Kid arrested for clock...

[Nightshade]

So...there was a young child of 14 that decided to make a project and present it to his teacher...and shortly thereafter, placed in handcuffs and interrogated.

14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed — who was immersed in building electronics and robotics in middle school — made a clock Sunday night that he showed to his engineering teacher on Monday morning.

Seems another teacher (English teacher) complained about its' beeping noise and he opened it up and showed it to her...

He kept the clock inside his school bag in English class, but the teacher complained when the alarm beeped in the middle of a lesson. Ahmed brought his invention up to show her afterward.

“She was like, it looks like a bomb,” he said.

“I told her, ‘It doesn’t look like a bomb to me.’”

The teacher kept the clock. When the principal and a police officer pulled Ahmed out of sixth period, he suspected he wouldn’t get it back.

Now obviously it was a total overreaction on the teachers' part and her ignorance about electronics didn't help matters- but take a look at his clock yourself.



What would you think if you just saw this sitting on a desk in an empty room in a school?

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2015/09/16/te ... nvitation/

[Ferno]

I'd think "nice clock"

mainly because i'm not a total imbecile and know that bombs don't have cords that plug into the wall.

[Nightshade]

I'd think "nice clock"

mainly because i'm not a total imbecile and know that bombs don't have cords that plug into the wall.

Well, coffee mugs look a LOT more like bombs it seems.

White House briefly on lock down after scare over 'unattended package' - that turned out to be a coffee mug

Lock down lasted a little more than 30 minutes

The president was not on the premises - he was in upper Washington, D.C. at Walter Reed hospital visited wounded armed service members

While the lock down was in effect, the park across from the White House and Pennsylvania Avenue were closed off

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... ckage.html

[woodchip]

I read that about the clock and I was wondering where the C4 or TNT sticks were at or anything that might actually explode. Idiots that run our schools are so terrified that kids pointing a finger like a gun are expelled and now possessing circuit boards makes you a potential mass murderer. Hope his parents sue the pants off the school district and the police who arrested him,

[Tunnelcat]

That kid's mistake was making the clock inside a case like that. Could have been misconstrued as a suitcase bomb. Didn't help that he's a Muslim kid smack in the middle of Texas either.

My husband's first foray into making electronics projects when he was in college. He created a digital alarm clock by putting the electronics inside a Planter's Peanut can with the digital display cut into the side of the can. It was a one of a kind item, but the only danger it had was that it was probably a shock hazard since it plugged into 120V. I convinced him to build one that looked like a timer on 5 sticks of fax dynamite. Had it for years and it looked cool on the nightstand. Can't say whatever happened to it though since it disappeared in one of our moves. We have enough components hanging around to build another, but I wouldn't want to freak out any Americans who happen to see it. People are crazy about things like this these days.

[Lothar]

The outside of the case looks considerably less intimidating:



The images you may have seen are misleading in terms of size. It's a pencil case, around 17 cm (6.6 in) across.

A few things are obvious:

1) the police and administration didn't think it was a bomb. They didn't evacuate the school, they didn't put the case out in the field and have the bomb squad do a controlled detonation. They sat in a room with the case. Because there's no payload, just electronics.

2) They may have had reason to think it was a prank -- that Ahmed was trying to scare people. It does, after all, look like a movie bomb that police would know isn't real but other kids might freak out about. That might explain the reaction of cuffing him. But I don't think that explanation really fits.

3) His father is a well-known political activist. It's likely he's the real center of this -- either the police were trying to use his son to intimidate him, or he was trying to use his son to manufacture a story to get himself in the news, or somebody bigger than him was trying to manufacture a story about anything from islamophobia to police overreactions to the role of moderate Islam in society. (His dad is on the modernist/moderate, pro-western, anti-calpihate side of the Islamic world.)

[Lothar]

Also (yeah, I know cop block is a ridiculous site) here's a list of other things kids have been arrested for:

http://www.copblock.org/140900/stupid-r ... ds-school/

My 7-year-old nephew is autistic with ADHD and sometimes has trouble calming down. He once had the cops called in to school because he was throwing things. He kicked one of them. He didn't get arrested, but he did get picked up by the back of the neck and very sternly spoken to, which I think is a much more appropriate reaction to a 7-year-old.

[Tunnelcat]

Why Lothar, that case is the perfect disguise for a bomb. No one would suspect it.

[Top Gun]

Ah, the eternal danger of a Trapper Keeper.

[Tunnelcat]

Wow, TG. I had to Google what that even was. I guess I'm behind the times.

[Lothar]

An interesting take on the whole thing -- reverse engineering Ahmed's clock from the photos.

http://blogs.artvoice.com/techvoice/201 ... ourselves/

spoiler: it looks like he disassembled and reassembled an old Radio Shack clock. There's no indication he built or invented anything new, or assembled it from separate components. (A 14 year old taking apart and reassembling an old Radio Shack clock is a cool project, no question, but it's not what has been represented in the media.)

There's also a nice comment where someone criticizes the "test bomb" theory.

I also liked a comment I saw earlier about how we keep emphasizing "see something, say something" and then we get pissed when someone sees something they don't understand and says something, because it can be interpreted as profiling. If there's one person I can absolve completely in this, it's the teacher who was acting according to training.

[Nightshade]

Seems Dr. Richard Dawkins thinks Ahmed Mohamed (the boy arrested for his 'clock') may have wanted to provoke an arrest or at least an incident in the school.

Scientist Richard Dawkins has provoked outrage after heavily criticising the 14-year-old Texan teen who was arrested for bringing a homemade clock to school.

Dawkins criticised Ahmed Mohamed on Twitter for claiming the clock was his invention, and questioned whether the teen in fact "wanted to be arrested".

Mohamed, a budding inventor, was arrested and suspended from his high school after bringing a clock to a class, which his teachers believed as a hoax bomb.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/americas/7 ... t-arrested

This theory is actually quite plausible...because as Ahmed admitted himself-

“I closed it with a cable, so… because, I didn’t want to lock it to make it seem like a threat so I just used simple cable…. so it won’t look that much suspicious”.

So he, in fact, knew it resembled and could be mistaken for a device made for ill intent.



There is another video that shows the "invention" was nothing of the sort and a total fraud meant to elicit fear.

[youtube]CEmSwJTqpgY[/youtube]

[Nightshade]

No more comment I suppose?

[Vander]

No. You win. Send him to Gitmo.

[Top Gun]

Richard Dawkins the consummate ★■◆●? And I say that irrespective of whether or not one agrees with his religious position: the man has made a career out of making inflammatory statements to piss people off, and this is no different.

[Nightshade]

Richard Dawkins the consummate ★■◆●? And I say that irrespective of whether or not one agrees with his religious position: the man has made a career out of making inflammatory statements to piss people off, and this is no different.

Well sure- but what did Ahmed Mohammed say himself in that quote?

[callmeslick]

[woodchip]

And Hillary Clinton can't figure out how to erase a hard drive:

The FBI has recovered personal and work-related e-mails from the private computer server used by Hillary Clinton during her time as secretary of state, according to a person familiar with the investigation.

[Jeff250]

No more comment I suppose?

Pretty much.