Ahmed Mohamed, His Clock, and the Curious Turn of Events 662
New submitter poity writes: After the news first broke of the 9th grader getting cuffed for scaring school officials with what turned out to be a digital clock, Ahmed Mohamed has experienced a surge of popular support — hailed as a genius and a hero, with college scholarships, internship offers, and even an invitation to the White House by President Obama himself. Now, amid rumors of possible racial discrimination lawsuits against the school and local police, some people have begun to more deeply scrutinize the details of the case, especially on the tech side with regard to the homemade clock in question. Recently, a writer at the creative site Artvoice posted a remarkable analysis of Ahmed's clock project, which raises new questions about the case and the manner in which people and the media alike have reacted. The linked analysis posits that Ahmed's clock started out as another clock, rather than a box of parts, and Ahmed can be said to have repackaged rather than "invented" a wholly new clock, but acknowledges that "none of us were there and knows what happened."
I liked the cartoon that read: (Score:5, Funny)
Child invents Islamophobia detector.
Re:I liked the cartoon that read: (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems to me the kid simply used the term "invented" in the incorrect or loose manner. Had he said "creation" instead of "invention" there would be no problem. He created something "new" with parts from two different things. If anything patent law is filled with "inventions" of this type.
Re:I liked the cartoon that read: (Score:5, Insightful)
He also said in an interview he only spent about 20 minutes on it, and it was anything but one of his best "inventions" (something that a number of other people in interviews have mentioned).
The kid is 14. And here we have someone at Artvoice who put great effort into writing an article criticizing him for not silk-screening his own circuit boards. I mean, seriously? What sort of person did he think he was writing for? Someone who looked at the clock picture and automatically assumed, "I bet a 14-year-old made that circuitboard"?
Re:I liked the cartoon that read: (Score:5, Insightful)
And here we have someone at Artvoice who put great effort into writing an article criticizing him for not silk-screening his own circuit boards. I mean, seriously? What sort of person did he think he was writing for?
He was probably writing for someone with reading comprehension. He doesn't criticize the kid at a for silk-screening or not, but simply points out that most hobbyists do not silkscreen their boards, especially hand drawn ones (as opposed to cheap boardhouses that deal with only electronic formats now). It is just a big hint that the board is not a hobbyist's, d.i.y. board.
Plenty of people learned electronics as a young teenager or even younger, and were making their own boards. I remember getting the supplies to do so for $10 from Radioshack decades ago, and it is even easier and cheaper online, with far more instructions and tutorials available. If I hear a teenager say they made an electronic clock, I would assume they did make their own boards, because it is a common project to do...
Re:I liked the cartoon that read: (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll be honest, my reading is that he's writing it to deflate the groundswell of support for Ahmed. He straw-man's Ahmed's statement that he invented it, as you describe, and then goes on to talk about how the teachers actually weren't responding absurdly. It's an article intended to give points of support to those who want to argue against the commonly expressed opinion that Ahmed was targeted absurdly and unfairly. It does this partly by whittling away at Ahmed's 'credibility' as a young inventor.
It's definitely contrary to my viewpoint, but I think that's what's going on here.
Re:I liked the cartoon that read: (Score:5, Insightful)
He did exactly what most of us slashdotters did as kids; take stuff apart to see how they work and put them back together in different ways. Of course it wasn't an invention, he said it only took him a few moments.
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Re:I liked the cartoon that read: (Score:5, Insightful)
How is he going to have a normal and healthy adolescence with that weight on his shoulders? How many children pushed into the limelight crashed and burned as young adults when reality came along and burst their artificially inflated egos? How is messing with children like that in any way ethical regardless of the cause you think it is in aid of?
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Re:I liked the cartoon that read: (Score:5, Insightful)
Half a bomb is a stupid way to phrase things. The clock before it was taken apart was therefore also half a bomb. Radio Shack before it went bankrupt could be classified as a Do-It-Yourself half-a-bomb factory. It's not even a trigger yet, it's just a clock with minimal changes to put it into a pencil box (looks cooler, like something maybe from a really bad spy movie where you have to cut the red wire, no the green one).
Did he intend it to look like a bomb? I don't know. It does not look like one to me. It did NOT look like a bomb to the police or teachers either or they would panicked, maybe have an evacuation drill, and they would not have kept a possible-bomb around. What they thought was that the kid intended it to be a hoax bomb, which the kid denied, and they arrested him and against Texas law did not have his parents present. The school wanted him to sign a "confession" without his parents present.
It sounds like a big case of the police and school assuming the kid did something wrong, not having any solid proof of any of it, then just wanting to send a big message with the hand cuffs and perp walk. The kid is supposed to learn the lesson to not stand out, keep curiosity in check, go play football when the urge to study strikes. All hail zero tolerance, keeping our kids safe and stupid for a decade.
does this lad have a history? (Score:5, Insightful)
Something else to consider is this kid's history. Is he a prankster? Or, has he shown anti-social behavior, written long rambling notes about how he'd like to kill the teachers and other students? Is he on anti-psychotic drugs? The schools keep records on that kind of stuff, they should know.
If he had no troubled history, there was no reason to think he'd suddenly turned into an angry, dangerous teen, and was about to enact a murder-suicide revenge fantasy. The school's reaction was way over the top, and cowardly.
