14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School(techcrunch.com) |
14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School(techcrunch.com) |
Somehow they still claim that Ahmed made a "hoax bomb".
The US has so much talent, but when such things will continue to manifest, the terrorists already have won!
I think reasonable people can understand why the police might have been called.
It was of course unreasonable for the police to have actually arrested the boy, once they found out what they were dealing with. Reading between the lines though, maybe the article's use of "arrested" just means they took the kid home to his parents.
Muslim != Islamist, just as Christian != Westboro Baptist.
You may not know this, but Sudan is ruled by its Muslim, Arab north and is often quite happy to enslave or murder the black Christians in its south. Hardly a model of an anti-Islamist republic.
He was cuffed and interrogated: https://twitter.com/OfficalPrajwol/status/644011809351962625...
Notice in the video he says "he used a simple cable to lock it so it wouldn't look like a threat".
People are forgetting that there's nothing impressive about a "clock in a case". He called it an "invention". Sorry kid, you're 14, not 8. Nothing inventive about sticking a digital clock in a case.
His own engineering teacher suggested he not show it to other teachers. So what does he do? Takes it to English class where it makes beeping noises. Real smart kid, real smart.
It's a clock in a case. NASA are not interested.
Then, when first questioned he was apparently "passive aggressive", not explaining why he made it or why he brought it to school. Gee kid, you're really making all the smart moves.
Ask yourself, why would his own teacher suggest he not show it to other teachers? Here's why... his "invention" looked dodgy as all hell.
Hashtag "I'm not standing with this kid, not this time".
"Asking for trouble" is what I mean. The default processes in the USA are not what I'm talking about, but everyone here is defending his "right to be creative". Nobody is saying "hang on, he put a clock in a case, brought it to school, not part of any school project, advised not to show it around, showed it around anyway and was passive aggro when asked about it".
He was asking for trouble, and got it.
He is a Sufi (mystic, esoteric) and more than a bit eccentric. I saw his brand of Islam described as "New Testament" elsewhere. He has tried to argue (contrary to most Islamic scholarship) that the earlier peaceful Meccan sections actually abrogate the later warlike Medinan sections of the Quran. I don't think he's any sort of Islamist at all.
"He says he has serious issues with the hardline, traditional readings of the text, and he's writing a book about his reading of the Koran -- with working titles like Jesus Among Us With the Quran, or The New Understanding of the Quran."
http://www.dallasobserver.com/news/why-mohamed-elhassan-the-...
He ran for the National Reform Party. Here's his website: https://web.archive.org/web/20110903180626/http://www.alisla...
Note repeated use of the word "sufi".
EDIT: He tried to repeal laws against converting from Islam and ratifying human rights. That's not the stance of Islamists. http://www.vox.com/2015/9/16/9339063/ahmed-mohamed-elhassan
"His father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, came from Sudan and is famous for arguing against anti-Islamic policies"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/muslim-at-koran-trial-s...
I recall putting my bags on a table so they the airlines people could look at what I was taking on the plane. When the FLIGHT ATTENDANT looked at my chemistry set, she turned to another official and said: "He could make a bomb out of these chemicals", My first reaction was to laugh.
I waited a minute while the adults thought it over and said: "I'm 10, I don't know how to make a bomb or anything. I jusy got this for christmas!"
They taped it up and made me check it, so I could not carry it on to the plane. To this day I marvel at the idea that a child would be suspected of making a chemical bomb.
This sort of demagoguery masquerading as journalism has got to stop. Upvoting exploitative personal political propaganda like this contributes to an atmosphere of narrow-mindedness on HN that plays to the bigotry of its readers, with the majority of comments here responding in like.
I'm certainly not defending it, but in reality this sort of (over) reaction, is perfectly explainable when you consider the risk of government employees responsible for the lives of children NOT reacting and being wrong.
Yes, those involved need some education, but no more so than the author regarding journalistic ethics, or the commenters here stirring up a witch-hunt. You can see all the anti-Texan/Conservative/School/Government-ists overreacting here right on cue.
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 then the discussion is likely to be of the form, "We need better mental health treatment to catch this stuff early!" If the kid was the wrong shade of brown then it's going to be, "He was obviously a terrorist and the administration should be thrown in a hole for not taking appropriate measures."
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, merely the assumptions and presumptions you espouse.
And, I can assure you that almost any science fair project found in a bathroom or under a car would look suspicious. So would a backpack or cardboard box.
Anyone know why the teacher had him hide it? Are they restricted from having electronic devices and toys at school? Is it because the teacher thought it looked suspicious?
Either way it's unfortunate that the teacher didn't just ask to hold on to it until after school was out. If one reasonable adult had stood up for him before another adult freaked then it may not have been an issue.
Condition 2. As long as we fail to value the education of children, Condition 1 will continue
Condition 3. As long as the majority of parent perceive that the life outcome of their children are less important than the parent's own desires for money, assets, sexual intercourse and self validation, Condition 2 will continue
Condition 4. As long we are humans, Condition 3 will continue.
Iterate ad infinitum ( or recurse if you love Lambda )
here is a google doc where you can tell them just that yourself (:
Maybe it was stereotyping of one kind of another or maybe not. When Asians or whites are arrested under questionable judgement is it also appropriate to say making while while or Asian?
Dammit, there is an injustice here, but going inflammatory is not helpful. Who does the editing for tv? Are the awol?
"What are you doing? If you take that to school they'll think it's a bomb!"
Even Ahmed's engineering teacher advised him not to show his clock to any other teachers. Fear and suspicion are the default now. That's heartbreaking.
On the plus side, where the end is coming into sight, so is a new beginning.
This would be quite educational, as everyone learned the hard way that cars, clocks, cell phones, loudspeakers, and so forth are packed with "threatening" fake bombs.
This line really bothers me. Probably because I simply don't think this way. I don't see color in people.
It is because of this, perhaps wrongly, that I can't accept the idea that this kid was arrested because he is brown. I think a white kid would have been arrested just the same.
Why?
Because the problem, as I see it, is our schools, in some areas, are bastions of ignorance. And this goes beyond K12 into colleges and university.
The problem in this case is an "Engineering" teacher who probably isn't anything close to an engineer. In other words, incapable of evaluating what the kid actually built. For this teacher what was in this little box might as well have been alien technology.
Why do I say this? Because it would have taken any engineer all 30 seconds --if that-- to understand what this kid built.
This could not have been the first time this kid brought some of his work to school. It sounds like he is really into making stuff. His "Engineering" teacher should have known this and should have known his profile.
My oldest kid had a "robotics" class in middle school. In quotes because the teacher would come into the room, sit down and browse the 'net on her iPad while the kids did whatever they wanted. She got to earn extra cash by pretending to teach this class. The union protected her from any potential consequence of her ineptitude. The only reason the other kids learned anything is because my son actually taught them (we have an FLL table in our living room).
Now in college, he's come across the same sort of thing. A calculus 1 "professor" who quite literally copies from the book onto the blackboard and will not answer any questions during class. Students are asked to write the questions down and they might be answered during the next class. She clearly knows nothing. And, to be politically incorrect, is likely to have gotten her job due to "equal opportunity" rules. If I didn't devote a serious amount of time to help my kid Calculus he would have come out of that semester way behind in his understanding. I feel sorry for the other kids if they didn't have a parent with the requisite knowledge and the time to do the teacher's job at home.
Yet in another case, a professor in an arts class devoted half of nearly every class meeting to a monologue about her ongoing attempts to become an actress, professional dancer, whatever. No tests. No teaching. Just ranting about various aspects of her personal life every class. At the end everyone got an A. Sad. Truly sad.
There are many problems with our schools. I feel a huge part of it has to do with ignorance, incompetence and union contracts that prevent us from a "survival of the fittest" approach to evolving good schools with truly intelligent, well-informed, balanced, knowledgeable teachers.
Then there's the deeper political element. Teaching, K12 through University, is largely populated with a wide spectrum of people of Liberal ideology. There was a study [2] that concluded some majors have a ratio of 44:1 in favor of left to extreme-left teachers. And, with that, comes the use of their position to indoctrinate kids --consciously or not.
If you don't think this is a problem, please take a moment to go through the mental exercise of inverting that ratio. How about 44:1 extreme right teachers? Or, today's favorite punching bag, 44:1 Islamic extremist teachers?
Right. The extremes are not good for anybody. Before you jump-up in joy if you like the idea of academia being permeated by left-leaning teachers you need to take a rocket up to low earth orbit and consider what that looks like from many points of view and what the consequences of a mono-ideology might have on society. As an Atheist and moderate Libertarian I feel I am firmly rooted somewhere around the center of both ideologies in many ways. I am with most Liberal social ideas while wanting to see less government intervention and a Conservative fiscal approach to things. Having a 44:1 ratio of teachers pushing one ideology on the kids is a bad thing, no matter where you are standing.
And so, there's also a high likelihood that the teachers who are ignorant, acted like morons and had this kid arrested are Liberal and highly intolerant [1]. Nobody wants to talk about how, for some strange reason, the Left has become the most intolerant group over the last several decades. Principles are great to put down on paper, but, if you don't follow them, what do they mean?
This kid was arrested due to everyone around him being ignorant morons.
A few videos to consider:
If you really "don't see color", then that's commendable. If you don't think it's possible that other people see color -- well, that's just willful ignorance.
The rest of your comment is irrelevant speculation. You have no idea about the political backgrounds of the teachers of this school. And if I had to speculate, I wouldn't think it's likely that you'd find a lot of hard-line liberal teachers in a suburban Texas high school, in a town whose mayor is notoriously anti-Islam. [1] In any case, it wasn't the teachers who put this kid in handcuffs and interrogated him, it was the cops.
I'm not going to watch a couple of hour-long videos of talking heads, but I'm well aware that people like Sam Harris believe liberals are "intolerant" of anti-Islam sentiment. I'm struggling to see how it's relevant to this issue.
[1] http://www.dallasnews.com/news/community-news/northwest-dall...
I didn't say that anywhere. Yes, of course, bigots do exist.
Perhaps the greater point is that we shouldn't jump at any conclusions, including one that proposes this kid was singled-out because of the color of his skin or his religion. Nobody knows, right?
I am proposing it was ignorance on the part of the teachers, particularly the Engineering teacher.
Had I been in that position I would have had the kid do a full presentation in front of the class on how he built the clock and how it worked and perhaps see about having him teach the other kids how to build their own in school or as a home project.
Had other teachers expressed concern I would have said something like "Calm down, he is a great kid who'd been tinkering with technology for years. We need to encourage him, not smash him down. He just build a fantastic clock. How about everyone learns from him.".
Then again, that's me. A non-engineer engineering teacher might think he is looking at Martian technology that could end life on the planet.
This kid should not have suffered one bit due to the ignorance of the adults that surrounded him at school.
Beyond that, I think about what he said in the video: They took him into a room with five cops who interrogated him. I, as a parent, would be angry beyond description for that alone.
His "invention" was not anything useful. The only useful function I can think of for such a device, is actually a hoax bomb for drama class. What good is a clock inside a case?
I'm getting down-voted to all hell, but that's what one gets for backing one's argument in a den of trigger-happy bigot-hunters.
He showed it to his engineering teacher. If he'd left it there, everything would have been okay. But he took it to English class.
His mother blamed racial profiling, but does that mean his ethnicity or his religion or both? Does he practice Islam? 14 year old kids studying Islam on the side, then bringing cases packed with electronics to school, then being coy when asked about it? It adds up to trouble in anyone's language.
The kid is 14 years old. So what if his invention isn't useful? He was enthusiastic about it and he probably learned something from it. Maybe some of his classmates could have learned that electronics aren't magical mysterious black boxes.
He took the object of his enthusiasm to English class. Yes, if he had left it at showing it to the engineering teacher this whole thing wouldn't have happened, but that doesn't mean he was wrong to show it to his English class.
What exactly about his behavior do you see as "asking for trouble"? Because I don't see anything that even remotely qualifies.
And what's with the "practicing Islam" thing? I was in this group where I memorized the Sermon on the Mount in junior high, in addition to going to church and doing choir. We got cookies every week. Seriously, no one thought I was getting radicalized when I "practiced" the religion of a radical Middle Easterner three times a week. Joke's on them: I got so radicalized I refused to join the church because of the hypocrisy I perceived (as a self-righteous mildly aspie junior highschooler).
And we made actual explosives at school in my day.... good times.
Yeah, seriously. Gotta watch those non-ROHS solder compounds hobbyists like to use. Also, through-hole pins can be sharp and scratchy.
This is part of the ridiculous ignorance that has a lot of us upset. At what point did a printed circuit board outside an enclosure become a "weapon"? Are the decision makers in our society (and exodust here) really so divorced from the techical world that they're informing their opinions based on the blinking gadgets in cartoons?
It's a circuit board!
Yep, that's the US today. And of course Obama doesn't waste a second to exacerbate the situation by vilifying the school/policeman/whatever. It's amazing how in 5 minutes everyone knows all the facts and concludes these school officials are racist xenophobic knuckle-draggers.
A teacher discovered it when it beeped. I'm not sure how you've lept from that to "showed it around".
EDIT:
> and was passive aggro when asked about it
I'm not sure where you got this from either.
The police officer was quoted as saying he was "passive aggressive" when questioned about the device.
Fair enough.
One more reason not to talk to the police in the first place, I guess, on top of all this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc .
The point was that the police said he acted very differently in his video than he did when questioned.
We've only seen his victim video. And finally his clock...
http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/10BF6/production/...
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.
It's a rhetorical appeal to authority, so implicitly, in addition to anyone who shares my respect for and identifies with the values of the American legal heritage, I agree with it. Therefore, even though it has no direct application, as you unnecessarily point out, it is a rhetorical convenience for delineating our very different views of right and wrong.
You misunderstand / mischaracterize me in that despite the existence of institutional racism, I think it is morally wrong and intellectually dishonest to presume or even assert that the specific police are racist, without personally specific supporting evidence.
And institutional racism against certain categories of brown people is far beyond a mere assumption at this point.
I'm not interested in engaging the rest of your arguments. It's not related to my original point, there's too much material to cover, and we clearly have wildly divergent views of right, wrong and what constitutes appropriate treatment of the individual police officers in this situation.
I will say, to avoid being mischaracterized, that we are in agreement that the student was mistreated. We merely draw different conclusions as to why. Mine upon the specific facts; yours upon generic presumptions, assumptions, assertions and other views that are not specific to this situation. As a personal admission, I don't see any avenue for myself for effective communication with someone that communicates as you have chosen here.
Except I don't see a single fact in your original comment.
Sorry, but we're both in the same boat here. We're both making political comments while bringing in our own biases based on a lot of assumptions about how things went down. The difference is, I admit it.
Of course, he's not going to admit that is he. Just an innocent 14yo, who would never make something that looked like a suitbase bomb. Reminder: he's 14. When you're 14, fake suitcase bombs are cool.
Here's a picture of it:
http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/10BF6/production/...
Obama says "it's a cool clock". But it runs off mains power, it's enclosed in a small suitcase (hobbyists don't use such enclosures). If you ask me, the kid was going for something that looked "secretive" or "spy games" at the very least.
"Walking," said Leonard Mead.
"Walking!"
"Just walking," he said simply, but his face felt cold.
"Walking, just walking, walking?"
"Yes, sir."
"Walking where? For what?"
"Walking for air. Walking to see."
"Your address!"
"Eleven South Saint James Street."
"And there is air in your house, you have an air conditioner, Mr. Mead?"
"Yes."
"And you have a viewing screen in your house to see with?"
"No."
"No?" There was a crackling quiet that in itself was an accusation.
"Are you married, Mr. Mead?"
"No."
"Not married," said the police voice behind the fiery beam, The moon was high and clear among the stars and the houses were gray and silent.
"Nobody wanted me," said Leonard Mead with a smile.
"Don't speak unless you're spoken to!"
Leonard Mead waited in the cold night.
"Just walking, Mr. Mead?"
"Yes."
"But you haven't explained for what purpose."
---
Excerpted from Ray Bradbury's short story 'The Pedestrian'.
For fairly obvious and somewhat depressing reasons.
Is there any study to ascertain how these kind of incidents affect children psychologically, the effects of which manifest only years later? (Let's assume that this boy is a gifted engineer, and this incident leaves deep psychological scars not expressed in the next few years, but eventually leads him to take up activities later in life which are harmful for American citizens)
All it did was make me anti-establishment at a slightly younger age. The kid in this story knows that what he's going through is bullshit, and he's likely to have something pretty good come out of this due to all the media attention. If anything, I'd suspect it would drive him to create more, because if there's something kids like to do it's sticking it to the man.
This was around 1993 or 1994 and I was in 11th grade. I was in some fairly "bonehead" computer class and we often worked on simple projects and saved them to floppy disks to take home or work on later.
At the time, the family computer was still an aging Commodore 128 but I was working mostly in DOS at school so I'd bring home my disks and work on projects on my dad's work laptop. Dad's work laptop included a primitive virus scanner so of course I scanned the disk I'd been using on the school network. The scanner finds some minor virus and cleans it up (in retrospect, I guess it could've easily just been a false positive but who knows).
