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This project is probably more suitable for high school students and deals with a serious, but generally ignored, social issue.

In American culture, it's generally accepted that nerds (also called geeks) are people, usually male, who have poor athletic ability, poor social skills (particularly poor ability to find girl/boyfriends) but good academic ability, particularly in math and science. In many schools, bullying nerds seems to be pretty much acceptable (of course it shouldn't be acceptable to bully anybody!) and has been blamed for such tragedies as the Columbine massacre. Attempts to prevent similar incidents have been made, mostly by taking action against the nerds rather than bullies. Unlike most forms of discrimination, that against nerds doesn't seem to have an ideological basis and is presumably instinctual. Nerds are probably at least as worthy of human rights protection as homosexuals but AFAIK there is no movement to promote this. It's also been suggested that high levels of autism in children in Silicon Valley is due to nerds marrying each other, because of positive assortive mating, and producing children (because nerds have a few autism genes). Positive assortive mating is when a gene gives an organism a preference to mate with individuals who have the same gene. This may explain the nerds' problems in finding dates (do female nerds have as much trouble as male ones?). In the light of this, it seems very strange that very little (if any) scientific research seems to have been done on nerds. It's not like it's hard to find nerds on a university campus! This project will try to determine if nerds are a real group or the extreme of a range of variation.

Nerd syndrome seems to have several factors: Tendency towards intellectualism and eccentricity basically the same as the Myers-Briggs N factor or mild Schizophrenia (sometimes called Schizotypal personality disorder or SPD); Tendency to think logically and being unemotional basically the same as the Myers-Briggs T factor or mild autism (Asperger syndrome); Poor coordination; Poor physical strength; High intelligence. Many nerds also seem to have poor eye-site or suffer from respiratory problems. (The Myers-Briggs T factor is reported to exist in 60% of males and 35% of females this is an interesting statistic consistent with a certain genetic mechanism do the math and figure it out!)

It's normally pretty obvious that a child is a nerd from an early age. The same is true of Autism and Asperger syndrome

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