Re:I liked the cartoon that read: (Score:5, Insightful)
It was a fucking clock. His engineering teacher could have verified it. Second, if they were really concerned why the fuck was the bomb squad and fire dept not called? They kept that kid for two class periods interrogating him without a lawyer and his parents. The principal trying to force him to write some kind of written confession. Again, without his parents. Do you think that was reasonable? Jeezus.
Also speculating what the kid was up to? Really? Why not just give him the benefit of the doubt?
Re:I liked the cartoon that read: (Score:4, Interesting)
It was a fucking clock. His engineering teacher could have verified it. Second, if they were really concerned why the fuck was the bomb squad and fire dept not called? They kept that kid for two class periods interrogating him without a lawyer and his parents. The principal trying to force him to write some kind of written confession. Again, without his parents. Do you think that was reasonable? Jeezus.
Also speculating what the kid was up to? Really? Why not just give him the benefit of the doubt?
Cuz in 'Murika we do not given the benefit of the doubt to kids with Muslim-sounding names (whatever that means) and/or suffer from Dermal Hypermelaninetis (a condition clearly documented in the "Take Our Country Back" medical manual.)
Re:I liked the cartoon that read: (Score:5, Interesting)
I didn't get the impression that the boy is cheeky or that this was a prank.
It just seems like he's a precocious kid interested in how things work and he wanted to show one of his teachers. Unfortunately, teachers' detectors are up for school violence (remember the child who was penalized for chewing his Pop Tart in the shape of a gun? [wjla.com]) and the rise of radical Islam (Islamic gunmen attack the "Draw The Prophet" 40 minutes away in Garland Texas) resulted in this situation.
It's a tricky situation. However, calling the cops seems slightly absurd. They didn't think it was a bomb by the fact they didn't evacuate the premises and bring a bomb robot to blow it up. If the authorities find a credible threat, they bring in a bomb robot and blow up whatever the threat is. That didn't happen.
As far as taking things apart and putting them back together, Henry Ford did that sort of thing. [nytimes.com] This might have been simpler, but the boy correctly put it together in a different way.
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...How is messing with children like that in any way ethical regardless of the cause you think it is in aid of?
Messing with? I guess we've somehow overlooked where this child would be at today if they would have just stayed the course with this paranoia-based interrogation.
Had we the masses not been alerted to this event, had the POTUS himself not intervened, I can promise you that this kids arrest record would have stuck with him for quite a long time, along with the fact he would likely be sitting on the Federal No Fly list by now, for the same non-reasons he was interrogated.
Go ahead. Tell me again how I'm exa
Re:I liked the cartoon that read: (Score:4, Insightful)
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he is now being handed golden keys to the kingdom.
No, he's still going to have to work to prove his worth, just like the rest of us. Getting an invitation to a school is not the same thing as earning a degree. Getting a meeting with a president, with that and five dollars you can get a cup of coffee. It's really not so much.
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He is getting a lot more publicity and support than you, I, or any other kid who has made a science project...
Jealous much?
Yeah, there is a reason he is getting attention. And it isn't because he's muslim either. It's just that todays schools have been turnen into an insane asylum by administrators who have complete intolerance as their goal, and armed police who have turned sassing into a crime. We need to step back from this abyss of endless war on our children,
Because It Doesn't Make Schools Any Safer
But it does make science a taboo subject. Vinegar and Baking soda mixed should become a state secret. M
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An "administrator" who knows a bit about kids is unlikely to have fucked up in such a dramatic way.
This touches upon a hypothesis of mine, that the inability of large numbers of parents to allow their children to grow up, safety culture, and people who simply hate children have combined in an unholy triumvirate that is now getting to be a positive feedback loop.
All enforced by the police. And it doesn't work. You would think that armed police and administrators ready to stomp out anything unnaceptable would have the situation in public schools pretty well cleaned up by now. A quarter billion arrests
Re:I liked the cartoon that read: (Score:5, Informative)
I liked the Charle Hebdo cartoons (Score:5, Informative)
And the Danish cartoons and the cartoons drawn in Garland.
You can call me Islamaphobic, but that doesn't mean there aren't muslims willing to kill me over a cartoon.
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Liking Charle Hebdo, Danish cartoons and Garland, does not make you islamaphobic. But assuming a brown kid with some wires and circuit is holding a bomb (and you decide not to evacuate, but still charge the kid with making a hoax bomb, force him to write a statement with the threat of expulsion, and deprive him of access to his parents while in your custody) does however.
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You know he was there to start shit.
Exactly. I mean, he was a muslim, he was named Mohammed, he had dark skin, you just know that he isn't going to the school to get an education but purely for jihadterrorohmygoshgollybombs!.
Re:I liked the cartoon that read: (Score:4, Funny)
What the fuck are "suspicious wires?" I have a drawer containing assorted lengths of wire, and if some of them are suspicious, I want to know about it.
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You have a drawer full of assorted lenghts of wire, and you didn't start your post with "Good news everyone."?
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Re: I liked the cartoon that read: (Score:5, Interesting)
How is it anti Jewish or anti Christian to point out that all witches must be killed? Anything anti semetic in pointing out that every living thing in Jericho was commanded to be killed, man, woman, child, animals. Or the law in Deuteronomy that if you're caught raping a virgin you must pay her father and marry her? And also in Deuteronomy, if someone convinces one of your family to follow another god, you should kill them? If everyone followed the letter of their religious texts, I'd be pretty afraid of Jews and Christians also.