After taking the disk back to school and working on projects again, I scanned it at home the following evening. Virus once again detected. So the next day in class I mention to the teacher that there's probably some innocuous virus on the classroom network and offered to help get rid of it. I was interested in that stuff even if I was still mostly a novice.
But instead of giving me a new project, the teacher flipped out. She accused me of trying to start a panic and disrupting class and sent me to see the ass. principal. Now, this dude hated kids (especially the ones who clearly had no respect for authoritah). I had to sit in his office without speaking while he held a (no joke) half hour conversation on the phone with his friend about some fishing trip they had planned for the weekend. Afterward he reamed me out and basically told me I was full of shit because the teacher wouldn't lie about such things.
In the end, it was my first lesson in "people who don't get computers or trust them will often avoid dealing with issues that make them uncomfortable and possibly view you with hostility for suggesting otherwise."
And back in the day we played with sodium, benzene, nitroglycerin, nitrogen triodide as part of the curriculum.
With the way current students are treated - the surprising thing about pupils going postal, is that so few of them are.
On the other hand that is a great way to incubate terrorists. Local and organic.
But apparently everything is indeed BIGGER in Texas and this applies to stupidity, ignorance and prejudice as well.
I am kind of leaning towards this being a publicity stunt, as a digital clock project really wouldn't require much circuitry, wiring or case space(with the result looking nothing like a bomb ). That being said I find it absurd for the child to be detained over any of it.
Think of it as the Git-R-Done philosophy, like installing Postgres for a single two column table. It ain't elegant, but I wouldn't make a kid feel bad for trying.
I'm basing this on 3 facts:
1. In 2015 it's highly unlikely that you could build a home-made clock that would be of the size and shape resembling a bomb - that is, unless it was made to look like a bomb.
2. Ahmed, his father, and anyone else with a phone camera (that is on Ahmed's side) would have posted a picture of the clock, or given a full description of it (size, shape, etc), in defense of Ahmed - that is, if it made sense, otherwise they would not. And I have not been able to find an image, nor a good description.
3. The initial teacher told him not to show it to anyone. You can break this down into that teacher having one of two opinions: A) It really did look like a bomb or B) its all about racism / hate / being anti-Muslim / anti-brown in that school (check the school's panel http://www.irvingisd.net/domain/2031 - that school is half brown and black).
Personally, I was punished repeatedly in high school for things I didn't do, simply because the administration was extremely paranoid about my computer knowledge. The principal once threatened me with "blacklisting" (seriously) because they got infected with a virus and didn't know what was going on.
A lot of people in the tech community have similar stories. We tend to stick out in the wrong way while in high school.
What's really worrying is that when I was his age, it was just the school I had to worry about. I was sometimes harassed and threatened (and to be fair, encouraged in a lot of things) by the administration while at school, but that's where it ended. Now they're getting the whole system involved.
But seriously, if you have to ask you will never know. This is more of a "you get it or not" thing, related to how HN's targeted demographic feels on such issues.
When a kid is brutally harassed over double nothing, we can both link with him AND cry for the experimental culture that is dying the death of a thousand cuts.
One-off events in the world don't really interest me. I believe that on any given day in the US, some public school administrator does something stupid where a student is involved. And also the majority of public school administrators are very competent and handle similar situations without blowing things out of proportion.
There's no evidence of a trend. This isn't a sign of a shift in culture or of the impending [DOOMSDAY SCENARIO].
I just ignore the headline and move on.
and it's better to show it at his house instead of at school for things like this I feel.
Please cite any evidence that this is true in practice.
Seriously.
The long-term cost to treating kids like this is probably vastly higher than any possible damage caused by the threats. (IE i would even expect it causes more kids to die younger over time)
Humans are very good at significantly overestimating the risks they can easily reason about, and significantly underestimate the ones they can't.
Please clarify. Things that are relevant to what you are studying in school and have been approved by your teacher for you to bring into class?
For someone who is speaking out against ignorance, this statement sure comes across as... ignorant.
Let's look at the facts...
1. His own engineering teacher "suggested that he not show the invention to other teachers." He should have listened, but...
2. During his English class the case made beeping noises. Not smart bringing it to English.
3. When questioned, he didn't explain what it was all about, and was described as playing "passive aggressive".
4. He calls it an "invention", but a digital clock in a case is not an invention. He's 14 years old, not 8. There's nothing inventive about it.
5. Admitted in the video he chose a "simple cable" to lock the case so it "wouldn't look threatening". So let's be clear, he did think about the possibility of it looking threatening, and his own teacher warned him about it.
Are the pieces coming together for you?
if he's smart, which apparently he is, then he should move on from clocks in cases to something that approaches an actual invention.
It's no surprise that our school systems are such shit when people actually feel there are two sides to a kid wanting to show his teacher something interesting and academic that he made.
You don't think that's a gross violation of civil rights?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mW4w0Y1OXE
It's a "Vaultz Tiger Pencil Box". Here's a video review of it:
It clearly did not. (There are pictures linked elsewhere in this comment thread, so you can see.) What happened is that a bunch of complete idiots thought it looked like a bomb, only because they have no idea what a bomb looks like, and they are additionally ignorant of their own ignorance.
Hacker News has been a left-wing echo chamber ever since the crazies started flowing in during that period when every story on the front page was NSA related.
Now it's nearly impossible to have a reasoned discussion on any non-technical issue without SJWs using the voting system here to silence dissent.
I don't get how this can possibly be about left vs right. Common sense hopefully doesn't depend on which side of the political spectrum you fall into.
"my argument is based [...] on facts, [...] yours ... on nonsense, [they're] not comparable."
Except I don't see a single fact in your original comment.
Now, we're in agreement that you believe presumptions are sufficient to reach different conclusions, and I do not.
while bringing in our own biases based on a lot of assumptions
The difference is, I admit it.
This statement implies there was a conversation with the teacher before bringing it in and that the teacher told him to bring it, but to not bring it out in other classes/in front of other teachers.
Your other points are not even worth replying to and border on trolling. You're upset that he didn't invent something new at 14? Building a homemade clock is too simple for his age and only 8 year olds should do it? This is one of the most insane posts I've ever seen on HN.
Which of the 3 points have been dis-proven?
Also take into concideration that -
1. The kid had a metal box containing PCBs and probably large components, all tide together around with a wire, and it was making beeping noises in class.
2. The school body and school district is almost 90% non-white, with the majority being "brown".
re. 2: He's asking the father to provide an image of something that was confiscated by the police or school administration. Furthermore, the first video with the boy contained a fairly detailed description of the clock, and the second video even contains an image of the box (or at least a similar box).
re. 3: Well, he provided an alternative explanation for that himself.
All I'm really saying is he could have easily cooled the situation.
Sometimes authority figures need to be undermined. Doing so is not "vilifying" them, even if the abuser might see it that way.
Why does the situation need to be "cooled," exactly? There aren't any riots over this. The only person who was harmed in any way was the 14-year-old kid who was arrested and interrogated at length without a lawyer and without his parents. Why are you more concerned about the feelings of the people who did this than about him?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10224216
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10224223
http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/10BF6/production/...
I would "stand with Ahmed", but if that means being attached to race baiting and Islamophobia accusations, I won't.
> But, Boyd said, "we are confident it's not an explosive device" intended to cause "alarm." Rather, he said, officers determined it was "a hoax bomb" and a "naive accident."
> As a result, he said, no charges will be filed against Ahmed, and "the case is considered closed." He also said "the reaction would have been the same regardless" of the student's skin color.
Nobody mistook it for a real bomb and nobody had any trouble with it, except for when it was set up in the middle of class to annoy the teacher :)
A later improvement was the addition of "detorator circuit" based on the flash electronics for a disposable camera, and you could hook up something like a resistor to it which would then be fried by who knows how many volts...
I think the bigger concern is all the people who get in trouble with the powers that be, and don't have media savvy parents with time or knowledge or connections to get something in the local paper and/or get in touch with civil rights organizations.
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 victim of mass violence numerous times. This is not a HP lab. They were right to take a look at the device with police. However, this is where things went terribly wrong:
> When Ahmed was called out of class, he said he was brought into a room with four police officers, one of whom said, "Yup. That's who I thought it was." [1]
Frankly, the school and police should have been more professional. They weren't. What is more disturbing, is the police have inadvertently admitted they are profiling people in this community. There is far more details in the CNN article:
[1] http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/16/us/texas-student-ahmed-muslim-...
[2] http://www.fayobserver.com/news/local/fort-bragg-soldier-arm...
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.
http://fusion.net/story/197958/irving-texas-police-arrest-mu...
But then this article has a completely different picture:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/09/15/student...
If it was really mounted in that case in your picture, it's indeed a little funny looking. I mean, all of this politically correct rage is misplaced if the fucking thing actually did look like a bomb. You gotta know that's not something to take into a school...
And who "invents" a clock anyway? It's sort of already-done. I mean, 50 years ago kids were putting together AM radios with electronic kits. At least that's sort-of interesting. It picks up signals from a 1000 miles away--cool! I mean, a clock? Why not invent an inclined plane next?
Oh, well. The media needs to push its narrative.
Clocks use a variety of circuit blocks - you need something to keep time; you need something to display that time; you can add other features.
With just "keep time" and "display time" you still have a variety of different methods. You can count mains frequency; you can use crystals and dividers. Displays can be 7 segment LEDs or LCDs or binary or analogue motors. Each require different approaches.
Even if it's just a shop-bought off the shelf kit the student learns a bit of component identification and handling and some soldering skills.
You would think these teachers would appreciate all the help they can get to earn some distinction in Sciences.
http://ritter.tea.state.tx.us/perfreport/account/2015/static...
https://twitter.com/MacReads/status/643784222394552320/photo...
Also, it was a pencil case, this one specifically: http://i.imgur.com/1SZH7JM.jpg
Doesn't exactly scream "dangerous bomb", does it?
Regardless of what someone looks like or what their name is, if you see them at a school with a device like this and it's beeping, I think it's reasonable to call the police. Allow them to come and have someone with expertise ensure that it isn't a bomb and determine the student's intention. Hopefully the police that arrive do their job well - with diligence, compassion, professionalism, and without animosity or bias.
Police were called, he was detained and questioned, and then released without charges [2]. It's a tragedy that we see bombings and shootings in schools - but we do see them, and far too often. These are the times we live in. So how should this have been handled?
Hopefully Ahmed doesn't lose any passion for science or electronics because of this afternoon, but I think if people handle the situation with rational thought rather than instigation, then he will have a much better chance at that.
1. http://www.wired.com/2015/09/heres-bomb-clock-got-ahmed-moha... 2. http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/09/16...
But I was white, so unlikely to get arrested/expelled.
I'll report back if she ends up in prison. It's not Texas, but Indiana isn't much brighter unfortunately.
(Thankfully the school is more hippy than dippy, and the teachers are aware and excited about the project).
Regardless of what someone looks like or what their name is, if they did not do anything wrong and is 14 years old, I think it's reasonable to expect them not being handcuffed and parade out of school in front of their peers. It's hard to take in good faith that the police have done their job well - with diligence, compassion, professionalism, and without animosity or bias.
Police were called, kid were arrested, detained massively erroneously, interrogated without the present of an attorney [0], and potentially having his life turned upside down, or side way (for better or worse). It's a tragedy that we see people without understanding of Bayesian statistics (or frequentist, for that matter) - but we do see them, and far too often. These are the times we live in. So how should this have been handled?
Hopefully some will learn that reasonable and probable cause needs to have some basis in certain priori, and that opportunity cost and the boy who cries wolf are really and very harmful issue. I think if people handle the situation with rational thought rather than instigation, and understand that P(massacre | kids = 14 years old in the US) is some number that probably is smaller than IEEE floating point error, then everyone will be better off for that.
[0]: http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/16/us/texas-student-ahmed-muslim-...
> Hopefully some will learn that reasonable and probable cause needs to have some basis in certain priori, and that opportunity cost and the boy who cries wolf are really and very harmful issue.
I put the security of a school full of other kids above the 'opportunity cost' of being questioned by police. I'm guessing many other people would as well - especially the parents of the other kids at the school.
> understand that P(massacre | kids = 14 years old in the US) is some number that probably is smaller than IEEE floating point error, then everyone will be better off for that.
Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Just because it doesn't happen in the US often, doesn't mean it won't. 14 years old are involved in violence all over the world, especially in bombing incidents.
I don't. All sorts of electronic devices beep. A bomb requires some kind of explosive and that suitcase looks empty apart from some electronics. Giving people a pass on assuming random electronics they don't understand is a bomb does not make us safer.
> It's a tragedy that we see bombings and shootings in schools - but we do see them, and far too often.
School shootings are far more common in the US than I'd like, but still fairly uncommon. School bombings on the other hand are incredibly rare. I can find only two in my lifetime. One in 2009 had no casualties. The other was the Columbine shooting which was quite deadly, but as best I can tell the deaths were all the result of gunfire rather than the bombs.
Or...you know, ask them about it. A bomber wouldn't carry a Hollywood-looking bomb in a Hollywood-looking secret agent suitcase. They'd conceal it in their backpack, which is just like the other thousands of backpacks in the school.
Calling the police is not an appropriate first response to this.
And if they truly believed it was a dangerous bomb, was the school evacuated?
> Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Just because it doesn't happen in the US often, doesn't mean it won't. 14 years old are involved in violence all over the world, especially in bombing incidents.
This is not even wrong, and it's terrifying if politicians would be thinking the same way as you does here. There is no guarantee EVER that anything will, or will not happen. But due to the limited resources and capability that we human have, we have to act and behave rationally based on the probability that something will happen. A scenario that comes from an unfounded basis and human imagination can not be treated with the same weight as a scenario that has some more reasonable chance to happen (based on past performance or what not). And note that P(something) indicate the probability that something can happen (or your belief of something to happen, in Bayesian interpretation), it has nothing to do with past performance/ events. The past changes your belief of P, but probability is predicting the future.
People in certain area of the world are involved in violence all year round, having bombed dropped on their roof, their hometown decimated. Are you preparing for that scenario to happen to you in the US in the present? Why or why not?
EDIT: A picture of the actual device is here.
http://www.wfaa.com/story/news/local/dallas-county/2015/09/1... https://archive.is/Q0OLb
http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/10BF6/production/...
The engineering teacher may have advised the student to bring the device to school but to not pull it out in any other class. This could have been done to avoid distracting other students or attracting unwanted attention from other teachers. This seems like a straight forward request that may have been taken out of context. I have not seen a quote that uses the word "hide", which really changes the connotation of the statement. I highly doubt the engineering teacher thought specifically that the device could be seen as a bomb.
the teacher recommended he hide it from the rest of the staff.
Perhaps he did and was shot down. I don't know but the details as shared stuck out to me.
> “We have no information that he claimed it was a bomb,” Mr. McLellan said. “He kept maintaining it was a clock, but there was no broader explanation."
Creative people don't need to have a good reason to make something. They create things because there is joy and satisfaction in creating things. It's a shame Mr. McLellan had such a boring childhood.
It's a clock, you know, for telling the time, because if I made a sundial and brought it in, it wouldn't work because of the walls and roof.
I couldn't find anything in there prohibiting a clock or other non-communication related electronic devices. I didn't read every word so maybe I missed something.
I did find the following under the prohibited items section: "Any articles not generally considered to be weapons, including school supplies, when the principal or designee determines that a danger exists."
But that would seem to create a dilemma in this situation. If it was a bomb it wouldn't be covered by that stipulation, but if it was a clock then no reasonable person could consider it to be dangerous.
If we're being charitable we could assume the principled believed it was a bomb at the time, in which case it would have been covered by other stipulations in the code. But if that is the case then I would think the school should have been evacuated. I don't know if that happened or not.
Also, good lord, I don't ever remember having to sign something like that document (it's a 44 page document that reads like a contract) when I was in school. Is it even legally binding to have a minor sign that?
Welcome to Earth, kid. These will be your fellow human beings. Enjoy your stay.
I really, really hope someone will pick this up and offer that kid some kind of internship somewhere, if only to keep his moral and spirit up.
He not only showed it around, but plugged it in during English class where it made beeping noises. Do you expect the English teacher should need to "verify" a box of wires and circuits? Who would she verify it with if the kid plays aloof when asked of its purpose?
Just because "authorities apprehend 14yo Muslim kid for home-made clock" doesn't mean you need to start making accusations of bigotry, ignorance and cowardice.
The accusations are justified. Your apologetics are misguided.
But I don't see how you can say there's no grounds to make accusations of ignorance and cowardice. Being unaware of what a bomb looks like is clearly ignorance, and being so terrified that you get an innocent kid arrested for it is clearly cowardice.
The fact that they continued to play games and arrest the kid is not for "safety". It's clear they arrested him because of racism.
That statement reeks of a story made up after the fact. You can imagine them sitting around their police station after they let the kid go.
