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Wednesday, June 12, 2019

Federal lawsuit: Arkansas voting system dilutes Black rights

The voting system for electing judges to Arkansas’ top courts violates black residents’ rights by diluting the strength of their votes, according to a federal lawsuit filed by civil rights lawyers.

The lawsuit filed Monday says that because the state’s seven Supreme Court justices are elected statewide, instead of by district, the white voting bloc overpowers the votes of black Arkansas residents. The suit says that’s why no black judge has ever been elected to the court.

The lawsuit points to several cases in which a black candidate was supported by a majority of black voters in an election, but was defeated by a white candidate supported by a majority of white voters.

Instead, lawyers suggest the state should change the voting system for Supreme Court justices by creating electoral districts, for which black voters “in at least one district would constitute a majority of the voting-age population.”

The suit also alleges that voting by districts for the state’s 12 appellate judges lumps all black voters into a single electoral district, reducing the strength of the population’s vote. Similar to its Supreme Court proposal, the lawsuit proposes creating two voting districts for appellate judge elections in which black voters are the majority.

A spokeswoman said state Attorney General Leslie Rutledge is reviewing the complaint and considering next steps.

Lawyers for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund filed the lawsuit on behalf of three voters and two statewide organizations.

In Mississippi, a federal lawsuit filed by four voters two weeks ago alleged the state’s system for electing its governor is aimed at preventing the election of black candidates.

The post Federal lawsuit: Arkansas voting system dilutes Black rights appeared first on theGrio.



from theGrio https://on.thegrio.com/2IAwsFE
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Race, power, drive: Elaine Welteroth shares all in new book

When she was about to graduate from college, Elaine Welteroth came up with a life plan: She’d hit the top of a magazine masthead, then move into TV, books, film and beyond.
She wasn’t messing around. The 32-year-old is way ahead of schedule after making firsts at Teen Vogue, both as beauty-health director and top editor, and then checking off “book” on Tuesday with the release of her memoir, “More Than Enough.”

“I think I’ve always been an ambitious person. I had this kind of blueprint in my mind of what success would look like,” Welteroth told The Associated Press ahead of the book’s debut. “The thing what I didn’t predict was just how fast the magazine part would happen.”
In 2016, to fanfare, Welteroth was named editor in chief of Teen Vogue, making her the youngest and only the second person of African American heritage in Condé Nast’s 107-year history to hold such a title. But she was only getting started, transforming the dusty property into an engaging platform for activism, inclusion, politics and social justice, and earning rock star status among young fans as she helped steer Teen Vogue into the digital age.

She developed the Teen Vogue Summit, bringing together young change-makers to soak up the words of elders Hillary Clinton and Maxine Waters, along with peer idols Yara Shahidi, Rowan Blanchard and others.

“We were able to help change the way many adults think about young people, who for too long have been underestimated and thought of as the selfie generation,” Welteroth said. “They are much more concerned about the issues impacting our world and how they can change them than we’ve ever given them credit for.”

The first summit played out amid hard times for the magazine industry. Teen Vogue’s print edition folded in late 2017 and Welteroth resigned soon after. Her frank retelling of those days includes some dark moments of ill health and personal frustrations for the self-avowed perfectionist and workaholic.

“Burnout is real,” said the small-town Northern California native, looking back on her wider-eyed era after 11 years in the media business. That includes a stop at Ebony magazine.

Still struggling with workaholic tendencies, Welteroth remains committed to telling stories of the under-represented, just as she was at Teen Vogue. Only now, she’s doing it not as the youngest or the first, but with friends and acquaintances named Ava (Duvernay), Shonda (Rhymes) and Lena (Waithe), having already earned a farewell hug and blessings from the person who took her career next level when she invited her into the “Condé Castle,” Anna Wintour.

“I have this arsenal of powerful, creative black women who are excelling in their careers, and it’s amazing to be alive right now. There’s never been a better time to be an empowered woman,” Welteroth said.

Duvernay wrote the foreword to the book, published by Viking, concluding that Welteroth’s story, at least thus far, points to the value of “knowing that the bad is our choice and the good is our choice. And to work to choose the good. Every day. In every way.”

Welteroth, also a judge on Bravo’s rejuvenated “Project Runway,” hopes to lift others as she was lifted by her mentors of color. Only now, she’s not struggling to make it to the table, and she’s not the first at the table. She’s building her own table as a free agent.
“There’s so much more to do,” said Welteroth, her signature aviator glasses in place, long curls pulled back as she chatted about the future. “Sometimes when you’re a first, it’s a mixed bag of sorts because it reminds you of so much more progress we have to make.”
Welteroth’s book takes us back to Newark, California, where she grew up working class, one of two children of a white father, Jack, and a black mother, Debra. She said her parents were committed to keeping black culture alive in their home in a predominantly white enclave skirting the southern edge of the San Francisco Bay.

Her parents, Welteroth said, have diametrically opposed backgrounds,

Debra a child of the Baptist church and backwoods Georgia who loves singing gospel and worked as a typist, and Jack a chain-smoking, guitar-playing hippie wild child and ex-carpenter who cussed like a sailor and drank a little too much.

The mixed-race experience, Welteroth said, is an identity that goes underexplored in our culture.

“My mother and my father decided before their children were born that they were going to raise black children because it would just be easier that way, and they wanted to make things simple for us,” said Welteroth, who identifies as a black woman.

“But as children who didn’t understand the nuances of race in America, when that Census card would come around every year, as a little tiny act of rebellion, my brother and I would check both black and white. We didn’t understand why we would have to choose one when we are both.”

Welteroth has come to embrace her biracial status as one of her “superpowers,” along with an ability to empathize with and understand many world views. She also has come to realize, as a mixed-race person, “whether you acknowledge it or not, you have some measure of white privilege and therefore you will have access to certain spaces that you can operate in almost as an undercover change agent.”

Bridging divides is part of her life plan, between black and white, beauty and politics, young and old, and especially among women.

“This book is about lighting torches,” Welteroth said. “This book I hope will inspire young women to dream a little bit bigger and to support other women as you go.”

The post Race, power, drive: Elaine Welteroth shares all in new book appeared first on theGrio.



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Ghana security forces rescue Canadian women hostages

The women, aged 19 and 20, were working as volunteers for a Toronto-based charity.

from BBC News - Africa https://bbc.in/2I9aL08
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Brighton's Nigerian footballers on why they miss their home comforts

Brighton and Hove Albion's Leon Balogun and Ini-Abasi Umotong play table football and have a chat.

from BBC News - Africa https://bbc.in/31rGTDP
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Tuesday, June 11, 2019

Caster Semenya wins 2,000m at the Meeting de Montreui

Olympic 800m champion Caster Semenya cruises to victory at 2,000m at the Meeting de Montreui - her first race since filing an appeal against the IAAF's ruling to restrict testosterone levels in female runners.

from BBC News - Africa https://bbc.in/2ZmTvuh
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Engineers set the standards

It might not seem consequential now, but in 1863, Scientific American weighed in on a pressing technological issue: the standardization of screw threads in U.S. machine shops. Given standard-size threads — the ridges running around screws and bolts — screws missing from machinery could be replaced with hardware from any producer. But without a standard, fixing industrial equipment would be harder or even impossible.

Moreover, Great Britain had begun standardizing the size of screw threads, so why couldn’t the U.S.? After energetic campaigning by a mechanical engineer named William Sellers, both the U.S. Navy and the Pennsylvania Railroad got on board with the idea, greatly helping standardization take hold.

Why did it matter? The latter half of the 1800s was an unprecedented time of industrial expansion. But the products and tools of the time were not necessarily uniform. Making them compatible served as an accelerant for industrialization. The standardization of screw threads was a signature moment in this process — along with new standards for steam boilers (which had a nasty habit of exploding) and for the steel rails used in train tracks.

Moreover, what goes for 19th-century hardware goes for hundreds of things used in daily life today. From software languages to batteries, transmission lines to power plants, cement, and more, standardization still helps fuel economic growth.

“Everything around us is full of standards,” says JoAnne Yates, the Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management at MIT. “None of us could function without standards.”

But how did this all come about? One might expect government treaties to be essential for global standards to exist. But time and again, Yates notes, industrial standards are voluntary and have the same source: engineers. Or, more precisely, nongovernmental standard-setting bodies dominated by engineers, which work to make technology uniform across borders.

“On one end of a continuum is government regulation, and on the other are market forces, and in between is an invisible infrastructure of organizations that helps us arrive at voluntary standards without which we couldn’t operate,” Yates says.