As far as Europeans go, they're not nearly the liberal hippie types that Americans like to think they are. There are plenty of people we'd classify as rednecks over there, there's a very racist and homophobic segment all over, etc. Generally Europe has seen to not have had a big race problem in the past because the countries were very homogenous for a very long time (but always an underlying anti-semetic and anti Roma nastiness).
Re: I liked the cartoon that read: (Score:4, Informative)
As far as Europeans go, they're not nearly the liberal hippie types that Americans like to think they are. There are plenty of people we'd classify as rednecks over there, there's a very racist and homophobic segment all over, etc. Generally Europe has seen to not have had a big race problem in the past because the countries were very homogenous for a very long time (but always an underlying anti-semetic and anti Roma nastiness).
This. Having spent lots of time on both continents, I have to say that Europeans are much more racist than Americans, by which I mean prevailing attitudes among the educated, genteel middle class, not the right-wing fringe. Dog-whistle ideas like "cultural identity" and "tradition" are widely accepted without any critical thinking at all.
Re: I liked the cartoon that read: (Score:5, Insightful)
As a Muslim, I can categorically state that anyone who thinks that we are required by our religion to kill or convert "infidels" has never actually met one of us, and only knows about us from Fox News. Fox News may accuse us of being ignorant and intolerant people, but history and fact does not support that assertion.
Our religion has a 1,400 year history of living side by side with Christians, Jews, fire worshippers, and atheists, even within the borders of Muslim nations, without incident. The wars in the middle east today are instigated by the idiots kept in power by foreign aid money. How many Muslims do you think actually support Assad? How many of us support the Saudi royals? Saddam Hussein? These people got into power by playing the game that landed them military support allowing them to seize power. The vast majority of Muslims do not support the barbaric idiocy demonstrated by these people, and that's to say nothing of the rabid dogs in ISIS.
You're judging 1.5 billion people, who collectively have a one and a half millennium long history of tolerance and acceptance, by the actions of a ragtag bunch of barbarians who are opposed by Muslims as much as they are by the rest of the world. That strikes me as rather, well, ignorant and intolerant.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re: I liked the cartoon that read: (Score:5, Insightful)
Fox News may accuse us of being ignorant and intolerant people, but history and fact does not support that assertion.
Citation? Has "Fox News" really said that?
Our religion has a 1,400 year history of living side by side with Christians, Jews, fire worshippers, and atheists, even within the borders of Muslim nations, without incident
Look, in general I am a defender of Islam. I don't believe that Islam requires aggression any more than Christianity requires crusades. If you want to look for genocide, forced conversion, and slavery, you need look no further than Christian Europe. However, I don't really find your statement above to be accurate either.
Historically, in territories controlled by Muslim polities, religious minorities have not fared particularly well. Jewish massacres in particular have happened like clockwork across Islamdom. Religious minorities were often forced to wear special identifying clothes. Christians were not allowed to build churches or even ring bells, historically (and in the present day in many areas). In every Islamic state that I know of--from Spain to India--religious minorities had few (if any) legal rights and were required to pay large taxes. If this sounds a lot like how the Nazis treated minorities, you would be correct. The Nazis of course were European Christians, so don't take this as a defense of Christianity.
Whether you're talking about the non-Muslim slaves of the Ottoman Empire (and the conversion of so many churches into Mosques--most notably the Hagia Sophia / Aya Sofya), the jihads against the "kafirs" of Kafiristan in Afghanistan (Kafiristan means land of the infidels, today pleasingly renamed to Nuristan, the land of enlightenment, after their forced conversion in the 19th century), or any number of similar clashes, it's very hard to make the case as Islam as a positive force for religious minorities. It's also incredibly ironic that you mention the Zoroastrians--who you insultingly call "fire worshippers"--as an example of Islam's tolerance. The Zoroastrians, one of the oldest religious on the planet, have probably fared worse than any other minority group under Islamic rule.
The wars in the middle east today are instigated by the idiots kept in power by foreign aid money. How many Muslims do you think actually support Assad? How many of us support the Saudi royals? Saddam Hussein? These people got into power by playing the game that landed them military support allowing them to seize power. The vast majority of Muslims do not support the barbaric idiocy demonstrated by these people, and that's to say nothing of the rabid dogs in ISIS.
Ridiculous assertions. You are correct when you state there is plenty of foreign interference in the Middle East and foreign interference has almost certainly been a negative for the vast majority of residents of the Middle East. However, the House of Saud rose as a fanatical fundamentalist regime aligned with Wahhabism. It rose with popular support. Today might be a different question, but I see no great satisfaction coming out of Sunni Saudi Arabia (barring the Shia minority areas). Assad and Saddam--Assad remains popular amongst his people, and his father--like Saddam--arose out of a period of Arab nationalism, secularism, and socialism. This is the Baathist movement (one of the main founders of which was a Christian, incidentally). Baathism was perhaps the dominant and most popular ideology across much of the Middle East for much of the 20th century.
You're judging 1.5 billion people, who collectively have a one and a half millennium long history of tolerance and acceptance, by the actions of a ragtag bunch of barbarians who are opposed by Muslims as much as they are by the rest of the world. That strikes me as rather, well, ignorant and intolerant.
