has produced five Nobel winners [bxscience.edu], more than most colleges.