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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."
Child invents Islamophobia detector.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
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?".
... 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.
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BMO
As noted elsewhere, the authorities in Irving, Texas, didn't act in a way that was consistent with a potential bomb threat. If they found a mysterious unattended package on the street, they would have cleared the area, brought in the bomb squad, and destroyed the contents of the package. But neither Ahmed's school, nor the cops that they called, did any of those things. Either they didn't act to protect the students and teachers in the school (on the assumption that it might be a bomb) or they knew from the outset that the clock wasn't a bomb, in which case it was Islamophobia in action.
Muslims are currently negotiating for sharia law in Irving TX (Google it)
OK, I googled it. You lose.
http://www.politifact.com/texa...
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.
While I generally support him, the media has been TERRIBLE at reporting this story. The LA Times had a very popular article that kept comparing him to Steve Jobs. JOBS!??! Don't they mean Woz?! The police also release misleading photos making it look like it was the size of a suitcase (it was waaaay smaller than that). I guess once the mass media gets their hands on something their only concern is ad clicks...
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...
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
As a kid I did take apart a old, large TV, and there was sparks, shocks and the smell of burning flesh even though it was unplugged (capacitors...)
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
... 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.
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 them quickly, as if he couldn't have bought them in the terminal.
I'd like to point out that if one of the two of us hits the "racial profiling" button in racist dirtbags, it's me. He's white as can be: blonde, blue eyes, damn near translucent. No freaky piercings or tattoos or anything. Totally normal looking. I, however, am what they call "ethnically ambiguous". You'd think if there was a reason to pick on one of us, it would be me. And that's never happened, even when traveling alone.
It's why I tend to lean heavily into the category of "idiot administrators looking to punch down" and use race as an excuse to do it. Racism is a factor, yes, but ultimately, with idiots like these, they would have found someone to pick on and a reason to do it.
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
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.
Get ready for a wall of text. All of this happened in a small town in Washington state, for reference.
I've had similar things happen to me for dicking about with electronics and I'm as white as you can get.
I had my desk and backpack searched in grade school because "some kids" reported me to the principal talking about fireworks (It was July) and told him I was looking up bombs on the computers (Electromagnets are apparently bombs). Of course I had random PCBs from shit I took apart in my backpack and that was damning enough evidence to call my parents and suspend me for a week (For "Disrupting the learning environment, a copout term when you piss off school administration but technically didn't break any rules). Cops were threatened but weren't called.
I was also (Without my parents knowledge) placed into a "special" class, consisting mostly of the "slow" kids where we got to talk about our feelings (By pointing to an expression on a plush cube). This was run by the school counselor.
According to her it was wrong to enjoy the things I enjoyed at the time (Average kid stuff for the most part. Drawing guns, playing video games, playing with soldering irons). I learned a few years ago after talking with my parents that she literally told them that I would be the next "Columbine kid" if they didn't put me on drugs to "fix" me (They didn't).
Same thing in middle school, again was looking up AVR tutorials in the library and a number of kids would come up behind me and yell out "IS THAT A BOMB!?" and variations of that. Again, all of my stuff searched, escorted by security, etc. Suspended for a few days for "abusing school computer privileges" because "School computers are not for learning whatever you want, your activities must relate to classwork".
In highschool I finally got a break, amazing teacher who had a back room lined with soldering irons and breadboards. We even started a F.I.R.S.T. robotics team before I graduated.
So please, don't give me bullshit about this only happening because of the color of his skin. Blame the school's lack of understanding and zero tolerance policies. Blame the culture of fear in this country, don't buy into this stereotypical "LOOK! LOOK! AMERICANS ARE RACIST" crap.
If anything, I would bet the only reason this story has taken off is because he was brown and race politics are all the rage these days.
There are a lot more victims of "Zero tolerance" policies than what you see in the news, stories like this and the poptart gun kid are more common than most people think.
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.
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.
Don't mess with The Phone Company. Piss them off and you'll be using two tin cans and a piece of string.
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"
"Appeal to extreme" fallacy.
The article makes some good points and some not so good points. Here's the TL;DR version of this whole affair as best anyone can tell from the evidence so far:
- 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
You have tried to support your argument with faulty reasoning! Go directly to jail; do not pass Go, do not collect $200!