A ragtag bunch of barbarians who are opposed by Muslims? You must be talking about the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakis
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[citation needed]. Also, this [wikipedia.org] and this [wordpress.com] kinda ruins your "Muslims hate Jews" narrative.
Read what you linked! Here are some massacres/expulsions/forced conversions of Jews off the top of my head (a few links included, you can research the rest if you don't believe me). A colleague of mine in graduate school was coming up with a complete list of such assaults. I'm not sure if his article was ever published. Ottoman history is my particular area of knowledge, but I've included some other particularly famous incidents from elsewhere.
627 AD, Muhammad slaughters (beheading many of them [wikipedia.org]--a practice
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I think the estimated 270 million victims of islam would probably disagree, had any of them survived:
http://www.politicalislam.com/... [politicalislam.com]
If you see something, say something (Score:5, Insightful)
The odd thing here is that one teacher knew he had the clock and it knew was harmless, that teacher "saw something", why did he not speak up when the others thought it was a "credible threat"?
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If the teachers/cops thought the box was a credible threat, the school would have been evacuated and the bomb squad called in, ...
Apparently they didn't believe that it might be a bomb, but they did believe that it was a bomb hoax. A bomb hoax is illegal, because a good bomb hoax would lead to a costly evacuation. A bad bomb hoax wouldn't.
Now you can argue whether this was a bomb hoax or not, but if it was a bomb hoax and they figured out it wasn't actually a bomb, then the bomb hoax is itself still punishable.
Re:I liked the cartoon that read: (Score:5, Insightful)
While Ahmed may have been innocent (but that's not been proved as yet [my emphasis]
Somehow I missed this gem in my first reply? Did you realise that you are now so scared of terrorists that you are willing to throw out the Magna Carta? Is that how you "defend your freedoms"? - by capitulating to their demands?
Genius or not (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Genius or not (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Full of bad reporting (Score:5, Insightful)
the woz comparison is better than you know:
https://www.reddit.com/r/today... [reddit.com]
including this tidbit:
woz made an actual fake bomb intended to frighten. in today's day and age he would be locked up for life
ps: the comparison to jobs, even though less valid than woz, still has the slightly valuable point that jobs was an arab:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
the added poignancy right now being the way syrian refugees are being treated by racists and bigots in europe right now
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your argument is mostly historical. it is common and normal to call syrians arabs. they fall under the umbrella due to language, and, increasingly, simple ethnicity
although you are correct that ethnic and sectarian pride means this can be a touchy subject, and that i shouldn't use the blanket term that all syrians be called arab, because there are significant minority populations who are most definitely not arab
but as an aside, ethnic jingoism and a sense of superiority based on sect is the source of most o
Re:Genius or not (Score:4, Insightful)
Whether he is a genius or not makes absolutely no difference in this case.
Actually it does. If all he did was rip the guts out of a working clock and stuff it in a box, he was probably trying to provoke exactly this reaction. Considering some of the other information (the cop saying he thought that's who it was) it's likely that this is the dad trying to start crap. Sounds like small town infighting in a rather large town.
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the cop saying he thought that's who it was
One of the reports I say indicated the cop who said that had never seen Ahmed before. So how did he know who it was going to be, if he never met him? Is the entire department briefed on "that Mooslim kid"?
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The whole incident would have been over had the school, without calling the cops, just said "this is an inappropriate toy, some people think it looks bomb like, I'll keep it in the desk and you can pick it up after school". Once the cops were called, the incident would have been over had the cops said "why are you wasting our time on this?"
It *should* have been a non-story. But people wanted to send a message to this kid ("don't mess with Texas punk"). What happened is that a different message got out.
Re:Genius or not (Score:4, Interesting)
I am not sure where this this kid is a Genius came from. He does have interest in technology and figuring out how things work.
When I was in 4th or 5th grade I had a cheap Atari/Sega/Amstrad PC joystick that broke. So I took it apart and I realized it was a simple design, so I played with making contacts with the wires and I saw what happened, then I made a cardboard Game pad that didn't work well. Then I went to Radio shack got some push buttons and drilled holes in some spare Plexiglas and made a game pad, actually the joystick supported one button, and the game pad supported two buttons by seeing what the other wire that wasn't used did.
Now I am not trying to brag, taking part a clock and finding how to trigger the same functionality takes the same amount of skill. It isn't Genius stuff, but it takes curiosity on how things work and try to get things working again.
Re: Genius or not (Score:5, Informative)
Also, the school indicated they knew it wasn't a bomb, but thought he built it to look like a bomb. They thought he was going to call in a bomb scare later.
Re: Genius or not (Score:5, Insightful)
But every story has two sides.
The part where the school claims they thought it was a bomb, so they left the bomb in his possession while they waited for the cops, and didn't evacuate the school? The side where the police claim it was a bomb, so they didn't call the bomb squad?
When one side is obviously full of lies, waiting for them to refine their lies to something that's not explicitly contradictory isn't "fair", it's stupid.
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He did explain what it was. He said it was a clock. The police present assumed he was guilty of something and refused to accept that answer. They were trying to police technique of wearing down the suspect on a kid in a school and hoping a confession pops out. Not appropriate behavior for the police to engage in.
About over-reactive police state, not genius (Score:5, Insightful)
He's a 13 year old kid, not an engineer.