Police A: "Oh shit, this kid was just bringing in a clock to show his engineering teacher. There are several witnesses who heard him tell us it was just a clock. And now everyone in the world is watching. We're fucked."
Police B: "Nothing's fucked, bro. Be cool. Think. Think. Wait, he never told us whhhhy he brought the clock to school."
Police A: "Why does that matter? he told us it was just a clock and it is just a clock! Did we even ask why he brought it?"
Police B: "I didnt ask why. Did you? Even if you didnt, its still somethin' you could say."
Police A: "That is so stupid."
Police B: "Still, you know... it is somethin' you could say."
Police A: "That is so stupid. You are stupid. And, we are fucked!"
...later at press conference
clears throat
Police A: "...he told us it was a clock buuuuut, he never told us whhhhy he brought the clock..."
glances over at Police B who has the stupidest grin on his face
Not real bombs, though. Richard Marcinko, the founder of Seal Team Six, once wrote that he'd blown up a lot of things in his career and he'd never seen a count down timer with glowing numbers.
[1] http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-make-a-digital-clock-... [2] https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10930
Either way, congrats to Mohamed for being curious about how things work, shame on his teachers for not doing due diligence (maybe asking the electronics teacher to take a look before calling the police?), and I wish there were more information available about exactly what Mohamed had done, because I find that to be the interesting part of the story.
Not that the response was appropriate, but I'm pretty sure that if I'd taken a similarly looking device into my very WASP-y suburban school, even though I'm white as a sheet, my school administration would have had a similar response. People are really paranoid these days, and right or wrong, we all have to deal with it.
Because they go viral, there is a lot of talk about them, which "confirms" even further that this is a Big Problem, and that it is caused by What I've Been Saying All Along.
In reality this is one single idiotic decision by some local knuckleheads. As a social science study, it has a sample size of 1 and a huge selection bias. The problems you think it "shows" may well be real, but retelling this anecdote does not prove that.
This case put me off living in the USA.
Many of the hacks I did as a child could have gotten me in jail today. Something 'silly' or 'funny' becomes dangerous/offensive/harassment; creativity, ingenuity and imagination are turned into dullness, self-hatred and nihilism.
These sorts of overreactions are very uncommon. That isn't to say these sorts of zero tolerance, jail what you don't understand, actions shouldn't be strongly condemned.
But there are probably hundreds of thousands of kids who are into tinkering and hacking who haven't ever been bothered.
The combination of zero tolerance with police stationed in schools means many children end up with criminal records for very minor events.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jan/09/texas-police-sc...
> In 2010, the police gave close to 300,000 "Class C misdemeanour" tickets to children as young as six in Texas for offences in and out of school, which result in fines, community service and even prison time
That feels pretty common. It doesn't feel rare.
It's known as the School to Prison Pipeline: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School-to-prison_pipeline
"Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It's what makes America great."
Don't hold your breath.
http://frontburner.dmagazine.com/2015/03/20/anti-muslim-sent...
One day in college, a friend and I decided to pack a plastic bottle with dry ice and hot water. In our hung over state, we thought this would be fun to watch. I was in my apartment. It took all of five seconds to realize that I couldn't rip apart the bottle. So, if the force of this explosion was sufficient to do so, it was probably really fucking dangerous. I figured it was too late to take the cap off -- the bottle was already making weird sounds. So, I threw it in the bathroom tub, and shut the door. Two minutes went by, and I felt momentarily foolish. Almost as I thought "nothing is going to happen," it exploded. The force knocked my friend to the ground. Granted she was tiny, and it was partly from fear, but I felt the shock wave rattle my bones.
I lived in the more expensive apartment building on campus. No one even came to say, "what's going on." If they did, they would have seen the bent metal of the tub's faucet.
And, that was accidentally but very literally a bomb.
And even pre-9/11 I'm still not sure what the legal status of that is. Since it was designed to be a "bomb," even if it is inert, several laws do cover that.
Essentially as soon as you describe a pile of distinct legal parts as a "bomb" you've now got a class of controlled weapon even if it has no explosive components.
Source? If I describe a chicken finger as a gun, is that also a controlled weapon?
But this sort insane, zero tolerance of total normal behavior is much more limited.
I agree we shouldn't be using the criminal system of kids who bring pot to school or who get into fights. But it's a different issue than a kid getting arrested for being a hacker.
it's a different issue than a kid getting arrested for being a hacker.
That is to say, I agree with not using the criminal system for those relatively minor excursions, but at the same time I do not see how it is a different problem.
http://www.wnd.com/2015/03/mayor-wont-back-down-from-muslim-...
No need to react so much in the other direction either, making this kid an ambassador of "freedom to pack electronics in a case and bring it to school" or whatever.
He made an error of judgement going against his teacher's advice, and a ton of bricks came down on his head way too hard. Hopefully everyone can learn something from this.
But you can't deny that "radicalization of young Muslims" isn't a thing these days. No point of covering your ears and insisting everyone wants to get along.
Radicalization of young Muslims is among the reasons why acts based on bias against young Muslims by authority figures in society is especially problematic, as those acts contribute rather directly to such radicalization, and directly serve the propaganda interests of those actively seeking such radicalization.
This would be problematic if radicalization of young Muslims wasn't a particular concern, but it doesn't become less problematic because such radicalization is a real thing, it becomes more.
The point I was making about young Muslims - I wish it weren't true. But it is true.
Arresting 14yo kids isn't a solution, but neither is patronizingly inviting him and his suitcase clock to the white house.
I'd love watch the video of him checking into whitehouse security with his suitcase clock...
http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/10BF6/production/...
Why should we not make this kid an ambassador of "freedom to pack electronics in a case and bring it to school"? That sounds like a pretty good freedom, and one worth fighting for. Kids should feel free to bring their (non-dangerous, no need to bring in guns or actual bombs or whatever) interests to school to share them. You might even broaden the horizons of some fellow students (and who knows, maybe even a teacher or two).
I tried to provide a balance point to this discussion, mainly due to the fact that packing the clock into the suitcase wasn't smart (even for a 14yo).
Google 'suitcase bomb' and you'll get endless results. Google 'Arduino enclosure bomb" and you won't get much.
I'm not convinced the kid didn't know it was looking like something from a movie, and I think he was aiming for that look, but he won't admit it. Why do I think this? Because I was 14 once too, and studied electronics just like him. Something that looked like a Suitcase bomb is something I'd want to show my friends.
His clock was mains powered too. Awful design even for a 14yo.
"I'd love watch the video of him checking into whitehouse security with his suitcase clock..."
It will probably be quite boring, because unlike paranoid local Texas policemen, the Secret Service knows what a bomb actually looks like.
I don't feel strongly about this other than not having the story occupy more than one spot on the front page, so if people have strong objections otherwise, we can adjust.
- 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 (that I can't find right now) where the administration said they would have been ok with cancer research folding@home rather than searching for aliens with seti@home. This combined with the backpedaling of "oh actually he was a bad employee, stole things, and cost the school millions in extra in electricity costs!" makes me believe that they just wanted to use it as an excuse to fire him and make the position open for a friend/relative. [2].
- Or an honor roll student suspended for buying candy from another student [3]. His statuses were only restored after it caught media attention.
I would go into my rant about the education system but you should just watch this video [4]
[1] http://linuxlock.blogspot.com/2008/12/linux-stop-holding-our...
[2] https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/forum_thread.php?id=5169
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20080313141623/http://edition.cn...
If these were typical desktop computers, the CPU working at 100% can use some 50 W more than the one staying idle. 5000 computers at 100 % CPU produce then the load of 250 KW, resulting in 6 MWh per day which at 10 cents per KWh costs 600 USD per day, or 220000 USD per year. Finally, 9 years that he did it make almost 2 million dollars (!) for electricity that he managed to spend.
Thousands maybe - definitely not millions as they are claiming. From what I read it was setup to calculate through the screensaver. For most of the day - the computer will be in use and I would imagine/hope that they turn them off when they leave.
I have no comment for that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School...
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 forums) you'd be shouted down.
The reality is that sysadmin and helpdesk staff shouldn't have this kind of power. If they want to run these types of things on their employers hardware they need to get permission.
You occasionally hear about this nowadays with Litecoin and Bitcoin mining, but it seems we've learned our lesson here. Power doesn't grow on trees. There are real costs and environmental effects here to seriously consider. This attitude of "fuck you, I understand computers and you don't" really needs to go the way the way of the dodo. Real professionals don't act this way. Also, comparing this guy to a 14 year old who was pulled out of his class and handcuffed for making a clock is fairly weak sauce.
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] http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/may0...
[2] http://www.ipl.org/div/stateknow/popchart.html
(edit) More recent funding figures, from 2013: http://www.governing.com/gov-data/education-data/state-educa...
We under value in society
1) Education (We make fun of smart people who lack social graces)
2) Science (Scoff at all science and under fund Space Programs)
I ran for local School Board in my city. We are a school district with over 90% qualify for free lunch and extreme poverty. Parents pick Charter School over Public Schools (But Charter Schools under perform on test scores and under pay teachers compared to Public Schools (Money goes to the top in Charter which gets 100% of the child's local funding)) My city per student was the state's lowest at $5,700. The next county over some districts were paying over $28,000 per student. My state has the greatest disparity between haves and have nots.
Our school board loves to point to Teacher Union and Teacher Pensions as the problem. How about just give us the money. We need a change in priorities and not freak out about taxes for education. Sadly I don't see this changing and I don't think funding is the number one factor for educational success but it is an easy thing to measure.
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."
I used to think on these lines too. After talking to two teachers in different districts, they both said the same things. More money is fine, but it usually goes to Administration.
The two teachers I knew, and talked to, lived and taught in California. They were both tenured. I talked to them a decade ago. They were both making, I belive 150k a year. At the time, they weren't complaining about wages. In fact, they had no complaints. Maybe, they just got lucky? I don't think money is the answer?
(Actually, I just remembered--my ex'es mother-inlaw was a school teacher, and she told me countless times the money always goes to bloated Administration. I don't know why I just remembered her? She taught high school back east.)
A lot schools/districts that are better spend less money per student than schools that are worse. You should ask David Tarver about it.
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.
The incentives are completely upside down when one's entirely avoidable screwups are used as an excuse to ask for more money. That's how we get the current state of public education and, frankly, most levels of government in the United States: hideously expensive bureaucracies run by ignorant jerks for their own benefit.
Under what circumstances would you consider that public schools are a failure and that we should try another approach?
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, growing pains, and abuse associated with the system that results should be a foregone conclusion.
The answer isn't to give up on the school system or assume bad intentions by administrators, curriculum developers, or legislators. The only thing that can come of that is an even more broken school system.
However the families most harmed by public school policies are precisely the people who can't afford to unschool or homeschool which is perhaps the saddest part of all of this.
[edit]: spelling
> 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...
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/03/04/us/ohio-boy-suspended-fing...
My point being, comparing what this kid is going through -- pure racist overreaction -- to a teacher installing seti@home on school computers without permission, isn't a great comparison.
From a previous news article I've read (not linked) - he claimed the previous system administrator told him to do it and he continued following their instructions. Again this has to have some other side to it - because if someone told me to do that and I googled what it was I would definitely question it and bring it to the administration and let them decide what to do (which some reports claim he had permission from previous administration). Originally they reported firing him because of running seti@home - but then they changed their story quickly afterwards.
> My point being, comparing what this kid is going through -- pure racist overreaction -- to a teacher installing seti@home on school computers without permission, isn't a great comparison.
It's a great compare because it shows how out of touch with reality school administration is. Yeah it's two completely different cases - but if common sense was introduced to both then we wouldn't be here discussing it. And this wasn't a teacher - it was a system administrator that was running it for several years. I find it hard to believe that if it truly was using that much more electricity that someone who does the budget for the school didn't catch it right away.
Unfortunately this is not a lack of intelligence, which in fact it was, but instead it is a Christian right society that fears everything and anything.
The USA has become a country that is now scared of it's own shadow.
The problem started when someone with a Muslim sounding name brought something clicking to the school and naturally everyone though it was Muslim terrorist with a bomb.
Luckily it was not a bunch disenfranchised white youths, carrying hand guns, machine guns and grenades as they would have walked straight through the security check, because they had the correct skin color.
Here is a simple lesson for the people of the USA. Clocks don't kill guns kill.
I wish I could reach out to the boy and say, "Hey, it gets way better. Later on you can surround yourself with people who not only understand but respect you. You get to spend all day building cool stuff, and you actually get paid very well to do so."
It is seriously disturbing.
I am reminded of stories of kids opening a command prompt and being accussed of "hacking", only this is a far more extreme case.
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 he never took a clock he'd built into school.
- Boys carrying pocket knives/hunting knives.
- Boys with firearms in their cars/trucks so they could go hunting after school.
- Access to a wide variety of chemicals in chemistry class.
- Access to a wide variety of electrical and electronic components in physics class.
- Access to a wide variety of power and machine tools in industrial arts/vocational classes.
Every incident like this is another damning victory for those who sought to change our way of life. They may not have taken us back to the stone-age but they sure as hell took away a lot of the freedoms we had.
Maybe this kid WAS singled out because he had brown skin, but school administrators were overreacting to stupid shit decades ago, in ways that obviously weren't connected to "racism."
According to TEX. FAM. CODE §51.095 [1]:
In order for a custodial written statement to be admissible, the following sequence of events must occur: 1) the officer must take the child to a magistrate; 2) the magistrate must then inform the child of his rights to remain silent, to have an attorney appointed and present during questioning and to terminate the interview at any time; 3) the child must knowingly, intelligently and voluntarily waive his rights; 4) the officer may then take a statement from the child; and 5) upon completion of the statement, the child shall be taken before the magistrate again and sign the statement in the presence of the magistrate (and outside the presence of the officer), who will then certify the statement.
This makes me sick that this kid was seemingly wrongfully interrogated. Sad to see that 'doing science while brown' results in him being treated as a second class citizen.
[1]http://www.tmcec.com/public/files/File/Course%20Materials/FY...
Everybody who's played with electronics knows that stuff is brittle and needs to be protected carefully. One wire coming loose renders your entire work obsolete and unlike software, there's no debugger to tell you where you potentially screwed up...
Racial profiling and ignorance at it's finest.
What, clocks? Or the NASA t-shirt he was wearing? (https://i.imgur.com/PMgDR7m.jpg)
[1] https://www.quora.com/Why-do-American-police-always-handcuff...
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 was very forcibly questioned about why I was flying with these things.
What struck me was that the larger airports (DTW and O'Hare) couldn't have cared less, but this 5-gate airport in IA freaked out that somebody flying with three laptops in his carryon would also have a bag of tools and equipment.
The best part out of all of this was after everything was cleared up, I asked the head TSA person what I should do in the future to prevent getting searched and interrogated. His answer was "just open your bag and show the luggage agent what is in it." I still don't understand how that would help - I envision that the conversation would go something like "Hi, these look like pipe bombs. They aren't. You can trust me." and I would immediately be detained.
(Edited for formatting)
"He’s vowed never to take an invention to school again.” what a place of learning!
I really doubt that this clock looked even remotely like any of the industrially made ready-to-use explosives.
Sometimes I can't help feeling like some people should be forcibly removed from the gene pool.
The hoax bomb charge that they are still considering doesn't make sense to me. As someone who has seen a lot of improvised explosive devices[0] "hoax" means something very specific. I occasionally encountered hoax devices which were deliberately placed to monitor our response. Finding one meant you could be sure you were on camera. Here the police seem to use "hoax" to mean someone got scared of an empty cardboard box, or in this case a cool electronics project. The difference is intent just like selling oregeno or baby powder can get you in trouble for selling drugs if you are portraying it that way. Having something suspicious means it should be investigated, but it shouldn't be a crime unless it is intentionally portrayed as an illegal object.
[0] Roughly 100 in Baghdad in 2005.
It's the same crap they pull at the airport where you must throw out your bottled water; and then their solution is to toss this bottle, which was classified a minute ago as a serious threat, into a pile of other unverified "threats" in the middle of a densely-populated area of the airport. How this kind of thing has gone YEARS without any serious backslash is amazing to me.
It is so out of hand. While certainly bad things have happened and could happen, statistically modern society is pretty safe and we all have to stop being so damn scared of every little thing.
But officers still did not believe Ahmed was giving them the whole story.
“We have no information that he claimed it was a bomb,” Mr. McLellan said. “He kept maintaining it was a clock, but there was no broader explanation.
“It could reasonably be mistaken as a device if left in a bathroom or under a car. The concern was, what was this thing built for? Do we take him into custody?”
Duh, the thing tells the time. And are they saying that if I don't explain why I made something it can be presumed to be a bomb? (especially given "and the police have no reason to think it was dangerous.")
Did it really need a broader explanation? It's a clock.
I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't make it through high school today.
But I think the same thing would've happened if I had brought such a device to school - having been a super dark dressed goth in school, the fear would've been it's a bomb.
