
Afghan girls win European prize for solar-powered farming robot - ohjeez
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-afghanistan-girls-science/afghan-girls-win-european-prize-for-solar-powered-farming-robot-idUSKBN1DU1R2
======
orf
Holy hell, what are these comments.

A group of girls form a pretty messed up country had the willing and the guts
to go ahead and submit anything to this competition, knowing full well they
would be at a disadvantage compared to other first world countries, and coming
from a very male orientated culture. Their parts where late and they only had
two weeks to build it.

Meanwhile a single accurate quote about how they where disallowed entry into
the US overshadows all commentary here, with people insinuating that their
robot was rubbish and it's just a political hitpeice, consolidation price
means nothing etc. Get a life and grow up, I'd like to see you have the guts
to try anything like this, even with your inherent advantage of living in a
first world country.

~~~
hutzlibu
Well, it is a highly political topic.

And I found no article yet, with technical details, about what they
technically actual accomplished. The Reuters article is especially lacking any
information, except stating that they succeded technically, but faced problems
at the US border before and the latter they repeated many times, not just one
quote.

So it looks a bit missleading and I would not call it journalism, if there is
a agenda with it. And this seems to be the case here - directed against Trump
and his Afghan ban etc.policy.

I mean sure, personally I despise that as well and I am highly against
restricting people from going somewhere else, just because of their origin.
And the girls are definitely courageous(their captains dad was killed by a
suicide bombing this year) and maybe even did an outstanding job given their
bad starting conditions ... but I saw nothing convincing so far, like the
article implys, that they build even remotely something like this:

"The team’s winning entry was a solar-powered robot that would help small
farmers carry out tasks including seeding and cutting crops like wheat "

I read something about designing flyers, etc. for this product, which sounds
more plausible - as designing an actual robot, even only with lego, who does
remotely, what the quote says, is huge work and not doable with access to good
education. Which they don't have. So yes, I think they deserve praise for
doing something while coming from where they are, but if news imply to me they
did more, than they did(and possibly could do), for political reasons, even
with good intentions, you could call it propaganda. And I think this is not
helping.

As then also people like me, who have lot's of sympathy for disadvantaged
people at tech - and beeing a girl from Afghanistan is probably as
disadvantaged as you can get, get the impression, that they mainly won their
price because of being who they are and not what they did. And this is a
shame, because maybe they are even technically very gifted and did
outstanding. But now I mistrust the whole thing ... and possibly also the next
thing I hear from high tech girls from Afghanistan ...

(edits: updadet a bit)

~~~
pavlov
_Well, it is a highly political topic._

Have you asked yourself why? Fundamentally this is about a group of children
traveling to participate in an entrepreneurial competition. There is nothing
inherently political about that.

Who made it political? Who benefits from creating divisions that have made
these children’s entry in a competition such a loaded question?

~~~
hutzlibu
"Who made it political? Who benefits from creating divisions that have made
these children’s entry in a competition such a loaded question?"

I think basically 2 things come into play:

One is good intentioned propaganda, to support underprivileged poor girls, by
exaggerating what they can do - to try to persuade immigration-unfriendly
people into more openness, like hey they are good for our economy, if we only
let them in.

Secondly, but connected: opposition to Trump and co. and the whole power
struggle in the US.

So in this context, I would see the message as, poor, lovely and technology
outstanding girls beeing denied entry to the US for a competition, because of
evil Trump and his politics. (which is why he did intervene personally to show
that he is not so bad, and only wants to keep the bad people out blabla)

But I doubt, that any side really cared for the girls as humans.

... so high politics as usual, I think.

~~~
pavlov
So you don't think the original decision by US authorities to deny entry to
these children was political? Because your answer only blames the other side
for politicizing the issue under labels of "propaganda" and "power struggle".

That speaks of a mindset where any decision made by law enforcement
authorities is apolitical, and any questioning of said decisions is political.
It's the same mindset where American police are always just doing their job
the best they can, while Black Lives Matters is a dangerous anarchist
movement.

Oddly this mindset only extends to the sectors of government that are
authorized to use power. Anybody else working in the public sector is part of
"the swamp".

~~~
hutzlibu
"So you don't think the original decision by US authorities to deny entry to
these children was political?"

Erm, where did I said that?

I think I made my point clear, that I don't like travel restrictions based on
origin, but that I also don't like propaganda. But you seem to not really have
read my post.

------
sandergansen
So I'm here as the Chairman of Robotex and will quickly give an overview of
these girls achievement.

We first saw Roya, the entrepreneur helping those girls ar World Summit AI in
Amsterdam earlier this October.

There they decided to participate in the Entrepreneurial Challenge, which is a
new competition determined to find the most awesome new robotics teams and/or
solutions across all continents. It's somewhat like a prototype competition,
as we're still building the whole Entrepreneurial concept and raising a pre-
seed global robotics fund to help such companies in the future.

At this competition, they showcased a prototype for the solar-powered
agricultural machine and managed to get almost 35% of all votes, not because
of their popularity, any politics or just the product but for their ability to
market their product throughout the whole event + the idea itself.

Overall we're happy that they came. Even happier that they got the first
place. And now looking into starting a franchise of our event also in
Afghanistan.

If anyone wants to help out with the latter, then please contact me.

~~~
dvfjsdhgfv
Thank you, I'm very happy for them! Cold you tell us a bit more about the
hardware and software used in this project?