This story is about a huge over-reaction by fools that can't tell the difference between "Should be questioned/looked into" and "Should be arrested, suspended, and punished".
We have to start holding government employees to a HIGHER standard than they hold non-employees. We should never punish regular citizens, let alone children for appearing to have committed a crime - just for actually doing it. But at the same time we need to start punishing police, principals, and similar people for APPEARING to have committed crimes. That's the only way to stop government over-reach.
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My view of this (Score:5, Insightful)
Submitter here. Since partisan accusations were quickly thrown when I mentioned this elsewhere, I'd like to just clarify my own view regarding this case: I think Ahmed didn't deserve to be handcuffed, he very clearly wasn't a danger to anyone. I also think he didn't deserve to be glorified and cast as a heroic genius with all this acclaim in the media, as the new evidence suggests.
My takeaway? Reality is complex (in this case perplexingly so), and the media doesn't do well with complexities.
Re:My view of this (Score:5, Insightful)
Clearly he didn't 'invent' the clock - but I don't think anyone really thought he did.
After all - we already have clocks.
He likes to tinker, and he calls the result his 'inventions'. Not the most nuanced use of language - but he is 13.
Whether he just took apart and repackaged an existing clock, or did something more technically challenging, your implied charge of misleading us over his 'invention' seems rather ungenerous in spirit.
Re:My view of this (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:My view of this (Score:4, Informative)
If that were the case, the teacher, principal, superintendent and chief of police would be screaming from the rooftops that Ahmed had joked about making a bomb, or otherwise led people to believe a bunch of wires and circuits was a bomb.
They're not. Which means you don't have a question, you have a non-sequitur.
Re:My view of this (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry submitter, not buying. Have you read the news articles about the city council and mayor of Irving, Texas? You can start with this one: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/ahmed-mohamed-beth-van-duyne-sharia
So, basically, a kid is hauled off in handcuffs and some clown goes to substantial efforts to demonstrate that he started with a Radio Shack clock.
We *need* kids tinkering around with stuff.
We even need kids who get maybe a teensy bit cheeky with their stupidest teachers.
And when the cheeky kid happens to be "not quite white" in a community with stupid bigots in charge, and they get hauled off in handcuffs, and the school leaves him suspended, we don't need some clever jackass backward-engineering his little toy to demonstrate media overreaction. We need people looking into how bigots ended up in leadership positions in Irving, Texas. Then, instead of investigating its overreaction, maybe the mainstream media could investigate why it hasn't been plain-old-reacting to this bigotry for the last fourteen years, or to the stupidity we've been witnessing for 14,000.
Re:My view of this (Score:4, Insightful)
We agree on your first statement, that he doesn't seem to be dangerous.
Your second statement -- he's not *really* a boy genius -- applies to all mainstream media coverage of science. No science fair kid is ever just clever, anyone who does anything at all is a presumptive genius. The same with kids in spelling bees, FFS. Papers need to be sold, advertisements need to be swathed in content, channel changers need to be kept at bay.
Your third statement is irrelevant. A child who brings a pencil box filled with clock parts to a school should not be suspended or, as you have said, arrested and cuffed. It's not a bomb hoax if everyone involved except for the idiot English teacher agrees it didn't particularly look like a bomb. If it was a bomb hoax, then any student bringing the insides of a toaster to school should cause immediate suspension and arrest for the student and the three hapless kids sitting closest to the student.
What is missing is your fourth statement: the reason the kid's actions turned into a media firestorm. Simply, it is that a great deal of tinder and kindling existed in leadership positions in Irving, Texas. The media is quite properly pointing out the existence of anti-Muslim bigotry in Irving. While bigotry's role in this may have been indirect, it seems to me to be impossibly naive to suggest the bigotry had no connection to the incident.
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I'd like to highlight a part of the article that I thought made some good points:
[...]Teachers are taught to be suspicious and vigilant. Ahmed wasn’t accused of making a bomb – he was accused of making a look-alike, a hoax. And be honest with yourself, a big red digital display with a bunch of loose wires in a brief-case looking box is awful like a Hollywood-style representation of a bomb. Everyone jumped to play the race and religion cards and try and paint the teachers and police as idiots and bigots, but in my mind, they were probably acting responsibly and erring on the side of caution to protect the rest of their students, just in case. “This wouldn’t have happened if Ahmed were white,” they say. We’re supposed to be sensitive to school violence, but apparently religious and racial sensitivity trumps that. At least we have another clue about how the sensitivity and moral outrage pecking order lies.
Because, is it possible, that maybe, just maybe, this was actually a hoax bomb? A silly prank that was taken the wrong way? That the media then ran with, and everyone else got carried away? Maybe there wasn’t even any racial or religious bias on the parts of the teachers and police.
I don’t know any of these things. But I’m intellectually mature enough to admit I don’t know, and to also be OK with that. I don’t feel a need to take the first exist to conclusionville. But I do like to find facts where I can, and prefer to let them lead me to conclusions, rather than a knee jerk judgement based on a headline or sound bite.
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For the average non-technical adult, both cases are indistinguishable from magic.
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Well the thing is... the former is a precursor step to making a bomb.
Beer leads to heroin, there's no doubt about that.
-- George Carlin
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Wasn't there, don't know he people involved, so who knows what the situation was. What I don't like is the fact that Ahmed Mohamed didn't accomplish anything worth of presidential attention, yet he was invited to the White House. There are children who do far more interesting things. Let's not forget David Hahn. [harpers.org] I think it can be said Hahn set the bar quite high for teenage science projects.
