Slashdot Mirror
Ahmed Mohamed, His Clock, and the Curious Turn of Events
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."
He is being hailed as a symbol against prejudice and suspicion. Whether he is a genius or not makes absolutely no difference in this case.
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.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
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.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Nobody got mad because his "invention" was being discredited, or even really cared if a 14 year old claimed he invented something he merely assembled. The reaction to show encouragement and support was to counteract the fact that this young boy might think the whole country would consider him a terrorist suspect for showing interest in electronics. I absolutely don't care if he is a boy wonder or not, lets not treat kids as terrorists because they are brown and like engineering.
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?".
From what I can see there is nothing special about him or what he did, he is just some cheeky kid who used a very naive way of getting attention and it got out of hand. All this talk of discrimination etc. seems like a beat-up and the poor kid will pay the price in the long run for all the manipulating adults have done to politically capitalise on his prank. Now he has the entire world watching him and expecting to live up to their expectations when there is no solid evidence he is gifted at all.
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?
My first computer program was little more than 10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD", but young me was damn proud at the time of making a computer do something ... anything ... and would have loved to share that enthusiasm with others.
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.
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"?
"This administration is so incompetent that they cover their tracks with bigger tracks." - Seth Meyers
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...
the woz comparison is better than you know:
https://www.reddit.com/r/today...
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/...
the added poignancy right now being the way syrian refugees are being treated by racists and bigots in europe right now
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
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.
If the teachers/cops thought the box was a credible threat, the school would have been evacuated and the bomb squad called in, they do the evacuation part even if they think it is a prank call. Neither action was taken here, yet they had physical 'evidence' of the bomb. To me this indicates they thought the kid was being a smart-arse and gave him the "scare the naughty boy" routine. The only thing different about the millions of other kids around the world who have received a traditional "official scare," is that this time it backfired on the officials. Which IMO is a good thing, since the practice does nothing but stamp the "might is right" message on its hapless victims.
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"?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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.
I hate printers.
Oh, there has been plenty of incident. To mention one thing that has been on my mind with the war in Syria of late, one thing that struck me traveling there before the war is that even under the "anti-fundamentalist" Assad regime, Christians were forbidden by law from putting crosses on their places of worship or inviting Muslims to their faith, while among Muslims it was completely allowed to engage in da'wah among the Christian population. As I would later discover, this discrimination in law holds for most Muslim states.
I wouldn't disagree that most of the 1.5 billion Muslims in the world are peaceful in individual interaction, and I'm certainly grateful for the immense hospitality I have received across the Muslim world from the Maghreb to southeast Asia. But when this population acts as a political bloc, I don't believe that the outcome is as pleasant for non-Muslim minorities as you claim.
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
Did you even read the Wikipedia article you linked to? It only proves the OP's point: "Like all non-Muslims, Jews ... faced other restrictions in clothing, horse riding, army service etc." (I found this informative, I thought that the horse-riding restriction was only imposed on refugee Jews in the Maghreb.)
And you completely skipped over the OP's mention that Christians were forbidden from ringing bells and the conversion of churches into mosques by force. That is awfully disingenous. If you sincerely want to defend Islam against critiques that may be unfair, then you still have to acknowledge and rebut all attacks. Remaining silent as you did here really only weakens your own cause.
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.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
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?