Schools are generally very very extra worried about everything these days, suspending him was unnecessary but with it only being three days I don't see it being a terrible thing. The record will get set straight.
So then this just falls back to being unfortunate racial profiling.
http://www.irvingisd.net/site/default.aspx?PageType=3&Domain...
God forbid that an officer drops his walkie talkie and discovers that IT TOO IS A POTENTIAL BOMB! I mean, it has wires and circuits...
The ignorance here is astounding. I suppose he's lucky they didn't also try him as a warlock for summoning electricity from a magical box.
> talk with your child about the Student Code of Conduact and specifically not bringing items to school that are prohibited
Since when can you not bring a clock to school?
But no they had to go and dig in. Which makes this really wrong on their part. I hate it when organizations take a stance around stupidity.
Sending your high IQ kids to school with adults who are batting 85 should be regarded as parental malpractice. And the notion that people defend public schools and tell us taxpayers they just "need more money!1!!1" flies in the face of reason and the facts (per pupil spending since the 60s has tripled with no change in test scores).[2]
Public schools suck by their very nature as state-controlled entities. If education is so important (especially today), why do we allow our kids to be taught and schools administered by the equivalents of DMV employees? Of course the poorest kids with broken families suffer the most.
And what happens when charter schools actually succeed? The Teachers Union is there to try and shut them down, with the help of sympathetic politicians (see NYC and de Blasio)[3]
[0] http://www.roanoke.com/news/columns_and_blogs/columns/dan_ca... [1] http://wjla.com/news/local/family-of-md-boy-suspended-for-po... [2] http://www.politifact.com/virginia/statements/2015/mar/02/da... [3] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/16/nyregion/success-academy-c...
But why did it need to lead to arrest, hand cuffs, finger printing after an interview and a casual examination of the device clearly demonstrated it was a clock (there was an engineering teacher who could easily collaborate)? It was an outright excessive reaction to further compound what was a regrettable mistake.
Why shouldn't he make his own clock?! Why does there need to be a 'broader explanation'? How can one develop an interest in anything if you must first provide an adequate explanation? sigh
Why does anyone do anything that isn't obviously beneficial?
Why climb K2? Why spend years writing a book only a handful will read? Why paint? Why make free software? Why modify a car?
Everything about this damn incident is making me angry
NB I totally agree it would be a douche move to charge this kid with some BS, but investigating unusual behavior is much more understandable.
Can we make a go found me for getting him into a private school?
He's also been invited to the White House afaik. That should be a confidence booster :)
He's on twitter.
What worried me is where is the engineering teacher he first showed the clock to? He or she could've clarified everything in 5 seconds.
And why would you have to be an engineering teacher to presume innocence here? This is a school; anyone involved should have been able to clarify everything in 5 seconds, even without the child explaining himself.
Welcome to 'murrica, kid. You better learn to censor yourself.
Who knows what kind of subversive ideas he might come up with if he's allowed to continue to think for himself.
Happened to me when I was a kid. Opened a DOS prompt. Was labelled a dangerous mind.
It may also be a Southern thing though.
There's no relative scarcity of ignorant and authoritarian schoolteachers, but consequences are likely to be confined to school, not involve law enforcement, and parents and pupils are more likely to knuckle down rather than fight or go to the press.
So, taking "such behaviour" much more broadly than this specific incident (and of course granting that Europe is a big and diverse place) - if a kid is found hacking school networks, or distributing a satirical magazine, or bringing possibly inappropriate or dangerous items to school, the schools are just as likely to crack down (even if it infringes the pupil's legal rights) but the matter is likely to end there without ruining the pupil's education. Or making the school administration change its behaviour.
Personally I think the situation as I have described it is favourable. Ideally schools wouldn't be administered by petty tyrants, but as long as everyone finishes their education with a blank slate it's fine. Keeping the police away from schools as much as possible would be a good start.
I see a few possible causes:
– 9/11 was a much bigger attack than anything that happened on European soil
– there is a more influential lobby for militarisation/criminalisation in the US
– Americans are more fearful
– America is more democratic. As such, the unfounded fears of parts of the population (on both sides of the Atlantic) are less likely to be buffered by the more rational thinking of experts
and, my favourite:
– Americans love excitement and violence & it is amplified by the media. Nothing better than a bomb scare on FOX.
Do you have any sources to back up that claim?
It this really their line of thinking? Or did you just deduce this from their actions, i.e. that they seem to think that way?
"Irving police might still charge Ahmed with making a "hoax bomb." Police spokesperson James McLellan said Ahmed "kept maintaining it was a clock" when he was brought in for interrogation, but that he offered "no broader explanation.""
Somewhat related, for a little sense of perspective. I studied E/E in Northern Ireland in the early 90's. I was regularly stopped by armed British Soldiers and searched. Invariably I have some half finished project in my bag. Could easily be passed off as bomb material. All it took was a simple explanation and I was on my way in 5 minutes.
This was a place where actual bombs were being set off on a weekly basis. But, the 'keep calm and carry on' mentality is what persevered. The US seems like it's becoming more of a Police State than N.I. ever was.
One avenue is to focus on those victims that happen to be a racial minority, and force the authorities to treat members of that minority group with kid gloves. This literally forces all of us to keep race and other divisive demographics at the forefront of our consciousness whenever we deal with other people. That's not a good strategy to reach of goal of everyone being blind to race.
Another avenue is to focus on the powers that are being wielded unjustly. By taking away to power to cause such damage, or at least imposing accountability when it's misused, we can force those with power to rein in their abusive behavior to all. This latter seems the winning strategy to me.
I remember a teacher seeing me type "BitchX" into a terminal and freaking out, he apparently thought I was doing something obscene in my terminal window..
It's a Texas thing not a US, or that what I hope the case to be.
Sign up to be notified when some plans are made: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1zCtwhsEh_zB4PkuwlgAVZRTFV4I...
Also, if/when he considers higher education I'm sure there are plenty of alumni who could consider opening doors for him.
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?
https://twitter.com/make/status/644219347079143425
and also an offer from somebody at NASA to come see how they drive the Opportunity rover:
https://twitter.com/mikeseibert/status/644152049525899265
Stuff like this somewhat restores my faith in humanity. At least it shows we're not all complete assholes, all of the time.
If anybody else is in a hackerspace, let me encourage you to try and get your group involved, and do something as a group. Better yet, do it and send out a press release and announce it to the world.
But there are probably very many young people like him who could also do with a bit of mentoring, a bit of tutorship, some tools and equipment. It'd be nice if the publicity from Ahmed's case could be used to provide more support to a wide range of people.
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.
However the 60s did have their share of domestic terrorism- leftwing anarchist protesting the war or big government. They deployed bombs.
Jobs didn't look stereotypically middle eastern.
That is so true. Personal I look very very stereotypically Scots/Irish but I also have a lot of Native American ancestry. As sad as it makes me to say I've had a far easier path in live than my cousins who were undeniably Native but from an extremely similar background and level of income growing up, in a 10 mile radius of each other. I was certainly treated differently then them.
The results typically show that lighter-skinned people are viewed more positively than darker-skinned people, even when the person providing the opinions is a darker-skinned person.
This can be trivially verified by testing the hypothesis, "In the relationship triangle, the protagonist will always choose the lighter-skinned person in the end," against all existing Tyler Perry movies.
And that's just passive cultural enforcement. I'm sure that the regular two-minutes hate on that one photo of Osama bin Laden as the quintessential, stereotypical terrorist mastermind did no favors to anyone sharing similar facial features.
This shows your lack of knowledge of the Middle-East. People in Syria/Lebanon look extremely different from the people in Saudi Arabia. They just happen to speak the same language (heck the accent is quite different too)
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?
It's just that the Woz vastly outnerded most people of his generation and they managed to meet.
I suspect going to look back on those awkward handcuffed minutes answering stupid questions in a few years' time and think "bringing that clock to school was the best mistake I ever made"
because it's completely irrelevant to what Jobs accomplished. It always seems to be the people implying that other are people racist who bring up his heritage.
Those guys founded Samsung, too? I had no idea. I thought they just founded Apple.
The violation of his rights was the insane arrest when clearly no law was violated.
Excellent observation. It's really about people conditioned to follow scripts.
These people were missing the "de-escalation script" in which a teacher laughs, puts their hand on their forehead and says,
"Wow, That scared the shit out of me for a minute there. Now let's show you how to make a tidy wooden box for your amazing clock project."That's pretty simple -- their "authority" depends on never, ever, admitting that they were wrong.
I've also made my share of brittle programming projects where one errant line could act like a "loose wire" and take down everything.
It should have never, however, escalated as far as it did. You're going to handcuff a kid who is cooperating and trying to explain what this thing he built is? Give me a break.
But worse still they're still not backing down. It's suspension of all logic and reasoning. They should have shown the clock to his engineering teacher and resolved the issue in minutes.
"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 teacher what it was, according to an account in The Dallas Morning News."
Also, asking doesn't need to get the police involved: "Hey, what is this?" "Oh it's a clock I built" 'Why'd you bring it to school?" "Cuz I'm proud of it and wanted to show you"
If there was still doubt, ok, find someone who knows something about it (there's gotta be a tinkerer SOMEWHERE in the school district) and ask them to take a look. Maybe couch it as "Why don't we show it to X, I think they'd get a kick out of it?"
But arresting a 14 yr old tinkerer for a clock? Whatever happened to having sane reasonable conversations?
Anecdotally; I was wiring together simple switches, electric motors, and solar panels in and out of the classroom in elementary school in the mid 90s. I was programming timers and games in middle school by the late 90s.
We all assumed that because of my age and appearance it wouldn't be suspicious.
Wrong! I was stopped and questioned for an hour before being allowed to board.
I was questioned by each of the TSA, the local sheriff, and the plane's pilot and an airline rep. Three different interrogations all asking the same questions just to determine if I was going to be allowed to fly.
I'm surprised they don't just mandate the spectrogram swab on every piece of electronics that comes through, consumer or custom.
On the other hand, I once had an airport security agent delay me because I had a transparent purple Game Boy Color in my carry-on. He (an older Filipino gentleman) seemed genuinely confused about what it was. It was pre-9/11, coincidentally also in Texas.
It reminds me of the Aqua Teen bomb scare back in 2007 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Boston_bomb_scare
http://boingboing.net/2007/09/21/mit-student-arrested.html http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2008/06/03/mit_stu...
I'm pretty sure the apology was for a more lenient sentence.
Anyone with half a brain would understand that you can't just magically make circuitry explode. That's a whole new level of ignorance, they teach this stuff in elementary school for gods sake.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Boston_bomb_scare
Incidentally, I was in Shenzhen (China) a short while ago, and signs like those were everywhere, and the sight of bare electronics not uncommon; but given that it's a huge centre of electronics manufacturing, I'd guess that almost everyone is accustomed to seeing such things.
"Student arrested for bringing backpack to school"
EDIT: Thanks Mike, that's a great improvement!
It's one of those weird game theory things. Your goal is to prevent dangerous liquids from being brought onto planes, but you can't reasonably tell them apart from other liquids, so you ban all liquids. Because it's banned, you can be reasonably sure that nobody is going to try to bring dangerous liquids through security in the first place. (Not because people always obey bans, but just because they know it'll be confiscated.) So you can be confident that all the confiscated liquids are not dangerous, and it's safe to just throw them in a bin. Yet you still need to confiscate them if you want to keep people from bringing the dangerous materials through.
If someone wants to blow up a security line, there are much better ways to do it than allowing their liquid explosive to be confiscated, so you can be pretty confident that nobody is going to attack the system that way either.
The decision to throw all liquids into a bin has created a danger that would not have existed otherwise, which means the confiscations have lowered security.
And collectively, unnecessary "security" measures slow down security lines, increasing the probability that more people will be in them and increasing the temptation to target security lines at all. The real goal should be to move people through so efficiently that there is barely a "line" to target in the first place, much less a massive crowd.
Not but you can severely punish idiocy, so that it doesn't dare act that way again (and I mean the idiocy of the police in the story, or the people having your daughter sign BS)..
But signing something? That's just really stupid. It's not enforceable and not even understandable.
No, it doesn't. If anything, the opposite (if the child is a teenager). If it's 4 it's just stupid.
Me: "Scribble something on this line."
Kid: scribbles
Me: "Here's your stupid form."
How would that get my kid "invested in complying" ?
Oh no. A device!?
Okay, so charge him with a hoax bomb if he does that, but he didn't so what's the deal?
What you just did is the deal.
What do I mean? You just said that had he left the device in a bathroom it would be more reasonable to charge him with the crime. They shifted the debate over and you followed with it. Instead of arguing if a kid should be charged over leaving a clock in the bathroom, you've now given them that ground and have moved on to debating charging them for having a clock at all.
Of course, on an individual level this doesn't do much. But they are pulling this sort of trick on the whole of society. At that scale, it is not ineffective.
But there's so much more here. He got arrested and put in juvenile detention. He was interrogated by the police without his parents being informed.
There's no excuse for this. The police involved should lose their jobs and spend some time in jail themselves. Not a lot, but perhaps a couple of days will get some of their colleagues to look up "probable cause" and "civil rights." The principal should lose his job as well, since he is clearly not mentally competent to supervise children.
This behavior happens ALL THE TIME. The police routinely will get away with what ever they can to get a conviction. The law is complicated and most people don't have a lawyer on retainer.
The police aren't your friend, and you gain NOTHING by talking to them.
Maybe in the US, but where I live, and I guess that's going to be the case in most countries, no one would ever think that this "suitcase" could be a bomb, regardless of the person's appearance. It's saddens me to see a country becoming more and more paranoid and living in fear.
As an example, we used to chase each other in school with BB-guns (here they don't have the orange marker distinguishing them from real guns). When a teacher saw us I'm sure the thought that these could be real never ever crossed their mind.
The child learns to not trust anyone and that his best intentions are twisted into punishment. I'm pretty appalled by this.
in a Texas Highschool I was sentenced to In School Suspension INDEFINITELY with my laptop confiscated for having shortcuts to directories on the network that I "shouldn't have had access to." After about a week of that I'd had enough, asked for OSS - got it, which I thought was enough but apparently wasn't. They ended up wanting to reassign me to an "alternative school" (the type with a dress code, specific hours, locked down no talking etc). I managed to get "homeschooled" for 3 months (re: no school work completed) and somehow still managed to actually graduate High School. It was the most ludicrous situation I'd ever been in for navigating a folder hierarchy in Windows.
3 days is lovely.
- three day suspension for bringing hoax bomb to school
- arrest record, juvenile detention, child protective services called
And that's it. There's no "and then the magical internet outrage fairy came in and fixed everything".
The amount of stupidity perpetuated by these administrators and the police is astounding. Never underestimate the poor taste of public authority. Most of their reasons tend to be 'We needed to lay down the law first to assert dominance. That's how we could then subvert the broader scope of his actions. Then we teach him about sacrifice, plea-bargaining. And like a good boy, he says sorry, gets his slap on the wrist, and everybody wins because he learns to respect authority, and be a good little automaton Johnnyboy!"
Unless your skin is the wrong colour because then your hard work is seen as suspicious!
http://www.businessinsider.com/researcher-bitcoin-supercompu...
Overhear both the Head and It guy responsible would have been fired and be on the "not allowed to work with kids and vulnerable people" list for the rest of their lives. They would have been lucky not to get prosecuted for child porn as well
Tragedy of the Commons and all that. Maybe it's best for society if we don't give up on the public school system, but for my kid, today, given the options I have, is sending them there the best option? Rarely is the answer yes.
I mean, I can't imagine what kind of monster automatically jumps to bomb when a kid makes a clock. Is that how we want to live, constantly being suspicious of everyone different?
Not necessarily, because the more people you alienate, the more enemies you create, and the more genuine threats you will face.
I checked twice before crossing the road and a nearby cop car spun around and stopped me saying I had done a double-take when I saw them and they needed to search me.
Turns out the client I was off to see was a porn magazine and I have a bunch of their product in my bag. The nice police officer didn't even blink when she saw that. Perhaps everyone i the City is carrying around lots of porn with them in the middle of the day?
They need to show intent. They cannot just show that others were in fear.
So it seems like they don't have a legitimate case, although "the ride" is often used to get guilty pleas out of otherwise innocent people (i.e. they would lock the kid up pending trial, delay trial, the parents may not be able to afford lawyer fees, so he might plead down to a lesser charge to get out even if the original charge is complete nonsense).
That is pretty standard fare for the US legal system these days. 95% plea rates, 7 minutes of public defender time on average per client, and so on and so forth.
The downside, of course, is creating the perception that Ahmed is being used as a figurehead, and making him, as somebody else said, a "political football". At 14 I doubt he wants all of that. But his story is part of a larger story, and I think we should all acknowledge that and help make that point to the rest of the world who don't realize it.