Re:My view of this (Score:5, Insightful)
What I don't like is the fact that Ahmed Mohamed didn't accomplish anything worth of presidential attention
that's completely irrelevant, the point is to show the country that we should cherish the experimenter spirit.
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Right, because he was invited to the Whitehouse because it was the most awesome invention ever? Is that the takeaway that you got out of this?
Hahn had indeed an inventive spirit - although his accomplishments were rather overplayed in the media. Also, he was 17 when he did what he did, not 14, which is a fairly big difference in terms of education and time to gain experience tinkering. But still, Hahn is an interesting case, and his dedication to learning and experimenting was commendable (the lying and s
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Ahmed didn't accomplish anything worthy of presidential attention. The authorities surrounding him did. Since the president cannot call them does on national TV, he does the same thing by inviting Ahmed to the White House.
It's the PR equivalent to owing a house in an area that [insert billionaire] wants to turn into his complex. You get a lot of reward for being in the right place at the right time.
Re:My view of this (Score:5, Insightful)
There's no new evidence here - it was obvious the instant we saw the photo of his project that he'd repackaged the guts of some old AC clock! Good for you that you figured out exactly which one it was, but really, so what? I worked on similar projects when I was his age. You have to start somewhere, and casemodding a piece of old garage-sale junk is a totally reasonable project for a 14-year-old newbie.
We aren't making a fuss over him because he's an extraordinary genius; rather, we're making a fuss over him because he's just an ordinary kid who *ought* to have been treated with ordinary respect, and we're trying to make up for the unforgivably shitty dumbass bullshit he's been subjected to.
And really, it's less about him than it is about all the other kids like him: the message is "don't let those fucknuts in Texas scare you, smart young Muslim inventor kids; America at large thinks you're cool".
Re: My view of this (Score:4, Insightful)
we're making a fuss over him because he's just an ordinary kid who *ought* to have been treated with ordinary respect, and we're trying to make up for the unforgivably shitty dumbass bullshit he's been subjected to.
It's not just that. If we hadn't made such a big deal about it, this innocent kid would probably have a criminal record. Even after the media got involved the cops were STILL deciding whether to press charges. Luckily, now that Obama has got involved in the story, I'm pretty sure nobody's gonna be dumb enough to pursue this further.
Re:My view of this (Score:4, Informative)
Anti-muslim hate crimes make up 11% of our religiously motivated hate crimes, but they make up 0.8% of our population.
And yes, that's a decimal place before the "8".
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And jews are less than 2% of the population but make up 60% of religiously motivated hate crimes, a vastly more disproportionate gap.
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And what percentage of those are perpetrated by neo-nazis, christian evangelical religionists and white supremacists?
I think you've just made my point.
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Article misses the point (Score:5, Insightful)
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Even if he simply transplanted a clock into a pencil case, he shows more knowledge of electronics than the vast majority of adults.
Geek cred: I was reading Getting Started in Electronics by Forrest Mimms in 5th grade, and wiring stuff to the user port of my C64 in middle school.
Passive agressive accusation (Score:5, Insightful)
Gotta love the passive agressive accusations in the second article - "I don't mean to accuse him of being a terrorist, but wasn't he acting suspicious, isn't all this a little funny, isn't it kinda like he was a terrorist?".
So let's just say that this article is true... (Score:5, Interesting)
... and go with what happened.
They didn't evacuate the school, or even the room. They didn't call the bomb squad. They did everything *but* treat the purported "possible bomb" as a bomb.
It wasn't about whether it was a bomb or not, it was about humiliating the brown kid.
If it was a bomb, and it did explode and take out the administration office, Uncle Chuck Darwin would have been smiling. But it wasn't, so it's not even close to a Darwin Award, but rather a damn good example of straight-out racism.
--
BMO
No one ever thought it was an actual bomb (Score:5, Informative)
TL;DR: No one ever thought it was an actual bomb.
Long version:
Since no one ever actually thought it was a bomb, the fact that the school and police took no action as if it were a bomb does not somehow "prove" it's racism and/or Islamophobia. That isn't to say one or more of the people involved had something in that vein in their minds, but their lack of treating it as a bomb doesn't demonstrate it, since numerous accounts of this story indicate the school and police never thought it was an actual bomb.
Some people thought it "looked like" a bomb, and wondered why he would bring it to school, because they don't understand why kids who like things like science and electronics do what they do.
And there are laws dealing with what are called "hoax devices". Many people have gotten into trouble for such things before. Hoax device statutes have been around for many, many years, long before 9/11.
Here is the Texas statute:
http://www.statutes.legis.stat... [state.tx.us]
The only thing that matters in the hoax device statute is intent â" a feature that is not unique. For example, intent matters when someone is killed. Was it an accident? Was it negligence? Was it premeditated? That is the difference between someone having done nothing wrong, and murder. And it is interviews and investigations and evidence that determine intent.
Even in the original Dallas Morning News article that broke this story â" before it went viral and Ahmed got invited to the White House, JPL, MIT, got scholarships, and become the hero of Silicon Valley â" the only thing the police officials said was that they knew it wasn't a bomb, that Ahmed never claimed it was anything but a clock, and that they were trying to determine WHY he built and AND brought it to school. Once it was determined there was no intent to alarm, scare, or deceive, it was further determined there was no wrongdoing.
