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Food insecurity is one of the most difficult problems that the human world has encountered in its existence. Food and the energy that it provides is something which is impossible to survive without. Despite this, in many corners of the world, food is simply unavailable or alternatively not nutritious. Due to the magnitude of the problem at hand, there have been thousands of efforts to mitigate the effects of such problems in practically every corner of the globe. While some have merit, the overall magnitude of the issue hasn’t necessarily changed. As Glenn Denning demonstrates in his book “Universal Food Security”, the issue of food insecurity is so incredibly nuanced that it could not possibly be solved by a mere one or two things. This is exemplified as when he was asked about how he would go about solving climate change, he began to criticize the concept of “all-we-got-to-do-is ism”.

The book itself is the product of over 4 decades of research and over 50 countries of various projects that accomplish various goals in various different ways. The problem is not isolated in the idea that one can only solve it by directly impacting food supply, as the economy, infrastructure, and social constructs of an area can all impede or aid the distribution of food. The other major implication of this book is the idea of climate change. Climate change is perhaps the greatest example of an ambiguous problem. Despite recent efforts in the energy and manufacturing industries to switch to cleaner energy and reduce our footprint on the atmosphere, we must also focus on taking existing carbon out of the atmosphere and disposing of it in a safe manner. This goes hand in hand with solving food insecurity because even if we manufacture more food or spend more energy distributing more evenly, the adverse impacts on the environment could be immense. A way to go about solving this is sustainable intensification of agriculture which could increase productivity with safer environmental practices, though there are numerous ways to implement this which all depend on the situation of each individual farmer.

As one might be able to tell, a lot of the significant global issues that we face (in this case food insecurity and climate change) are all interconnected in the sense that to begin to solve one such issue we must also look at its implications on another issue. It’s also important to stay aware of the fact that we all have an impact on the world around us. While one or two farms adopting more sustainable practices may not on the surface have any impact on either issue, the combined efforts of millions around the world certainly can. It’s extremely important to understand what the individual and community can do because it will certainly differ depending on where you live and what you do. As for the book itself, I highly recommend reading it because it gives you an extremely complex understanding of the lives of people who have dedicated themselves to solving this mammoth problem and it really drives home the whole idea that such problems are much more complex than they seem.

This summer, I attended two programs at Columbia University. Because there was so much to talk about these courses, this is only the first of 3 or 4 posts.

In particular, this post will be about a movie I watched during the first program. The movie’s name was “The Man who Tried to Feed the world”. It follows the life of Norman Borlaug and his vital role in the Green Revolution. The Green Revolution was an agricultural movement that saw the efficiency at which crops were grown increase drastically. Rather than expand the amount of farmland used, he developed unique strains of crops that grew a greater yield in the same amount of space. His efforts, especially those in South Asia, have been said to have saved over a BILLION lives. Despite this absolutely incredible statistic, he still remains a largely unrecognized figure when compared to other Nobel Prize winners.

Moving away from his accomplishments, I found the character of Borlaug itself to be very interesting. His youth shaped his personality in many ways. Specifically, his unwillingness to compromise has been attributed to his early days wrestling, which he believed taught him to stand his ground. Additionally, unlike other scientists or activists of his time, he did his work in the field, travelling the world in the process. This meant that he witnessed firsthand the struggles of people all over the world over the basic necessity that is food.

With all of this in mind, there is a reason that people still go hungry in today’s world. If you look at a map of the percentage of people hungry in each country, you can see that most of the extreme cases are in countries in Southeast Asia (such as India) or in Africa (the most extreme case being Chad). It is important to understand that global hunger is not just about providing food to those who need it but providing nutrients as well. Food may be available but if it isn’t healthy or it doesn’t provide the entire set of elements, vitamins, and other nutrients that a human needs to survive, it is not adequate. Another statistic of note is that the majority of those who suffer from food insecurity are women, which implies that there may be social barriers to overcome in addition to logistical ones. While people may think that we can just generate more food, agriculture is not magic. When higher-yield crops became more prominent in places such as India, the amount of nutrients used also increases, which opens a window to other problems. For example, agricultural production may pollute the water, the air, and the earth while greenhouse gas emission from cattle-farming may worsen the already critical conditions of climate change. This means that those who seek to solve the overall issue of global hunger in the world must first consider every possible impact of their solutions.

