Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Hi,

I'm Brian, a Junior from Oregon, and I am stuck.

If you're still interested, uh, here's some background on my situation. I am interested in entering the Northwest Science Expo (NWSE) this year, and I signed up for a science research class this year specificially to force myself to work on a project.. but it's already been two months into the school year, and I still have no idea, whatsoever, about what my project will be on. Heh, if only I were born in the 16th century and simply figuring out how to build a catapult or a firearm would be an amazing achievement. Anyways, so I'm stuck trying to balance feasiblility AND usefulness, or even simply what subsection of science I want to pursue. Isn't there's any field out there where a high school student can still make progress in?

As for specific interests... I don't know what to say. I did a project on airfoils in 8th grade and got 3rd place, but I'm not really interested in pursuing aerodynamics anymore. I'm very fluent with computers in the sense that I've been using the internet for half my life and so I know where to look for a wide variety of things, just not for science (in other words, I don't know any solid languages yet, only PHP and HTML). As for curriculum, I took AP Chem last year, I am currently taking AP Bio, Calc and self-studying Comp Sci (Java) this year, and.. I guess some preliminary fields that I'm interested in are engineering, biology, programming, and electronics. Maybe physics and math, but I don't feel very strong in those fields, and I also feel that they're a lot more.. complete and hardcore (for lack of better words) than the rest, which is a slight turn-off, since I am tight on time in my Junior year. They seem like less bang for the buck, if you will. Not that I'm looking to research for the sake of researching, I am just interested by a large variety of fields. Finally, I like to think I learn fast.

And... that's it. Thanks for reading my incredibly vague and needy post, and any suggestions on where to head with my project would be greatly appreciated!

Hey, hopefully you can check out

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/mentorin ... opic.shtml

and get ideas for a potential project

Oh yeah, forgot to mention I did. And it gave me genomics and ... something else bio related. I glossed through the BLAST project suggestion.. but haven't gone through it completely. I've got a lot of homework right now...


Ehh.. I guess it's expectin way too much to get handed an idea, huh? I'll keep thinking of an original project, I know it's out there..

Hi karch.

If you are interested in something like Computer Part Recycling,
there are lots of uses for burned out hard drives and bad CD drives
and other computer parts like the power supply.

This may be too elementary, but you could use components
from hard drives to help younger kids do science projects,
like building a speaker from the hard drive magnets,
the plastic case the hard drive came in and about 13 turns of about
24 guage copper wire.

Do some google searches on keyword
"hard drive project"
hard drive project
"hard drive clock"
hard drive clock
hard drive speaker project

bad hard drive project
bad cd drive project

Let us know if this anything of interest to you.

Good Luck!

Hi Mr. Whaley,

Oh yeah, I've seen that Parekh guy's hard drive clock before, and I really want to try my hand at it. Haha, god it looks so awesome in the dark. But.. project-wise, I'm looking for something more..

Though, thanks for your reply.

karch wrote:Hi Mr. Whaley,

Oh yeah, I've seen that Parekh guy's hard drive clock before, and I really want to try my hand at it. Haha, god it looks so awesome in the dark. But.. project-wise, I'm looking for something more..

Though, thanks for your reply.

Hi Karch, if you want to try something that is very important, but feasible... how about looking into computer security. More and more hackers are getting very good at breaking simple passwords like "bob" "password" "11_12_05" so companies like Microsoft are looking for ways to help users pick passwords that are difficult to crack, but easy to remember passwords. One promising area is the use of pictures as memory cues. What they do is show you a series of four images... say a cat sitting on an armchair, a racecar in the pitstop, a little girl in a yellow raincoat, and a man in a suit talking on a cellphone.

What you do is look at each image and use the first thing that comes to your mind as part of your password. For instance

cat sitting on an armchair - cc for "cat on chair"
a racecar in the pitstop - rc for "race car"
a little girl in a yellow raincoat - lg "little girl"
and a businessman eating a piece of pizza - bm for "business man"

This creates a password "ccrclgbm" which is very difficult for a computer to guess and if you put a lot of things in the image there are too many combinations for a hacker to guess what the original person thought of.

The nice thing is that when you look at a photo, you always tend to think of the same thing and more importantly, it is usually very easy to remember what you thought of before. so while "ccrclgbm" is a really hard password to remember, if you are presented with the photos you used to create the image, it is pretty easy to remember. Also different people see different things, so the same photos can be used and people will pick different passwords (it will help to rotate the image orders though).

Anyways... since you know some PHP, HTML and learning Java... you can create a simple website that allows people to create a username/password based on a series of photos you show them and then when they type in their login name, they get back the same photos and see if they can remember their password.

For more information do a search for "strong password creation" and here's a research article done by Microsoft on using images to create strong passwords. (http://research.microsoft.com/displayAr ... spx?id=417)