Steve Wozniak got in trouble for using a hoax device (with intent to scare), and was arrested and spent a night in jail. I got in trouble with authority figures â" school, police â" for things similar to what Ahmed did several times, when doing nothing wrong. Maybe a little borderline, maybe a little, "What on earth are you doing?" but not illegal. And frankly, some of those came down only to intent as well.
So this little trope misunderstands what happened. Could racism or Islamophobia been an element in anyone's mind? There is no way to know, as much as people desperately want to come to that conclusion. When people say, "What white kid would have gotten in trouble for doing nothing wrong?"
Plenty. Ignore the title, read the article (for those who haven't already):
https://reason.com/blog/2015/0... [reason.com]
His English teacher overreacted by getting the principal's office involved. The school overreacted by calling the police. The school bears almost all of the responsibility here â" not "post-9/11 America", racism, or police. If the police had not been called, none of this would ever have happened â" and Ahmed wouldn't be a celebrity, either.
When police are called for a situation where any of the parties involved are not in perfect agreement, and there is no controversy, even if nothing illegal occurred, I would submit that there are not many times that results in a more positive outcome. The police are there, in part, to investigate and to determine if there was any wrongdoing, which they did. I wish they would have simply handled it at the school, but what I really wish is that the school would not have called the police in the first place.
Re:So let's just say that this article is true... (Score:5, Informative)
The principal in Woz's case deserves real credit for risking his life to save kids from a bomb. Principal today? Not so much.
Genius ? Really ? No, Sir. (Score:2, Interesting)
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I'm gonna be bold, but he didn't invent shit.
you can be as bold as you want about stuff that is irrelevant
Re:Genius ? Really ? No, Sir. (Score:5, Interesting)
At best, from the picture, the "clock" seems more to be a commercial product hacked up in a different case. Why would he add 2 source of power (9V battery + main) ? Why do this on 2 different boards linked up by ribbon cables ?
You answered your own question with your first sentence. According to analysis in TFA, he took apart an LED clock (a Micronta 63756 to be exact) and transplanted it into a pencil case. I had an old LED alarm clock (since replaced by my phone) that plugged into a 120V source, but also took 2 AA batteries as a backup source so that you wouldn't lose your alarm if the power went out. The oddities of the design are due to whatever engineer came up with it in the 70s.
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Eh, I've traveled with some microcontrollers I got from Adafruit in my carry-on. I've never been called out on it before.
However, my husband and I went on a long trip once maybe ten years ago, and he was carrying a bunch of spare batteries in his bag (instead of carrying the charger...don't ask, I don't know why either). He was pulled aside for that.
Another time, he was pulled aside for having a bunch of Maxim magazines in his bag. For whatever reason, the (female) TSO felt it necessary to flip through t
Cops didn't think the clock was a bomb (Score:3, Insightful)
I hate to break it to the author... (Score:2)
and even that dirty garbage-picked black and white TV my parents dragged home that they knew I’d have a blast playing with
I hope I'm not shattering the illusion of a pleasant childhood but if his either of his parents were at all technically inclined, then there's only one reason to provide a kid with a used TV to take apart... and while there probably won't be a blast, I'd certainly expect a loud spark and possibly the smell of burning flesh... :p
Re:I hate to break it to the author... (Score:4, Informative)
I don't believe this guy... (Score:4, Insightful)
So... a 14 year old did not actually build electronic integrated circuits with his own 2 hands. He either assembled or repackaged something commercially available. How is that even relevant? That changes this situation how exactly?
And how does this in any way excuse or even mitigate the behavior of the teachers, administrators & police involved in the situation?
Why don't you come out and admit your reasons... you have too much invested emotionally in the hard right narrative and cannot bear the thought that your side fucked up, and you are now doubling down and rolling around in the mud trying to save face. The though of offering up a simple apology would never occur to your lot.
First projects should be celebrated even if minor (Score:5, Insightful)
It doesn't matter whether Ahmed built the clock from scratch after forging his own components from rocks in a furnace or disassembled something else and made a small change. Who cares. We all had to start somewhere and a little encouragement goes a long way.
Don't let the know-nothings get you down Ahmed. Keep at it.
My 2 cents (Score:4, Insightful)
If we stop and think – was it really such a ridiculous reaction from the teacher and the police in the first place?
Yes.
How many school shootings and incidents of violence have we had, where we hear afterwards “this could have been prevented, if only we paid more attention to the signs!”
Well there are actually not that many school shootings period, as tragic as the ones that do occur are. Furthermore, people generally have a better idea of what a gun looks like than what a bomb looks like.
Teachers are taught to be suspicious and vigilant.
They are also apprently very stupid in that not only do they not know what a bomb looks like, they also don't know that they don't know what a bomb looks like. If we are going to call the cops every time a kid has something that *could* be a bomb, we are going to arrest every kid with a possible cell phone IED detonator, and blow up every backpack with a bomb squad robot. It seems the suspicion and vigilance teachers actually have is very selective and misguided.
Ahmed wasn’t accused of making a bomb – he was accused of making a look-alike, a hoax.
I didn't realize the police were required to deal with known hoaxes. IT seems pretty obvious that the accusation was switched to that of a hoax after it was discovered that it wasn't a real bomb.
