Projects investigated deaf people’s sleep, oil and cooking techniques, and how to use your freezer cheaply
CAN A person born deaf acquire hearing while dreaming? And if so, how would they know what hearing sounded like to know they were hearing? A project by two transition-year students from St Wolstan’s Community School, Celbridge, Co Kildare, sought to answer this question but raised many more as a result.
“We wanted to find out whether deaf people could hear in their dreams. My uncle and his wife are deaf,” explained Caroline O’Callaghan who, with Emer O’Brien, conducted a survey to find out.
They first thought of doing a study on whether blind people “saw” in their dreams, Emer said, but switched because they had access to deaf subjects in Ireland. In the end, however, they used an online survey system, the Nottingham Trent Autoform Survey, to acquire subjects.
They decided to survey using a “Likert scale” response system, where subjects have a choice of six answers, ranging from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree” along with “no answer”. This they felt would give their subjects a greater range of responses compared to a “yes/no” survey. They also distinguished between those born deaf and those who became deaf.
The results among those born deaf showed that 20 per cent strongly agreed or agreed that they did not hear in their dreams while a full 41 per cent either disagreed or strongly disagreed that they did not hear while dreaming.
There is considerable uncertainty in the answers, however, as seen in the combined 39 per cent who answered either “neither” or did not answer this question.
A far less weighty question was tackled by Hanna Heeran, SeánaLee Davis and Hannah Collins: what is the best way to cook popcorn while leaving behind the least unpopped kernels? “We wanted to find out how to make the perfect popcorn with the minimum wastage,” explained SeánaLee.
The three second-year students from Dominican College, Wicklow, conducted dozens of experiments using a variety of cooking methods including saucepan, microwave and open fire, and different oil and butter mixes. They tested different temperatures and also altered the kernels, either by freezing before cooking, piercing the tough husk with a pin or soaking them in water before cooking.
Their determination to make the ultimate popcorn was obvious, given the variety of experiments needed to answer so many questions. They also conducted background research, learning that popcorn pops because of a small amount of water present in the kernel and visited a popcorn factory in Co Wexford.
Their exhaustive study delivered the absolutely wrong way to cook it – in butter in a saucepan after soaking. The best popcorn was made after freezing the kernels and cooking in 2½ tablespoons of vegetable oil for four minutes at gas mark five in a saucepan.
Optimal efficiency was also the goal of Daniel Hederman (12) and Tom Carroll (13) of St Mary’s College, Rathmines, Dublin. They wanted to improve power consumption in a domestic freezer to see how to save money.
They monitored power use when the freezer was defrosted or frosted up, and when empty, full and half-full. They monitored power use in three-day blocks and came to some unexpected findings.
They thought it would be best to keep the freezer as full as possible but this was not the case. “We actually found it was better when the freezer was half-full and fully defrosted,” said Daniel.
They found that defrosting was particularly important to improve efficiency, and recommended that people defrost their freezers at least once every six weeks.
“This isn’t just for the exhibition,” said Tom when commenting on their study. “This is for people at home.”
They found that savings of at least two cent per day were possible when comparing the best and the worst readings. This may not sound like much, but it all adds up over a year.