Well, I helped judge the North Harbour Science and Technology Fair 
yesterday on behalf of the NZ Statistical Association ... and 
distributed $120 of prize money in ways that might help re- 
institute the endeavour as a major exercise for kids in my city.

The prospect is negative.

Lack of funds, interest and support meant no such Fair last year,  
and this year's effort had only half the entries of 2003.

The nation's science syllabii have recently changed for the worse, 
requiring school experimentors to spend as much time writing 
papers on the health & safety, cultural, indigenious, fair testing 
and animal/human rights aspects of any experiment as might be 
spent actually changing water into hydrogen and oxygen - and/or 
recombining the gases back into  H20 !

For example, the only Wimhurst machine I've seen in years was 
presented inside a perspex box - and disabled to avoid the 
aggressive, dangerous discharging that such horrific machines are 
noted for.  And it stood only 6 inches tall  -  a far, far cry 
from the beast my own school built in the 1940's,  with a platform 
for a lad to sit on to make his hair and tie stick out....

The Statistics Prizes are increasingly hard to give away, skill 
with maths and stats being replaced with a variety of spreadsheet 
analyses that are applied randomly to produce garish, meaningless 
graphics....

There's nothing nothing like an entrant-, school- and teacher- 
approved project boasting means and SDs calculated on a set of 
nominal answers by a silly spreadsheet button to send me off into 
spluttering rage....

This year's worst effort came from some graphs (scattergrams, 
acutally) comparing two variables on a population made up of two 
seperate entities,  with meaningless trendlines (regression lines, 
true) surplanted with two numbers labelled R and R^2 ("teacher 
said they were very important but I'm not sure what they mean") 
!!

You can't hit the child, or the hovering parent;  the teacher(s) 
responsible haven't given up their Sunday to be present;  all that 
is left is to march emotionlessly to the other end of the huge gym 
and aim several fatal savate kicks at some totally innocent 
medicine ball...

I get the feeling that Arthur Clarke's comment about things not 
understood being perceived as magic is turning on us,  with more 
and more of our toys and tools being seen as bewitchments and 
spells rather than the result of exploring and applying nature....

:-(((
 
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