Now Yates is the co-author of a new history that makes the role of engineers in setting standards more visible than ever. The book, “Engineering Rules: Global Standard Setting since 1880,” is being published this week by Johns Hopkins University Press. It is co-authored by Yates, who teaches in the MIT Sloan School of Management, and Craig N. Murphy, who is the Betty Freyhof Johnson ’44 Professor of International Relations at Wellesley College.

Joint research project

As it happens, Murphy is also Yates’ husband — and, for the first time, they have collaborated on a research project.

“He’s a political scientist and I’m a business historian, but we had said throughout our careers, ‘Some day we should write a book together,’” Yates says. When it crossed their radar as a topic, the evolution of standards “immediately appealed to both of us,” she adds. “From Craig’s point of view, he studies global governance, which also includes nongovernmental institutions like this. I saw it as important because of the way firms play a role in it.”

As Yates and Murphy see it, there have been three distinct historical “waves” of technological standardization. The first, the late 19th- and early 20th-century industrial phase, was spurred by the professionalization of engineering itself. Those engineers were trying to impose order on a world far less organized than ours: Although the U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to set standards, a U.S. National Bureau of Standards was not created until 1901, when there were still 25 different basic units of length — such as “rods” — being used in the country.

Much of this industrial standardization occured country by country. But by the early 20th century, engineers ramped up their efforts to make standards international — and some, like the British engineer Charles le Maistre, a key figure in the book, were very aspirational about global standards.

“Technology evangelists, like le Maistre, spread the word about the importance of standardizing and how technical standards should transcend politics and transcend national boundaries,” Yates says, adding that many had a “social movement-like fervor, feeling that they were contributing to the common good. They even thought it would create world peace.”

It didn’t. Still, the momentum for standards created by Le Maistre carried into the post-World War II era, the second wave detailed in the book. This new phase, Yates notes, is exemplified by the creation of the standardized shipping container, which made world-wide commerce vastly easier in terms of logistics and efficiency.

“This second wave was all about integrating the global market,” Yates says. 

The third and most recent wave of standardization, as Yates and Murphy see it, is centered on information technology — where engineers have once again toiled, often with a sense of greater purpose, to develop global standards.

To some degree this is an MIT story; Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, moved to MIT to establish a global standards consortium for the web, W3C, which was founded in 1994, with the Institute’s backing. More broadly, Yates and Murphy note, the era is marked by efforts to speed up the process of standard-setting, “to respond to a more rapid pace of technological change” in the world.

Setting a historical standard

Intriguingly, as Yates and Murphy document, many efforts to standardize technologies required firms and business leaders to put aside their short-term interests for a longer-term good — whether for a business, an industry, or society generally.

“You can’t explain the standards world entirely by economics,” Yates says. “And you can’t explain the standards world entirely by power.”

Other scholars regard the book as a significant contribution to the history of business and globalization. Yates and Murphy “demonstrate the crucial impact of private and informal standard setting on our daily lives,” according to Thomas G. Weiss, a professor of international relations and global governance at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Weiss calls the book “essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the major changes in the global economy.”

For her part, Yates says she hopes readers will, among other things, reflect on the idealism and energy of the engineers who regarded international standards as a higher cause.

“It is a story about engineers thinking they could contribute something good for the world, and then putting the necessary organizations into place.” Yates notes. “Standardization didn’t create world peace, but it has been good for the world.”



from MIT News http://bit.ly/2IyWadz
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Richard Grundy: Leading Youth On A Tech JOURNi

BE Modern Man: Richard Grundy

Nonprofit founder and executive, 36, CEO of JOURNi

Twitter: @mrrichgrundy; Instagram: @mrrichgrundy

I cofounded JOURNi along with a fellow BE Modern Man Brian McKinney and Quiessence Phillips. JOURNi’s a nonprofit that focuses on empowering young Detroiters in underserved communities through tech education, design thinking, and entrepreneurship through courses, programs, and events that we facilitate. What makes our org a bit different is that we don’t only teach our students how to build web projects but also how to monetize that skillset on their own through freelancing and entrepreneurship. We also bring in different tech professionals and entrepreneurs, through a speaker series, who can identify with our students and the challenges they may face outside of the classroom. In 2018 alone, we’ve helped to introduce close to 3,000 students to coding.

WHAT ARE YOU MOST PROUD OF IN LIFE?

At this point in my life, I’m most proud of the impact we’re making at JOURNi. We’ve come from running our first program in 2016 to introducing close to 3,000 kids to coding last year. Along the way, we’ve been able to garner support from the Campaign for Black Male Achievement, The Skillman Foundation, United Way for Southeastern Michigan, Ford, Microsoft, and Google among others. We’ve come a long way in how we impact our community and I know that we’ll get better.

HOW HAVE YOU TURNED STRUGGLE INTO SUCCESS?

JOURNi was a part of an accelerator program where I had the opportunity to pitch for a $50,000 grant for the organization. I’ve always struggled with public speaking and it definitely was not a strength in the past. I absolutely bombed the pitch. I didn’t let that consume me that day and continued to make lasting connections on a one-on-one basis with attendees for the remainder of the event. Those connections turned into relationships with people who still support and partner with JOURNi until this day. I’ve also greatly improved my public speaking since then and look forward to any opportunity to do so when talking about JOURNi and the problem that we’re focused on solving.

WHO WAS YOUR GREATEST MALE ROLE MODEL AND WHAT DID YOU LEARN FROM HIM?

I wouldn’t pick any one person, but I would say that I actually learn a lot from my peers and leaders in my area that came before that I get to work with. I’ve learned a lot in the last few years as far as what it means to be a youth developer, how one can carry oneself while in the work and what it means to actually be present.

I’m also learning how the black male leaders that I really admire are all approachable and treat everyone with the same respect regardless of their influence.

HOW DO YOU DEFINE MANHOOD?

I define manhood as understanding the responsibility that a man has to his family and community and proudly carrying out that responsibility. Whether that’s protecting or providing for his family or educating those that came after him, [it means] understanding that there is a responsibility and carrying that with honor.

HOW ARE YOU PAYING IT FORWARD TO SUPPORT OTHER BLACK MALES?

With JOURNi, we support black males through our coding and entrepreneurship programming. This gives me the opportunity to teach young black men a skill that can generate income and then we take it a step further and show them how to actually monetize the skillset through freelance work. We’ve also sponsored a black college tour for two of our earlier black male students. In addition, I’m a part of the campaign for black male achievement Black Male Equity Initiative fellowship in Detroit. After completing the fellowship, I’ll be able to help transfer some of the knowledge learned to the next cohort.

WHAT DO YOU LIKE MOST ABOUT BEING A BLACK MAN?

I think that black men have done some amazing things in American history and continue to do amazing things today. I don’t take lightly the opportunity to stand on the shoulders of those great men from the past to impact and teach in our community or the opportunity to stand shoulder to shoulder with my current peers impacting the community now. Knowing what was accomplished in the past by these men and that we come from the same stock helps to motivate me in my work today.

It’s truly an honor to be recognized as a BE Modern Man of Distinction. I remember years ago entering a Black Enterprise hackathon, which subsequently introduced to me to a black tech community in New York and helped shaped the way I look at community and the work I do today back home in Detroit.

It’s amazing how things come full circle.

BE Modern Man is an online and social media campaign designed to celebrate black men making valuable contributions in every profession, industry, community, and area of endeavor. Each year, we solicit nominations in order to select men of color for inclusion in the 100 Black Enterprise Modern Men of Distinction. Our goal is to recognize men who epitomize the BEMM credo “Extraordinary is our normal” in their day-to-day lives, presenting authentic examples of the typical black man rarely seen in mainstream media. The BE Modern Men of Distinction are celebrated annually at Black Men XCEL (www.blackenterprise.com/blackmenxcel/). Click this link to submit a nomination for BE Modern Man: https://www.blackenterprise.com/nominate/. Follow BE Modern Man on Twitter: @bemodernman and Instagram: @be_modernman.

 



from Black Enterprise http://bit.ly/2KeJRGy
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Spike Lee’s classic film, ‘Do The Right Thing’ makes its return to theaters

How racist housing contracts stole $4 billion dollars in wealth from Black families

New Report: 23 percent of young Black women now identify as bisexual

THE CONVERSATION – Since 1972, social scientists have studied the General Social Survey to chart the complexities of social change in the United States.

The survey, which is conducted every couple years, asks respondents their attitudes on topics ranging from race relations to drug use. In 2008, the survey started including a question on sexual identity.

As sociologists who study sexuality, we’ve noticed how more and more women are reporting that they’re bisexual. But in the most recent survey, one subset stood out: 23% of Black women in the 18 to 34 age group identified as bisexual – a proportion that’s nearly three times higher than it was a decade ago.

What forces might be fueling this shift? And what can learn from it?

