The latest crime figures show rises in both murder and sexual offences over the past year
from BBC News - Africa https://ift.tt/2ZUGbkL
via
Intro Video
Thursday, September 12, 2019
How to Practice Long-Term Thinking in a Distracted World
The Land Rover Defender Is Back—With a Softer, Smarter Look
Best iPads (2019): Which New iPad Should You Actually Buy?
‘Harriet,’ the first film about Tubman, premieres in Toronto
Hard as it may be to believe, “Harriet” is the first feature film about Harriet Tubman.
Kasi Lemmons’ movie about the Underground Railroad leader premiered Tuesday night at the Toronto International Film Festival where festival director Cameron Bailey, introducing the film, noted the cinematic injustice of Tubman only now making it to the big screen.
“There are 30 films about Gen. Custer,” said Bailey. “This is the first film about Harriet Tubman.”
“Harriet,” starring 32-year-old British actress Cynthia Erivo, presents a younger, more vibrant picture of Tubman, whose accomplishments have often been entombed in middle-school history books. And the best-known appearance of Tubman, who was in her late 20s when she escaped from slavery and began going back South to help others to freedom, has largely been of her as an older woman.
“There are pictures of her that have been painted from the wrong time period almost,” said Erivo, the Tony-winning actress of the Broadway revival of “The Color Purple. “It’s important to know this was a really young woman who took a lot of risk in what she was doing.”
Tubman, whose original name was Araminta Ross, was born into slavery in 1820 or 1821 on the eastern shore of Maryland. In 1849, she fled to Philadelphia, after which a reward for her recapture was posted. But Tubman returned to the South to lead other slaves to freedom, conducting more than 70 people through the Underground Railroad network of abolitionists.
She worked as a scout, spy and nurse for the Union Army during the Civil War. In 1863, she helped lead 150 black soldiers on a gunboat raid in South Carolina. With Col. James Montgomery, she rescued more than 700 slaves. Tubman also became a noted suffragette before dying in 1913.
“Harriet,” which will be released in theaters on Nov. 1, focuses on her escape from Maryland and, a year later, her returning raids.
“When we think of Harriet, we kind of don’t see her womanhood. That’s partly because in the pictures we have of her, she’s an older woman,” said Lemmons, the “Eve’s Bayou” filmmaker. “There’s a picture found fairly recently of Harriet as a young woman, and that was my inspiration. There was this very small, young woman who managed to do incredible things.”
Earlier this year, that previously unknown photograph of a more youthful Tubman, believed to be taken in the 1860s, was put on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington.
Efforts to make a movie about Tubman have been going on for several years, with Viola Davis (who Erivo co-starred with in Steve McQueen’s “Widows”) once in line to play the part. But the project came together around Erivo, a casting choice some have criticized because she isn’t American.
Erivo, however, believes there is more in common between the experiences of British and American black people. She defended her passion for Tubman in an earlier Instagram post: “I fought for the role of Celie, and spilled blood, sweat and tears playing her.”
Lemmons believes the production was guided spiritually by Tubman. She doesn’t think of the film as righting a wrong in film history.
“I didn’t think in those terms. I really thought about this as a task I took very solemnly of bringing Harriet to life so that young girls could see this young woman heroine, and that the world could see her as this fierce, strong, feminine presence that she was,” said Lemmons. “You want to remind people of what can be and what has been done through sheer force of will and courage.”
The post ‘Harriet,’ the first film about Tubman, premieres in Toronto appeared first on theGrio.
from theGrio https://ift.tt/32G0joe
via
The Biggest iPhone News Is Apple's New U1 Chip Inside It
Would the Internet Be Healthier Without 'Like' Counts?
Why Uber Thinks It Can *Still* Call Its Drivers Contractors
The WIRED25 Festival Is Back—Get Ready to Fix Things
South Africa xenophobic violence: Nigerians fly back to Lagos
Emmanuel Adebayor: Man City striker's outrageous celebration against Arsenal - 10 years on
Benjamin Moukandjo: Ex-Cameroon skipper returns to France with Lens
Robert Mugabe family’s fury at funeral plans
Wednesday, September 11, 2019
Detecting patients’ pain levels via their brain signals
Researchers from MIT and elsewhere have developed a system that measures a patient’s pain level by analyzing brain activity from a portable neuroimaging device. The system could help doctors diagnose and treat pain in unconscious and noncommunicative patients, which could reduce the risk of chronic pain that can occur after surgery.