Edit:
Also, FWIW, at SplatSpace we spend a lot of our energy on exactly that - encouraging young people. We do a lot of outreach with local public schools and the various local library systems. We have done a lot of things like offering Scratch programming workshops, and electronics demos using 'squishy circuits' and taking 3D printers to "math and science night" at local schools, etc. So yeah, I totally agree with the sentiment that we (in the broadest possible sense) should do all we can to encourage and support young hackers/makers.
The plan that caused the liquids ban called for 500ml of each component.
The TSA certainly is reacting to a threat, but I'm not sure how much of an over reaction it is.
That's the problem right there. These people have let their common sense be overtaken by their sense of fear, they're so afraid they aren't thinking.
That's why going after a 9 year old or MIT student with a t-shirt[0] makes sense, because they literally aren't thinking straight because they're so convinced there is a threat around every corner (thanks mass media!).
[0] https://boingboing.net/2007/09/21/mit-student-arrested.html
Haha. No, they don't. Not anymore at least.
Some yes, but there's a lot of difference between a machine idling at 0% CPU and one fully loaded with SETI or Folding and running 100% all the time.
Would be even more worse now with deep sleep states and GPGPU, but even back then the difference between an idle and a fully loaded machine was absolutely significant.
Once those kWh are used in the CPU, they don't just disappear. They become heat.
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/414050/computer-cluster...
[0] http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2010/04/27/amd-phenom-...
My buddies do the same sort of stuff I do and make 1.5x my salary.
5,000 machines churning SETI for nine years? I'd be interested in estimates of cost.
(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 8 hours of each day the district expected to pay for them to run, so that leaves ~16 hours the district expected the machines to be asleep or off.
24 - 8 = 16 (about 66% of the 24 hour period)
So, the admin was consuming about $12.51 per machine per month the district did not expect.
This comes out to around $750,600 the sys admin potentially cost the district, for a single year. He ran this scheme for 9 years -- so...
$750,600 per year * 9 years = $6,755,400 in additional electricity costs
Keep in mind this is likely rather low, since most places in the US have a significantly higher per kWh fee than the $0.06 per kWh used in these calculations.
I'm certain that this sum alone was enough cause to terminate the sys admin.
Think about all the things the school district could have spent an extra ~$7MM+ on...
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 (presumably) paying to heat at least a few months of the year.
Edit: also if it was a public school, wouldn't they be off for about 3 months over summer ?
15 years ago, the power difference was probably smaller, maybe quite a bit smaller -- modern CPUs are better optimized for low idle power.
Also, bear in mind that PSUs do not use their full rating unless the hardware they are powering requires it. [0] Your number could easily be double what the machines actually used, if the PSU was somewhat oversized, as they typically are.
[0]: https://superuser.com/questions/106792/does-a-power-supply-d...
That's assuming they didn't use computers. Your calculation assumes that the computer uses a full 350+ watts of electricity. If it had a 350 watt PSU and was drawing that full load - it would shutdown (I've had this happen). Even then the CPU doesn't require 350 watts of power [1]. The only device that I know of that will use and designed to use a full load is a bitcoin miner.
Taking in consideration that these computers might have been left on already. I would argue that he used MAYBE an extra 50 watts of electricity [2]. So assuming $0.10/kw/hr (which is the cost of where I live) - he wasted a whopping $0.12/day or ~$50/year.
You have to take into account if the computers were already on. He didn't waste electricity because someone left their computer on - his "waste" would be electricity use that is above that of an "idle computer". It should also be pointed out that if the computer has Mcafee or some other crappy AV the CPU usage would be 100% anyways due to poor programming of the AV software (I have personally seen this many times and you don't know how many times people complain about their slow computer because the AV is using 100% of the CPU).
There is no way he wasted $7m - and even if he did and no one noticed that is part of a larger problem. Besides they only claim he wasted $1.2m - $1.6m [3] - with no evidence of how they came up with that number. That is saying he managed to waste over $100k/year (over 9 years) in equipment purchases, electricity etc - and NO ONE noticed this? I find it hard to believe that the people managing the budget were like "$100k unaccounted for this year? no big deal...". And even if it was accounted for and signed off - there should be 2 people fired - his and the guy who approved the purchase.
Even from the article:
> would find that in a middle of a lesson, the SMART Board had turned off.
This has happened to me personally on my own laptop. Not because I was mining bitcoins or running seti@home. In fact I've seen them installed and they are such POS that no instructor I know actually uses it as a SMART board.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CPU_power_dissipation_...
[2] http://i.stack.imgur.com/4HQPY.png
[3] http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2009/11/30/20091130se...
Let's say 100W per computer running at full blast, and assume 12 cents per kWh for electricity. Running for 9 years straight, that's about 5 million dollars. If they're running for 16 hours/day then it's more like 3 million dollars. Adjust other factors to taste, but "millions" sounds pretty reasonable.
Where I live, electricity costs about 20 cents per kWh. 0.2dollars * 6000kWh * 365days * 9years = $3.94 million.
Running a processor at an extra (grossly exaggerating here) few watts + an extra 5-10 watts for fans, LEDs, etc don't amount to much. Especially when you consider that all electricity is paid for by the Thousand-Watts/Hour.
How the fuck are the accoutants supposed to connect "big increases in electricity use" with "unauthorised installation of software on 5,000 school computers"?
Use common sense and ask people? Unless the school is doing something that requires that much electricity - it's probably reasonable to assume that it's the 5000+ devices that consume 300-1kw/hr of electricity.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - 1973, Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination
But my 17-year-old brother doesn't live under a racist cloud of "probably a terrorist."
So, in the craigslist example, many American people are afraid because there is overwhelming evidence that craigslist robberies A) really do happen with some significant frequency and B) meeting at a public place is a simple, low-effort way of mitigating that risk. I can understand people living in lower crime areas not worrying about craigslist robberies (though I would take the precautions anywhere because it is so simple).
However, in general, I would agree with you that Americans eat up FUD. You can see it in our DHS/TSA, the Patriot Act, collective disinterest in the Snowden leaks, and general anti-Muslim sentiments.
[0]: http://wlfi.com/2015/08/18/man-robbed-at-gunpoint-while-meet...
[1]: http://wlfi.com/2015/08/18/lafayette-adds-monitored-exchange...
Also, for some reason, whenever something bad happens, the US seems to respond with bigger countermeasures, more stringent laws and heftier punishments. Europeans are amazed when they read that children are sometimes threatened with tens of years of jailtime for relatively small incidents.
The reason why you don't have to be afraid when dealing with Craigslist in europe is that guns are rare, as is gun violence.
But I'm sure some will just buy another gun to feel safer. Isn't that the standard argument after a serial shooting? The first victim should have had a gun, then this wouldn't have happened... that's as perverse as it gets!
Is there evidence, or media reporting well beyond the actual rate of occurrence?
No kidding. Many people in the Middle East are completely "white", by every definition.
In fact, it's amusing that the word "Caucasian" has been corrupted into a euphemism for "white", given where the word comes from....[0]. (Most people who are Caucasian aren't even white!)
While we're on the topic, the most pale and fair-skinned people I've met in my life were not European; they were Indian (Kashmiri). People have this notion of what regions stereotypically map to which skin tones, and this doesn't actually reflect reality at all.
I don't think anyone is arguing that the child in question is 4.
Many toddlers younger than three could grasp the idea of signing something as a promise to do that thing in the future. A three or four year old could easily understand it.
I would expect the school (being a place with lots of teachers) to understand that you get the parent to sign the document - with legally enforceable terms that the parent is responsible for whatever the kid does.
That's what a kindergarden - grade 8 elementary school field trip permission form looks like!
I'm sure they've made and processed hundreds of thousands of these forms before. It's just not understandable why they wouldn't do something similar with this open house.
I swear, if I was rich, I would have a PAC specifically for school board elections and go after these idiots and their supporters on the school board.
I don't think it would be hard to find people who would have rather have faced what you suffered than what they went through. (Kalief Browder might have been one.) That doesn't mean they would be right to say that what happened to you was "lovely."
Sure those are not the super fancy private schools, but they will always be out of reach of anything but the very rich.
"Yup. That’s who I thought it was."
Conveniently, you ignored the facts and in doing so implicitly mischaractered me as equally lacking in factual basis for my "narrative", which, of course, is absurdly wrong, since my first word, "Exactly" presupposes the parents' citations.
The mystical real issue for which no other explanation is offered is like a textbook example of a political narrative.
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 and facts, equivocate ("real issue"), and wildly mischaracterize me to make an increasingly invalid point based on a fundamental misunderstanding of my comment.
http://www.pbs.org/parents/education/homeschooling/unschooli...
"Unschooling is a branch of homeschooling that promotes nonstructured, child-led learning. There’s no set curriculum or schedule."
Even a three year old can easily understand the significance of signing something. Especially if you, as an adult, place importance on the ritual.
Asking toddlers to promise things, to explicitly agree to future events, is a big part of preventing tantrums. Three year olds are very capable negotiators.
Yes, we adults really place a lot of importance in the ritual of "scroll to the bottom and click 'Agree'".
(In case my point is missed in the snark, it's that adults will often sign whatever they're told to sign, especially if worded like "sign this or else you can't [X]", and kids will sign whatever they're told to sign by their parents. If parents were actually placing importance on only signing things that were necessary, there's no way they should let their 4-year-old sign anything that could remotely be considered important.)
But I just wanted to make the point that four year old — or even a three year old — can totally understand the concept of signing something and a parent could even use it to enforce a future event (e.g., sign this bath time contract which means you must have a bath after dinner).
Then it should go, "Oh it's a clock." "Is that true, engineering teacher?" "Yes." "OK cool."
Ok, I can't help but be reminded of my recent comments about English classes in high school.
Again, I don't agree with the liquid ban, but it's a problem with the goal, not a problem with the methods. There's no real evidence that liquid explosives pose a threat that needs to be countered. However, if you take as a given that you're tasked with stopping them, the system as it's set up is a decent way to go about it.
If the person's goal was to bring it on a plane, they're suicidal so they probably don't care if it accidentally blows them up in the security line instead.
If instead they expect to set it down and walk away, they can do that anywhere (even if they clear the checkpoint without having their bottle taken). The difference is that the added "security" has given them a much more effective target than they could have anywhere else.
Before the ban, it was always possible for someone to do either one: get on a plane, or set down an object and walk away. It wasn't happening, which means the old security precautions were just fine. And if it had happened, there probably would have been security camera footage of one suspicious individual setting down an object instead of dozens of suspects throwing objects into a bin.
I don't recall security lines getting noticeably worse after the liquid ban was enacted. It doesn't take up much time relative to the whole process.
If the kid gets into dinosaurs, a regular homeschooling parent might add a dinosaur module to the science/biology part of the curriculum. The unschooling parent might ask, "How would you like it if we took a trip to Utah, to visit an actual dig site?"
If the kid gets into robots, a regular homeschooling parent might add mechanical engineering and electronics to the curriculum. An unschooling parent might bring home a LEGO Mindstorms set and sign the kid up for the robot soccer league run by an adjunct from the local community college.
As I understand it, successful unschoolers rely rather heavily on a whole-family lifestyle commitment, to subtly discourage the kid from choosing to become the world's foremost expert on Minecraft, and learn nothing else. I would, at the least, be compelled to suggest that perhaps my kid should play all the computer games in my personal collection, in chronological order, starting with the Infocom library, progressing through the Sierra/Dynamix era, running through Black Isle and LucasArts titles, and ending with access to my Steam and GOG accounts. I could also hook up my old console systems.
Then I might, ever so subtly, suggest that an encyclopedic knowledge of video gaming, past and present, might be useful to a heavily-followed and well-monetized text or video blogger. Because I am certainly not going to unschool if it won't eventually get the kid out of my basement (and pantry).
Unschooling is a subset of homeschooling.
The rest of the post is rather accurate though, although I would say that with the robotics, the unschooling parent would probably take the kids to a local Radioshack (Or Maplin's, if you're in the UK!) and buy a book on electronics, along with a few bits and bobs (motors, etc), encourage the kid to experiment, and encourage them to join a local engineering group :D
The point here though is that whether you call it Homeschooling or Unschooling it is still a labor intensive process that will likely require sacrifice on the part of the parents. Sacrifices that many times a lower income family can not afford to make.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2015/03/06/6-year-old-finge...
Of course they have. However, the authorities everywhere don't consistently flip their wigs—certainly not as badly as this—every time a student does something like bringing in this project. So the fact that they wigged out badly in this particular case probably—not certainly, but really pretty likely—does have some relation to the fact that the student just happened to be Ahmed Mohamed.
(OTOH there pretty certainly is a selection bias in the fact that this particular case is getting so much publicity. It's the social-media catnip of the perceived (and again, let's be serious here, probably partly real) discrimination that has pushed this one up the charts while others go mostly unremarked.)
I do not know that school administrators have "consistently" flipped out at white kids, either. I don't know what the baseline occurrence of these events are. My suspicion would be that every case we've ever heard of, including this one, is still an outlier, and thus not suitable for drawing sweeping conclusions from, and in fact kids probably do stupid stuff like this every day without making the national news.
In this test, the subject to be tested is socializing with his or her normal social circle. During this activity, a potential romantic interest interrupts, and proposes that they go out on a date with the subject, immediately.
Responses are classified as follows. A: the subject leaves the gathering for the date. B: the subject declines the date. C: the subject counter-offers that the romantic interest join the existing social gathering in lieu of a date.
I propose that a true nerd's nerd would never choose response A. Geek Night is sacrosanct. And if you bring a date, they had better bring their own deck/controller/dice/pawn.
I think Jobs would have failed that test. It's not just about hanging out with nerds, but actually preferring their company to non-nerds. How many of the people in that photo did Jobs stay in contact with after he became Mr. Big? How many did he materially share his success with?
I didn't realize that nerds had to suddenly share their success with their nerdy friends to qualify nowadays.
A wealth differential can become a strain on a friendship. Some people who suddenly become wealthy reconvene their former social group as an entourage to overcome it. Others just drift away from their old friends and make new friends.
If you had more money than everyone else you already knew, combined, would you feel any obligation to do anything to make their lives better? It doesn't even have to be anything big. If I were CEO of Apple, I think I would, at the least, give away copies of the major hardware product releases to my oldest friends just before launch day, with prepaid support. You don't need to hand out cushy sinecures, but those are fine, too, provided it's from your personal bankroll, and not your company's.
I certainly wouldn't shut down my company's existing philanthropic programs, and never leave any public trace of charitable giving whatsoever.
Hell, I'm not even rich, and I put $500 into an old high school friend's first Kickstarter project. If I had more to contribute, I would have contributed more.
It may not be an absolute quality all nerds need to have, but some generosity towards friends and family is a requirement for me, specifically, to like someone.
Gifting etiquette varies by person, even within the same culture, but I expect rich people to give to charities and put their names on museum galleries and hospital wings and university buildings and zoo habitats and park playground equipment. I also expect them to show up to award ceremonies and accept their mantelpiece trophies with good grace and concise speeches. That's what lets the rest of us know they are not completely self-absorbed assholes. When your success rests upon so many people that you cannot possibly thank each of them personally for their support, that's how you show gratitude to "the public".
Didn't treat the clock like a bomb? Might get fired. Did treat it like a bomb, turned out to be wrong, apologized? Might get fired. Did treat it like a bomb, turned out to be wrong, uhhh... maybe if I get the police involved I can make this not my fault?
Reasonable errors on all levels are often greeted with harsh punishment and sometimes demonization by news media. It's not just kids who are subject to it. People are rightly terrified of being blamed for errors that anyone could make, and their behavior makes a lot of sense in that context.
But of course that isn't particularly the problem here. When something like this comes up and catches our attention, there is outrage until that specific situation is fixed. We all pat ourselves on the back for helping this one person and move on forgetting that nothing that allowed this situation to happen in the first place has been changed.
It's not going to stop all of them. Or most of them. Or even a whole lot of them. But there are going to be a few people reevaluating their approach.
The good teachers end up with students who should be punished but they're afraid to do it because they might lose their jobs for doing their jobs. The bad teachers will know to aim their abuse at the white males because nobody's watching for that and many who people picture that scenario think to themselves "Good."
Core 2 Duo was <35W TDP and was pretty popular from what I remember. P3 was in the same neighborhood too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CPU_power_dissipation_...
[0] yes, even many teachers. The power of unions in preserving teachers' jobs is highly regional, and often exaggerated.
~$50 per year per computer * 5,000 computers = $250,000 in additional power consumption per year
He ran this scheme for 9 years:
$250,000 per year * 9 years = $2,250,000 total additional electricity costs
No matter what way you run the math, he blew millions of the school district's budget.
And the school blew millions by not turning off the computers when not in use. Power management is built into Windows - this can easily be done/managed with group policy.
> $250,000 per year * 9 years = $2,250,000 total additional electricity costs
This is all assuming he went around in a ski mask before he left every day and turned on all the computers across the school. Sure he might have used WOL but from the article I don't think he was that devious. From reports of what I read this was something the previous system admin guy did and just passed it along what to do.
