11-year-old girl inspired by Flint water crisis creates cheap kit to test lead

http://abcnews.go.com/Lifestyle/11-year-girl-inspired-flint-water-crisis-creates/story?id=50559884

by MaysonL • 9 years ago

152 93 9 years ago

abcnews.go.com

alva• 9 years ago

"while browsing the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering’s website, a site she said she checks weekly to see “if there’s anything new.”

does anyone believe these stories? they seem to be popping up more often.

stefanpie• 9 years ago

I am part of this area of high school / pre college research and part of a high school that is successful in having students reach high levels of high school research including myself, so I can shed some insight. These kinds of stories show up all the time and it is usually the case that they have received some kind of outside help. But in the world of competitive high school research, there is a lot more emphasis on making innovations which are successful and more immediately applicable at the trade off of being something superficial or abandoning projects or ideas that don't appear to be immediately amazing or successful since they are easy to quickly dismiss in a competitive environment. However, there are plenty of amazing students who go on and win ISEF and other top competitions who collaborate with professors and engineers and I certainly encourage collaboration like this. Although, within my own research, I have remained independent since at my school, my research director's and other research teachers' main field is in biology or chemistry, leaving little domain specific assistance for me who has perused projects with heavy electrical engineering and computer science knowledge and skills. I have tried to reach out to professors before, but I can be hard to find someone whose project ideas and interests align with yours (without having to travel long distances to meet and work with them at their universities which I am able to do). The world of high school research is fiercely competitive and without some kind of collaboration or connections with professors and professionals, it becomes almost impossible to reach the top and be successful. I have managed to do this on my own but it has been a struggle and very competitive and hard journey in which I regret not finding someone such as a professor to work with. I sometimes worry that my research friends and high schoolers that pursue research will abandon or forget about the idea core values of research and collaboration in the unforgiving world of high school competitive research. I know this has kinda turned into a rant but if you have any questions about the world of competitive research or my own research I would be glad to talk about it since I rarely see this subject talked about outside of the high school research community.

spikels• 9 years ago

Maybe high school aged people don't need paragraph breaks but older people like me do.

madengr• 9 years ago

Need English too, to learn about paragraphs.

datalog199082• 9 years ago

"unforgiving world of high school competitive research"

wtf? learn and be curious. Have fun.

GuiA• 9 years ago

I believe them, because I see the amount of support these kids get (highly educated + available parents & teachers, with large budgets). I have a coworker who graduated high school not so long ago, and her high school had an industrial design studio with better equipment (laser cutters, 3D printers, CNC machines, metal lathes, etc.) than the design studio I work in. My own high school, in comparison, had maybe 20-30 computers for about 1000 students.

It can be upsetting to read these things if one feels that they'd have thrived in such a supportive environment, but instead only had indifferent teachers/a school with little budget/etc and had to do without such support. But it's not a reason to doubt the veracity of any of it, or hate on the kids; these kids are sharp and hardworking and doing their best, they just happen to also be much more privileged than average.

forapurpose• 9 years ago

My own high school, in comparison, had maybe 20-30 computers for about 1000 students.

I had some old college-level comp sci books I was getting rid of (C++ by Stroustrup, etc.) and thought I would call a the magnet tech high school in the local inner city. The books were old editions, but why not ask? A teacher was indeed interested and even personally came to my home and picked up the books. He told me that if I had any old computer equipment - anything at all, even if it didn't boot - they could use that too. This is the tech magnet high school. What opportunity do those kids have? How much talent is lost? It's sickening.

jnbiche• 9 years ago

I think you hit just the right note here. Yes, recognize that the child is benefiting from economic privilege and readily-available mentors that aren't available to most children, but at the same time, recognize that these kids are hard-working and smart (and above all, they're kids).

philipkglass2• 9 years ago

I believe it. I had a home lab when I was a child. The Web didn't exist yet, but I read the scientific publications that were available at the library. It used to be common enough that there were books published about how to set up a lab and do research at home, like there were about setting up a home dark room for photography. (More recently I met someone who even had his own NMR (second hand, non-superconducting, but still) at home, was doing sophomore ochem lab activities at home at age 13, and left for university by age 15.)