Bisexuality among women is on the rise

In the 10 years that the General Social Survey has included a question on sexual identity, rates of identification among gay men, lesbian women and bisexual men in the U.S. haven’t changed much.

Bisexual identifying women, on the other hand, account for virtually all of the growth among those who say they’re lesbian, gay or bisexual. Of all of the women who responded to the 2018 survey, more than 1 in 18 identified as bisexual. One decade ago, only 1 in 65 did.

The most dramatic shift among bisexual identifying women is happening among young people. In the 2018 sample, more than 1 in 8 women from the ages of 18 to 34 identified as bisexual. There were more than twice as many young female bisexuals as there were young lesbians, gay men and bisexual men combined.

That’s a large shift – and it all happened in a relatively short period of time.

Add race to the figures and you’ll see that young Black women, in particular, account for a disproportionate share of this shift.

A few years ago, we wrote about how approximately 18% of young Black women identified as lesbian or bisexual in the 2016 General Social Survey sample. That rate was more than two times higher than for white women or other racial groups – and almost four times higher than for men of any racial group.

By 2018, more than 25% of young Black women identified as lesbian or bisexual. And the majority of that change can be accounted for by bisexual-identifying black women.

In other trends, Black women also led the way

Data like these help us to establish a shift is occurring, but they don’t really explain why it’s happening.

Exploring the “why” requires different methods of analysis, and existing studies – like Mignon Moore’s research on gay identity and relationships among black women – can provide some clues.

But beyond this, other demographic research shows that Black women have led the way in other trends related to gender.

Consider the gender gap in college attendance. As early as 1980, Black women began to outpace black men in completion of a four-year college degree. It wasn’t until a decade later that white women started earning college degrees at a higher clip than white men.

And in the first half of the 20th century, more unmarried Black women started having children. Eventually, more unmarried white women started having children, too.

Perhaps when it comes to sexuality, Black women are also ahead of the curve. If that’s the case – and if this trend continues – we might expect women of other races to follow suit.

A shortage of men?

Cultural forces might also play a role.

Sociologists Emma Mishel, Paula England, Jessie Ford and Mónica L. Caudillo also analyzed the General Social Survey. Rather than study sexual identities, they studied sexual behavior. Yet they discovered a similar pattern: Young Black women were more likely to engage in same-sex sexual behavior than women and men in other racial and age groups.

They argue that these shifts speak to a larger truth about American culture: It’s more acceptable for women to spurn gender norms because femininity isn’t valued as highly as masculinity. Since masculinity and heterosexuality are closely intertwined, men might believe they’ll suffer a higher social cost for identifying as bisexual.

Others have pointed to the shortage of men hypothesis to explore young Black women’s decisions about relationships and marriage. This too might explain why young Black women, in particular, seem more willing to explore bisexuality.

According to this argument, fewer “marriageable” men create a need for women to consider options beyond heterosexual relationships or marriage. A traditional marriage isn’t as necessary as it once was; since women have more educational and economic opportunities, they can afford to be pickier or, possibly, to explore same-sex relationships.

Another aspect of the hypothesis involves the disproportionately high rates of incarceration of Black men in the U.S. It’s possible that because Black women are, as a group, more likely to live in areas with smaller “pools of marriageable men,” they’re more open to bisexuality.

We’re less convinced by the shortage of men argument because it ignores the fact that incarceration rates of Black men haven’t increased over the past decade. Yet over this period of time, the percentages of young Black women identifying as bisexual have grown substantially.

The challenge of surveying sexuality

Finding reliable ways of measuring sexual identity on surveys is more difficult than you might think, and the trend could have been spurred by something as simple as the way the question is phrased in the General Social Survey:

“Which of the following best describes you?”

  • gay, lesbian or homosexual
  • bisexual
  • heterosexual or straight
  • don’t know

Of the roughly 1,400 people who responded to this question on the 2018 GSS survey, only six responded “don’t know.” Another 27 didn’t respond at all.

But everyone else selected one of those three options.

Perhaps some respondents didn’t want to neatly tie themselves to the category of “gay” or “straight.” If this is the case, “bisexual” almost becomes a default fallback.

Either way, one thing seems clear: Young people – especially young Black women – are more willing to explore their sexuality. And the ways they are sexually identifying themselves on surveys is only one indicator of this change.

The Conversation


Tristan Bridges, Assistant Professor, Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara and Mignon R. Moore, Professor and Chair of Sociology, Barnard College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post New Report: 23 percent of young Black women now identify as bisexual appeared first on theGrio.



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Are Facebook Ads Discriminatory? It’s Complicated

The company’s system for targeting ads is under fire for gender and ethnic bias. In some cases, the cure could be worse than the disease.

from Wired http://bit.ly/2I7Lnb7
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‘Pose’ star Indya Moore gets in scuffle with Trump supporter over re-election sign

Indya Moore, one of the breakout stars of FX’s hit show Pose, got into a dustup with a Trump supporter holding a ‘Re-elect Donald Trump, Keep America Great, 2020’ sign.

Jussie Smollett pops up on social media for first time since hate crime scandal to celebrate Pride Month

On friday, Moore was caught on camera snatching the sign from a Dion Cini, who reportedly holds a weekly demonstration with a small group of fellow supporters, across from Trump Tower in New York City.

After Moore snatched the poster out of Cini’s hands, the trans actress stomped on it and seemingly tried to destroy it.

“The actor came over, started kicking a sign, and threw it to the ground,” Cini told DailyMail.com.

Two other people, reportedly friends of Moore, also tried to intervene. Eventually, a cop stepped in to diffuse the situation.

Moore also reportedly said she “didn’t want [Trump supporters as] fans of his show.”

Yesterday Moore took to Twitter to write: “Thank you for loving my community, fighting for us, supporting us fight for ourselves and others who are experiencing an increase of oppression and violence under this current administration.”

Rihanna opens up about her billionaire boyfriend and longing to be a mom “more than anything in life”

Moore stars as Angel Evangelista on Pose, which returns for season two this week.

The post ‘Pose’ star Indya Moore gets in scuffle with Trump supporter over re-election sign appeared first on theGrio.



from theGrio https://on.thegrio.com/2XzUcQm
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Rihanna opens up about her billionaire boyfriend and longing to be mom “more than anything in life”

Rihanna’s wild, wild thoughts are becoming pretty tame these days.

The 31-year-old singer and beauty and fashion mogul sat down with Sarah Paulson, her Ocean 8 co-star, for Interview magazine to dish about her personal life, including her new man.

Rihanna makes history as first woman of color to helm own fashion line with LVMH

“I got into a new relationship, and it matters to me. It was like, ‘I need to make time for this.’ Just like I nurture my businesses, I need to nurture this as well,” she said about her billionaire boyfriend Hassan Jameel.

“I’ll shut things down for two days, three days at a time. On my calendar we now have the infamous ‘P,’ which means personal days. This is a new thing.”

Rih Rih’s ‘P’ also means she’s prioritizing her life goals. While she doesn’t give in to divulging about whether marriage is on the horizon for the super secretive couple, she does say she wants to be a mom “more than anything in life,” PEOPLE reports.

But contrary to popular belief, the Grammy-award winning singer says she’s not secretive on purpose. She says her shyness comes across as confidence.

“People don’t know that I’m shy… because I kind of pretend it’s not happening people read me as being confident,” she confessed. “I still get nervous going to award shows. What is that? I always feel like everybody’s looking at me.”

Well because we are!

As of late, Rihanna’s been racking up wins in other aspects of her life. She broke records by becoming the first woman of color to run a fashion house with Fenty Maison as part of the LVHM Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton company. And Fenty Beauty and her Savage x Fenty lingerie lines are both booming.

DUP official, who once opposed Rihanna, elected out of office

As for a new album, Rihanna’s promises new tracks are on the horizon.

“It’s the reason why an album isn’t being spat out like it used to,” she explained about her busy schedule. “I used to be in the studio, only the studio, for three months straight, and an album would come out. Now, it’s like a carousel. I do fashion one day, lingerie the next, beauty the next, then music the next. It’s like having a bunch of kids and you need to take care of them all.”

But when her music does hit the scene, she promises it will be fun for all.

“It really does suck that it can’t just come out, because I’m working on a really fun one right now. I’m really happy with a lot of the material we have so far, but I am not going to put it out until it’s complete,” she said. “It makes no sense to rush it, but I want it out.”

