thats awesome

Awesome, but I can't shake the feeling Apple is about to sue them for patent infringement

See Islam! Do you see what happens when you let girls learn? They solve problems and achieve wonders.

Or maybe that's the reason you seem so insistent against the whole concept of "Women in school".

Intel has a great article on their circuit, this is awesome, if I were in the science fair with them I would want them to win! But the top winner was a girl who invented a way to kill cancer tumors by activating chemicals with photosynysized light to target the tumors using nano technology.

But for them to do what they did with limited resources, shows that there is no limit to human ingenuity.

Asil Shaar and Nour Alarda, Nablus, West Bank, Palestine

When Asil Shaar and Nour Alarda observed the struggles of sight-impaired neighbors attempting to navigate the hills and war-torn streets of their hometown, Nablus, and find their way around the refugee camp where they lived, they decided to do something about it. They created an obstacle-detecting cane for the blind.

The process wasn’t easy, especially considering how difficult it was to obtain electronic parts such as sensors and circuits in the West Bank. The determined pair made multiple trips to Ramallah, about 45 minutes away and through two military checkpoints, to find the materials they needed to complete the task.

Though previous “laser canes” existed, these models were flawed in that they were unable to detect uneven surfaces or holes in the ground. In contrast, the girls’ design incorporates two infrared sensors into a pine walking stick, one front-facing and one down-facing, to detect both obstacles and drop-offs.

Dammit...that's friggin awesome I just gotta smile at that.

>> ^therealblankman:

See Islam! Do you see what happens when you let girls learn? They solve problems and achieve wonders.
Or maybe that's the reason you seem so insistent against the whole concept of "Women in school".


Hey dip fuck. Look at Iran or Palestine. I'll bet there are more higher educated women with positions like doctors, etc. then in the US or other western countries. So you can shove your ignorant big talking mouth back to hickistan.

>> ^joedirt:

>> ^therealblankman:
See Islam! Do you see what happens when you let girls learn? They solve problems and achieve wonders.
Or maybe that's the reason you seem so insistent against the whole concept of "Women in school".

Hey dip fuck. Look at Iran or Palestine. I'll bet there are more higher educated women with positions like doctors, etc. then in the US or other western countries. So you can shove your ignorant big talking mouth back to hickistan.


Well, that was certainly uncalled for. Off your meds again?

[quote]Hey dip fuck. Look at Iran or Palestine. I'll bet there are more higher educated women with positions like doctors, etc. then in the US or other western countries. So you can shove your ignorant big talking mouth back to hickistan.[/quote]

This seemed tremendously unlikely so I checked. The only specific example you gave was doctors, so I checked that:

10.8% of Palestinean doctors are women. (see http://www.pwic.org.ps/english/Health/hea3.html)
24% of US doctors are women. (see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1404692/?page=2)

I couldn't find good stats for Iran, but I expect they have a higher percentage of woman doctors than Palestine because of Iran's particular focus on religious rules (male doctors are discouraged from seeing naked female patients). Given this particularity, I thin if we expanded this out to other "higher educated" positions I think we'd see at least the same gap.

That said, I think many people would assume the status of womens' rights in, say, Iran is worse than it actually is. But that's no reason not to look at things objectively. And if we expand out to other Islamic nations (like, say, Afghanistan) then the situation is much more dire.

And in defense of hickistan (which I assume is somewhere in the US despite its name), I think it's hard to fault the US too much on this front (that of educating women). It has made tremendous progress in the last 30-40 years in terms of gender inequality. For example, in 2003 49.2% of medical students were women.

I'm not sure anyone in Palestine is able to get access to education...

Anyways, I did look up Iran and it is also lower than I thought it would be.
http://payvand.com/news/09/feb/1110.html

Though I think it is much different in Tehran than the rest of the country.
Anyways, Islam isn't against "women in school" and other racist rants by bigots.

I would applaud the girls' efforts and intentions, but the invention itself seems a little underwhelming. They spent time and effort and limited funds to get the electronic parts, but have they ever seen a blind person walk with a cane or asked such a person what would make for a better cane?

The point of the cane is to function as a probe. It isn't held rigidly in one place directly in front of the user, it is tapped or dragged back and forth in an arc in front of them. You don't need a sonar/laser proximity sensor to alert you when you are approaching an obstacle; the cane physically touching the object does that. I don't really understand their hole detection system, again I imagine that simply using the cane to probe out holes or steps down would work just as well if not better.

So it seems to be a cane with electronic circuits that at best provide little benefit at the cost of having to periodically replace batteries, and at worst feeds the user with incorrect information or causes them to become less adept at using the cane as a simple (but effective) physical probe.

I don't really mean to be a downer, but it just doesn't seem particularly practical. Maybe there is more to it than meets the eye, or the report didn't do it justice.

*edit for spelling error

Upvote for the handwritten periodic table in the background of the classroom.

[T]he only known cure for poverty, [...] is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.

-Christopher Hitchens


Go girls, go!

Pfft, you totally meant to be a downer >> ^MilkmanDan:

I don't really mean to be a downer...

This is not what I was looking for when I searched for "schoolgirls vibrators".

[redacted]

>> ^MilkmanDan:

I would applaud the girls' efforts and intentions, but the invention itself seems a little underwhelming. They spent time and effort and limited funds to get the electronic parts, but have they ever seen a blind person walk with a cane or asked such a person what would make for a better cane?
The point of the cane is to function as a probe. It isn't held rigidly in one place directly in front of the user, it is tapped or dragged back and forth in an arc in front of them. You don't need a sonar/laser proximity sensor to alert you when you are approaching an obstacle; the cane physically touching the object does that. I don't really understand their hole detection system, again I imagine that simply using the cane to probe out holes or steps down would work just as well if not better.
So it seems to be a cane with electronic circuits that at best provide little benefit at the cost of having to periodically replace batteries, and at worst feeds the user with incorrect information or causes them to become less adept at using the cane as a simple (but effective) physical probe.
I don't really mean to be a downer, but it just doesn't seem particularly practical. Maybe there is more to it than meets the eye, or the report didn't do it justice.
edit for spelling error


I thought the same thing at first, but here's the key difference:
A blind person's "probing" cane/stick does not support weight, the same way an old/handicapped persons cane/walker does. So the probing canes are only good if the blind person is in otherwise good enough physical condition to walk on their own. This invention just merges the probing and walking canes into one cane.