Newman's Stem Skills Blog

 

    SETI or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence is a science organization that scans the sky for signs of alien life using your computing power to do so . Citizen Science projects are projects which heavily rely on help from the general public. These projects can range from anywhere from researching the folding of protein which can be used to advance medical technology to SETI. There are thousands of Citizen Science projects and even more ways you help out with them. It is important that everyone spends some time looking at research projects and finds ways that they can help out with the pursuit of human knowledge, either for the many things that knowledge lets us do for merely the knowledge itself.     Dating back to 1996  GIMPS (The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search) has been searching for incredibly large prime numbers. They are attributed to finding the largest known prime number, 2^82,589,933-1. This knowledge can be used to increase ...

Gov School Gov school has been an amazing experience and better then I ever could have imagined. All of my classes and the programing in between have been amazing.  STEM Skills     Every day in STEM Skills we did something different some of which I have done a lot with some that I have never touched. We have done some 3d modeling, programing and data visualization. We experimented with AI and talked about the engineering design process. We had a tasting platter of anything STEM.  STEM in Society     It is weird to talk about science from the ethics and philosophy side of things. Never in my life did I think I would be taking a class like this but it was enjoyable and appears everywhere without you realizing it.  Math      There is so much to say about my Math class over the last month. I was expecting to have to do a lot of calculations, all of your Math-y stuff. We did none. We talked about math research and proofs, how you look at some...

Neuromorphic AI      Neuromorphic AI use neurol networks based off of the human brain to minimize energy cost in computing. Dr. Schuman's research group has built a robot car that they are using neuromorphic AI to lower the energy cost of.  Research Opportunities     The most interesting part about her talk to me was the fact that you could do research as a high schooler. Her group does research in the aforementioned field of Neuromorphic AI. She does research over the academic school year and over the summer both of which are in person and online. I want to do research in to computer science as a career path so I am really hoping to join the group for this upcoming school year.

      I love knock knock jokes. They are horrible in every way and very fun to tell. There is one thing better then telling knock knock jokes, making a bot tell knock knock jokes for you.     What is a Chat Bot?     A chat bot is a very simple program that Chats. It moves along a tree of options called a flow giving you choices along the way. When you choose something it gives you some more information and more options then asks you something else.  My Bot     As you might have guessed I made a bot that tells Knock Knock jokes. Below are two different versions one made using ChatFuel and the other in python.  My python bot asks if you want to here a joke then tells one to you but you have to be very specific in your response or it breaks. It only knows one joke because I was trying to make it quickly so I could move on to the next bot. My second wonderful bot knows not one, not two, not three, not four, not five, but six full knock ...

 

 Visualization     We worked on data visualization over the last 2 class days. Below was the visualization I made to make McDonalds sales make more sense at a glance. Below are the total sales, profit, and number of customers along with sales by country, costumer satisfaction and sales trends. I have found that just looking at the numbers directly usually makes more sense to me then a bunch of fancy pie charts and maps but I can see how they would be useful. It is definitely really helpful for showing off numbers to those who need to get it at a glance or did not work closely with the data. AI     AI or Artificial intelligence is a really bad name for what is essentially a bunch of statistics. For example we used it to guess who would have survived and who would have died on the Titanic. To do this we got a list of training data which is a bunch of details about people on the ship and whether or not they survived. The code takes that data and uses it to construc...

Concentration Animal Feeding Operations or CAFOs are a way of farming animals by smushing them in to small spaces where they can barely move as much as turn around. In these horrible operations the animals are fed horribly and are mainly sustained on anti biotics. But are they Ethical???? Yes totally absolutely ethical 100 percent for real (for the record I was forced to take up this position) and here is why: It is efficient. In order to keep the same output we would have to use thousands times more land. Factory farmed cows produce less methane so if you think about it CAFO's are saving the planet. CAFO's cause cancer,... Which is actually a good thing because if more people get cancer then more people will be on the verge of death and resort to experimental treatment. If more people take experimental treatment it will become better until eventually we will have a cure. They are the only way we can get the meat production that we currently have in the US. If we were to shut d...

What makes people people?      In Stem in Society we went through and looked at the qualifications for personhood and were given the choice of a couple of questions to respond to. As a person I feel qualified to talk about this subject and I feel as though I can answer all of these relatively simply so I have decided to speed run morality. If you do not meet all the criteria for personhood, does that mean you are not a person?