It takes a child of remarkable interests and aptitude to win a national competition, of course. That's why you're reading about her specifically. It also takes unusually supportive parents. A sizable minority of American families with children could afford a home lab, equipment, and supplies if a child were so inclined and the parents encouraged it, but I suspect it's rarer for parents to OK funding it than other costly-but-more-common extracurricular activities or adult hobbies. Half of the battle is just having parents who understand you well enough to support what you want to do.

afpx2• 9 years ago

Agreed. As a child of the 80s, one of my favorite things to do was have my mom drop me off at the local university library. I used to just sit in the reference section and devour information. Of course, I never had any mentors or really even anyone with a bachelors degree in my life. So, my comprehension was very low. But, it didn’t stop me from dreaming and reading and thinking. I can only imagine how amazing it must be to be a curious kid in the 2010s.

On the other hand, I think it requires natural and insatiable curiousity. For instance, myy kids, while quite smart, certainly don’t have the same thirst.

replicatorblog• 9 years ago

If you're at all willing, I'd love to interview you for a project I'm working on about precocious kids and how to parent them. I'm joseph.flaherty@gmail.com. Can be a lightweight email interview.

Thanks!

Johnny5555• 9 years ago

Her parents are both engineers, it's not hard to believe they are helping to guide her interests to STEM.

Mz• 9 years ago

Former secular homeschooling parent. Sounds completely normal to me.

--> "You have kids who don't do things like that? What planet are you from?"

rz2k• 9 years ago

Take a look at its news section: https://dmse.mit.edu/news

It looks interesting, and the articles are accessible to an intelligent 11 year-old without being written to appeal to that age group. It's easy to forget how stifling it is to be young and have so much of what you're given to read tainted by pedagogical writing style.

Of course your reaction isn't unusual either. As people get older they learn not to talk about interests that are too specific until they know people well.

Fomite• 9 years ago

Kids are good at deep, intense fixation. For awhile, I was obsessed with aerogels, for reasons I still don't fully understand, and did occasionally stop by the local university library to read up on them.

pnathan• 9 years ago

Absolutely. Former homeschooled nerd. Having an intellectual interest and focus was normal in my household.

danso• 9 years ago

Yep, that was the kind of thing I did even on 28.8K modems. Minus the winning prizes part.

dominotw2• 9 years ago

Indian parents in america are in mad rush to get their kids into top schools. They start "college prep" at 5 yr old ( eg: http://northsouth.org/public/main/home.aspx/), spelling bees, kumon ect .They know simply acing tests is not enough anymore. They know what other parents are also doing. Hard to get a leg up by simply studying more.

I won't be surprised if we see more of the indian child prodigies in coming years when bulk of indian immigrants kids hit that age.

http://www.extremetech.com/electronics/156361-teenage-girl-c...

QAPereo2• 9 years ago

I won’t be surprised if you see a rash of suicides...

L_Rahman• 9 years ago

It's difficult to imagine because there has been a not widely acknowledged rise over the last twenty years of incredibly well-resourced parents who spend all of their available time, energy and money on their children.

Elite education (Ivies, Stanford, MIT, Chicago, Hopkins) historically was almost entirely the playground of the already rich. From the 70s onwards, it became a competitive game for the working upper middle class to send their children there. This elite stamp was necessary for their children to at least maintain working upper middle class status but ideally they'd collide with one of the already rich kinds and enter the wealth not labor class.

As income inequality has grown, admission to these institutions have grown even more valuable and parents have dedicated even more resources to giving their children a shot.

The result is that the children of well educated professionals end up in incredibly well resourced environments at home and in their schools. For context, the neighborhood this girl lives in has a median family income of 109,000 dollars, is 91% white and has only 2% of its population living below the poverty line.

MichaelMoser123• 9 years ago

I have looked up the site of this department - it looks very sparse , unless you can log in that is (it has a news section, to be fair). I guess one needs some fairy dust, sometimes.

louprado• 9 years ago

Does anyone have a link to the article on the lead detector ?

To comment on your question, my favorite past time as a child was walking the aisles of a hardware store or Radio Shack hoping to find a tool or device I had never seen before. If the store had a parts catalog, I would take it home and read every page. The girl in the article is doing the same only in a different format.

It is bizarre that an activity one child finds so fascinating and gratifying is seen as painfully dull and pointless by another child.

gvb• 9 years ago

The article is aggravatingly short on details. It looks like the MIT sensor this is based on is:

http://news.mit.edu/2016/wireless-wearable-toxic-gas-detecto...

nkkollaw2• 9 years ago

Has nothing to do with the article, but what is go.com and why are some websites hosted as a subdomain of go.com..?

