http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2015/12/10/technology/10reuters-kentucky-hand.html
Last week the NY Times printed the above article about a 6 year old who was able to replace his right hand with a plastic prosthetic. This is obviously good news for people with disabilities. But when reading the article, I kept remembering our class discussion on Monday. Someone had asked “Shouldn’t we focus our efforts on stopping the use of plastics instead of limiting the use?” I wonder how these types of plastics can impact our future.
In the article, Lucas Abraham was born with a rare disorder that left his right hand malformed. This past month the University of Louisville and e-NABLE created a working prosthetic right hand for him using 3D printing. The bioengineering students at the university worked with e-NABLE, a group that helps create prosthetics. By using 3D printing they were able to lower the cost of the whole process and the plastic that they used is similar to the ones in Lego blocks. This allows for the prosthetics to be produced in various colors.
The plastic used in Lego toys are not sustainable. In fact earlier this year Lego announced plans to build a new center to research and develop “sustainable, raw materials”. Lego tries to either recycle its plastics or sell them to various manufactures who would be able to use it. Only about 1% of Lego plastics go unrecycled. Yet that 1% can make a vast difference when you think about how many Lego products are sold around the world. A lot of the focus on recycling is on the food and clothing industry, but in the future I think that it would be a good idea to look at recycling across the board.
While politely waiting to pass through a crowded area in the basement of the Macaulay building I had been attracted to this poster. The student who was in the middle of a presentation had been very animated and enthusiastic about her project. That, combined with the fact that I had nowhere else to go, caused me to listen in on her poster presentation.
Rebecca Kurtz and her group mate Karen Goldbeger had chosen to focus on the coalition between educational experiences and ADHD diagnosis. Inspired by the rising “ADHD epidemic” they decided to use statistics to see if there were any trends with ADHD diagnosis. When viewing a map of all of the cases of ADHD in America it is easy enough to see that most cases were concentrated around urban areas while the rural parts of America had very few ADHD cases. Rebecca and Karen wanted to see if quality education and understanding environments provided by psychologists and teachers could decrease the amount of ADHD cases, or if they could at least have a positive influence.
This topic was extremely intriguing to me since I had worked with students with ADHD throughout high school as a Spanish student teacher. Rebecca’s data was very thorough, almost too thorough. She had called the APA for the exact number of psychologists in each state. She then used that data in combination with the amount of ADHD diagnosis in a given area to see if there was any real relationship between the two. She repeated the graph, replacing the number of psychologists with the quality of education in a given area. In my opinion the second graph is subjective, because the variables that make up a school ranking can not cover everything that would be considered a “quality education”.
They used a complicated statistical formula to ultimately answer their question, and no there was no clear relationship between the three variables. However, some of the data is subjective so there wouldn’t have been a clear answer either way.
I really liked their poster it had a good balance of visuals and words. Rebecca’s presentation was engaging and her answers to my questions were very thoughtful.
A Macaulay Honors College Seminar taught by Prof. Brett Branco