The post Rihanna opens up about her billionaire boyfriend and longing to be mom “more than anything in life” appeared first on theGrio.



from theGrio https://on.thegrio.com/2X2IrF6
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More than 100 villagers safe despite Mali attack

The 108 people are sheltering in a school after attackers killed 95 people in central Mali.

from BBC News - Africa https://bbc.in/2WCch3R
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Rapper Scarface gearing up to run for Houston City Council

5 Secrets of Successful Entrepreneurs

If you have the goal of becoming a successful entrepreneur, it is crucial you work on improving yourself personally as well as professionally. You can’t hope to achieve long-term business success as an entrepreneur if you aren’t constantly trying to hone the skills necessary to build a viable company. Successful entrepreneurs invest time in becoming better versions of themselves—that tends to build stronger businesses as well as an extensive business network. If this is the year you go all in on entrepreneurial growth, following are five life lessons you ought to learn sooner rather than later.

5 Secrets of Successful Entrepreneurs

 

Manage Your Emotions

An essential skill you need to hone as an entrepreneur is the ability to manage your emotions. Entrepreneurs who overreact or let their emotions get the better of them tend to make rash decisions not based on hard evidence. Learn to control your emotions and you’re likelier to make smart business decisions.

Your Entrepreneurial Story Is Within Your Control

Your story as an entrepreneur is within your control. How you react to challenges, the effort you put into personal and business growth, and your inner motivation all contribute to your entrepreneurial story. If you don’t like how your journey is progressing, it’s up to you to make the necessary changes.

Analyze Your Doubts

Becoming a successful entrepreneur is not without its challenges. There will be many days where you question your own sanity and ask yourself why you chose to be an entrepreneur. If you focus your efforts on analyzing why you feel like quitting or why you are finding a particular situation stressful, you’ll get at the underlying problem. Once you understand what’s really bothering you, chances are good you’ll be able to address the issue and develop a solution.

Manage Your Mental Energy

How you focus your mental energy has a huge impact on your success (or failure) as an entrepreneur. Business builders who focus their thoughts on positive endeavors tend to have greater success rates than those constantly immersed in negativity. Learn how to train your thought patterns to focus on positive, uplifting endeavors and you’ll have a much more enjoyable entrepreneurial journey.

Increase Opportunities for Those in Your Network

If you want to become a more successful entrepreneur, learn how to increase growth opportunities for others around you. If all you ever do is focus on your own growth as an entrepreneur, you won’t develop an extensive network of individuals who want to see you succeed. Learn to lift others up as you attempt to become a better business builder and your odds of developing a formidable social and business network significantly increase.

Focus on learning these five life lessons and you’ll increase your odds of success as an entrepreneur. Work on becoming a better version of yourself and you’ll not only become a stronger entrepreneur, but you’ll also likely build a better company in the process.

 



from Black Enterprise http://bit.ly/2MEEMJw
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Your Cadillac Can Now Drive Itself More Places

Cadillac's Super Cruise will shut itself off when the car reaches a tricky spot where a driver needs to pay attention.

from Wired http://bit.ly/2X7V29U
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Jussie Smollett pops up on social media for first time sense hate crime scandal to celebrate Pride Month

How To Save Text Messages on Your iPhone: 5 Simple Solutions

Here are five ways to back up all of the Messages and SMS conversations stored on your mobile device.

from Wired http://bit.ly/2fplN2I
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Jada Pinkett Smith on infidelity and breaking free from husband Will’s idea of marriage ‘Our whole life looked like his dream’

Jada Pinkett Smith goes deep on another episode of her hit Facebook talk show, Red Table Talk.

In monday’s episode, the actress took viewers inside her Hollywood marriage and revealed the some of the challenges that she and Will Smith faced as she tried to break free and live her best life independently.

Will Smith on Jada’s shocking porn admission and how he feels about ‘Red Table Talk’– ‘They be telling all our business’

Pinkett Smith spoke intimately about her journey to navigate her own wants and needs in her life aside from her marriage to her mega-star husband with a conversation with world-renowned therapist Esther Perel, PEOPLE reports.

“Specifically for me, in regards to redefining my marriage as a life partnership was the necessity of autonomy for myself and for Will,” Pinkett Smith said. “And finding the core of us that wanted to be together outside of the constraints of the traditional ideas of marriage because they weren’t working for us.”

She explained: “We went on that journey to find that autonomy and to find the true authentic bond outside of obligation. I don’t want you to be obligated.”

Pinkett Smith spoke candidly about the hard-fought road to help her husband understand that each of them had their own vision of life.

Pinkett Smith said she felt the pressure of trying to fit in his box.

“You have to be the perfect wife, you have to be the source that supports his dreams, no matter what it is, whatever he wants to build you’re there to support that,” Pinkett Smith said.

She added, “Our whole life looked like his dream. I’m his energy source. That’s great, but I’ve got to create part of this life that is designed and looks like me.”

Ciara opens up about how she healed relationship scars with Future on ‘Red Table Talk’

And when Jada started to tell her husband about her dreams and desires, she admits it wasn’t easy for him to accept.

“He felt abandoned at first, he felt really abandoned,” she said. “You never want to hurt the person that you love. You never want to create instability that way.”

“It has been one of the most excruciating processes of my life,” Pinkett Smith said. “I’ve wanted to personally break out of Will needing to be something for me because I felt like that was so unfair. And a lot of it had to do with my father issues. I just realized one day, ‘This man is not your father!’”

Perel chimed in: “Or he’s not meant to be everything your father was not.”

“That was the thing, I was like, ‘[Jada], you gotta grow up. You gotta be a woman. That little girl trauma does not work here.’ That was the work I had to do.”

And while Pinkett Smith said that she and her husband haven’t faced any issues of infidelity in their relationship, the actress said she’s been cheated on and been the one to step out on her own partner in the past.

“I had a really interesting experience when I was younger. I had two relationships before Will that were kind of serious to me, where I got cheated on,” Pinkett Smith recalled. “[It] really broke my heart.”

“And then I cheated on somebody I really cared about and let me tell you, me cheating on someone was more devastating than being cheated on,” ahe added. “It actually taught me to forgive when I got cheated on because I understood.”

According to Pinkett Smith, what she learned from the experience is when she was the one getting cheated on, it wasn’t because of anything she’s done or anything wrong with her.

“When I had to look at myself and why I did it, I realized it had nothing to do with my partner, at all,” she explained.

Pinkett Smith and Perel also talked about the different kinds of betrayal that can jeopardize a marriage, including “contempt, neglect and violence and indifference,” according to the renowned therapist.

“I’m asked a lot about, ‘Is there infidelity in your relationship with Will?’ And it’s like, ‘No, but there have been other betrayals of the heart that have been far bigger than I could even think in regards to an infidelity situation,'” Pinkett Smith shared. “When you talk about contempt, resentment, neglect, it can just tear your world apart.”

Red Table Talk airs Mondays on Facebook Watch.

The post Jada Pinkett Smith on infidelity and breaking free from husband Will’s idea of marriage ‘Our whole life looked like his dream’ appeared first on theGrio.



from theGrio https://on.thegrio.com/2I8RHzc
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Ethiopian woman gives birth and sits exams 30 minutes later

She took the exams in hospital because she did not want to wait another year to graduate.

from BBC News - Africa https://bbc.in/2WwasRd
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Beyond Madonna: A More Colorful Picture of Queer History

From Pose to Tales of the City, there's a slew of content telling new stories about the LGBTQ+ rights movement.

from Wired http://bit.ly/2wMMjv7
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New Space Telescopes Could Look Like Giant Beach Balls

Inflatable balloon reflectors could peer into deep space, scanning for signs of water, at a fraction of the cost of a traditional telescope.

from Wired http://bit.ly/2XE3ZEW
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Fans Are Better Than Tech at Organizing Information Online

Archive of Our Own, the fanfiction database recently nominated for a Hugo, has perfected a system of tagging that the rest of the web could emulate.

from Wired http://bit.ly/2wO2NDk
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New York City street named for rapper Notorious B.I.G.

A New York City street has been named for rapper Notorious B.I.G.

Community members and elected officials gathered in a downpour on Monday at the intersection of St. James Place and Fulton Street.

Rapper Lil’ Kim — embracing the event’s themes of social justice and making a difference — exclaimed: “We did it, Brooklyn!”

B.I.G., who was born Christopher Wallace, was shot to death in Los Angeles in 1997.
He detailed street life in Brooklyn in songs and on albums that dominated the pop charts.

Voletta Wallace recalled telling a friend amid her heartbreak: “My son was well loved.”
But she said the street naming evoked “happy tears.”