The purpose of this article isn’t to say that tackling global hunger is impossible, but rather to shed some light on some of the other often overlooked factors at play that people may not think about when they hear about global starvation on the news.

Recently, a few of my friends and I attended the IgniteStem Design-Thinking Challenge, which was held at Princeton University. It was a really enjoyable and enriching experience, and I would recommend participating to any high schooler in the area who wishes to work in a STEM industry.

What is IgniteStem?

The main idea of the challenge was to create solutions that could be used to address various problems that affect communities. This year’s prompt was “Helping Healthcare” and there were 3 challenges that we had to respond to. At the end, we chose what we felt was our best response and presented it to a panel of judges. In addition to the competition, there were also a few workshops about design-thinking and project-based learning that served to teach us skills we could then implement into our projects. In particular, the people running the event heavily iterated the idea of Design-Thinking and the brainstorming process, which we used to collaborate effectively. One of the important distinctions of the event was that we could not use the internet in any form to create ideas, something which forced us to embrace our creativity.

What is Design-Thinking?

Design-Thinking is the concept of coming up with a solution to a problem using a process to first brainstorm, narrow down solutions, expand a chosen solution, and then implement said solution in a beneficial way. This is something that I had learned in fifth grade with my Math and Science teacher, who was a huge proponent of this concept, though I never really used it again until recently in my science fair projects. If you want to see the process we had for our solution, you can view/download our short presentation below.

What did we do?

One of the prompts, and the one that we eventually decided to go with, was to help create a clever solution to a problem that impacts our community. At our school, we realized that about half of our students wore glasses, due to a plethora of reasons. However, glasses themselves are not entirely accessible to everybody who needs them, with the price and time taken to create an ordinary pair of glasses being much too long. Additionally, most vendors require appointments or eye-test results to create the glasses.

Our solution to this problem was to create a photobooth that made the entire process of obtaining glasses a simple, quick, and easy-to-use process. First, the user would undergo an eye test with lenses that could be changed with the simple click of a button rather than another person. Second, a software would be used to take a scan of the person’s face and generate a simple pair of glasses as a 3D model. This model could then be exported to a 3D-printing software so that this model could be printed out using a durable filament. This also would allow for customization via choosing color. A challenge we faced during development of this, however, was the implementation of lenses. These usually need to be fitted professionally, and it would not work with our model for the solution, so we came up with the idea of using magnetic lenses in fixed sizes that were pre-made. This would also let the frames be reusable because popping lenses in and out would become easier. The access to such photobooths would also be more widespread than ever before. Imagine needing glasses and being able to simply walk to your nearest convenience store or pharmacy and only wait a couple hours to receive your glasses. Costs would also decrease drastically as lenses would become the only main expense as labor and frame-material would be eliminated.

Overall, I had an amazing experience at the IgniteStem Design-Thinking Challenge, and our team placed second overall! I once again definitely recommend experiencing an event like this because it serves as a could introduction to the concepts of STEM without as much of the technicality you would see in traditional hackathons. The ideas of Project-Driven Learning were also where I got the idea for my AP Seminar paper from.

If anybody is interested, the slideshow (which we had an entire five minutes to create) is attached below.

I was scrolling through YouTube TED Talks when I found this witty video that really piqued my interest and gave a lot of insight into data analysis.

I am a firm believer that data will become one of the most important resources available as the variety, amount and access to data increases drastically over time. Data has the ability to form patterns and visualize trends that may otherwise go unseen. In the context of humanitarian crises, seemingly unconnected data, such as the cell phone pings mentioned in the video, can tell a story that lets us predict and prevent a catastrophe before it can even occur. Sometimes, analyzing these copious amounts of data is a task that can’t be reasonably done by hand. Instead, algorithms, such as the one used in the video to optimize food transport to those in need, can be used to analyze, relate, and compare massive amounts of data to find an optimized solution. Data Science has been (and is continuing to be) widely used by data scientists in recent years to solve a vast variety of problems, and the introduction of newer and better machine learning algorithms and AI should only continue to improve our understanding of the various humanitarian crises that challenge world policymaking, and in suggesting potential solutions.