I'm not saying he could have wasted money - I'm just giving him the benefit of the doubt and trying to make sure we don't frame him as some sort of criminal mastermind out to rip off this school district. There are a lot of reports out there about this and it's obvious the school wanted to spin it to look like he was the bad guy.
I do believe somewhere someone stated the district had wanted the systems put to sleep (not turned off) and believed it was happening.
Almost certainly not known to him before this incident.
http://www.dallasnews.com/news/community-news/northwest-dall...
buy a book on electronics, along with a few bits and bobs (motors, etc)
She makes $35k / year.
If she wasn't lucky enough to have an engineer paycheck behind her life, she simply wouldn't be able to do the job.
It's likely that funding gets allocated in stupid ways, but the whole process is inherently expensive. Managing thousands of employees, dozens of buildings, updating equipment, training, etc, etc. It's a hard problem, and we've basically just decided that only "dedicated" workers should do it, which is code for "willing to be underpaid compared to qualifications".
She makes $35k / year.
How much do teachers in her school system who have 25 years experience make?
The union-mandated tenure system, which prevents young, talented teachers from making even vaguely competitive salaries, but rewards older, mediocre teachers with "time served" is part of what's stopping "more money" from being the answer. Higher teacher salaries under the current system would largely reward the oldest, not the best.
You can pick up some extra stipends if you coach or work in certian departments (STEM) but good luck getting into 6 digits as a Teacher.
When I taught in Massachusetts (where we have a teacher union)[1] pay starts at $36,400 and maxes out at $74,000 (with a PhD) after 19 years.
Turns out that public school salary information is public information. So if you "know" a teacher that is making 6 digits, I challenge you to look up their pay scale and see if you really know what you think you know.
[0] https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B27mc-sxcu8ldW9OTHlLMjZ0SlU... [1] http://www.pittsfield.net/UserFiles/Servers/Server_1051846/F...
In my state, which has comparable starting salaries, $56k assuming they obtained some professional certification along the way. Otherwise, $50k. (For comparison, an engineer straight out of college could expect to make maybe $75k.)
I find the idea that we should destroy the entire school system to ensure that a small handful of undeserving people are not able to serve out their career on a still-very-modest salary quite mad.
No teachers in this district are making money suitable to their training and experience.
That's exactly what it is.
When I was in high school we got a shipping pallet of new $100+ calculus textbooks that sat unused because they were the same as the old calculus textbooks but with material cut out because the curriculum had been dumbed down.
Thank god our teacher saw them as the worthless turds that they were and continued teaching us prohibited advanced material like gasp integration from the old books.
Meanwhile our CS teacher was actually a history teacher who stayed a chapter or two ahead of us in the book because who in their right minds would become a teacher making $50k if they actually knew how to write software?
Imagine building a company where you cannot get rid of incompetent, mediocre and down-right caustic employees because some third party (a union) gets in the way. This company will never amount to anything and will never be able to compete with one where excellence is the goal and people are well paid because they are worth it.
For some reason we seem to be OK with the idea of supporting the unions and lose sight that our goal should be to ensure the kids come out of school with absolute genius level knowledge, experiences and enthusiasm across a range of topics from arts to engineering. Kids ought to leave school with a hunger to succeed and contribute to society resembling a massive buffalo stampede with a purpose. Today a huge swath of them leave school with a "thump" and no passion, direction or real knowledge to guide them forward.
The system is broken.
Public schools will never pay $100k+ to someone to teach Computer Science, so how will they ever get someone that actually knows Computer Science to be a teacher[0][1]? Instead they are offering a $1000 stipend to current Science and Math teachers to take a 1 semester course in Java so they can pass the Computer Science Certification Test and teach Computer Science.
So the future computer science high school students will be getting taught computer science by 10+ year Physics teachers that took a 15 week Java course.
[0] I left a $100k Software Engineering job to become a Computer Science teacher... hoping to make a difference with the diversity issues in our field. Luckily I am married to someone that has a job that can pay the bills.
[1] There are at least 3 open Computer Science teaching positions in my district right now if anyone is interested! And in the next 2 years we will have enough students that we will need another CS teacher at my school.
[1]: http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/10/why-are...
[2]: http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_28401042/colorado-supreme-...
[3]: http://dianeravitch.net/2014/02/26/breaking-news-new-data-sh...
Is my info bad or does that suggest that more money isn't the problem. Is the problem how the current money is being spent or is it that we need more money. Are those articles making stuff up?
https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp
http://www.oecd.org/edu/skills-beyond-school/48631286.pdf
As for salary I also think it's a crime that teachers get paid so low. At the same time low is probably relative. A teacher in Berlin making $40k a year is doing a lot better than a teach in NYC/LA/SF making $40k a year. I've tried to talk myself into becoming a teacher but salary is a big reason I can't quite get myself to take the leap.
The person in question - coach Bob Hurley, in a decaying New Jersey town - is a retired parole officer, and he's there to keep kids out of prison. So this is is his white whale.
I don't think you can buy that, but you might be able to buy furniture - support systems, assistance, the like - to keep it from being killed off. Instead, we get six-sigma metrification which may well make it worse. At least it Heisenbugs the curriculum and distracts from actual teaching.
Something must be done, this is something, this must be done...
Then again, the canonical teacher is Socrates, and he was forced to drink hemlock...
I think people get embarrassed by being discarded by the sorting-machine and resent the system, even when it's their kids in it. We don't really value education for its own sake - it must be shown to be in service of other societal goals - mainly economic goals. That can get out of control quickly.
It isn't a funding problem. It's a problem with how we spend that money.
Instead, label them BOX 1, BOX 2 and BOX 4 and put "geo-location circuity" (it doesn't have to work, just make it look like it could) in it and place those at various points in the school, preferably with visible wires.
Then you can claim that you were trying to build your own local mini-gps to monitor your movements throughout the day.
Same popcorn value, less time in prison.
You shouldn't be caught sitting in your comfy chair eating popcorn though...
Why is tenure-based compensation an efficient use of dollars in primary education but not elsewhere?
You are right. I was just going off the source I found, which accounted for some of the aspects you point out, but not all. These numbers simply provide a rough estimate, and detail how the sys admin certainly did cost the school district real (and potentially very substantial) sums of money.
> Even more complicated is the heat.
You make a good case for the winter months, but the opposite would hold true for the summer months when the heat becomes a real issue and additional air conditioning may be necessary, etc...
> Edit: also if it was a public school, wouldn't they be off for about 3 months over summer ?
Not necessarily. Usually over the summer months (for a traditional schedule school as opposed to a year-round schedule like many public schools are these days) some of the staff is typically on campus monday-friday doing various administrative tasks, workshops, prepping for the next school session, moving classroom furniture, cleaning, etc... IT staff would be included in this, and therefore we can reasonably assume the sys admin was still running his systems.
Yes, it will draw even more than 350 Watts at full load. 350 is the output power, whereas incandescent lightbulbs are measured in input power. So a 350 watt power supply, depending on efficiency of the PSU anyway, is probably using around 400-500 Watts at the wall at full load.
And that's a pretty awful efficiency you suggest. It may be that bad, but I'd sure hope not.
Talking about power load, though, I have a Kill-A-Watt pass-through power meter, and I have measured power at the wall exceeding the rated output power capacity of an 80% efficient power supply on a computer running at full load (running a graphically and computationally expensive computer game).
A lot of PSUs are pretty inefficient. You can look up the stats. It wasn't until recently that you even had a lot of them earning the 80 Plus "bronze" rating, which is 80% efficiency. There's still plenty with worse efficiency than that. A decade ago, you're probably looking at 60% efficiency on average.
What grandparent commenter showed was the school district's numbers are plausible. I doubt the district entered into a legal battle without first consulting an engineer or two about the electric costs.
HP 6000 Pro SFF - Core2Duo E8400 @ 3GHz - 100% CPU: 70, Idle: 26, Sleep: 2-3, Off: 0-1,
HP 6200 Pro SFF - Core i5 3470 @ 3.2GHz - 100% CPU: 83, Idle: 31, Sleep: 2-3, Off: 0-1,
HP 6300 Pro SFF - Core i5 2400 @ 3.1GHz - 100% CPU: 100, Idle: 30, Sleep: 2-3, Off: 0-1,
It's been a few months now, and I can't remember what I used to max out the CPU. It wasn't SETI @ Home, but it should give you a pretty good approximation. When it was off, it had Wake on LAN enabled, so it still drew some power. But it would fluctuate between 0 and 1.
They may be off for 3 months over the summer. Which might mean they were actually off, or it might mean that they ran 24/7 and NONE of that time was for 'educational' purposes.
As a parent, can I see the list of "items... that are prohibited"? I'd be pretty shocked if "clock" is actually on there.
Sticking to the line that something was a 'bomb hoax' keeps the responsibility with the accused: they shouldn't have perpetrated a bomb hoax; not we shouldn't have over-reacted to an innocuous object.
Then again, this is Texas.
Remember the Aqua Teen Hunger Force "bomb" scare in Boston? The city rigorously pursued legal action to spare their police department the embarrassment of having wasted millions of dollars carefully dismantling DIY Lite-Brites.
"Though city prosecutors eventually concluded there was no ill intent involved in the placing of the ads, the city continues to refer to the event as a "bomb hoax" rather than a "scare." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Boston_bomb_scare
The boy's father is from Sudan and is well known for being outspoken against anti-Islamic policies. To an unworldly south/midwesterner that spells "potential terrorist". It's not too much of a stretch to see that diagnosis extended to the son.
The school admins reacted as stereo typically badly as they could have hoped. It should have been assessed quickly and immediately removed from the school. Instead it just got stupid quick.
So this father will now get images of himself with his son with our President. We get some immediate attention to the horrible plight of Muslims in America (there isn't any horrible plight other than some people don't trust them)....
No but embarrassment may explain quite a lot of it.
Calling it a hoax bomb is ass covering by shifting the blame to the person who happens to be the only adult in that bumfuck town's government.
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 of my conclusion.
It's fair if you wrote "the real issue" and actually meant something else, in which case my conclusion would indeed be invalid, but not writing in clear terms hardly puts you in a position to accuse me of equivocation.
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."
I doubt you could concisely articulate anything if your preceding contexts depended upon it.
You might want to ignore race [...]
police made repeated mention of his surname.
Now given you are getting all high and mighty bandying around terms like defamation, you going to go calling him a liar?
It's not that they're afraid of things they don't understand. It's that there is a certain type of person they generally don't like. In this case it might have been a man that had some sort of intellectual curiosity, maybe a bit eccentric. And they will use their ignorance as a weapon against those people.
The police department knows full well they can determine whether this was a bomb or not. It's within their ability to interview every person he interacted with to find if he claimed it was a bomb at any point. Instead of doing that they will use their lack of knowledge to allow falsehoods to move the investigation.
It was within the ability of the staff to determine the monetary cost of this man's actions. In the very least they could compare the electricity bill during a month he was running SETI versus the next month when he was not. They could calculate the power consumption of the machines.
It's not that they are afraid of knowing. But that knowing or admitting the truthfulness of the facts makes them less powerful as people.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Metropolitan_Statistic...
Ignorance is a source of power only within a like-minded group, and only as long as that group is powerful.
Now get out of there and see where ignorance gets you.
Or wait until that group washes out into the irrelevance of history.
PS: Money wasting from their point of view, not making any judgement about SETI here
I did this when I worked as a network administrator for a new school campus. It was folding@home vs. SETI but same concept. Once the administration realized all the computers were running folding@home they compared the bills after turning it off and it was tens of thousands of dollars difference (granted this was 2001 and full-size desktops).
Now, one could say they overreacted, sure, in my case I just got reprimanded and told to uninstall it off all the computers. But firing for costing the district significant amounts of money isn't some testament to the ignorance of the South, unlike the "bomb" clock.
I still don't believe that - unless this was 10k computers+. I'll bet that if you used watts up on an idle computer, then used it on a computer running seti@home I'll bet the difference would only be 100 watt difference at the max (probably more like 50 depending on what is running on the computer).
1) if 1 KWh costs 10 cents, which is reasonable to expect, and the load increases just 50 W.
And for this guy here it's even much more:
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=54609&pos...
His single computer uses 490 Watts when turned on and calculating Seti, and he's keeping it on for 18 hour more per day just for Seti. Only 500 of such computers and such usage patterns make 14000 dollars more per month.
Sure, he didn't make profit from the seti@home instances, but he did it without approval, did ultimately cost the district money, and likely caused other issues along the way (like additional wear-n-tear on the machines)
I wish we could fire teachers for using their computers for Facebook and Amazon shopping during the day.
The internet was also heavily monitored, with a proxy server that required a login to get to forbidden sites. Our IT guy had a pretty good idea of when teachers were getting on facebook etc.
And then you'll hire them?
Gets complicated fast, dunnit?
My wife was on the advisory committee for a local middle school that's struggling. One winner is that they bought SmartBoards for a bunch of classrooms but didn't get stands for them, so they just mothballed them for a year until they could buy stands with the next year's budget.
I wouldnt call someone externalizing costs for whatever noble endeavor responsible or forward thinking.
Most people, be they in the deep south or the northeast have no fucking clue what SETI is and may even have very specific metaphysical opinions on how we should deal with the possibility of alien life that doing this violates. Most people don't care enough about paper to do more than write it off as a normal expense.
I personally think that alien life is everywhere and I can't wait until we discover more evidence of it. But I think SETI is a huge waste of resources that could be spent better elsewhere. Even though I'm pro science, discovery, and utilizing wasted cpu cycles, I still think searching for life this way is a huge waste of time and resources and I'd be pissed if some teacher decided he was going to use the resources I take a part in paying for to do this.
The benefits of this are external while the cost is internal. If you're going to use resources, at least use them to benefits the kids who are in your budge.
To me every dollar legitimately (with a HUGE emphasis on the legitimate part) spent in schools is a valuable investment in the future. I hope that is a statement that cannot be disputed.
However, we've performed badly enough and have wasted so much money that we are in a situation where someone who thinks teachers ought to be able to make $150K per year would be laughed out of the room.
We are slowly destroying our country from the inside. And a big part of that is in how we are not educating our kids. And perhaps even our population in general. I mean, the fact that the Theory of Evolution is cause for debate in the US is down-right shameful and a sad indication of just how backwards some of our population is in their thinking.
The problem of schools and education is simple. It get's complicated when we are not united in an understanding of what our objectives should be.
What are they? In my view: science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) and entrepreneurship. Arts belong in school as well but we are not going to float the boat on arts alone. STEM+E need to be our strong suit and our kids need to be exposed to the arts in order to see, feel and experience the beauty in the human condition.
The problem with education is that old saying "people that can, do; people who can't, teach" but it's more like "people that can, do even if they would be really good at teaching because teaching doesn't pay nearly as much as anything else you can do with the same skills"
The way things are right now, who cares about tenure! If you fire all the bad teachers who are you going to replace them with? The only people that want those jobs are the applicants that weren't as good as the people that just got fired!
And like you said, an additional problem is that every state gets to decide what the goals for education are and those goals can get very political (see: evolution vs creationism, civil war vs war of states rights).
And the biggest blind spot for HN readers concerning education is that most of the students in school are not like you! Public (and some Private) Schools are full of students that would stare blankly into space all day rather than watch one Khan Academy video. It takes a lot of work and effort to provide an education to both the low achieving and the high achieving students, especially with 25:1, 30:1, sometimes 35:1 student to teacher ratios.
I am one of two engineering mentors for our local FIRST FRC robotics team. Brilliant kids fully motivated to learn. I love it. We've built a bunch of neat stuff. I happen to own a lot of nice manufacturing equipment so we've taken advantage of that with the kids learning such things are running CNC and manual milling machines as well as soldering SMT, using DSO's etc.
Anyhow, one day I get hit with this business of having to register as an official school system volunteer in order to be able to be a mentor for the team. Mind you, FIRST has no such requirements, this is the school system bureaucracy meddling with things.
What did it entail? Filling out a bunch of forms that nobody could email me. I had to go to the main office and get them. And then they need to do a full-up background check, blood test and other crap. The process takes months. Oh, yes, and I have to pay for it.
Being that part of my work is in aerospace there are certain things I just can't do, at least not without involving certain checks and balances.
I flat out told the school system folks to go stuff it. I further threatened to fully fund the robotics team myself and pull it completely out of the the school. FIRST does not require teams to be attached to schools, so, technically, we could run it out of my warehouse and we'd be fine. The school folks took a few steps back and figured out a way to allow me to continue to be a mentor (after two years of doing it) without red tape. I suspect someone is making money somewhere by having this team be at the school. We are required to have a teacher associated with the team (one who knows nothing about nothing). My guess is he is getting extra bucks for having his name on a list somewhere.
This is just one example of why they don't attract better talent. We could have a lot more engineering mentors in this team but everyone recoils at some of the red tape they toss in front of you.
I know I and other practitioners could be amazing teachers and sources of inspiration for students. Yet, none of us has any interest in dealing with bullshit. And the school systems are permeated by it.
