WY Teen Cut From Science Fair For Entering Too Many 204
An anonymous reader writes " A Wyoming high school student who built a nuclear reactor in his dad's garage was disqualified from the International Science and Engineering Fair this month on a technicality.' His crime: competing in too many science fairs."
How? (Score:3, Interesting)
I've heard of several teens building nuclear reactors in their garages it seems. How are they accomplishing this, when foreign states seem to have such difficulty?
All the better.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:How? (Score:5, Interesting)
Almost anything is a nuclear reactor if you play with the definition. There are isotopes decaying in my thumb right now. It's a nuclear reactor. I seriously doubt these things are producing net energy beyond curiosity wattage. You can probably do some interesting betavoltaic stuff that would generate power at the cost of $50/milliwatt. If you tried to scale it up and generate any significant power, the Feds would eventually find you... probably. I've often wondered if anybody has set one up for "off grid" power. I think there's a 50-50 chance that one back-woods dude is powering his cabin on a huge parcel of land somwhere where it woudln't attract attention. Dangerous as all get-out though. It's so much easier just to use wood stoves, solar panels, etc.
Farnsworth–Hirsch fusor (Score:5, Interesting)
The Farnsworth–Hirsch fusor [wikipedia.org] is decades old, relatively easy to build (I know someone who built one in his garage), available commercially (as a neutron source) and is generally considered to be not a candidate for fusion power.
Given that the name of the student is Conrad Farnsworth, I have to wonder if there is a family connection, but the article does not go into that.
Re:All the better.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, that's what the rule's for; to prevent students from milling through county fairs in order to qualify for the state fair. (Perhaps the idea is that it would let a student with a lot of funding go into a low-income county and exercise an unfair advantage? Although that would just even itself out at the state level anyway...) In this case, though, the student was entering into fairs in two different states, (if you consider Wyoming and South Dakota different) and the rule wasn't worded in a way that considered that. The person responsible was quietly let go, though, so... yeah.
This story has nothing to do with the kid's project, if anyone was wondering.
Re:All the better.. (Score:5, Interesting)
disqualifying someone just because they failed to win too many times is low
That's not why he was disqualified. He was disqualified because he failed to advance to the next level and then jumped over the state border to try again with the same project in another state. Without this rule, you could have kids entering a dozen different state competitions with the same project, just hoping to get the right set of judges to advance you.
While what you say is technically true, the way you say it implys that he did this to circumvent the system. From the article itself, it was his high school that entered both the Wyoming and the South Dakota events and they, along with the people at both Universities involved were unaware of the rule. It seems like this was one of those rules put in place to prevent cheating that had unintended consequences. Even the article states the rule is looking at being rewritten because of it.
Re:Fusion Reactor (Score:5, Interesting)
That's the kid's own website, right?
No, it's not. You may have been confused because his name is Farnsworth, which isn't a particularly common name; as another poster said, it would be interesting to know if there's a family connection with the Farnsworth [wikipedia.org] the fusor [wikipedia.org] is named for. Fusor.net, AFAICT, is a site run by and for fusor hobbyists, people who like to tinker with the kind of machines this kid built.
And for those who are saying "Oh, he just downloaded some tutorials off the net"--well, if you could or would have done something like that as a teenager, good for you, but most people couldn't or wouldn't. It's not groundbreaking research, but putting together a working fusor is a pretty neat accomplishment for a high-school kid.
Re:All the better.. (Score:4, Interesting)
This story is the round-robin vs. single elimination argument. From what I gather, the ISEF use a single elimination system. That means (to use an extreme example) even if your science experiment is the second best in the world, you can be eliminated in the first round if the eventual winner happens to also go to your school. The "you can only enter one science fair" rule enforces that possibility. That's what happened to me - my best friend in high school was #1 in math and the sciences and I was #2. He won all the awards, scholarships, accolades, and recognition. I got... nice pieces of paper congratulating me on my 2nd place finish. Until I moved and went to a different high school, and easily beat out all the other students in math and the sciences.
When practical, a round-robin system is much better as it allows you to appraise a wider range of competitors head-to-head. Then you can take the top 2^n candidates from the round-robin and put them into a single elimination "finals" if you wish. What you call a "loophole", others could legitimately see as a mechanism to bypass this inherent unfairness of the single elimination system.
All major sporting competitions use round-robins before the single elimination final rounds. Tennis appears to use purely single elimination, but they track each player's win/loss ratios against different opponents (equivalent to round-robin results) to give them a ranking, then use the ranking to seed the single elimination tournaments to make sure the top seeds do not meet each other early in the tournament. Another approach is to use single elimination, but have a loser's bracket for everyone who loses once. Then the final is between the person who goes through undefeated vs. the person who wins the loser's bracket.
All of these systems were designed to overcome this inherent major flaw of the single elimination system. So it's a bit naive to declare this story over and uninteresting simply because the student/school broke a rule apparently designed to enforce that flaw. Unless they have some mechanism to allow outstanding runner-ups to enter the next level of science fair competition, I'd say it's a bad rule.