ISEF 2011 Day 7

Day 7 - First thing in the morning was the Grand Awards Ceremony. Same great Hall, very long ceremony again. The categories were divided into the Life Sciences and Physical Sciences; the Fourth Award winners of each Life Science category were announced, then the Fourth Awards of the Physical Sciences, the Third Awards of the Life Sciences, the Third Awards of the Physical Sciences and so on. Each category has a large number of Fourth Award winners, many Third Award winners, a few Second Award winners and two First Award winners.

Some of the Fourth Awards of the Life Sciences

My room mate in red - Tan Yuan Jin getting a Second Award in Microbiology

The other two Singaporean finalists - (from left) Ng Qin Xiang and Matthew Lee sharing a Second Award from their team project on Environmental Management

Representative from the MIT Lincoln Lab

Straight from the program booklet:

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Lincoln Laboratory, Ceres Connection

Lincoln Lab has partnered with SSP and the Intel ISEF to promote science education through the Ceres Connection. The names of first and second place category award winners at Intel ISEF will be submitted to the International Astronomical Union (IAU) for naming of a minor planet. All minor planets in the Ceres Connection have been discovered by the Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) program, operated by MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory.

I think "minor planet" means "asteroid". The above representative from the Lab assured us that our namesakes would be too far away from Earth to be a potential cause of destruction on Earth.

I got a First Award in Computer Science!

I don't know how the cool effect in the above photo happened...

One of the two First Awardees also gets Best in Category. Not me, though :)

The Top Awards were awarded to a few projects out of all the Best in Categories. They are:

• The Gordon E. Moore Award (the best project in ISEF 2011)
• Intel Foundation Young Scientist Award
• Dudley R. Herschbach SIYSS Award
• European Union Contest for Young Scientists

The three on the right are from Thailand. They studied how to turn fish scales into plastics. Impressive!

Now everyone can really just relax ^_^

Team Singapore. red blazers - finalists, rightmost - Dr. Wulf, other adults - supervisors

We decided to tour the Los Angeles Science Center, so we set off to have lunch somewhere near there. On the way, we came across a demonstration by schoolchildren and parents/teachers. Apparently, their school was facing budget cuts and teachers were getting laid off. Here we have really young children shouting "Save our teachers! Save our Teachers!"

I have a video of a much longer and denser chain of demonstrators but it was too long for Blogger.

We had lunch at a Quizno's outlet:

Huge burrito filled with all sorts of ingredients. There was chili hidden in the lettuce!!! >.<

Huge seagull strutting around the Science Center grounds

We spent a very long time inside the store on the first floor of the Science Center.

Very beautiful glass ornaments!

One of the Science Center displays was some pictures hung along a corridor wall. Click on the pictures to enlarge. The detail should be enough to read the text in the bottom left of each frame.

I ended up spending a lot of time talking about the mathematics of bubbles and Conway's Game of Life to one of the supervisors.

The whole troop went to Chinatown for dinner. There's too much to talk about so instead I won't talk about it :) Here's an interesting signboard at its Metro station:

Click to read the individual fines in more detail. Their mascots are cuter than the ones in Singapore.

Speaking of the Metro, the train accelerates and decelerates quite often so you feel your body getting jerked around (you have to hold the pole tightly). The MRT in Singapore has a much smoother ride and the trains look cleaner too.