I mean, imagine the idea of having someone like Elon Musk do a physics lecture at a High School even once per semester. Think of the inspiration and effect that would have on kids. The effect would be very similar if you had passionate practitioners, perhaps less well known than Elon, yet passionate about their work, contribute to the education of our kids.
Money, to some degree, isn't the problem or the solution. We just don't have a good system. Teachers could be professional "inspiration organizers" who pull-in from the local and distant communities with the goal of blowing away kids with the passion, wonder and possibilities of the subject at hand, whether it is music, mathematics or physics. That. Something even a little bit like that. Would be amazing.
I keep in touch with my high school CS teacher and that school now offers four years of CS education with multiple CS teachers. Your profile says you're in Round Rock, I graduated from Seven Lakes near Houston. My experience does not match yours.
People don't freak out over paying taxes for education. Even if they don't have kids in the system.
They freak out over throwing money at a broken system and the solution isn't to throw more money at it.
Attach a specific dollar amount to a student. Allow that student to go to whichever school they want. End of story.
Stop forcing children to go to broken schools.
In my experience the people who claim the public schools are "broken" the loudest are the least qualified to make such an assessment. Also, public schools reflect the public, as in, you know, society at large. Saying that public schools are broken is essentially saying our basic local systems are broken, and that opens a whole new can of worms regarding inequality, poverty, and social priorities.
The significant problem with your "End of story" type solution is that there are schools which are tantamount to educational fraud based on their religious priorities, and there's no way public monies should enable that type of selectivity. Pay into the public system. If you can afford to keep your child ignorant through religious pursuits, or can afford the opportunity for a selective population experience by way of a private school, that's totally fine, always has been and always will be.
Stop forcing schools to listen to broken people.
Not necessarily.
They have good reason. Much of the money poured into public schooling in the U.S. goes to administration and overhead rather than the direct costs of teaching and student evaluation.
Many parents in this country are desperate to get their children the best education they can, within a certainly dysfunctional, and possibly also corrupt, system.
Part of the problem is that the funding is largely dissociated from effectiveness. The people spending the money have no vested interest in seeing that it is spent appropriately, for the benefit of the children--and the community they will be a part of when they eventually cease to be students.
I am not proposing any fixes. I am simply agreeing with my parent post. Every parent knows that raising local taxes to throw more money at their local schools will not solve anything. Richer neighborhoods will have to subsidize the schools in poorer neighborhoods in order to provide equal access to educational resources to all children.
If you want your kids to have extra opportunities, you can voluntarily give your own money to the PTA for the school they attend. Clearly, having to pay to remove the dents in the school-owned band instruments is a problem of a completely different order of magnitude from students in the classroom not having textbooks, or paper and pencils. Equally clearly, it is a disservice for Louisiana students to get pseudoreligious instruction in science class, as Massachusetts students learn without political interference.
I'm not a socialist, but it is blindingly obvious to me that if the state is to provide public education in any form, it needs to provide equal resources to everyone. It cannot select winners and losers by giving more money to schools where the children of richer people attend, and less money to schools where the children of poorer people attend.
As PP stated, attaching an equal dollar amount to each student, for the sole purpose of paying educational expenses, is one way to improve upon the existing system. It is not necessarily the best way, but better is a good first step on the voyage to good.
It depends on where you live. In Silicon Valley, they have local measures to raise parcel taxes to fund the schools. All money stays in the district and none of it goes to administration.
I was given this option in the third grade. I got a letter from the State Board of Education saying that I had performed exceedingly well on their standardized test and that I was invited to change schools and go to a special program in another town for smart kids.
My parents told me I should do it.
I regret it to this day. I was not equipped to understand the consequences of this choice, was not aware what I was getting into and it basically ruined my education.
Our class was separate from other students at this school. We started at a different time and ended earlier. In general, the rest of the school knew us as "those smart kids" and it took a major toll on my work ethic throughout high school.
No. Please do not give students the choice of which school they go to. They need to learn to get along with students different from them, not self-segregate into classes based on wealth, intelligence, etc.
Fundamentally, we already have school choice. If you have enough money, you can choose your school district by purchasing a house wherever it is that you want to send your children.
That's absolutely revolting.
We are giving choice to those who can afford it and taking it away from those can't. Is that what a public school system should do?
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 administrator or a sports program at a non-profit institution, or into the pocket of some CEO or shareholder at a for-profit one.
They are getting something they want and that's all they care about.
If we had an education system that as a whole, gave people what they wanted, we would all be better off.
Allow it to go where there is little to no public over sight, no public school board or checks and balances, under performing scores, teachers paid $20,000 less with no pension, and CEOs making millions. Charter Schools are a part of the problem with American education. Sure some Charter Schools are good so are some Public School but as a whole Charter Schools are not for America's children but for the non-profit and for profit companies that run them.
PUBLIC SCHOOLS are the back bone of our educational system and democracy. Sending to school that take monetary advantage of our tax money with no over sight is wrong for everyone but the people who get the money.
Who is running America's Charter School: https://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2015/07/22/whos-actua...
A lot of people want "vouchers" so that private schools are more affordable. And plenty of private schools have a good track record, while having similar per-pupil costs as public schools.
If it costs $1000/student/month irrespective of if a child goes to a public school or a private school, why does the state really care which one the child attends? Why not let parents choose the school?
Or maybe I hate paying school taxes because the schools promote sports as far more important than academics. End of last year I went to the awards ceremony for top performing students in academics and sports... the difference in treatment left me feeling ill in my gut.
Exercise serves a purpose. I've even remember seeing evidence exercise helps improve learning. And in no way am I against a group of kids playing ball together. But I do not like funding an educational institute which does more to foster sports are being more important than the very stated purpose.
Think about some other good goal. Say feeding starving people. Now imagine if you were forced to pay some charity that was grossly incompetent in how it actually worked. Yes, people got fed, but often after they were negatively impacted in other ways. And that is money that could'be been going to better charities, but you aren't allowed to make such a choice.
Unfortunately, this is unlikely to change given that sports bring in revenue and academics do not.
?!?!
In high schools in the US, academics are intimately linked to funding. Sports are not. I guarantee you no teacher or administrator gives a shit about how much money the Friday night concession stand is bringing in. It probably doesn't even cover the electricity bill for the flood lights.
But they do all care a lot about test scores and other (mostly academically-related) metrics that determine how many millions in state/federal funding they receive.
Sports are one of many ways that students can use their free time to learn to socialize, lead, and work in a group. Those are all important skills that are hard to teach in a classroom, and running a sports team (or robotics team or programming competition team or chess club) is a hell of a lot cheaper than running a classroom. And often far more enjoyable for everyone involved.
Recently (well, a few years ago), there was a controversy in my home state about the removal of funding for bus transport to and from magnet schools. I went to one of those magnet schools - as did my two older siblings.
I brought it up talking to my dad (who still lives there), and he said, "well, I don't have a horse in that race anymore."
Meanwhile, those schools' academic ratings are plummeting...
Education is so incredibly important, and honestly the education system here in the United States is abhorrent. Not due to the teachers mind you, but due to the requirements that are being made by legislators.
Testing requirements don't allow for a wide variety of curriculum anymore, students are all taught at the same baseline (lowest common denominator because otherwise it's discrimination) and students are no longer allowed to excel for fear of making their peers uncomfortable.
As a country the United States is not teaching students to think for themselves and challenge viewpoints, instead they are becoming complacent followers. Which is perfect if you want people that can easily be controlled.
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp
Do you think more money is the answer or should we spend smarter?
Umm.... My "preceding contexts depended upon it"? First, as stated, the preceding contexts were not mine. Second, concisely articulating someone else's stance or summary, or a current context, while not easy, is trivially simple.
Here's an example: Contents of Moby Dick => "A whale fishing allegory about the idolization of man's desires and its limitations."
Also, hard not to feel a little snark in the emphasis and "dunnit", really...
Perhaps they are like farmers we paid to not grow corn in the past.
But that's just for the time-servers, not the dedicated professionals, who are probably the majority.
Amen. I'm astounded by the number of people who completely fail to see this very basic point.
EDIT 2: Looks like my Edit window timed out. I meant to also update this line as follows:
Neither the original DallasNews article nor the TechCrunch article
makes any such assertion about the officer's use of his surname.
EDIT 3: One last time for clarity, the kid felt his name to be relevant (which still does not mean his name was in fact relevant), but did not assert that the "police made repeated mention of his surname", which, apart from the mischaracterizations, was specifically what I was refuting.
And yet these are rare and never given the same prestige that sports does. Being a member of many of those clubs will likely negatively impact your ability to socialize and learn social skills as you will be ostracized by the larger groups.
They are too rare, which is why it's important for (even/especially childless) engineers to be actively involved in the after-school activities offered by surrounding schools.
> and never given the same prestige that sports does.
This might be true in some schools, but in every school I've worked with (which have included everything from blue collar suburb to pretty depressingly poor urban), academics are values much more than sports.
Kids who do well at sports get validation. And they should. Performing well in a competition -- any competition -- requires equal parts skill and dedication.
So why don't academics get the same sort of social validation from adults as sports?
It's worth remembering that the social validation is probably the only validation high school athletes will receive.
In contrast, most people assume that academics will be validated by scholarships, and that the intermediate social validation is therefore unnecessary. That painfully over-estimates the maturity of the typical high schooler (even a bright one), but it's a common mindset.
So it's not that academics isn't valued over sports; rather, it's more like the value of academic achievement is perceived to be self-evident and therefore doesn't require social validation, whereas for sports that's not so much the case.
> Being a member of many of those clubs will likely negatively impact your ability to socialize
That's not true at all! It will absolutely improve your ability to work on problems with a group. No one on a robotics team is going to ostracize someone because they are on a robotics team...
> as you will be ostracized by the larger groups.
Bullies are everywhere in life. Knowing how to live life and get work done in spite of bullying is an important skill.
That's all fine and good on a geological scale, but we've been waiting 200+ years for the irrelevance of this particular group, and there's not a hope in sight of it happening any time soon.
When you take into account the shorter work day/work year http://www.uft.org/new-teachers/your-work-day-and-year
really good benefits, including a $50-$60k a year pension (http://www.empirecenter.org/publications/pension-calculator/) and essentially tenure...well, it's not too bad...
Your link says it's 6 hours and 55 minutes, including lunch. So 6 hours and 25 minutes is a work day.
Plus there's 150 minutes a week (2 and a half hours, or 30 minutes per day) for training, professional development, teacher collaboration, parent engagement and other professional activities.
150 minutes for all of that is a joke, and if any teacher was actually following that rule (union or not) then you'd be hearing about it.
What are "other professional activities?
Students that need extra help? Students that need to make up work/tests? Grading homework/tests/quizzes
I have about 150 students. If I give a test, that's 150 tests to grade. If it takes me 1 minute to grade each test, then I've just blown that entire quota of "other professional activities"
But I still do my job.
I grade all those 150 tests. Then I grade the homework that I gave all those students. Then I write my lesson plans for the next classes and I write the next test. And I email/call parents. And I meet with parents. And I see students before/after school to answer their questions and have them make up their work and tests. And I answer emails from students that have questions about their homework.
I spend 6 hours and 25 minutes a day teaching. I spend plenty more time making sure students learn.
But at least I get summer vacation, right? Sure, it's just full of mandatory Professional Development (so I can keep my teacher license up to date) and lesson planning for the next year.
But hey, in New York you can make up to $105k! After 22 years AND earning a PhD (which you paid for with your own money ... and where did you find the time to get that degree?) Rent in NY is 3x rent where I live, but the max $105k isn't even 3x the starting salary of my school district.
Even for someone without more advanced degrees (fyi you do not need a PhD to cap out.) you cap out at $93k. Agreed that teachers (particularly beginner teachers) put in a lot of hours outside school. 10 hours a week? More? So a 40-50 hour workweek during the school year? (But with predictable scheduling, which not all professionals have.)
A roughly $1 MM dollar annuity when you retire isn't so horrible either.
Lesson planning takes less time as you get more experienced, plus you reuse your old lesson plans.
175 hours every five years for required professional development? http://www.uft.org/q-issues/maintaining-your-professional-ce...
Did I miss anything? COL in NYC is definitely higher...but you do not have to live in Manhattan. There are many affordable areas in NYC.
My girlfriend is a High School teacher in NY, and easily works more than I do. You have to factor in planning and grading which is all done after "work".
Also, most teachers don't need to do as much planning after a few years. Is if fair that longer serving teachers get paid twice as much as new ones, when new ones put in more hours usually? Well...
I'd also note that those are salaries (and similar for others in this discussion) are for 187-day school calendars, or 37.4 weeks/year. Generously applying the same rate to a 46 week/year "full time" calendar puts the top end in Round Rock at over $78,000. The median household income in Round Rock is around $70,000[1], suggesting that it isn't outrageous for a couple of married teachers there to earn well above average, even without summer income.
Also, at least in MA, many teachers are not required to pay Social Security tax, but instead pay into a much more generous pension system. Other benefits are also competitive relative to the private sector.
Again, though, I'm all for teachers making more money so more talented people are encouraged to teach. But the tenure system is not the way to get that result.
First: teachers typically work days not on the student's school calendar, so it's more like 39 or so weeks by your calculation.
Second: they work WAY more than an 8 hour day. Last night she did 7am - 4pm in the building, then 2 or so hours at night grading. (and that was a light day since she had gotten her planning done previously this weekend).
Third: summer is where you can finally catch up and plan classes. Girlfriend did a major revamp of her AP US History class so she was in-line with the new standards. Last year was Western Civ revamp. Next year will be the standard US History class.
You're right, benefits are in-line (not better, just in-line) with corporate america. Mediocre, but existing health care. A pension style retirement plan that's reasonable, but at the mercy of underfunding by politicians (which seems to be expected at this point).
They can afford to send their kids to private school, they believe that school to be superior to the public schools their kids would otherwise attend, so they pay the private tuition. As a parent, I agree with this. I, however, do not have a $400k income with a $169k expense account and a sweet pension plan, like he does.
In short, his kids don't attend public school because he can afford for them to go somewhere better. I am not willing to penalize any child for the sake of their parents' political views (or offices), nor am I willing to restrict people from spending their own money just because they might buy something I don't like.
I could be mistaken, but as far as I am aware no politician (from either side of the aisle) sends their kids to a government school. At least, no politician at the national level (president, congress, etc.).
I am not a fan of having a centralized governmental school system (I think the indoctrination risk is greater, because then there aren't competing institutions around to teach anything different) but it strikes me that any voter who does believe in government schools should demand that their representatives send their own kids to governmental schools as a sign of good faith.
About half of Congress sends their kids to public school.
http://www.publicschoolreview.com/blog/how-many-politicians-...
In the matter of experience in dealing with the issues (and dealing with the Secret Service on security is far from the only one) that attend children of major public figures, no, a school is not a school. And Sidwell Friends, the school that has been attended by every school-age child of a US President since the Nixon Administration is, arguably, sui generis in that regard.
The President not sending his kids to public schools is probably, as much as anything, a service to the public school that they would go to if they weren't going to Sidwell Friends.
I could have done better however, so in that spirit, here's First Dog on the Moon's take on the event - http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2015/sep/18...
Not surprisingly, consistent with your weak intellectual arguments and preceding dishonesty, your comic forwards bigotry and ignorance while ignoring every meaningfully accurate portrayal of the truth.
You're a mouthpiece for hatred and ignorance.
Are you aware of how extremely predatory many of these for-profit colleges have been? Their students aren't getting something they want.
I don't disagree with vouchers in general, but you can't just ignore the risks when using public funds to have private institution provide education.
I don't know what this statement means.
If you're suggesting that people attend these institutions and then aren't able to find work in that field, I would say that's true of many other institutions as well.
Those majoring in English in a standard non-profit college aren't likely to become authors or English teachers. Those going to law school aren't likely to become lawyers. So what?
http://www.consumerfinance.gov/newsroom/cfpb-sues-for-profit...
>The Bureau alleges that Corinthian lured tens of thousands of students to take out private loans to cover expensive tuition costs by advertising bogus job prospects and career services. Corinthian then used illegal debt collection tactics to strong-arm students into paying back those loans while still in school.
> Corinthian Colleges, Inc. is one of the largest for-profit, post-secondary education companies in the United States. The publicly traded company has more than 100 school campuses across the country. The company operates schools under the names Everest, Heald, and WyoTech. As of last March, the company had approximately 74,000 students.
Because a teacher's job is customer service and the customer is always right? ;)
Yes?
Good customer service is making sure the customer walks away happy in the long-term. Sometimes you do that by giving homework and tests. They might be miserable in the moment, but they'll be happy in the long-term.
Viewing students as customers may not be ideal, but it's certainly better than seeing them as a burden.
The school day may be 6.33 hours (including lunch) but do you only count football players as working 3 hours a week when you watch them on TV? Teachers have to do a lot of "under the table" work to make those 6.33 hours (including lunch) happen.