      How do values effect objectivity?      In class today we went over the effects values have on science and its objectivity. Below is a still from a video I will be analyzing along with a link to that video. In the video the Pitbull licks the bunny while the bunny moves around the Pitbull. https://utk.instructuremedia.com/embed/5dc6395e-cff0-4bcf-8fd2-33f76d7c21dc Analysis of the video     It looks like the Pitbull is grooming the bunny while the bunny seems to be grooming itself. I am assuming this is the case because the bunny does not look particularly scared while the dog is licking it. Pitbulls tend to groom animals so it does not seem farfetched that it would groom the bunny. Analysis of the analysis     When I did my analysis I looked at the video assuming that the dog was not intending to hurt the bunny. I did this because that would make me sad and I don't want to think let alone write about it. It would be a good idea to lo...

3D printing and my experience with it      I have a decent amount of experience with 3D printing, I own a printer and have made a bunch of models. I have printed replacement pieces for board games, stencils for D&D battle maps. Whenever there is a problem that requires a small plastic piece of very specific parameters I can make a solution. At one point the band had water bottles whose handles would snap off every other second so I went and made a file for replacement. It is safe to say that in any practical situation I can make something. There is one thing I have no clue how to do, and that is make something completely impractical, so incredibly pointless that it exist for the shear fact that it exist. Today I made a rock. A quick discussion on the concept of rocks      Rocks do not have a reason to exist, they did not decide that they wanted to be, they simply are. Rocks are not uniform they do not attempt to be perfect in any way, a rock that is a p...

In Class over the last two days we have been talking about programing and its uses such as AI. Python Programing

Is SETI Pseudoscience?      Today in stem in society we broke out in to groups to discuss whether or not SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is real Science or Pseudoscience. Our group was composed Roju Miller, Amelia Northam, Elsie Sheumaker, and Me, Austin Newman.      We used the following sites to build our discussion This is SETI's description on what they do.  https://www.seti.org/primer-seti-seti-institute   This is an article from Nasa about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.  https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/news/technosignatures-and-the-search-for-extraterrestrial-intelligence/    This article is a debate on whether or not Fermi's paradox is disprovable and why SETI may be useful.  https://www.universetoday.com/139467/new-model-predicts-that-were-probably-the-only-advanced-civilization-in-the-observable-universe/#google_vignette     An article about a new experiment from SETI  https:...

     Today in Stem Skills we worked in groups to make a mode of "transportation" using Knex. To do this we used the engineering method.     Step One Define the Problem: The problem is pretty clear make something move from point A to point B     Step Two Brainstorm Solutions: A couple ideas came straight to mind, A car, something with wheels, A catapult. As soon as the thought of flinging something came up we knew that that is what we are doing.     Step Three Research Ideas: We began to look at the different ways to fling things around. The main ideas are a trebuchet, a catapult, or a ballista. As we looked in to the trebuchet we realized that it would be difficult to build as it has a lot of moving pieces. A catapult seemed like it could work but it did not seem as easy as a ballista as most of the pieces of a catapult are less connected then with a ballista. For a ballista we need to have some form of moving piece and a way to store up ener...

How should a self driving car react when its passenger is at risk.     In "The ethical dilemma of self driving cars - Patrick Lin" linked below by TED-Ed poses the question if you were a programmer deciding what to crash into between an obstacle which has a high likely hood of death to the rider of the self driving car, a motorcycle which would most likely kill its rider, and a SUV which is a middle ground between the two.       I believe that there is one really important detail that needs to be considered, who is consenting to self driving cars being on the road? It isn't the motorcyclist and it isn't the person in the SUV. The only people who has actually agreed to let a AI on the road is the company that made the car and the people riding in it. This leads to another question is it ok to decide that you are going to risk other people's lives to protect your own. I don't believe that it is and thus I believe that the self driving car should run in to t...

    Hello everyone my name is Austin Newman and I am an aspiring programmer and mathematician in the UTK governors school for science and engineering. I am from Nolensville TN and I am soon to graduate from Nolensville High School. I spend a lot of my time playing and designing boardgames which if life goes perfectly will be my full time job. I hope to share what I learn in the stem skills and stem in society class with all of you.