John Lamansky

I did a Google search for stith syndrome and — tada! — JohnLamansky.com was the number one result.

But I noticed another interesting search result. This result no longer appears on the Google search results because the news story about Stith syndrome was “pushed” off of the page, but I was able to find the article again here. It was a news article about the Future Problem Solving State Bowl. It didn’t say which state specifically, but it was about FPS.

Unfortunately, you have to pay to read the whole article, but we can still read the excerpt. And according to the website on which the article is located, I’m not allowed to republish anything without permission. I’m assuming that means the excerpt too, so you’ll have to go to their site to read it go to their site, click on the Search tab, and then search for “stith fps”.

Is it just me, or did they, uh, have some trouble understanding “pressurized treatment”?

The 2006 Future Problem Solving State Bowl was last weekend, which was March 31 to April 1, 2006. (Trust me; there are no April Fool’s inaccuracies anywhere in this post. ;-)) And, as usual with FPS bowls and conferences, it was a great experience. As I always have, I competed in the Team competition this year.

The State topic was Health Care Access. As with all FPS competitions, before the competition we do preparatory research. One thing I like about the FPS program is that kids get to be exposed to so much information on such a wide range of cool topics. Anyway, I learned some interesting things about health care access. (For example, did you know that according to Money magazine, 80% of medical bills contain errors?! :-o)

In the Future Scene (the sci-fi story that is the basis of a given level of competition), many people were living past their 100s. However, these old ages introduced a new variety of diseases and challenges. The F.S. focused on an imaginary disease called Stith Syndrome that affected 1 in 3 people between the ages of 115 and 120. It was a painful disease that caused nerve deterioration and eventually led to death.

The solution to this was health care known as Aqua-Treatment, which consisted of confinement in underwater high-pressure chambers. The big problem in the Future Scene was the cost of this healthcare.

After completing the written portion of the competition, my team and I competed in the skit competition. We did a play on the word “Stith” and changed it to “Sith.” In other words, we had Darth Vader be a 115-year-old with Stith Syndrome.

We received the results on the second day of the bowl — April Fool’s Day — which led to a very believable April Fool’s joke claiming those in the Senior division would have to wait 2 weeks for their results. My team placed first in the written competition and third in the skit competition. This means we’ll be going to Connecticut for the International Conference in June!

I’m part of an awesome academic program called the Future Problem Solving Program. I thought I’d better tell you a bit about Future Problem Solving (FPS) first in case I want to talk about it in future posts. However, since I’m the primary author (as of this writing) of the Wikipedia article on the Future Problem Solving Program, I’ll just refer you there for info on FPS instead of spending a lot of time writing a long post about it.