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14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

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Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

#531

Post by electic »

zardo wrote: post #506
electic wrote: post #486

Frankly, if someone showed up with a clock and a circuit board with wires leading to a box on the board, what would people think? Keep in mind, there have been multiple mass shootings at schools already this year. They have to investigate it. What if someone showed up to the mall with a gun in an open-carry setting? People panic.[2] The setting matters. Especially if the setting in question, a school, has been a vict…

Frankly, if someone showed up with a clock and a circuit board with wires leading to a box on the board, what would people think? I don't think we should assume that everything we don't understand is a weapon. I don't understand a lot of things, the vast majority of which are not bombs.

Did I say that? Don't think I did. You are basically arguing that they should not have investigated?

Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

#532

Post by nitrogen »

codyb wrote: post #342
xacaxulu wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More evidence that school serves to simply stultify the youth. Unschooling is looking more attractive all the time.

I think thats a very cynical view point which reduces to a platitude an extremely complex issue especially when your evidence primarily appears to concern a smattering of cases among a system which serves millions of children a year. Technology is very esoteric and almost brand new in a sense. It's been as little as two decades since the advent of schools even having computers. The fact there are misunderstandings, g…

It seems we're talking about schools' failure to support exceptional students -- those most likely to make outsized contributions to society when older. So of course we are only looking at exceptional cases.

Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

#533

Post by dx211 »

ZachWick wrote: post #475

This hits close to home for me too, and I am as WASP-y as it gets. Just over a year ago I was flying to the middle of US with some prototypes for an agriculural automation system in my checked luggage. Going through DTW and O'Hare to my final destination was fine and went without incident. On my way back, again with a checked luggage bag of protypes and tools, this little airport in northwest IA got evacauted and I w…

When I got out of the Army in the 90's, I had to fly back to America, and since I didn't trust the government's shipping contractor I took all of the guts out of my PC, stuck them in a carry-on bag, and went through security with it. The guy at the counter looked inside the bag and asked what it was. I told him it was a computer and he let me through. Oh, such an age of innocence!

Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

#534

Post by zardo »

clarkmoody wrote: post #379
chejazi wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If public schools are going to succeed, then many states need to "catch up" when it comes to funding. More funding will attract more teachers, creating a stronger candidate pool. If you look at the average funding per student by state, Texas isn't doing so hot [1], especially for being the second largest state [2]. There's definitely more to it than just funding, but I think that would be a good starting point. [1] h…

> If public schools are going to succeed Under what circumstances would you consider that public schools are a failure and that we should try another approach?

In the case that they don't provide a world class education for all students. Why should we settle for less than that?

Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

#535

Post by kirsebaer »

xacaxulu wrote: post #202
nadams wrote: post #121

If anyone is actually surprised by the administrations intelligence - I should remind you of 3 events: - A teacher confiscates Linux CDs claiming that the student was essentially distributing illegal copyrighted software - because no software is free [1] - A system administrator was fired for installing/running seti@home on school computers. There is a lot of controversy about this case - but I read one news article…

More evidence that school serves to simply stultify the youth. Unschooling is looking more attractive all the time.

From a survey of adults who had been "unschooled" (homeschooling without a curriculm):

> Almost all of the respondents, in various ways, wrote about the freedom and independence that unschooling gave them and the time it gave them to discover and pursue their own interests. Seventy percent of them also said, in one way or another, that the experience enabled them to develop as highly self-motivated, self-directed individuals. Many also wrote about the learning opportunities that would not have been available if they had been in school, about their relatively seamless transition to adult life, and about the healthier (age-mixed) social life they experienced out of school contrasted with what they would have experienced in school.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201406/su...

Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

#537

Post by malisper »

jameshart wrote: post #371

A story. So, this thirteen year old kid with a Syrian father once got flagged up by Hewlett Packard because he was ordering electronic components. I'm sure you can imagine what happened next... Yeah, Bill Hewlett offered him a summer job, he got hooked on making stuff, wound up founding a company out of his garage with his buddy Steve Wozniak, and created the biggest electronics company in the world. Thank goodness h…

> Thank goodness he never took a clock he'd built into school.

Uh... From Steve Jobs's biography:

In twelfth grade he [Woz] built an electronic metronome—one of those tick-tick-tick devices that keep time in music class—and realized it sounded like a bomb. So he took the labels off some big batteries, taped them together, and put it in a school locker; he rigged it to start ticking faster when the locker opened. Later that day he got called to the principal’s office. He thought it was because he had won, yet again, the school’s top math prize. Instead he was confronted by the police. The principal had been summoned when the device was found, bravely ran onto the football field clutching it to his chest, and pulled the wires off. Woz tried and failed to suppress his laughter. He actually got sent to the juvenile detention center, where he spent the night. It was a memorable experience. He taught the other prisoners how to disconnect the wires leading to the ceiling fans and connect them to the bars so people got shocked when touching them.

Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

#538

Post by cbhl »

digler999 wrote: post #416
Alupis wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, far from being definitive, but it looks like a regular pc will cost around $227.52 (350 watt psu, $18.96 per month) in electricity per year to run 24/7.[1] (calculated using $0.06 per kWh, which is rather low for most people in the US) So, 5,000 machines running 24/7/365 would cost around $1,137,600 annually (5,000 machines * $227.52 per year) in electricity usage alone. Of that 24 hours per day, we can assume…

> 350 watt psu, PSU's arent light bulbs. A "350 watt" psu doens't draw 350 watts. That's the theoretical maximum you can draw from it. Sure, SETI was probably drawing a higher load than idle, vs off, but I highly doubt it was drawing 100%. Even more complicated is the heat. If they lived in a cool climate, at least some of the waste heat that was emitted would have been absorbed by the building, which they are (presu…

Even if the machines only drew 50% of that at load, it would still be over $3 000 000. That's a lot of money.

Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

#539

Post by mikeash »

eldude wrote: post #520
mikeash wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right that the reaction is explainable by pervasive CYA and the risk of not reacting and being wrong. However, you're missing that pervasive and institutional racism is a big part of that risk. Imagine a kid brings an actual bomb to school, the authorities don't react, and he detonates it. Then what? The kid's race is going to play a huge role in how that decision is analyzed afterwards. If the kid was white t…

I'm not ignoring institutional racism, merely not assuming it, which is consistent with the American justice system tenet of never presuming guilt, even when you really want to and everyone around says you should. You're making a lot of wild assertions that really are tangential and not intellectually consistent with my original point that there are no facts specific to this case to support the author's narrative, me…

I love it when "guilty until proven innocent" gets brought up in internet conversations, as if it were somehow the right way to have a conversation.

This isn't a court of law. Skepticism is, of course, always warranted, but equating it with high principles of justice is ridiculous. We're not putting someone in prison here.

And institutional racism against certain categories of brown people is far beyond a mere assumption at this point. Just ask one of the many, many such people who get "randomly" selected for additional security screening every time they take a plane, for one random example.

You say that we shouldn't assume racism here because the incident is adequately explained by CYA. I say that CYA is not an adequate explanation without also looking at race, because CYA would not have happened like this if the kid had been white and named John Smith.

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