The post New York City street named for rapper Notorious B.I.G. appeared first on theGrio.



from theGrio https://on.thegrio.com/2RaVCP2
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Botswana decriminalises homosexuality in landmark ruling

The High Court decision is a landmark case and contrasts with Kenya's recent ruling against gay sex.

from BBC News - Africa https://bbc.in/2Zk48y4
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Caster Semenya named in South Africa's preliminary squad for World Championships

Olympic 800m champion Caster Semenya is named in South Africa's preliminary squad for the World Championships.

from BBC News - Africa https://bbc.in/2XATv9y
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Monday, June 10, 2019

Algorithm tells robots where nearby humans are headed

In 2018, researchers at MIT and the auto manufacturer BMW were testing ways in which humans and robots might work in close proximity to assemble car parts. In a replica of a factory floor setting, the team rigged up a robot on rails, designed to deliver parts between work stations. Meanwhile, human workers crossed its path every so often to work at nearby stations. 

The robot was programmed to stop momentarily if a person passed by. But the researchers noticed that the robot would often freeze in place, overly cautious, long before a person had crossed its path. If this took place in a real manufacturing setting, such unnecessary pauses could accumulate into significant inefficiencies.

The team traced the problem to a limitation in the robot’s trajectory alignment algorithms used by the robot’s motion predicting software. While they could reasonably predict where a person was headed, due to the poor time alignment the algorithms couldn’t anticipate how long that person spent at any point along their predicted path — and in this case, how long it would take for a person to stop, then double back and cross the robot’s path again.

Now, members of that same MIT team have come up with a solution: an algorithm that accurately aligns partial trajectories in real-time, allowing motion predictors to accurately anticipate the timing of a person’s motion. When they applied the new algorithm to the BMW factory floor experiments, they found that, instead of freezing in place, the robot simply rolled on and was safely out of the way by the time the person walked by again.

“This algorithm builds in components that help a robot understand and monitor stops and overlaps in movement, which are a core part of human motion,” says Julie Shah, associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT. “This technique is one of the many way we’re working on robots better understanding people.”

Shah and her colleagues, including project lead and graduate student Przemyslaw “Pem” Lasota, will present their results this month at the Robotics: Science and Systems conference in Germany.

Clustered up

To enable robots to predict human movements, researchers typically borrow algorithms from music and speech processing. These algorithms are designed to align two complete time series, or sets of related data, such as an audio track of a musical performance and a scrolling video of that piece’s musical notation.

Researchers have used similar alignment algorithms to sync up real-time and previously recorded measurements of human motion, to predict where a person will be, say, five seconds from now. But unlike music or speech, human motion can be messy and highly variable. Even for repetitive movements, such as reaching across a table to screw in a bolt, one person may move slightly differently each time.

Existing algorithms typically take in streaming motion data, in the form of dots representing the position of a person over time, and compare the trajectory of those dots to a library of common trajectories for the given scenario. An algorithm maps a trajectory in terms of the relative distance between dots.

But Lasota says algorithms that predict trajectories based on distance alone can get easily confused in certain common situations, such as temporary stops, in which a person pauses before continuing on their path. While paused, dots representing the person’s position can bunch up in the same spot.

“When you look at  the data, you have a whole bunch of points clustered together when a person is stopped,” Lasota says. “If you’re only looking at the distance between points as your alignment metric, that can be confusing, because they’re all close together, and you don’t have a good idea of which point you have to align to.”

The same goes with overlapping trajectories — instances when a person moves back and forth along a similar path. Lasota says that while a person’s current position may line up with a dot on a reference trajectory, existing algorithms can’t differentiate between whether that position is part of a trajectory heading away, or coming back along the same path.

“You may have points close together in terms of distance, but in terms of time, a person’s position may actually be far from a reference point,” Lasota says.

It’s all in the timing

As a solution, Lasota and Shah devised a “partial trajectory” algorithm that aligns segments of a person’s trajectory in real-time with a library of previously collected reference trajectories. Importantly, the new algorithm aligns trajectories in both distance and timing, and in so doing, is able to accurately anticipate stops and overlaps in a person’s path.

“Say you’ve executed this much of a motion,” Lasota explains. “Old techniques will say, ‘this is the closest point on this representative trajectory for that motion.’ But since you only completed this much of it in a short amount of time, the timing part of the algorithm will say, ‘based on the timing, it’s unlikely that you’re already on your way back, because you just started your motion.’”

The team tested the algorithm on two human motion datasets: one in which a person intermittently crossed a robot’s path in a factory setting (these data were obtained from the team’s experiments with BMW), and another in which the group previously recorded hand movements of participants reaching across a table to install a bolt that a robot would then secure by brushing sealant on the bolt.

For both datasets, the team’s algorithm was able to make better estimates of a person’s progress through a trajectory, compared with two commonly used partial trajectory alignment algorithms. Furthermore, the team found that when they integrated the alignment algorithm with their motion predictors, the robot could more accurately anticipate the timing of a person’s motion. In the factory floor scenario, for example, they found the robot was less prone to freezing in place, and instead smoothly resumed its task shortly after a person crossed its path.

While the algorithm was evaluated in the context of motion prediction, it can also be used as a preprocessing step for other techniques in the field of human-robot interaction, such as action recognition and gesture detection. Shah says the algorithm will be a key tool in enabling robots to recognize and respond to patterns of human movements and behaviors. Ultimately, this can help humans and robots work together in structured environments, such as factory settings and even, in some cases, the home.

“This technique could apply to any environment where humans exhibit typical patterns of behavior,” Shah says. “The key is that the [robotic] system can observe patterns that occur over and over, so that it can learn something about human behavior. This is all in the vein of work of the robot better understand aspects of human motion, to be able to collaborate with us better.”

This research was funded, in part, by a NASA Space Technology Research Fellowship and the National Science Foundation.



from MIT News http://bit.ly/2IwzZEY
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A platform for Africa’s mobile innovators

Sam Gikandi ’05 SM ’06 and Eston Kimani ’05 have always believed in the potential of Africa’s entrepreneurial community. Their years at MIT, beginning in 2001 when they left their home country of Kenya, only reinforced that belief.

Through the MIT-Africa initiative and other campus programs that allowed them to work in regions across the African continent, they met hundreds of established and aspiring software developers, many of whom were in various stages of starting companies.

In order for these developers to maximize their impact, Gikandi and Kimani knew they’d need to reach the hundreds of millions of Africans who own cell phones but not smartphones. That has traditionally required entrepreneurs to go through several long and complex processes, including applying for access to telecommunications infrastructure from mobile operators, setting up the necessary technical integrations, and gaining approval from regulatory agencies in each region they wanted to operate in.

Gikandi and Kimani felt those hurdles were holding Africa’s businesses back, so they founded Africa’s Talking to unleash entrepreneurs’ full potential.

Since 2012, the company, known colloquially as AT, has been helping businesses in Africa communicate and transact with customers — whether they have a smartphone or not — through text, voice, and other mobile-centered application programming interfaces, or APIs.

The APIs act as plug-and-play capabilities for developers to quickly add mobile features, including the ability to send and receive payments, to their solution. Gikandi describes the company as “telecom in a box.”

Africa’s Talking currently operates in 18 countries around Africa and supports about 5,000 businesses ranging from early-stage startups to large organizations. Businesses can add APIs as new needs arise and pay as they go, dramatically reducing the risks and time commitment traditionally associated with telecom integrations.

This spring, the company launched AT Labs, which aims to leverage its network, expertise, and infrastructure to help entrepreneurs create impactful companies in the shortest possible timeframe.

Gikandi, who ceded his CEO role at Africa’s Talking to lead AT Labs, says the new program will take a small stake in the companies it supports. But he also wants to incentivize founders to give back to AT Labs once they’ve had success.

He says the business model is in line with the larger symbiotic relationship between Africa’s Talking and its customers, in which all parties feed off of each other’s success: “We have a big advantage with Africa’s Talking, but we feel we only grow when the local ecosystem grows.”

Removing barriers to innovation

The rise in cell phone ownership among Africans over the last 15 years has given entrepreneurs the opportunity to create transformative solutions on the continent. But Gikandi says telecom companies make the process of gaining access to their infrastructure very difficult, sometimes forcing entrepreneurs to obtain multiple contracts for the same service or denying their requests outright.

“That’s basically a full-time business in itself,” Gikandi says of gaining approvals from telecom companies. “A lot of innovation wasn’t happening because developers didn’t see how they could leverage that infrastructure. We really lowered the barrier.”

Now, if an entrepreneur builds a financial lending solution, for example, they might use AT’s texting API to allow people to register for the service through an SMS message. The entrepreneur may then use another AT API, known as Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD), to gather more information (think of prompts such as “Reply X for more information on Y”). After a customer is registered, it could be useful to send them text- or voice-based payment reminders. And AT’s payments API makes it easy for businesses to send and receive money through text messages, a powerful tool for working with the millions of Africans without bank accounts.

Africa’s Talking even offers businesses a call center and an analytics platform for tracking customer contacts and engagement.

