The start of an idea that won an award from a U.S. congressman!

The content I will post today is a great topic for those who are struggling with EC ideas. This is a story that includes my personal experience on how to start EC and where to get inspiration, so it would be good to refer to it and use it well.

I will tell you in detail how I came up with the idea in the EC activity that won an award from a U.S. congressman and how I ended up winning.

Today’s post can only start from my personal story.

In the 24 hours that everyone commonly has, if you set the remaining time excluding sleeping time and other essential time to 100, in my case, 85% is left for professional work, and the remaining 15% is left as spare time and I put effort into self-development. During this time, I pay attention to things that are not personally familiar or unfamiliar to me. The 15% of self-development that I set aside started to apply to my life in a good cycle that directly connects to 85% of my work again. There were many personal experiences where parts that I thought were different fields were connected as good ideas in my job, teaching students.

I tend to read a lot during the 15 percent of spare time I set aside. The books that I find interesting are books written by experts in a certain field about a field other than their own. The book I want to introduce for a moment is SCALE by Geoffrey West. The author of this book, Geoffrey West, is a theoretical physicist, and this book looks at biology, the rise and fall of companies, cities, etc. from a physical perspective. The start of the idea I will introduce today was this book. It’s a thick book of about 600 pages, but in fact, I was inspired within 3 pages.

The concept I focused on in this book is “Linear Extrapolation”. That is, when you go from X1 to X2 on the X-axis, and the Y value moves from A to B, if you are curious about the Y value at the X point, you predict where the Y value will be by drawing a virtual line. This is called “Linear Extrapolation”.

I brought an interesting experiment as a wrong example of Linear Extrapolation. Although it was an experiment conducted 40 years ago, it was an experiment on how much LSD, a hallucinogenic substance, should be administered to a 3000kg elephant, based on the fact that when LSD was injected into a 1kg cat, it started to affect the cat from 0.1mg. In other words, since the weight of the elephant is 3000 times that of the cat, it is assumed that Linear Extrapolation was used, and it is said that the experiment was conducted by injecting the elephant with 300mg of LSD, which is 3000 times the 0.1mg that was injected into the cat. However, unlike the cat, which was only slightly affected, the elephant died after 1 hour and 40 minutes.

It was a misfortune that occurred by simply thinking linearly, Linear Extrapolation, assuming that the animal receiving the drug was true and that the drug should be increased 3000 times because the mass of the animal receiving the drug increased 3000 times. After reading the book and learning the concept of Linear Extrapolation, when I looked at the dosage of Tylenol, 24-35 lbs patients: 5 mL 72-95 lbs patients: 15mL In other words, patients with 3 times the weight also had 3 times the dosage. This raised a reasonable doubt about whether this was an accurate indication of the dosage.

Because it is a topic that is actively being researched in pharmacy and biology, and so far, it has been concluded that it is difficult to give an accurate value for how much dosage should be administered depending on the weight. Perhaps Tylenol is simply marked like this because it is not fatal even if it is overdosed.

I would like to approach more theoretically what was wrong in the elephant experiment. When the size and weight increase from a cat to an elephant, the organism not only changes in size and weight, but also increases in volume, so I would like to tell you while proving mathematically why Linear Extrapolation should not be used. In the case of doubling, When the length is a line of 2, the value that doubles the length is 4. When the length is a square Area of 2 and the area is 4, the area that doubles is 16. One more dimension to Volume volume, when the volume of a cube with one side 2 is 8, The volume of a cube with a length of 4, which exactly doubles one side, is 64.

So to summarize,

Length increases by the amount multiplied Area is the square of the number multiplied Volume is the cube of the number multiplied

This concludes that you cannot use linear as a standard. Let me explain further. Let’s explain with the theory of Galileo Galilei, who was also called the father of modern science by Einstein. Ants with small mass and length have strength, so they can carry 10 ants on one ant. But a horse can’t carry even three horses on one horse. Based on Linear Extrapolation, since an ant can carry 10 ants of its own length/area/volume, a horse should be able to carry 10 horses on itself, but it is difficult for strength to increase equally as length increases.

I will skip the parts that need a deep explanation from what I explained above and

Area is directly proportional to Strength. Volume is also directly proportional to Mass.

Please understand this point and listen to the explanation. The relationship between Area and Volume can be thought of as the same as the relationship between Strength and Mass.

If the dosage of the drug is set to Strength, the relationship between Area and Volume can be interpreted as the relationship between the drug dosage and Mass.

Based on this theory, I made a formula and named it Ahn’s Hypothesis after my last name, and derived the relationship between Dosage and Mass in the same formula using the relationship formula between Area and Volume. If you calculate the dosage of Tylenol with the above formula, when the weight increases by 3 times, the dosage also increases by 3 times, so it becomes 10.4mL, not 15mL. Eventually, you will find an Overdose if you take the drug with the dosage announced by Tylenol.

Based on this idea, we thought it would be great to create something and connected it to the students’ EC activities.

So, our student took on the Congressional App Challenge and developed an app that calculates the appropriate dosage based on one’s weight, as long as there is data on the weight and dosage of people taking each drug. The app was entered into the competition.

Various drugs are entered as data values, and when you finally enter your weight, the app outputs the appropriate dosage for that drug.

With this idea, our student won the Congressional App Challenge! The student received an award from a U.S. congressman.

Initially, the competition idea came from the 15% of time that was set aside as spare time, and it was a very happy occasion personally when the student ended up winning.

Today’s posting will end with a book introduction. It is Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, the winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics. Although it is a thick book of about 600 pages, it is a book in which the author, a psychologist, scrutinizes the reasons underlying human behavior and specific events in economic terms. It would be good for students to discover parts they didn’t think of while reading this book. This could be the idea and starting point for EC activities. I hope that you will be inspired by your spare time and that a great idea will be derived from there and connected to EC activities.

Today, I shared my personal experience. A One Institute will always strive to influence students in various areas with good ideas.

Thank you!