I don't get why anyone would want to do that.

swampthinker2• 9 years ago

It's Disney. Probably their own implementation of AMP.(Separate page that loads much faster for mobile sites.

Why they implemented it this way? Beats me.

gowld2• 9 years ago

go.com is over a decade older than AMP.

hiharryhere• 9 years ago

Disney own it. It's a hangover from the late 90s dot-com era, when portals were the hotness.

I'm guessing lots of people have it as their default homepage from the old days so they keep it running.

nkkollaw2• 9 years ago

Yes, I know that much, but why would a major site not redirect to a regular .com domain?

et-al• 9 years ago

Go.com was a portal by Infoseek--one of those search engines prior to Google's dominance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go.com

macintux• 9 years ago

ESPN was, for the longest time, espn.go.com.

jerkstate2• 9 years ago

This is cool and this kid is obviously very smart and precocious, but I bought a lead test kit for under 10 bucks when I was concerned about the paint in my house.

Winning a science fair, great. Scholarship, great. Breathless articles about how this kid is changing the world? Probably setting them up for failure.

edit: valid point that testing for lead in water is a much lower threshold than testing for lead in paint. I remain skeptical of the news coverage.

whipoodle• 9 years ago

Hmm. My take was more like, this is great and all but wouldn’t it be better if Americans didn’t have to test their water for lead?

jerkstate2• 9 years ago

Well, somebody has to test water for lead, I think you're saying that it shouldn't be the (sole) responsibility of the consumer, which I agree with.

kafkaesq3• 9 years ago

I bought a lead test kit for under 10 bucks when I was concerned about the paint in my house.

Hmm. Of her device, the article says:

The result is Tethys, a sensor-based device designed to detect lead in water faster than other techniques currently on the market.

So have you considered the possibility that her device works differently (and perhaps better) than yours? You seem to be basically knocking her innovation, based on the fact that you once used a device that was "similar" in some way.

gowld2• 9 years ago

Have you considered the possibility that is doesn't? and that a successful product on the market deserves more benefit of the doubt than a kid's science fair project?

Usually what happens in these stories is that a kid makes something that is a pale imitation of current standards, and the parents use their industry connections to get a PR blast about their awesome kid, that gets the kid a leg up in college or getting a job, and the 'invention' is forgotten.

zacharycohn4• 9 years ago

Testing for lead paint is not the same as testing for lead in water.

There are test strips for lead testing water, but they're unreliable, unregulated, and not particularly trustworthy. The only great option right now is to call a lab who does water testing and work with them to send in a sample and have it tested via a method like induced plasma mass spectrometry.

Unfortunately many of these labs aren't interested in working with individuals who will only send one or two samples. They prefer to work with companies that will send them hundreds of thousands of samples. Even if you found one willing to work with you, their business processes involve fax machines, invoices, and talking to sales people on the phone.

(Related: That's why I started a company called http://www.testyourwaterforlead.com. We started a company and partnered with a lab, we let you order online, pay with a credit card, and we deal with the lab to help you avoid the hassle.)

davecap1• 9 years ago

If you are in NYC you can test your water for free: http://www1.nyc.gov/nyc-resources/service/1266/request-lead-...

s0rce2• 9 years ago

Another option: I sent my home water to a labs (http://www.karlabs.com/) they were happy to work with individuals and even have a test kit to facilitate.

kevinchen• 9 years ago

Service looks awesome, but I wish you guys would use HTTPS on the checkout page (or even better, the entire site!). Let's Encrypt can give you a certificate for free: https://letsencrypt.org/getting-started/

pilom• 9 years ago

This seems amazing but you need to have your order form automatically redirect to https. This is a really big deal. I almost didn't purchase because of this just so you know. Sure I can type the extra 's' in myself but 99% of your customers aren't going to do that. Even if you aren't worried about the security issues because you use stripe, your customers are going to get "don't enter credit card info on sites like this" alerts from most browsers (chrome told me not to buy). Please enable a redirect now.

amluto• 9 years ago

Where I live, it's easy. Don't try calling a lab -- call an environmental testing service instead. IIRC the cost was about $40 when I took the sample myself.