Pain management is a surprisingly challenging, complex balancing act. Overtreating pain, for example, runs the risk of addicting patients to pain medication. Undertreating pain, on the other hand, may lead to long-term chronic pain and other complications. Today, doctors generally gauge pain levels according to their patients’ own reports of how they’re feeling. But what about patients who can’t communicate how they’re feeling effectively — or at all — such as children, elderly patients with dementia, or those undergoing surgery?
In a paper presented at the International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction, the researchers describe a method to quantify pain in patients. To do so, they leverage an emerging neuroimaging technique called functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), in which sensors placed around the head measure oxygenated hemoglobin concentrations that indicate neuron activity.
For their work, the researchers use only a few fNIRS sensors on a patient’s forehead to measure activity in the prefrontal cortex, which plays a major role in pain processing. Using the measured brain signals, the researchers developed personalized machine-learning models to detect patterns of oxygenated hemoglobin levels associated with pain responses. When the sensors are in place, the models can detect whether a patient is experiencing pain with around 87 percent accuracy.
“The way we measure pain hasn’t changed over the years,” says Daniel Lopez-Martinez, a PhD student in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology and a researcher at the MIT Media Lab. “If we don’t have metrics for how much pain someone experiences, treating pain and running clinical trials becomes challenging. The motivation is to quantify pain in an objective manner that doesn’t require the cooperation of the patient, such as when a patient is unconscious during surgery.”
Traditionally, surgery patients receive anesthesia and medication based on their age, weight, previous diseases, and other factors. If they don’t move and their heart rate remains stable, they’re considered fine. But the brain may still be processing pain signals while they’re unconscious, which can lead to increased postoperative pain and long-term chronic pain. The researchers’ system could provide surgeons with real-time information about an unconscious patient’s pain levels, so they can adjust anesthesia and medication dosages accordingly to stop those pain signals.
Joining Lopez-Martinez on the paper are: Ke Peng of Harvard Medical School, Boston Children’s Hospital, and the CHUM Research Centre in Montreal; Arielle Lee and David Borsook, both of Harvard Medical School, Boston Children’s Hospital, and Massachusetts General Hospital; and Rosalind Picard, a professor of media arts and sciences and director of affective computing research in the Media Lab.
Focusing on the forehead
In their work, the researchers adapted the fNIRS system and developed new machine-learning techniques to make the system more accurate and practical for clinical use.
To use fNIRS, sensors are traditionally placed all around a patient’s head. Different wavelengths of near-infrared light shine through the skull and into the brain. Oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin absorb the wavelengths differently, altering their signals slightly. When the infrared signals reflect back to the sensors, signal-processing techniques use the altered signals to calculate how much of each hemoglobin type is present in different regions of the brain.
When a patient is hurt, regions of the brain associated with pain will see a sharp rise in oxygenated hemoglobin and decreases in deoxygenated hemoglobin, and these changes can be detected through fNIRS monitoring. But traditional fNIRS systems place sensors all around the patient’s head. This can take a long time to set up, and it can be difficult for patients who must lie down. It also isn’t really feasible for patients undergoing surgery.
Therefore, the researchers adapted the fNIRS system to specifically measure signals only from the prefrontal cortex. While pain processing involves outputs of information from multiple regions of the brain, studies have shown the prefrontal cortex integrates all that information. This means they need to place sensors only over the forehead.
Another problem with traditional fNIRS systems is they capture some signals from the skull and skin that contribute to noise. To fix that, the researchers installed additional sensors to capture and filter out those signals.
Personalized pain modeling
On the machine-learning side, the researchers trained and tested a model on a labeled pain-processing dataset they collected from 43 male participants. (Next they plan to collect a lot more data from diverse patient populations, including female patients — both during surgery and while conscious, and at a range of pain intensities — in order to better evaluate the accuracy of the system.)
Each participant wore the researchers’ fNIRS device and was randomly exposed to an innocuous sensation and then about a dozen shocks to their thumb at two different pain intensities, measured on a scale of 1-10: a low level (about a 3/10) or high level (about 7/10). Those two intensities were determined with pretests: The participants self-reported the low level as being only strongly aware of the shock without pain, and the high level as the maximum pain they could tolerate.
In training, the model extracted dozens of features from the signals related to how much oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin was present, as well as how quickly the oxygenated hemoglobin levels rose. Those two metrics — quantity and speed — give a clearer picture of a patient’s experience of pain at the different intensities.
