Past winners

At the 1999 NEOSEF, nine projects were winners of special awards given by the Cleveland Chapter of the American Statistical Association. These projects were selected by our panel of judges from the over 400 projects entered in the NEOSEF.

Certificate of Award Winners

• "Sniff and Die: A Test of Inhalants" by Kirsten Hansen from Beaumont School in Cleveland Heights. This project com-pared means taking into account variation.
• "Results of a High School Questionnaire: Non-Traditional Occupations Impact on Relations" by Nida Degesys from Mayfield High School. This project summarized associations using two-way frequency tables and chi-square tests.
• "How Far Will Your Golf Ball Go?" by Robert DiMarco from St. Rita. This project compared the distance travelled of four types of golf balls using a home-built "driving" mechanism to apply uniform hits to the balls. The best ball was the Top Flight Strata as determined from _ t tests comparing the mean distances travelled of the three types of balls to the distance travelled by the a priori "best" ball.
• "Butane and Beyond" by McKensie Koss and Caroline O'Neill from St. Bernadette in Westlake. This joint project evalu-ated whether temperature affected the molecular mass of butane. Differences were shown by using stem and leaf, and box plots.

Certificate of Merit Winners

• "The Effects of Auditory Distractions and Age on Response Time" by Trevor McGrath from Mayfield High School. This project showed scatter plots and regression lines to examine the relationship between auditory distractions (such as loudness) and response time.
• "Rocky River Sedimentation" by Tom Blank from Lakewood High School.
• "The Impact of Different Number of Spiders on Prey Capture and Web Strength" by Elisa Jones of Hathaway Brown. This project used a clever design and summarized the data by means and standard errors.
• "The Bell Curve" by Hannah Hilow of Our Lady of Good Counsel. This project showed that dropping balls through a series of pins resulted in an approximate "normal" distribution.
• "Comparative Study of Body Mass Index of Female and Male Teens" by Hac Bui of Cleveland

At the 1998 NEOSEF, five projects were winners of special awards given by the Cleveland Chapter of the American Statistical Association. These projects were selected by our panel of judges from the 419 projects entered in the NEOSEF.

“Get the Lead Out” by Missy Blakely, a junior at Beaumont School in Cleveland Heights. Missy’s project examined the effect of lead on brain neurons in rats. The hypothesis was that lead inhibits neuronal differentiation causing impeded calcitronin gene-related peptide (CGRP). Brain neurons were exposed to lead concentrations of 25um and 50um and showed lower survival rates of CGRP percentiles compared with controls. Survival curves with standard deviations were shown. Missy worked on the project with Alison Hall, an Associate Professor at CWRU School of Medicine. Missy received a $25 cash award, the book "Statistics: A guide to the Unknown" by Tanur et al, and a Certificate of Merit. Her teacher, Ms. Kensig, received the book "Exploring Data" by Landwehr and Watkins. Missy Blakely was also the NEOSEF grand prize winner in the biological science division and competed in the International Science and Engineering Fair in Fort Worth, Texas.

“Does Balloon Color Affect Floating Time” by Kirsten Hansen an eighth grader at St. Dominic's School in Shaker Heights. Kirsten’s project compared four colors of balloons using five balloons of each color. Mean floating times were compared using a one-way analysis of variance. Significant differences were found with the colored balloons staying aloft longer than the white bal-loons. She received a $25 cash award, the Tanur book and a Certificate of Merit. Her teacher, Mrs. Turkell, was given the Explor-ing Data book.

“Which Type of Wood is Stronger” by Amanda Peck a tenth grader from Lakewood High School. Amanda compared the breaking weight and flexibility of four types of wood: oak, poplar, pine and cedar using four samples of each. She first normalized the data to account for the different sizes of the samples and then compared the results by showing a boxplot for each type of wood. Oak and poplar had the best results. She received a $25 cash award, the Tanur book and a Certifi-cate of Merit. Her teacher, Mrs. Lickly, received the Exploring Data book.