And be honest with yourself, a big red digital display with a bunch of loose wires in a brief-case looking box is awful like a Hollywood-style representation of a bomb.
There are a bunch of kids we could probably arrest for being hackers because they match the Hollywood-style representation of a hacker. I don't know why adults are not held to the standard of knowing that reality is different than TV.
Everyone jumped to play the race and religion cards and try and paint the teachers and police as idiots and bigots
Because many of us are pretty sure we (if not muslim looking) could have (and did) bring/make similar looking things to school without issue.
, but in my mind, they were probably acting responsibly and erring on the side of caution to protect the rest of their students, just in case.
I don't think it's reasonable or responsible to assume that a bunch of electronics is a bomb, any more than it is reasonable or responsible to assume that a cell phone is an IED detonator.
“This wouldn’t have happened if Ahmed were white,” they say.
I agree
We’re supposed to be sensitive to school violence, but apparently religious and racial sensitivity trumps that.
You can and should be sensitive to school violence. You should also know your own limitations in discerning the credibility of potential threats. And if your sensitivity to potential bombs is heavily affected by the way the the kid holding the bomb looks or what his name is, then you are probably a bigot. Just like if your sensitivity to gang violence causes you to only suspect blacks and mexicans, you are still a racist even if you hide your racism behind the pretense of violence mitigation.
At least we have another clue about how the sensitivity and moral outrage pecking order lies.
When non-muslim looking/named kids start being suspected of making bombs simply for being interested in electronics, then maybe the conversation will be different.
Kudos for figuring out that the clock was actually just an existing clock taken out of it's original housing. But to me this illustrates even more how ridiculous it is to overreact to this "bomb". Maybe we need the teachers to be trained on "what the insides of common things look like", so they don't need to freak out that something is a bomb just because it's not in it's original housing.
I don't want to fault people for being cautious in dealing with a potential bomb. I am criticizing people for being incompetent and racist in their method of determining which potential bombs are credible.
Speculation it was intended to look bomb-like (Score:3)
The fine article contains some speculation as to whether it was really intended to be a clock, because it's a poor design for a clock:
Well, that makes me wonder if the kid who made the clock mounted the display to be viewed with the case open, or if he cut a hole in the side of the pencil box and mounted the display to be viewed the other way.
Someone familiar with how LED clock displays look from the front and from the back: can you tell which way the clock display was mounted? Was it in fact mounted such that you can't read the time without opening the case?
If you really can't read the clock without opening the case, then it really is an odd design for a clock. If form follows function, then what indeed was the intended function?
I'm wondering how often the kid brought other projects to school, and what the other projects were. I can well imagine a kid that age making a fake bomb to troll everyone, but I can also imagine someone who is just a hobbyist, so I am not going to draw any conclusions here at all.
has anybody on Slashdot ... (Score:4, Interesting)
... realized yet that his father is an activist? Ran twice for president of Sudan (from the US!)? Debated that FL pastor who burned a koran?
I knew this was too "perfect" the first whiff of it I got, and the more details come out, the more right I was.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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Play is a legitimate activity (Score:3)
I'm surprised by comments that Ahmed "just" took things apart and put them together. Do you remember getting your first chemistry set, or bicycle, or learning how switches work? I'll bet that you tried things out, many times.
If you played basketball, I bet you went out to shoot baskets, just because you could.
If you took shop class, did you invent wood, or drills, or nails? I bet you did things that somebody showed you.
If you played a musical instrument, I bet you played the same practice pieces over and over.
Those activities are "play" and most mammals do that. They practice their skills, even if they are not immediately needed to survive. That is a developmentally appropriate thing to do! There are parts of your brain that are not wired up to the rational, language using parts, and those parts need to develop.
I don't care if all Ahmed did was take something apart and put it together again. That was encouraged in me, and I hope it will be encouraged in others.
Plenty of Blame to Go Around (Score:3)
- Ahmed brought disassembled clock to school for show and tell
- Ahmed never claimed it was a bomb
- Neither the school nor police actually thought it was a bomb (if they had, the entire event would have gone down much more dramatically)
- Given that, it's entirely possible the whole affair was racially motivated (or some idiotic zero-tolerance thing where they thought scaring him would teach him a lesson)
- Ahmed did not build the clock in question, he merely disassembled a store bought clock
- Ahmed is a fledgling tinkerer and may have a productive career in engineering when he grows up...if he doesn't crack from the pressure of being a world-renowned boy genius and shining jewel of Muslim-Americans
- Disassembling a clock at 13 does not a boy genius make. Even building a clock from a microcontroller at 13, while nothing to sneeze at, would fall short of the title of "genius".
- Obama's presidency will be ending soon, but the memories (and pictures/videos) of him inviting a kid that disassembled a clock to the White House are forever
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OK if a $color kid brought in a suitcase with wires sticking out, which he plugged in and it making a noise and then refused to answer questions what is was exactly, I suspect he would have received the similar treatment.
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It wasn't a suitcase, it was a pencil case. http://www.officedepot.com/a/p... [officedepot.com]. About 5 by 8 inches.
Re:It's an outrage scam (Score:4, Insightful)
Muslims are currently negotiating for sharia law in Irving TX (Google it)
OK, I googled it. You lose.
http://www.politifact.com/texa... [politifact.com]
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