The Cost of Success

This Saturday I took my first ACT test. For that one test I had prepared for several months, taking practice tests and meeting with a tutor to maximize my score out of 36. The tutoring did help me improve my score but what it also showed me is that the ACT is not a measure of any student's actual aptitude. The ACT is a measure of how well you can take an ACT. My tutor didn't teach me any new information; all I learned were strategies on how to manage time, on how to manipulate the test, and how to go about each separate section. Without a professional feeding me tips, my score might well have been a few points lower, but I would be no more or less prepared to go to college.

If my family couldn't afford a tutor, I likely would have done worse on the test. The few points that I may have earned because of my training could be the difference between meeting a top tier college's requirements or not. It would be a nearly impossible monetary commitment to get tutoring for a family near or below the poverty line. It would be a very hard thing to do even with modest means. What the ACT is effectively doing is making it very hard--no matter someones actual aptitude--for someone in a low income family to go to a very good school. A table of the average scores at top schools can be seen here.

Are your cells art?

Above is a picture of two human neurospheres forming connections taken through a fluorescent microscope. Microbe art is a new kind of art emerging in exhibits and galleries. One such exhibit was used as a marketing tactic to show the beauty of the work companies were doing in life science.

 A company that is taking and showing these pictures is called Biocom. The company said about the project, "The public is often unaware of the amazing beauty of life at the molecular level, because they only see the end result of the innovation that takes place in the lab." I think that this new trend is really begging people to ask the question: What is art? What is seen above I would argue is beautiful but is it art? Is it a kind of human portraiture just very zoomed in or is it just a picture of microscope slide that should have been left in the lab? I think that this brings a whole new branch to art and challenge everyone that looks at it to think about their own definition of art. Do you think this or any of the other pieces (seen here) are works of art?