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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

#671
post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only irony here is your complete failure to understand my original comment and your own failure to provide reasoning for your own false conclusion. Based on the facts in the OP and parent comment, I was disassembling the race-baiting rhetoric as anti-intellectual and fact-less (which, since you missed it, is itself a fact), to refocus on the original issue. Meanwhile, double-ironically, you again ignore context a…

The only irony here is your complete failure to understand my original comment and your own failure to provide reasoning for your own false conclusion. Which exactly is my false conclusion? Weren't you referring to the real issue ? Doesn't the determiner in that mean that there is a only a single such thing? Did you offer any basis for the assumption that it was indeed the single real issue? Those are the assumptions…

You falsely conclude that I have a singular (implicitly subjective) "real issue", to which I "offer" "no other explanation." In fact, despite your projecting, by "real" / "original" issue, I meant the mistreatment of children by authority in schools, which is both the context of the parent comment and the original article from which the TechCrunch article derives.

Again, for clarity, I am asserting that the original article focuses on student mistreatment and not race, TechCrunch subverts it, and the parent comment refocuses on it. In other words, the "real issue" was pre-established as the context for and precedes my comment. All my comment served to do, was concisely articulate the issue of the preceding contexts, which is self-evident when reworded to be less generic, "Use of institutional force by the police and school officials to suppress or punish divergent student behavior."

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

#672

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…

Honestly, I don't know that Jobs could have made a clock. Woz could have made one that calculated primes and rendered vector graphics, though.

Here's Jobs in his high school electronics club: http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm//wp-content/uploads/201...

But yeah, I mean, I'm sure he was just there to tell them to use rounded corners on the circuit diagrams and meet girls.

Just cos Woz was the nerd's nerd, let's not crap on Jobs too much - he was geeky enough to hang out with Woz, that should be good enough for everyone else, right?

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

#673
post #95

The real question here is: how can we help this kid? I'm not talking about from the legal perspective, but rather what can we (me, you, the larger tech world) do to make it so that this kid and others like him keep tinkering. He needs to know that what he built wasn't wrong, it was awesome.

President Obama has invited him to the White-House in a very public fashion, and Zuck has invited him to visit Facebook. That, at least, show help show Ahmed, and other kids, that there is support for kids who like to tinker.

The one person I personally wish would extend a similar offer, is Elon Musk. I think a lot of nerds / hackers / etc. see him as one of the most prominent and awesome nerds around, and if he offered Ahmed a tour of Tesla and/or SpaceX... well, how cool would that be?

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

#674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, it's a high school. And the reaction really wasn't warranted. He did show it to his engineering teacher before he got nabbed, too. According to the Times, "When Ahmed Mohamed, 14, brought the clock to MacArthur High School in Irving, Tex., on Monday, an engineering teacher suggested that he not show the invention to other teachers. But it beeped during an English class, prompting Ahmed to show his English teache…

I wonder, did any of the staff actually know the kid? They're acting like he wandered in, and not like any of them could attest to his character.

It's pretty early in the school year, and judging by his stated age he's likely a freshman. Not much of a chance for a teacher to ascertain things like "character".

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

#675
post #565

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…

[deleted]

Good job his surname wasn't Wozniak, then.

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

#676
post #662
post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition to the per-student cost-to-educate not being constant, but charters only admitting the cheap students (as mentioned in sibling posts), charters also tend to have much lower salary costs, because in most states charter school teachers aren't part of the teachers' union. They have lower pay, worse benefits, and trend quite young. The charters, for the most part, are only making use of the cheapest, least ex…

I find it funny how you completely ignored the most important aspect of the equation. The student. The students are choosing to attend those charter schools. People choose things that are better for themselves. Not always, but often enough that you can safely assume it's true for the majority. Why are they doing that? Could it be, that in spite of everything you mentioned ... charters are a better option for the stud…

> The students are choosing to attend those charter schools.

Generally not the case. The parents are, usually, choosing.

> People choose things that are better for themselves. Not always, but often enough that you can safely assume it's true for the majority.

You might reasonably make that assumption for cases where the people making the decision are making it for themselves, and with sufficient information and skill to make a reasonable prediction of the utility that will result from each available choice. (A stronger form of this is a central element of rational choice theory, so its common to Econ 101 models of behavior -- and lots of people have internalized these models without understanding the assumptions underpinning them, and how limited they are in the real world.)

I think its far from evident that school choices under the conditions they are actually made meet that description.

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

#677
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…

>A system administrator was fired for installing/running seti@home on school computers. Actually, I agree with this. I remember when this got big and suddenly every IT department, school, etc had these things installed, clearly without permission. If you tried talking about wasted electricity, added pollution, and the social cost of running power hungry processors 24/7 for "alien points" on their forums (or any forum…

In an environment where kids are literally arrested for sending popup messages over the network, I think that attitude has some value. People are overreacting based on things they have no understanding of.

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

#678

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…

> More funding will attract more teachers, creating a stronger candidate pool Without the ability to get rid of bad teachers as quickly and easily as one can fire bad engineers in the private sector money isn't going to fix a damn thing. It might even make it worst. Fix that part first.

In Colorado teachers can be fired at the drop of a hat (or, more likely, not be asked to come back next year). I can assure you this hasn't kept the state off of the bottom of the academic performance lists.

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

#679
post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that lots of money is wasted in the public school system, but we don't need University of Phoenix brought to elementary schools.

> we don't need University of Phoenix brought to elementary schools. I realize that from your perspective, the world if full of imbeciles ... but just for a second, consider that {insert for-profit college name} is providing a service that people want and that's why people are choosing it. Those people don't care how the money they are paying is divvied up afterward. Whether it goes into the pocket of some administra…

> If we had an education system that as a whole, gave people what they wanted, we would all be better off.

Because a teacher's job is customer service and the customer is always right? ;)

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

#680
post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may want to check comment history of the account you're replying to.

Why? I don't see anything particularly remarkable there.

multiple flagged dead comments for the same kind of race trolling that you're feeding?

This comment (about a muslim conference where the speakers were saying it's never acceptable to beat your wife) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10228134

Or this comment abut how SJWs love victim culture: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10228134

Or this comment saying African Americans have an average IQ of 80: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223344

Or this flagged comment, that got a reply from dang: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9991230

That's quite a lot in a 45 day old account.

(Do you have "ShowDead" turned on?)

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