“The developers just have to tap into AT, and then we can coordinate [everything],” Gikandi says. “The developers can outsource their telecom infrastructure to AT and just focus on their core business.”

Scaling for impact

Gikandi says Africa’s Talking is still in growth mode after raising an $8.6 million funding round last year. Since 2016, the company has had a presence in several countries in east Africa and in Nigeria. The new funds have allowed it to spread into southern Africa (including in Zimbabwe, Zambia, South Africa, and Botswana) and west Africa (including Côte d’Ivoire and Senegal).

It can be difficult for entrepreneurs in the West to appreciate just how huge these markets are: At around 1.2 billion people, Africa’s population is nearly equal to the populations of Europe and North America combined. Each country Africa’s Talking expands to brings a wave of entrepreneurs eager to improve lives with innovative, mobile-based solutions.

“We think it’s really powerful,” Gikandi says. “Let’s say we add a new payment integration in Nigeria. You could then run your business in Nigeria without changing anything in your core business. It creates economies of scale, and allows businesses to focus on what’s important: The value they’re delivering to their customers.”

In Februrary, Gikandi handed his CEO role at Africa’s Talking over to longtime chief operating officer Bilha Ndirangu ’06. Gikandi says he knows Ndirangu can continue growing the company while he puts more time into AT Labs, which is still in the early stages of building its incubator-like support model. For AT Labs, Gikandi envisions a studio that brings people with ideas together with technical talent, infrastructure, and business expertise.

With both Africa’s Talking and AT Labs, Gikandi’s goal is to support the African continent by tapping into its most valuable resource: its people.

“Africa is full of industry and consumers,” Gikandi says. “So the goal is to create a single platform where entrepreneurs can access the entire African market.”



from MIT News http://bit.ly/2Wu9Hb2
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Oberlin College must pay $11 million after jury claims it wrongly accused bakery of racism

The family behind an Ohio bakery has won an $11 million judgement against Oberlin College claiming they suffered backlash from its staff and students amid racism charges.

Where are they now? Key players in O.J. Simpson murder trial 25 years after the trial of the century

The owners of Gibson’s Bakery and Market says it was libeled and wrongfully accused of racially profiling students and a Ohio jury reportedly agreed last week.

Three Black students were arrested in November 2016 for allegedly trying to “steal wine or otherwise illegally obtain wine” from the bakery, according to a defamation lawsuit.

From those arrests the school community, including deans and professors, protested against the bakery and accused it of being racist, according to CNN.

The boycotts, the lawsuit states, had a “devastating effect on Gibson’s Bakery and the Gibson family” after students and community members were urged not to shop at their business.

The school’s Vice President and Dean of Students Meredith Raimondo and other college staff members “handed out hundreds of copies” of a flier that stated the bakery had racially profiled its students, the lawsuit states.

The flier specifically told people “DON’T BUY” from Gibson’s Bakery, according to the suit.

“This is a RACIST establishment with a LONG ACCOUNT of RACIAL PROFILING and DISCRIMINATION,” the flier read, the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit also states the bakery suffered damage due to the school promoting 10 other bakeries in the area and telling people that it had severed its business relationship with the bakery.

How reality TV show helped ID former University of Florida football player as wife’s killer in cold case

A jury on Friday, found Oberlin College liable for defamation, infliction of intentional emotional distress and intentional interference of business relationships.

Donica Thomas Varner, Oberlin vice president and general counsel, wrote in a statement about the verdict:

“We are disappointed with the verdict and regret that the jury did not agree with the clear evidence our team presented,” the letter said.

“Neither Oberlin College nor Dean Meredith Raimondo defamed a local business or its owners, and they never endorsed statements made by others. Rather, the College and Dr. Raimondo worked to ensure that students’ freedom of speech was protected and that the student demonstrations were safe and lawful, and they attempted to help the plaintiffs repair any harm caused by the student’s protests.”

“Our team will review the jury’s verdict and determine how to move forward,” Varner wrote.

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Texas football referee caught on tape throwing around n-word suspended

A Texas football referee has been sidelined for the 2019 season amid reports he was caught using offensive racial slurs.

Michael B. Jordan presents exonerated Central Park Five men with courage award ‘It’s dangerous in America when you’re living in a black body’

Mike Atkinson was suspended by the Texas Association of Sports Officials after they heard recordings where Atkinson used the n-word, according to The Houston Chronicle.

Atkinson admits to using the racial slur.

“I thought these were private conversations between friends,” Atkinson said. “I promise you with my life, using the N-word by me is true, but I will promise you with my life, my wife’s life, my kids’ life and everything I do, (the person who taped him) also used that word.

“We were back and forth. I understand what it sounds like, but I was baited into it.”

In one of the clips, Atkinson launches into a verbal tirade about a “Chapter and Crew Mixer” hosted by the Houston Football Chapter of TASO, saying:

“I just went to the mixer the other day … a bunch of f—— n—–s wanting a free meal,” Atkinson said.

“He would find a way to n—– it up.”

“There probably was some of them … (a black official) thought he had, ’cause he wanted to be the big n—–.”

How reality TV show helped ID former University of Florida football player as wife’s killer in cold case

“TASO classifies the former member’s actions as unethical and unprofessional,” the statement by TASO executive director Michael Fitch read in part.

“Members who make racially insensitive remarks reflect badly on TASO and the vast majority of TASO members find those remarks repugnant. TASO has and will take disciplinary action against any member displaying any racial prejudice by words or deeds. TASO will discipline any member though they claim they made the inappropriate remarks in jest.”

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Dwaipayan Banerjee receives 2019 Levitan Prize in the Humanities

Assistant Professor Dwaipayan Banerjee of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society (STS) has been awarded the 2019 James A. (1945) and Ruth Levitan Prize in the Humanities. The prestigious award comes with a $29,500 grant that will support Banerjee's research on the history of computing in India.

Melissa Nobles, the Kenan Sahin Dean of MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS), announced the award, noting that a committee of senior faculty had reviewed submissions for the Levitan Prize and selected Banerjee’s proposal as the most outstanding.

“Dwai’s work is extremely relevant today, and I look forward to seeing how his new project expands our understanding of technology and technological culture as a part of the human world,” Nobles says.

Postcolonial India and computing

Banerjee’s scholarship centers on the social contexts of science, technology, and medicine in the global south. He has two book projects now nearing completion: "Enduring Cancer: Health and Everyday Life in Contemporary India" (forthcoming in 2020, Duke University Press) and "Hematologies: The Political Life of Blood in India" (forthcoming in 2019, Cornell University Press; co-authored with J. Copeman). Both books assess how India’s post-colonial history has shaped, and been shaped by, practices of biomedicine and health care.

Banerjee says he was delighted to receive the Levitan Award, which is presented annually by SHASS to support innovative and creative scholarship in one of the Institute’s humanities, arts, or social science fields. “Its funds will go a long way in helping explore archives about computational research and technology spread across India, some of which have yet to receive sustained scholarly attention,” he says.

Global computing histories

Banerjee's Levitan project will investigate the post-colonial history of computing in India from the 1950s to today. “Contemporary scholarly and popular narratives about computing in India suggest that, even as India supplies cheap IT labor to the rest of the world, the country lags behind in basic computing research and development,” he says. “My new project challenges these representations.”

Banerjee adds, “In presenting this account, I urge social science research, which has predominantly focused on the history of computing in Europe and the United States, to take account of more global histories of computing.”

The project, titled "A Counter History of Computing in India," will trace major shifts in the relation between the Indian state and computing research and practice. Banerjee explains that “In the first decades after India’s independence, the postcolonial state sought to develop indigenous computing expertise and infrastructure by creating public institutions of research and education, simultaneously limiting private enterprise and the entry of global capital.”

Noting that today the vision for development relies heavily on private entrepreneurship, Banerjee asks: “Why and how did the early post-colonial vision of publicly-driven computing research and development decline?”

Policy, computing, and outsourcing

More broadly, Banerjee plans to investigate how changing policies have impacted the development of computing and shaped the global distribution of expertise and labor. “After economic liberalization in the 1980s, a transformed Indian state gave up its protectionist outlook and began to court global corporations, giving rise to the new paradigm of outsourcing."

Banerjee says he will endeavor to answer the question, “What is lost when a handful of U.S.-based corporations seek to determine hierarchies of technology work and control how its social benefits are globally distributed?” The Levitan Prize will support Banerjee's field research in India and help him develop a multi-city archive of primary sources relating to the history of computational science and technology in the region.

First awarded in 1990, the Levitan Prize in the Humanities was established through a gift from the late James A. Levitan, a 1945 MIT graduate in chemistry who was also a member of the MIT Corporation.
 