If done well, I feel this is quite an achievement. Farming machines are
usually very heavy and making hem work via solar power only is not so easy.

------
kaitai
For people who seem upset that these girls won a different, US, prize for
courageousness, in a different competition in a different month for a
different robot...

Someone was going to get the courageousness prize at FIRST. Why not the kids
who built their robot in two weeks and traveled 2000 miles to get their visas
before even leaving the country? If they didn't get it it would the inner city
team whose adult mentor got cancer and couldn't come due to chemo, or the
rural team from Mexico that crowdfunded their trip and blah blah blah.
Complaining that kids with a feel-good story won a feel-good award is like
complaining the nicest girl at a pageant gets Miss Congeniality.

------
dvfjsdhgfv
I couldn't find any details in Reuters article, so I read the comments.
Someone gave a link to Forbes, but there were no actual details about the
robot either. Fortunately at least the name of the competition was given. So I
went to [https://robotex.ee/en/](https://robotex.ee/en/), spent some time
there and found nothing. Even the "Results" link is misleading. Does anyone
have any idea what these girls actually built? Even a smallest detail
regarding hardware or software used in the project?

------
spayu61
So what's the actual news here? That they were denied entry in the US? Should
we feel bad about it or what?

There's 0 insight into what they achieved and the reporter even got the name
of the European country wrong. Looks like propaganda to me.

Edit: yes, it's propaganda: "Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the
charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s
rights, trafficking, property rights, resilience and climate change."

~~~
devnonymous
> So what's the actual news here?

School girls from Afghanistan built a solar powered robot. That's news because
this is something which is very hard to do in the absence of the many
privileges that would make such an achievement easy.

> That they were denied entry in the US?

Yes. That too is news worthy and was covered extensively.

> Should we feel bad about it or what?

Maybe. But rather than feeling bad wouldn't it be better to celebrate this,
promote this and encourage things like this until a time that such things are
common place enough to not be news worthy?

~~~
newsbinator
I'd like to encourage their achievement, but it's not clear what they
achieved.

> The team’s winning entry was a solar-powered robot that would help small
> farmers carry out tasks including seeding and cutting crops like wheat

Apart from the general idea, what was created?

Here's a more detailed article from the NY Times:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/29/world/afghanistan-
girls-r...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/29/world/afghanistan-girls-
robotics.html)

> The team, which had only two weeks to build its robot for the event because
> a shipment of parts was delayed, won a silver medal for courageous
> achievement.

Courageous achievement is good politics, but not necessarily good engineering.

Here's an article from NPR:

[https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/07/22/538088825/what-
re...](https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/07/22/538088825/what-really-
happened-at-that-robotics-competition-youve-heard-so-much-about)

> The winner was chosen by the thousands of spectators who attended the event.

They mention what the robot actually does:

> Every team arrived with a robot in tow, each built with the exact same
> components, but designed, engineered and programmed differently. The goal:
> to gobble up and sort blue and orange plastic balls representing clean water
> and contaminated water.

> The Afghan team's consolation prize: a medal for "courageous achievement"
> and knowing that they placed much higher than countries like Canada, the
> United Kingdom and the U.S.

\- - -

So my takeaway is that apart from facing all of the challenges that come with
delayed shipments and denied VISAs, the girls managed to build a robot out of
the standard parts list.

Their robot was voted on by thousands of attendees, and they placed higher
than teams from developed countries like Canada, the UK, and the US.

What's the actual news? Not much, this is a fluff story. But it means
something that a team of Afghan girls even made it to competition, much less
built something that could legitimately outcompete more developed teams.

~~~
spayu61
Thank you for doing this research. This looks fabricated, the same way Abdul's
clock was.

In response to the guy down here (I can't post anymore): the fact that they
"won a prize", as shown in the title of this post, is highly misleading, when
it was just a consolation prize. THe takeaway of these news is "look at
everything the US is missing for not opening their borders", and this being a
consolation prize, the US is simply missing nothing. So the entire thing is a
fabrication.

~~~
newsbinator
I don't think it's a fabrication.

The girls won a prize for overcoming adversity, and they arguably built a
better robot than teams that didn't have much adversity to overcome. That's
not nothing.

But at the same time articles like this one leave me with a feeling of
pandering and head-patting.

We all like to see groups of underdogs do impressive things.

If the article were about what an outlier their robot is because it's so good,
or what an outlier the team is because they pulled off a feat of engineering
against all odds, then I'd be cheering along with everyone else.

But mainly the article is: "these girls faced far more adversity than most
anyone else, but still managed to perform adequately."

That's something for them to be proud of personally, and for Afghanistan to be
proud of nationally.

At the same time, if the competition were adjudicated in a double-blind way,
would they have still beat out other teams?

There's nothing wrong in discussing whether that's a relevant question.

On another note, I'm surprised I got downvoted when adding background
information to the discussion.

~~~
kaitai
Again, you're talking about a different competition than that discussed in the
article. The way you have presented the background information is misleading.
The "entrepreneurial challenge" prize at Robotex has different criteria than
the "courageousness" award for overcoming adversity at FIRST.

------
eighthnate
Using prizes to push a political agenda. What could go wrong? Remember the
nobel peace prize to obama for nothing? Or the clock in the suitcase boy a few
years ago?

Yes, lets ruin the good name of science to push a political agenda. Then we
won't have anything to trust anymore.