A Certificate of Award and the Tanur book were also given to two other students:

“Can the Addition of a Small Percentage of Rubber Change the Physical Characteristics of Asphalt” by Jennifer Nix, an eighth grader from Messiah Lutheran. Her experimental approach had good design features and used the data results to make reasonable comparisons. Grant Meachem, a seventh grade student at Shaker Middle School studied

“Creating Transparent Skin and Subcutaneous Tissue.” His project used an evolutionary design where the next composition of Kraton polymers to test was determined from the results observed in the previous mixtures. The goal was to make a substance that could be used for modeling and practice of doing medi-cal syringe injections in humans.

Certificates of Award

The first prize went to Kevin Ostanek from Madison High School in the Biology 11-12 category for his project entitled “Gray tree frog research project.” This study examined two species of gray tree frogs that look alike. When blood cell length and width were examined there was very good discrimination between the two species. A Mann-Whitney Test was used to compare the distribu-tions of the two species. It was highly significant. A cutpoint was chosen to classify future frogs into the two species. There were only about 5 percent of the observations that overlapped in the two distributions. Kevin received $75 cash, Tanur's book and a Cer-tificate of Award. Cohn's book was awarded to advisor Tim Matson at The Natural History Museum.

Cortrell Kinney from John Hay High School in Cleveland was awarded a Certificate of Award, a $50 cash award and Tanur's book for his project “Do estrogen and gibberellic acid affect plant growth?” His entry was also in the Biology 11-12 category. A Cohn book was awarded to his teacher, Mr. Jeffries. Cortrell's study compared the growth of plants given one of three treatments: control (no treatment), estrogen, and gibberellic acid. Plots were made of the plant height over time and the distance between major leaf nodes with means and standard deviations shown. This was one of the few projects recognizing variability. One group showed much more growth and the standard deviations did not overlap with those in the lower groups (gibberellic acid). The two lower groups (including the control) had much overlap in the standard deviations. Therefore, it was concluded that the gibberellic acid group did significantly better and the two lower groups were similar.

Jessica Blanton of Shaker Heights Middle School was also awarded a Certificate of Award, $50 cash award, and Tanur's book for her Biology 7-8 entry “The effects of detergent on DNA transfer to bacteria.” Jessica compared the effectiveness of DNA transfer in bacteria in each of four groups by measuring the number of bacteria colonies formed to what was the expected level in a control group. She used a Student's t-test for each comparison and foundsignificance. She also showed the standard deviation of each group along with the mean. Cohn’s book was awarded to the teacher Ms. Loughler.

Certificates of Merit were also awarded to three other students:

• “Achievement tests - the effects of ethnicity and environment,” Gabriel Ling, Mayfield High School, BHS 9-10 Gabriels's entry compared SAT scores in 5 students of Asian ethnicity to 5 students of European ethnicity. He found higher mean scores in the Asian group. Also, he correlated a score of amount of pressure parents apply to students and the level of importance the students felt their parents placed on school to the SAT scores of both groups combined and found very low correlations and was able to interpret them properly.
• "Which size bouncy ball bounces highest?" Amy Summers, Lakewood Junior High School, PMA 7-8. Amy's entry had three balls of each of three sizes. Each size group's balls were of similar composition (but the compositions of the different sizes were different). She recorded the height each ball bounced after being dropped from the top of a refrigerator and compared the three size groups using the mean, median, mode and range of heights within each group.
• "The speed of sound: constant? I think not,” Jonathan Khoury, Mayfield High School, Math 9-10. Jonathan's Physics and entry Jonathan measured the speed of sound by the time it takes to hear a board being hit with a hammer and seeing it being hit from a distance. Four values were recorded on each of four days where the outside temperature was differ-ent. Observations were done in Chagrin Valley Recreation area and excluded one observation as an outlier due to being more than 1.5 times the interquartile range. He showed that the observed relation of distance and time did not follow the expected quadratic relationship, probably due to experimental error in recording the measurements accurately (for example, precisely starting the stop watch when the board was hit with the hammer).