Story prepared by MIT SHASS Communications
Editorial and Design Director: Emily Hiestand
Writer: Kathryn O'Neill


from MIT News http://bit.ly/2WpPMdn
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UPOP’s new career peer-mentoring program reaches for the STARS

MIT’s Undergraduate Practice Opportunities Program (UPOP) has striven to enhance the effectiveness of MIT students by providing professional development and career education to MIT sophomores since its inception in 2001. This past year, a new student leadership pilot program — the UPOP STARS (Student Taskforce Advancing Retention and Success) — was integrated into all aspects of the yearlong program to provide a fresh perspective and add another layer of community.

“Many of the roughly 600 UPOP graduates who are still juniors and seniors at MIT are fiercely enthusiastic and supportive of the program, so setting up a STARS team seemed like a great opportunity to provide peer education and mentoring to the current class of UPOP sophomores. The pilot year has been extremely successful, and we plan to make the STARS an ongoing component of the UPOP experience,” said Joel Schindall, acting faculty director of UPOP.

After months of planning and design involving a heavy amount of student input and best practices from nationally recognized peer career-advising programs, the UPOP STARS program was born. The inaugural class’s leaders — lovingly nicknamed PopSTARS — were seniors Ryan Koeppen, Jen McDermott, Marissa Steinmetz, Gabe Valdes, and Kim Veldee.

After an intensive training in proper career coaching methods, the STARS immediately were put to task to bring the message of professional development to MIT sophomores by helping to recruit 500-plus students to UPOP’s Class of 2021. After a successful campaign, they jumped into onboarding by assisting with orientation and résumé reviews. Over the course of three months, the STARS were able to review all of the résumés, many of which needed multiple revisions. Altogether, the STARS engaged in more than 650 in-person and email check-ins with the UPOP students.

“It was absolutely incredible to have them be a part of the team. With only five full-time UPOP staff members, it can be quite the undertaking to onboard 500 students every fall, so it was a welcome addition to have these STARS act as a force multiplier to bring an increased amount of support to all of our students,” says Justin Crim, UPOP’s student program administrator.

Résumé reviews were only the tip of the iceberg. The STARS all brought their own unique backgrounds and experiences to mentor other students.

“Over the past semester, I was very stressed about the internship process, especially the interviews. I felt overwhelmed by all of the resources at MIT and on the internet, which only increased my anxiety,” says sophomore Varsha Sridhar, a current UPOP student. “Luckily, I was able to reach out to UPOP and meet Jen, a PopSTAR. Her advice not only prepared me for technical interviews but also helped me calm down and feel more confident in myself. I am also grateful for her empathy and patience throughout our meetings, especially when I asked way too many questions. Overall, the PopSTARS program has been a very valuable resource to me at MIT. Jen’s guidance has helped me through this past semester and will probably be advice I will use in the future as well. I am glad that I was able to consult PopSTARS, because it not only provided me with a new resource, but also a basis for support into the next few years.”

With the fall semester behind them, the STARS pivoted to exploring ways to engage graduates of UPOP, as well as the greater MIT community. After exploring several opportunities, they set out on the path of paving the way for current MIT first-year students to make informed decisions about their major declarations via a new event called the First-Year Major Mixer.

“I struggled a lot with deciding on a major, and ended up not declaring until months into my sophomore year,” said Marissa Steinmetz, a Course 15 (Sloan School of Management) major. “We thought it would be fun and helpful to bring juniors and seniors together to talk to first-years about the experiences they’ve had in their majors.”

Hundreds of Insomnia Cookies were consumed as more than 80 first-year students attended the STARS’ Major Mixer in April. More than 35 UPOP-alum juniors and seniors, spanning the vast majority of majors and minors offered to undergraduates, discussed their majors and the internship opportunities they afforded. The STARS created comprehensive data sheets on all the majors, covering popular classes, average salaries, and relevant student groups, to name a few. The Major Mixer was timed to help first-years make informed decisions before the official major declaration day later that month.

The STARS program will continue next year, and hopefully beyond, to help guide the next classes of UPOP sophomores.

“The STARS have brought considerable passion, energy, and talent to their roles this year, and leave big shoes to fill for next year’s peer career advisors. It will be exciting to see the program continue to grow and innovate how we provide professional development to MIT sophomores,” says Reza Rahaman, director of UPOP.

MIT’s Undergraduate Practice Opportunities is a co-curricular program, and part of the Bernard M. Gordon-MIT Engineering Leadership Program. UPOP is open to MIT sophomores of all majors, and will be accepting applications for the class of 2022 in fall 2019. For more information visit: upop.mit.edu.



from MIT News http://bit.ly/2ZhYEn8
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Solving equations to design safer ships

David Larson ’16, SM ’18 spends much of his time thinking about boats. He has been a competitive sailor since high school. In his free time, he designs and tinkers with boats and is a member of the MIT Nautical Association Executive Committee. As a PhD student in MIT’s Laboratory for Ship and Platform Flows, he works on modeling ship-wave interactions to understand how ships behave in severe storms.

“I think I got into design and engineering through the sailing route,” says Larson. “I wanted to understand the physics of what was happening when I was out on the water.”

It was sailing that first drew Larson, who grew up near the water in San Diego, California, to MIT. On a trip as a first-year in high school, he stayed at a hotel on Memorial Drive and watched sail boats dart along the Charles River. Four years later, he enrolled at MIT.

Initially intent on studying physics, Larson quickly determined that he was most interested in mechanical engineering and ocean engineering classes. As a sophomore, he took class 2.016 (Hydrodynamics), taught by Paul Sclavounos, professor of mechanical engineering and naval architecture. The class would end up shaping the rest of his academic career.

On the second day of teaching 2.016, Sclavounos told students about his experiences designing for the America’s Cup. Larson knew some of the sailors with whom Sclavounos had worked. The two struck up a conversation after class, marking the beginning of their collaboration.

“Professor Sclavounos was the most influential in encouraging me to continue studying ocean engineering and naval architecture,” recalls Larson. Sclavounos recognized Larson’s talent and passion, often taking time after class to explain theories that Larson hadn’t yet learned.

“He was by far the best student in the class and was eagerly sought after by other students to help them through the course,” adds Sclavounos. “It was immediately evident to me that he possessed an intelligence and maturity unusual for his age.”

After graduating with his bachelor’s degree in 2016, Larson enrolled in MIT’s graduate program for mechanical engineering and ocean engineering. The summer between his undergraduate and graduate studies, he went back to his native California for an internship with Morrelli and Melvin Design and Engineering.

As an intern, Larson got to apply the concepts he learned as an undergrad — like controls, geometry optimization, and fluid mechanics — to real-world ship design. “That experience gave me a lot of practical insight into what the actual ship design process entails,” says Larson.

Back at MIT, Larson has spent his graduate studies working with Sclavounos on developing stochastic models for how ships interact with waves. While his work seems at times theoretical and abstract, it is grounded in a very practical problem: keeping ships safe in extreme weather.

“What I’m doing is motivated by practical ship design and manufacturing,” explains Larson. “I’m working to create a framework that gets more accurate predictions for how ships behave in severe storms, and to get those predictions fast enough to use in iterative design.”

Current models have come a long way in enhancing our ability to predict how waves move in the ocean. But many existing models that predict how ships move in waves, while extremely powerful, are constrained to one or two degrees of freedom, or often used over-simplified hull geometries. Larson hopes to take those models to the next level.

“The key components of our method are that we can take any realistic ship geometry directly from a CAD program, put that geometry through our model that treats the full six degrees of freedom, and get predictions for how these ships will behave in waves,” explains Larson.

Understanding how these ships behave in rough water could have immediate industrial applications. In addition to helping sailors find the safest route for their vessels, the predictions could be used to someday facilitate interactive ship design.

“My long-term goal is to eventually create an interface that can be used by design and manufacturing engineers for iterative design and optimization of the next generation of ships,” says Larson.

When Larson needs a break from mathematical equations and modeling, he uses CAD to design boats. “My research is quite mathematical, so designing boats is my outlet for reconnecting with the experimental and practical work I loved doing as an undergrad,” he adds.

Whether it’s designing boats in his spare time, competitive sailing, umpiring collegiate races across New England, helping the MIT Sailing Pavilion design its next fleet of dinghies, or developing a model to predict how ships behave in choppy seas — Larson will continue to pursue the passion for sailing he developed in childhood.



from MIT News http://bit.ly/2WXwGzU
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Forget the Bahamas. China's Cruises Are Where It's At

As China's middle class grows, cruise companies are seeing dollar signs.

from Wired http://bit.ly/2I5Yzx8
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Experiments reveal the physics of evaporation

It’s a process so fundamental to everyday life — in everything from your morning coffeemaker to the huge power plant that provides its electricity — that it’s often taken for granted: the way a liquid boils away from a hot surface.