When are those tests getting graded? When are those struggling students getting extra help? When are those lesson plans getting written? When are those parent-teacher conferences happening? When are those teachers going to football games/plays/other events to make connections with the students? When are those teachers writing letters of recommendation for those students? When are those lesson plans being modified to meet the needs of students with IEPs? When are those lesson plans being modified to meet the needs of ESL students? When are the formative and summative assessments being analyzed to modify lesson plans to better meet the needs of the students?
Those 6.33 hours (including lunch) are just the hours that teachers spend in front of the camera. There is so much more work involved to support those 6.33 hours (including lunch). Even for the long tenured teachers. If a teacher is resting on their laurels and just rehashing old lesson plans, then that's one of the "bad ones".
[0] http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/03/30/395322012/the-hidd...
Yes, of course, like I said, there are many outside the class hours. And in fact, 6.33 hours/d are not the "hours in front of the camera" (I assume you mean instructional hours.) The exact number is a bit hazy, due to self-reporting issues, but it seems to be about 700 h/y. http://cbcse.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/The-Mi...
However, if you get offered a 9-5 job for $100,000 and you are looking at making $48,000 after several years experience ... you start imagining what you could do with an extra $50,000 a year. Just think of the compound interest!!!
If you can make lots of money, you almost owe it to yourself to get it. But who does that leave us to educate the kids that are going to run the country when we are old? Do we really want to leave that job up to people who can't do anything but teach (so they live and die by the dreaded tenure system) and people who don't have experience teaching (and will soon leave to make money in industry)?
Also, not all states have unions or tenure (my state included) and those states to not have industry-competitive salaries and they do not provide better educations. If unions were the problem, wouldn't we see better results from non-union states? Wouldn't it behove non-union school districts to out perform/compete union school districts to keep teachers from unionizing? (or is the fact that they can get laws passed saying that teachers cannot unionize better than trying to be competitive in the job seeker market?)
I made waaaaay more money working in industry and never worked anywhere near as hard or long as I do being a teacher.
Sure, lesson planning gets easier. And you can reuse old lesson plans (although, the standards get changed fairly regularly and in my district you need to use "data-driven metrics" to improve your lesson plans year after year, so if you're just reusing lesson plans you get put on the "bad teacher list" in a state with no unions which means no tenure).
Without the PdD, you don't cap out at that 6 digit number. But $93k isn't bad. That's about the entry level salary of a Software Enigneer, right? And you only need to be a teacher for 20 years to earn that. What a deal!
That's probably all a teacher deserves though. As a society we really need incentivise our best and brightest to use their skills to build new ways to share photos.
All I'm saying is that you get what you pay for. If you pay teachers $40k, then you're going to get $40k value.
One of my bêtes noires about the system is that it does not differentiate between a high school teacher getting an advanced degree in STEM versus a kindergarten teacher getting a secondary development blah blah from University of Phoenix.
My personal opinion is that some teachers are underpaid, and some are overpaid. Senior teachers should not be making twice as much as junior teachers, and high school physics teachers should not make the same as kindergarten teachers. Additionally, schools should have some leeway in rewarding better/harder working teachers, instead of the unionized lockstep pay scales.
Yes, programmers make more than teachers, on average. (Though the mean hourly wages are not that different, actually-- http://www.bls.gov/ncs/ocs/sp/ncbl1614.pdf for NY/NJ/CT). So?
Which is why everyone is a "self taught" programmer.
Imaging if you took everyone that posts to Hacker News about how they were the only person in their school that knew how a computer worked and they did all sorts of hacks and had all sorts of fun subverting authority and you went back in time and you gave them a knowledgeable mentor (read: teacher) how much better would they be at programming now?
It's 2015 and we don't have those teachers in our schools. What we have are Math teachers that are being told "We have to have a Computer Science class and we heard that programming is like math, so you're going to be teaching Computer Science next year. Go take a Java course."[0]
Also, unions are not keeping the pay scales the way they are. Texas does not have unions. Texas does not have tenure. Texas still has "lock step pay scales". Unions are not the problem.
Private schools pay teachers less than Public Schools. Private Schools don't have unions. Unions are not the problem.
I don't know what the problem is. I think it has something to do with there being very little respect or prestige for the teaching profession among tax payers (or anybody, really). But the problem isn't unions. If unions were the problem, then the problem wouldn't exist in places where there are no unions.
[0] 100% serious. I had a training this summer where 6 of the other 7 teachers were Math teachers that were told at the end of the year that they would be teaching AP Computer Science and were sent off to take their first ever Java course over the summer.
Except it doesn't. In fact, at-risk children going to poorly performing schools cost more per dollar: they need more extra curricular activities, possibly counseling, lower cost lunches, a lower teacher:student ratio, and so on and so forth. More children at poorly performing schools have more problems with their home life, and school is about the only thing other than organized crime that can give them structure.
There was a whole season of The Wire about this.. :)
Because it doesn't cost a flat amount per student. The fact that funding is fixed per student doesn't mean that all students are equally costly to educate, and private schools that don't have a universal acceptance mandate impose selection criteria which tend to select for students which are less expensive to serve, increasing the per-student costs (but not funding!) in the public schools if public funds are used on an equal per-student basis to support students going to those private schools.
As a predatory move to extract value from a very large market, it's commendable capitalism. As a general trend that undercuts the quality of public education nationwide, well, it's very distressing.
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 student? Isn't that's what's important?
What's broken with the public education system isn't the funding, not the teachers, not the unions, not the administrators, or the facilities. It's none of those things.
It's demented notion that the system exists for the sake of the teachers/unions/administrators/etc. It doesn't. It exists for the students. Do what's best for them. Let them choose where they spend 12+ years of their life.
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.
The point is: (as dragonwriter mentioned), the student rarely makes this decision. Furthermore, even when the student does, or when the parents of the students do, the decisions that are being made are pretty heftily influenced by advertising, gut instinct, and in-general wrong thinking about education. Take, for example, the weird and broad anti-common-core movement. Parents don't want their kids thinking about mathematics, they want their kids memorizing math facts just like they did when they were in school. Parents are swayed by images of tons of technology being used in these charters, when it turns out that most schools don't use tech all that effectively (they just reproduce old behaviorist models of instruction in an attempt to automatize teaching - recreate the teaching machine as Audrey Watters puts it).
In fact, the recent OECD report about use of technology in classrooms around the world was just making news earlier this week: in schools where there's a lot of 1:1 use of computers, students actually fare more poorly. This isn't surprising to me, or anyone else who studies education and the school systems, because of the point above: those computers aren't being used to improve or extend interactive learning, they're being used to deliver memorization-based, fact-and-repeat instruction. That's the same kind of boring teaching that turned off generations of kids in the past, and we're reproducing it again in classrooms with computers. However, those classrooms are shiny, filled with young, idealistic, often very poorly-prepared teachers and are very photogenic to parents.
Even worse- the charter movement (broadly speaking) has subverted most of the assessment process by ensuring that what is tested is the most flat, boring, and fact-based material around. (This is, incidentally, my own objection to common core- not the standards, but the terribad implementation of those standards in untested and regressive assessments). The assessments are bad, tend to not measure good learning, and instead measure a student's ability to memorize and repeat factual information. When charter schools do well on that front, and when the pro-charter movement gets the entire narrative framed in terms of "bloated, failing public schools", it is not surprising that parents (and grandparents, and students, and so on) are generally mislead by this narrative. It's not surprising that people choose charter schools.
People choose to give their money to University of Phoenix, which is objectively a terrible idea. Marketing works. Shiny pictures of happy kids with laptops learning the basics works to motivate people. The truth is, good education is complex - not even complicated, but complex - and asking the general public to really grok the nuances of it is difficult, especially since everyone has their own experience of what worked for them and things were good enough for me when I was in school, darn it.
A brief aside: there are plenty of good charter schools and charter networks, which are striving to bring high-quality reform-oriented education to everyone, especially underserved minorities. However, these charters aren't the ones I'm talking about. There are plenty more that take district dollars and provide sub-par education, and somehow manage to keep either getting renewed or just change names every three years when they come up for re-accreditation. There's also plenty of poorly-performing public schools and districts. Teachers' Unions aren't a panacea.
Ultimately, the problem from top to bottom is that our school system is in the hands of people who don't actually know much about education. Many board of education positions (especially state levels, which exert a lot of control) are political appointments or elected positions. How many times do you read about stupid stuff some board of ed is doing - rewriting history or requiring creationism or other crapola? Education is complex and nuanced, and people seem to engage in the discussion thinking that there's a Simple Fix for everything.
Charters are just vouchers in disguise, and vouchers are just saying "let the Free Market fix it", because the Free Market is super-great at fixing things like the banking, energy, health care, and housing systems in the US. Other charters have "let's let Technology fix it" ideas or "we're super-rigorous, require dress codes, and provide Discipline by calling all our students Mr. and Miss Lastname instead of having real relationships with our students". There's dozens of silly simple fixes floating around.
And you want parents to navigate all of this? It may be arrogant of me to say it, but I honestly don't think most parents can parse through all the crap. Again, people are still paying money to University of Phoenix, people buy guns thinking it will make them safer, and do dozens of other things that are just plain foolish because people aren't experts in everything. If you could assume that someone had enough understanding of how people learn (at least having read the book... How People Learn, which is still a great primer), you could maybe assume they're going to make good decisions. But this is a decision that (as you point out) will stick with the kid for 13 years proximally, and influence their opportunities for the rest of their life.
We should regulate this market.
> why does the state really care which one the child attends?
Well I as a tax payer cares. If those school fare even worst and the administration and CEO/President of the foundations makes millions at the expense of children there is a concern.
Public Schools work and have worked for decades. We have a problem with inner city schools and a big part is unfair funding, but killing public schools and give it over to various schools with no public oversight just government over sight is scary. We vote on our School Boards and Directors. We can protest and get Administrators removed. Can't do that to these Charters School. Also privatizing schools will make being a teacher an even worst job.
As long as private schools are required to take any comer can cannot charge tuition beyond the per pupil amount.
Somehow I doubt any private school advocate wants actual school choice.
So Vouchers really will be the new segregation tool for the 21st Century. Your money will be used to send kids to religious schools you don't like teaching Islam, Christianity in all its forms, or who knows what and if they want to teach the children ignorance and hate and you as a tax payer just flipped the bill for this and can't stop it. I can't see a good voucher system that would answer my fears of miss used funds spent on poor education back by people groups that will not teach based on various world views that are not politically correct and just wrong. Our Brain Drain in America will go into Nuclear Meltdown.
To quote the 2002 Supreme Court Voucher Dissent: Justice Breyer on Descent “... all religious institutions cannot be given equal opportunities to the government funding and trying to do so not only turns back the clock on the Constitution, but creates a powder keg in our society.” http://www.pewforum.org/2002/06/28/judgment-day-for-school-v...
Back ground: I went to private school and graduated with a Theology Degree and worked as a Pastor for years. I absolutely know that many in the voucher movement see the Government footing the bill for their Christian Education. You have no idea how deep Crazy Christianity can get (Westborogh is just the tip of the ice berge). They will spew their version of crazy that they got with no academic or logically training to children with your tax dollars paying for it.
Like other rational people who live or have lived in USA, I have minimized my interaction with both "sides" to the extent that I've been able. (Although frankly I elicited more sympathy for a stolen bike from an admitted bike thief than I did from any cop.) If you drop another "you just don't know how it is to be a cop" whinge on us, I'll be forced to assume that you are a cop or in the immediate family of one.
That depends; there are lots of different kinds of charters. Charters are public schools that have some exceptions -- enshrined in a particular charter, hence the name -- to the generally-applicable rules for public schools in the jurisdiction. These can be exception in terms of administrative process, specialty curriculum, alternate non-geographic admission criteria, etc.
They can also be exceptions in that the whole operation of the school is contracted out to a private entity, making it essentially a private school where tuition is entirely publicly paid for a cherry-picked student population with less accountability to the public than is usually the case with public schools. But that's not always the case.
I remember both taking off in parallel with very different support basis; the movement for privately operated charter schools has taken off when and where vouchers-for-private-schools haven't succeeded, but the publicly-operated charters that function as alternative-model public schools still exist and are still something that reformers that aren't supporters of the education privatization movement push (and sometimes nearby areas -- possibly even the same districts -- will have both kinds of charters.)
> There's a lot of isomorphic economic policy between the two, although if I had to pick I'd say charters are better than vouchers.
Between vouchers and privately-operated charters, I don't think you can make a useful of which is better; it mostly comes down to conditions, management, and accountability measures; charters probably make it administratively simpler to avoid the worst problems, but also tend to be greater single-point-of-failure systems.
And what about the people who don't have some religious agenda, but simply want to get away from crazy school administrations like, well, this one? "We're worried that you might be religious, so we're adamantly against leaving you any option whatsoever to avoid a known bad local school" doesn't exactly make a compelling argument if it's your kid suffering.
FWIW, I did go to a normal, public school. Mine wasn't so bad, but some of the usual idiocy was still present, like getting punished for "fighting" when I was attacked, unprovoked and had not even touched the other party.
Also show one example where vouchers BETTERED students education? It didn't in Switzerland it actually made their scores worse since 1992.
I am in group X and I object to things that you value in group Y. You in group Y object to things that I, in group X, value. What do we do?
Once you have a particular group that claims to have the moral high ground for some nebulous definition of "the high ground" the whole argument is lost because so few people agree on so few things.
I get that creationists are annoying, but I'll give them credit for not demanding that science not be taught, just that they wanted their pet theory taught too. That looks a lot more reasonable (from a certain perspective) than the evolutionists who insist that evolution is the only possible explanation ever, with quite religious zeal, despite having only circumstantial evidence. Evolutionary science is nowhere near as rigorous as physics and won't be for thousands and thousands of years of highly accurate recordkeeping. At that point the creationists will have suffered a thorough defeat, but until then, well, truthfully the science isn't settled. At least to the degree of rigor that I would personally care for.
This was largely demonstrated to be a ruse by so-called "Intelligent Design" proponents in the Kitzmiller v Dover trial[0].
I would respectfully suggest that you haven't really looked into the evidence that carefully if you question the degree of rigor that underpins evolutionary science.
Large parts of evolutionary theory are indeed based on circumstantial evidence. But the quantity of such evidence is so overwhelming[1] that questioning its explanatory power is rather foolish. It's the sort of evidence where coming up with any alternative hypothesis besides evolution quickly becomes an exercise in futility. Unless, that is, you don't care if the hypothesis is testable or not, in which case creationists have many.
Moreover, evolution does not only have circumstantial evidence. You and I are living through the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria - an evolutionary change that is being observed and documented as it occurs. Fruit flies from the same species have been split into physically isolated groups, allowed to breed over many generations, and subsequently reintroduced, only to discover that they had become reproductively isolated.
There's more evidence discussed here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_of_common_descent
Or here:
http://amazon.com/dp/1416594795/
Or here:
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitzmiller_v._Dover_Area_Schoo...
[1] For example, here's Wikipedia's list of transitional fossils (so-called "missing links" between divergent extant species) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_transitional_fossils
But what I am saying is that physics has a lot more rigor for the claims by virtue of how it works, and what people are looking for there. Evolution is punctuated equilibrium and human beings haven't directly witnessed this to the same degree that people have in physics.
I think the direct witnessing aspect is important, even if others may disagree. The reason I think it's important is that there are other possible though highly improbable explanations for various physical phenomena we see on earth.
If there really was a "guy in the sky" he could have absolutely made a bunch of stuff and "planted the evidence" all over the place to fool people. But if also for some reason, he always handled the laws of physics just the way things are now, we wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
To me it's kind of like the people who suggest that we should try and see if reality is just a simulation being run in a computer. The odds -- at least in my mind -- are absolutely astronomical against. But just because it's a "crazy idea" and there's "no way" it could be true doesn't mean I get to dismiss it offhand and maintain my intellectual integrity.
I don't think this is really true. For most important effects in large domains of physics, directly witnessing the underlying processes is as impossible as directly witnessing the history of evolution (to the extent that "directly witnessing" is even meaningful -- on a detailed level, all witnessing other than of ones own internal subjective mental states is through several layers of indirection.) We witness them indirectly, through various media whose mechanism are explained by other well-tested scientific theories.4
> If there really was a "guy in the sky" he could have absolutely made a bunch of stuff and "planted the evidence" all over the place to fool people. But if also for some reason, he always handled the laws of physics just the way things are now, we wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
IF there's really a "guy in the sky" exercising arbitrary power over the physical universe, even if he had not always handled the laws of physics in the same way, we couldn't necessarily tell the difference, since he would also have the power to make it so that our perception of evidence we examine at any given time (including our present recollection of what we might have done in the past) is always consistent with physical law always having been the same, even if it wasn't, and even if our actual observations in the past would have differed.
1) I think in experimentation charter schools do serve a good purpose, but right now it is the battle of not having another New Orleans (New Orleans has ZERO public schools and its school board has dissolved).
I agree that both are incredibly unlikely, but you can't say for certain that it is not so.