Google Science Fair 2011 winners: all girls, zero innovation, empty buzz words

Google Science Fair 2011 winners.

All girls.

A fellow at Reddit/MR asked whether we should give Google the benefit of the doubt for choosing three girls and mentioning "girl power". I can't imagine an article about "boy power" if three boys had won.

Let's analyze these results. They gave the age 13-14 prize to a girl who basically just cooked chicken with different marinades. Meanwhile Luke Taylor from South Africa did the following:

With this in mind, he embarked on a project to help robots understand commands written in natural human language. He limited design and testing to a prototype robot called Tribot and used only a basic set of instructions. The resulting application, SIMPLE, analyzes and translates English sentences into C-code. It also compiles and downloads them, as well as assisting users via prompts that request required information to program the robot.

I wonder which was actually more deserving. This kid's a genius, and the girl is... a decent cook?

I mean just look at what the boys did versus what the girls did. The girls did very simple experiments, nothing innovative, no new technology, while the boys created new things and tested new hypotheses. http://www.google.com/events/sciencefair/finalists.html

It's just an indication of the stupidity of our culture, where we discourage innovation (what boys do best) and encourage rote memorization for indoctrination purposes (what girls do best). It wouldn't surprise me if the "girl power" thing was a motivator for the judges too, though.

And look, the finalists in the 17-18 range were all boys except for the one girl, who again did a simple experiment. The boys, for the most part, developed innovative technologies. And so the girl wins.

You'll also notice that the three girls did projects on carcinogens/environment/cancer which are nice juicy catchphrases today, the kind of crap the general public, and naive little girls, eat up. Meanwhile the boys actually tended to do projects on meaningful, complicated stuff, requiring innovation and a great deal of talent, rather than just focusing on cancer and environment buzz words.

Of course, the girls are rewarded for eating up the propaganda, while the boys are the ones actually pushing the boundaries of science.

Today you are rewarded for conforming, not for innovating. For creating waste, not value. It's true in the corporate world, government, and apparently the Google Science Fair. And women are really good at value destruction - HR, non-essential public sector jobs, and worthless science fair projects.

edit: I just noticed that each winner will receive the following prize: "A personal LEGO color mosaic (one for each team member, to build her/himself)". Yikes! I sure hope the instruction booklets are clear, since although the innovative, creative, logical, and spatial cognitive ability of the winners has not been demonstrated, they sure know how to perform rote tasks! I hope they don't struggle too much before they call in their brother or dad (stepdad?) to put them together.

additional edit: After some discussion at reddit/mensrights, I have the following to say: The people who advance technology are the innovators, not the followers. These "winners" are followers. Several of the boys who did not win are true innovators and will contribute more than these "winners" ever will, guaranteed. A society that rewards people who won't contribute shit to this world over the ones who will is not a good one.

I responded to quite a few comments at Reddit, threads linked here for full disclosure:

http://www.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/inkzq/google_science_fair_2011_winners_all_girls_zero/

http://www.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/iniw0/this_is_interesting_should_we_give_google_the/