Yet surprisingly, this basic process has only now, for the first time, been analyzed in detail at a molecular level, in a new analysis by MIT postdoc Zhengmao Lu, professor of mechanical engineering and department head Evelyn Wang, and three others at MIT and Tokyo University. The study appears in the journal Nature Communications.

“It turns out that for the process of liquid-to-vapor phase change, a fundamental understanding of that is still relatively limited,” Wang explains. “While there’s been a lot of theories developed, there actually has not been experimental evidence of the fundamental limits of evaporation physics.”

It’s an important process to understand because it is so ubiquitous. “Evaporation is prevalent in all sorts of different types of systems such as steam generation for power plants, water desalination technologies, membrane distillation, and thermal management, like heat pipes, for example,” Wang says. Optimizing the efficiency of such processes requires a clear understanding of the dynamics at play, but in many cases engineers rely on approximations or empirical observations to guide their choices of materials and operating conditions.

By using a new technique to both control and detect temperatures at the surface of an evaporating liquid, the researchers were able to identify a set of universal characteristics involving time, pressure and temperature changes that determine the details of the evaporation process. In the process, they discovered that the key factor determining how fast the liquid could evaporate was not the temperature difference between the surface and the liquid, but rather the difference in pressure between the liquid surface and the ambient vapor.

The “rather simple question” of how a liquid evaporates at a given temperature and pressure, has remained unanswered despite many decades of study, says Pawel Keblinski, professor and head of Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), who was not involved in this work. “While theorists speculated for over a century, experiment was of little help, as seeing the evaporating liquid-vapor interface and knowing the temperature and pressure near the interfaces is extremely challenging,” he says.

This new work, Keblinski says, “brings us closer to the truth.” Along with other new observational techniques developed by others, the new insights will “put us on the path to finally quantify the evaporation process after a century of efforts,” he says.

The researchers’ success was partly the result of eliminating other factors that complicate the analysis. For example, evaporation of liquid into air is strongly affected by the insulating properties of the air itself, so for these experiments the process was observed in a chamber with only the liquid and vapor present, isolated from the surrounding air. Then, in order to probe the effects right at the boundary between the liquid and the vapor, the researchers used a very thin membrane riddled with small pores to confine the water, heat it up, and measure its temperature.

That membrane, just 200 nanometers (billionths of a meter) thick, made of silicon nitride and coated with gold, carries water through its pores by capillary action, and is electrically heated to cause the water to evaporate. Then, “we also use that membrane as the sensor, to sense the temperature of the evaporating surface in an accurate and noninvasive way,” Lu says.

The gold coating of the membrane is crucial, he adds. The electrical resistance of the gold varies directly as a function of the temperature, so by carefully calibrating the system before the experiment, they are able to get a direct reading of the temperature at the exact point where evaporation is taking place, moment by moment, simply by reading the membrane’s resistance.

The data they gathered “suggests that the actual driving force or driving potential in this process is not the difference in temperature, but actually the pressure difference,” Wang says. “That's what makes everything now aligned to this really nice curve, that matches well with what theory would predict,” she says.

While it may sound simple in principle, actually developing the necessary membrane with its 100-nanometer-wide pores, which are made using a method called interference lithography, and getting the whole system to work properly took two years of hard work, she says.

Overall, the findings so far “are consistent with what theory predicts,” Lu says, but it is still important to have that confirmation. “While theories have predicted things, there’s been no experimental evidence that the theories are correct,” Wang adds.

The new findings also provide guidance for engineers designing new evaporation-based systems, providing information on both the selection of the best working fluids for a given situation, as well as the conditions of pressure and removal of ambient air from the system. “Using this system as a guideline you can sort of optimize the working conditions for certain kinds of applications,” Lu says.

This team did a series of elegant experiments designed to confirm theoretical predictions,” says Joel Plawsky, professor of chemical and biological engineering at

RPI, who was not involved in this work. “The apparatus was unique and painstakingly difficult to fabricate and operate. The data was exceptional in its quality and detail. Any time one can collapse a large spread of data by developing a dimensionless formulation,” that is, one that applies equally well under a wide variety of conditions, “that represents a major advance for engineering,” he says.

Plawsly adds, “There are many questions that this work opens up about the behavior of different fluids and of fluid mixtures.  One can imagine many years’ worth of follow-on work.”

The team also included Ikuya Kinefuchi at the University of Tokyo and graduate students Kyle Wilke and Geoffrey Vaartstra at MIT. The work was supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation.



from MIT News http://bit.ly/2X2H892
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How reality TV show helped ID former University of Florida football player as wife’s killer in cold case

A former University of Florida captain is now facing murder charges

Univ. of Florida apologizes for White staffer ‘aggressively’ pushing Black grads off stage

Earl Antonio “Tony” Joiner was arrested Saturday on a charge of second-degree murder in the death of wife Heyzel Obando, the Fort Myers Police Department said in a statement.

The body of Joiner’s 26-year-old wife was discovered in an apartment on Feb. 14, 2016.

Police worked in tandem with the Oxygen TV series “Cold Justice” and the Office of the State Attorney to hone in on Joiner and make the arrest, according to CNN affiliate WFTX.

Obando was killed in Feb 2016 and his body was found in an apartment, according to police.

On Friday, “Cold Justice” finished production ion the Obando case.

“It’s a really tragic case to read,” Kelly Siegler, a former prosecutor who also hosts “Cold Justice,” told WFTX.

“When you read it, it’s just one of those cases where you think, ‘with just a little bit more effort and concentration and push, it can be cleared.'”

Aaron Hernandez’s fiancée Announces $20MIL lawsuit against Patriots and NFL

Joiner reported finding Obando shot to death on Valentine’s Day three years ago.

The post How reality TV show helped ID former University of Florida football player as wife’s killer in cold case appeared first on theGrio.



from theGrio https://on.thegrio.com/2wMewlS
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Post-Apocalyptic Survival Skills: How to Measure Acceleration

Before the internet or any electronics at all, people used a gadget called the Atwood machine. It might come in handy should modern society take a hit.

from Wired http://bit.ly/2WR0Tk7
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Author sues book publisher who dropped her after she shamed Black MTA worker for eating on train

Natasha Tynes, the woman who lost her book deal after snitching on a Black transit worker who was catching a bite to eat on a train in a tweet that went viral, is now suing her publisher and blaming them for her downfall.

Author shames Black DC Metro employee for eating on train, book launch postponed

Rare Bird Lit decided to distance itself from the author after she shamed a Black woman for eating on her way to work.

“When you’re on your morning commute & see @wmata employee in UNIFORM eating on the train I thought we were not allowed to eat on the train. This is unacceptable. Hope @wmata responds.”

The social media backlash agains the writer was swift and soon her publisher was feeling the heat and decided to drop the author.

Tynes “did something truly horrible today in tweeting a picture of a metro worker eating her breakfast on the train this morning and drawing attention to her employer,” Rare Birds said in a statement. “Black women face a constant barrage of this kind of inappropriate behavior directed toward them and a constant policing of their bodies.”

Tynes has now filed a $13.4 million-dollar lawsuit against Rare Bird Lit blaming the publisher for breach of contract and defamation, USA Today reports.

Tynes, a Jordanian-American writer, reportedly claims in the suit that she has been forced to leave the country amid death threats and online harassment and racial slurs.

Tynes said she has endured “extreme emotional distress” and had to be hospitalized for chest pains, severe anxiety and suicidal thoughts, according to the lawsuit.

The author said Rare Bird is an ‘an all-white company,’ that is benefitting from characterizing her as a racist “immigrant woman of color.”

Rare Bird’s attorney David S. Eisen told USA Today  said that Tynes caused these issues on her own.

“It is ironic that, having taken advantage of her First Amendment rights with an ill-advised tweet, Ms. Tynes now seeks to stifle and punish use of those very same rights of a respected book publisher who legitimately expressed its opinions of her conduct, rather than take responsibility for her own actions,” Eisien said.

The post Author sues book publisher who dropped her after she shamed Black MTA worker for eating on train appeared first on theGrio.



from theGrio https://on.thegrio.com/2I6GyPr
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Attack on Mali village 'kills 100'

Nearly 100 people killed in attack in central Mali village inhabited by Dogon ethnic group, reports say

from BBC News - Africa https://bbc.in/2wMpyra
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Instant Pot Ace Multi-Use Cooking & Beverage Blender Review: Excellent, But Only With the Right Cookbook

This versatile appliance from the multicooker giant is excellent—if you buy the right cookbook to go with it.

from Wired http://bit.ly/2K8DDIo
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