A cheaper kit would be nice if I wanted to take a bunch of samples to estimate how far from the tap the lead source was, though.

invalidOrTaken2• 9 years ago

As a kid who ended up not "changing the world," thanks.

oh_sigh• 9 years ago

What were you quasi famous for when you were young?

bmmayer1• 9 years ago

Probably setting them up for failure

How does covering an 11-year-old's accomplishments set them up for failure?

verylittlemeat2• 9 years ago

Because getting nationwide press is a tough act to follow and no one wants to feel like they peaked at age 11.

Kids typically aren't known for the kind of emotional maturity and perspective necessary to handle such self-esteem implications.

ucaetano• 9 years ago

I wonder what the school principal will think it is to justify calling the police and having her arrested!

gozur88• 9 years ago

I guess it depends on whether or not she deliberately made it look like something for which she ought to be arrested.

dominotw2• 9 years ago

funny that your comment is downvoted but the parent comment is not despite both being equally off topic.

Feniks• 9 years ago

America is truly an inspiration to us all...

avgkol• 9 years ago

The spelling bee and now this .Indian parents keep pushing their kids .. I know first hand

WalterBright• 9 years ago

I attempted to build many science projects as a kid, but failed repeatedly because of my poor fabrication skills, lack of proper tools, and no money. Particularly frustrating were my attempts to build a gas liquifier outlined in "The Amateur Scientist".

Not exactly a science project, but my brother and I finally managed to construct a go-kart out of scrap. It would do about 40 mph, and was enormous fun.

s0rce2• 9 years ago

There is very little in the article about how the technology actually works, other than some vague indications it relies on carbon nanotubes, which so far haven't really been useful for anything, outside of academic curiosities. Testing your water is actually easy, you collect some and send it to an analytical lab that uses standard processes and understands possible interference.

edit: the video shows a bit more, the nanotubes appear to have been chemically treated with compounds that show an affinity for lead, not much information beyond that. This seems like quite a feat to accomplish at home. My experience in grad school with high school students working in our lab was that you needed access to the university facilities to do well at these competitions.

terminado• 9 years ago

How it works:

https://youtu.be/7UR6epdce-o?t=40

Disposable cartridge consisting of briefly outlined carbon nanotube component...

How does a regular person make one of these nanotube cartirdges?

techtofixpeople• 9 years ago

Flint did not suffer from lack of lead detectors! The EPA knew for some time before but largely failed to act. Saying this girl is changing the world is like saying that SAT/ACT tutors in silicon valley are enabling disadvantaged kids.

nickporter• 9 years ago

Looking at the videos, it seems to be some kind of carbon nanotube sensor that checks the resistance of the water its dipped in. This is hooked up to an arduino and the data is pushed to a smartphone via bluetooth.

Not sure how she made the carbon nanotube detector, but I think people figured out a way to do it with a microwave oven? Seems dangerous, but very cool.

GenericsMotors• 9 years ago

The lead-testing industry hates her!

Next article: Meet the single mother of 10 who discovered this simple and effective alternative to vaccination! Doctors don't want you to know!

thowarray2• 9 years ago

Ok, another wunderkind story. At the age of 11:

* Knows how to program Arduino

* knows how to write Android Apps

* has a working understanding of chemistry

* is able to infuse carbon nanotubes with chlorine and build a disposable sensor from this.

* understands marketing enough to promote her product via the app stores (there really is no other reason for using a smartphone instead of three colored LEDs to display results).

Is anyone really buying this?

Here's a more likely story:

* Parents see scientific curiosity in her daughter, as well as the will to help people.

* Parents see a fear of lead in water and therefore a market for testkits

* Parents see that testkits already on the market suffer from being unreliable in untrained hands/too difficult to use.

* Parents have the idea for a better, "digital testkit", but that turns out to be way more expensive than anything that is already on the market.

* Parents then spoonfeed the idea to her daughter. They do the work, she gets the credit (and probably thinks that she did most of the work).

* The media picks the story up because "awwwww ... smart kid", resulting in free marketing for what would otherwise be a totally overengineered/overpriced product.

skocznymroczny• 9 years ago

I've seen a few similar stories. "11 year old kid creates artificial brain". Translation: 11 year old kid copy pastes and runs tutorial code for OpenCV image recognition.

caseydurfee• 9 years ago

All the truthering in this thread is a bit much.

Some of the nastiest bullying I've observed (and experienced) in my life has been from smart people towards even smarter people that they resented. I'm getting more than a whiff of that here.

I don't know if this girl is a Mozart, but there sure are a lot of angry Salieris in these parts.

11-year-old girl inspired by Flint water crisis creates cheap kit to test lead

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