Clock-boy’s story gets odder – with more overreaction

Last updated on: September 22, 2015 at 6:01 pm by Jane the Actuary

Clock-boy’s story gets odder – with more overreaction 2015-09-22T18:01:08-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Update on Ahmed Mohamed:

The other day I discussed reports that his “invention” was just a disassembled and re-assembled 80s digital clock. Now there’s some “new news.”

This article from the National Review reports that Mark Cuban, basketball team owner, relayed to Bill Maher his experience of talking to the boy on the phone:

Cuban was impressed with the ‘science geek’ and ‘great kid’ in their discussion but noted an awkwardness to him.

“I talked to the kid,” Cuban said. “He’s from Dallas, and I’ve talked to the people in the school district. The kid is a super smart kid. Science geek. We talked about science, but while I’m talking to him on the phone, as I ask him a question, ‘Tell me what happened because I’m curious.’ Right? His sister, over his shoulder, you could hear, listening to the question, giving him the answer. So, I don’t know all the details of what happened, but what I do know, when I talked to him about science, when I talked to him about magnets, when I talked to him about creating things, he was very, very engaged.”

As the panel discussed whether Mohamed’s arrest was related to his skin color or his faith, Cuban argued that many are missing a key point.

“All he had to do was engage with the teacher, and he didn’t. That’s the point that was missing,” Cuban said. “It was wrong that he got arrested, but all that he had to do was talk to the teacher, but he didn’t.”

Why did the boy need his sister to coach him?

Then the Dallas News provided an update: the boy and his siblings have withdrawn from the local public schools, and

He doesn’t know where Ahmed will go to school next—plenty of schools have offered to take him, and the family is reportedly in talks with MIT.

MIT? Available news reports describe an offer to visit and tour the campus, e.g.,

“If there’s any possibility that you can come visit us as MIT, I would love to give you a tour of the center for theoretical physics and the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics,” [MIT astrophysicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein] said adding that her former advisers at Harvard University were equally keen to show the teen around Cambridge, Massachusetts. “You are the kind of student that we want at places like MIT and Harvard.”

But attend there? Skip the rest of high school and show up at MIT in the second semester? No. Conceivably he could have gotten an offer from a local private high school, though I would be surprised if they have scholarship money to hand out on a whim.

Oh, and he’s been a “guest of honor” at the Google Science Fair — where he’s been hobnobbing with, and being treated as a celebrity, by kids who have actually invented, well, some pretty serious inventions:

Taking home the $50,000 grand prize was Olivia Hallisey, 16, from Connecticut. Moved by the lives lost in Africa to the Ebola outbreak in 2014, she devised a rapid, portable and inexpensive diagnostic test for the detection of the virus. Hallisey says she was inspired to become a scientist by her late grandfather, a doctor and medical researcher and one day hopes to work for a global health organization such as Doctors Without Borders.

Also receiving awards were Girish Kumar, 17 of Singapore, who came up with a way to automatically generate review questions for students from online textbooks; Krtin Nithiyanandam, 14 of Surrey, England, who designed a diagnostic tool to detect Alzheimer’s at earlier stages in the disease; Pranav Sivakumar, 15 of Aurora, Illinois who invented an automated method for finding and characterizing gravitationally lensed quasars; Anurudh Ganesan, 15 of Clarksburg, Md., who designed a more reliable way to transport vaccines to remote locations in developing countries; Deepika Kurup, 17 of Nashua, NH, devised a filtration system to remove toxins from drinking water; Lalita Prasida Sripada Srisai, 13 from India, came up with an inexpensive way to clean waste water by flowing it through corn cobs; and Eliott Sarrey,14 from Maron, France, who built a robot that when controlled by a smartphone can tend vegetable gardens.

Another news site claims that he’s being “recruited” by tech companies — well, maybe if “recruiting” means being invited to visit the campus:

Writes Mark Zuckerberg to his Facebook wall:

You’ve probably seen the story about Ahmed, the 14 year old student in Texas who built a clock and was arrested when he took it to school. Having the skill and ambition to build something cool should lead to applause, not arrest. The future belongs to people like Ahmed. Ahmed, if you ever want to come by Facebook, I’d love to meet you. Keep building.

So this is pretty nuts. Lots of people going crazily overboard in their hailing this boy as a wunderkind, a genius, when, at best, they have simply no sense of proportion, and cannot distinguish between a reasonable project for a young high schooler and exceptional intelligence, and, at worse, are fawning over him because of the politics.

And at the same time: where’s the family headed now? Not to Disneyland, but to Mecca:

So on Wednesday, the entire family plans to fly to New York, where Mohamed said dignitaries with the United Nations want to meet the boy.

After that, if they can get a visa, [father Mohamed Elhassan] Mohamed wants to take Ahmed on a pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia. He hopes the family can better plan the future from holy ground.

Mecca? If they can get a visa? And then pick a school? The Hajj started today, and runs for five days. Does the family expect to somehow fly there immediately and join in the rites halfway through? Are they planning on waiting until the crowds have left? (Incidental fact: it doesn’t “count” for fulfilling the Islamic religious duty to come to Mecca at just any time of year; it must be for the Hajj.) It seems rather improbable that the family can obtain a visa with any degree of speed — unless a trip was planned all along, in which case they’d have already left to get their on time.

I said earlier that, if this was a prank or a trap, that still doesn’t justify the authorities having taking the bait. But the situation is odder by the minute.

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