Dustin enjoys both team and individual sports including baseball, basketball, track, and golf. He spends time playing video, board, and card games and likes to do magic tricks. He also plays the piano and the trumpet. His science hero is his mother, who encouraged him to enter his school's science fair when he was just in first grade. Dustin would like to pursue a career in medicine. "I want to be the kind of doctor who is both knowledgeable and a good communicator," he says.
Last year, Dustin and Jordan surveyed the color preferences of their classmates. When they became concerned about the amount of personal information collected over the Internet, they wanted to find out if information such as color preference could be used to corrupt an election.
Dustin and Jordan organized a mock presidential election. They chose Presidents Garfield and Hayes as candidates because they were obscure, looked alike, and had similar backgrounds. They then printed individualized ballots. Garfield ballots were printed on paper of the color the voter liked, while Hayes ballots were printed on paper of the color the voter disliked. To minimize the impact of the actual candidate on the outcome, they printed half of the Garfield ballots with Hayes's face and name, and vice versa. They also ran a control election with all ballots printed on white paper. The control election was one vote from a tie, but the color-rigged election favored Garfield 62% to 38%.