Importantly, the model also automatically generates “personalized” submodels that extract high-resolution features from individual patient subpopulations. Traditionally, in machine learning, one model learns classifications — “pain” or “no pain” — based on average responses of the entire patient population. But that generalized approach can reduce accuracy, especially with diverse patient populations.
The researchers’ model instead trains on the entire population but simultaneously identifies shared characteristics among subpopulations within the larger dataset. For example, pain responses to the two intensities may differ between young and old patients, or depending on gender. This generates learned submodels that break off and learn, in parallel, patterns of their patient subpopulations. At the same time, however, they’re all still sharing information and learning patterns shared across the entire population. In short, they’re simultaneously leveraging fine-grained personalized information and population-level information to train better.
The personalized models and a traditional model were evaluated in classifying pain or no-pain in a random hold-out set of participant brain signals from the dataset, where the self-reported pain scores were known for each participant. The personalized models outperformed the traditional model by about 20 percent, reaching about 87 percent accuracy.
“Because we are able to detect pain with this high accuracy, using only a few sensors on the forehead, we have a solid basis for bringing this technology to a real-world clinical setting,” Lopez-Martinez says.
from MIT News https://ift.tt/2ZTF99h
via
Engineers develop multimaterial fiber “ink” for 3-D-printed devices
A new method developed by MIT researchers uses standard 3-D printers to produce functioning devices with the electronics already embedded inside. The devices are made of fibers containing multiple interconnected materials, which can light up, sense their surroundings, store energy, or perform other actions.
The new 3-D printing method is described in the journal Nature Communication, in a paper by MIT doctoral student Gabriel Loke, professors John Joannopoulos and Yoel Fink, and four others at MIT and elsewhere.
The system makes use of conventional 3-D printers outfitted with a special nozzle and a new kind of filament to replace the usual single-material polymer filament, which typically gets fully melted before it’s extruded from the printer’s nozzle. The researchers’ new filament has a complex internal structure made up of different materials arranged in a precise configuration, and is surrounded by polymer cladding on the outside.
In the new printer, the nozzle operates at a lower temperature and pulls the filament through faster conventional printers do, so that only its outer layer gets partially molten. The interior stays cool and solid, with its embedded electronic functions unaffected. In this way, the surface is melted just enough to make it adhere solidly to adjacent filaments during the printing process, to produce a sturdy 3-D structure.
The internal components in the filament include metal wires that serve as conductors, semiconductors that can be used to control active functions, and polymer insulators to prevent wires from contacting each other. As a demonstration, the team printed a wing for a model airplane, using filaments that contained both light-emitting and light-detecting electronics. These components could potentially reveal the formation of any microscopic cracks that might develop.
While the filaments used in the model wing contained eight different materials, Loke says that in principle they could contain even more. Until this work, he says, “a printer capable of depositing metals, semiconductors, and polymers in a single platform still did not exist, because printing each of these materials requires different hardware and techniques.”
This method is up to three times faster than any other current approach to fabricating 3-D devices, Loke says, and as with all 3-D printers, offers much more flexibility regarding the kinds of forms that can be produced than typical manufacturing methods do. “Unique to 3-D printing, this approach is able to construct devices of any freeform shapes, which are not achievable by any other methods thus far,” he says.
The method makes use of thermally drawn fibers that contain a variety of different materials embedded within them, a process that Fink and his collaborators have been perfecting for two decades. They have created an array of fibers that have electronic components within them, making the fibers able to carry out a variety of functions. For example, for communications applications, flashing lights can transmit data that is then picked up by other fibers containing light sensors. This approach has for the first time produced fibers, and fabrics woven from them, that have these functions built in.
Now, this new process makes this whole family of fibers available as the raw material for producing functional 3-D devices that can sense, communicate, or store energy, among other actions.
To make the fibers themselves, the different materials are initially assembled into a larger-scale version called a preform, which is then heated and drawn in a furnace to produce a very narrow fiber that contains all those materials, in their same exact relative positions but greatly reduced in size.
The method could potentially be developed further to produce a variety of different kinds of devices, especially for applications where the ability to precisely customize each device is essential. One such area is for biomedical devices, where matching the device to the patient’s own body can be important, says Fink, who is a professor of materials science as well as of electrical engineering and computer science and the CEO of the nonprofit Advanced Functional Fabrics of America.
For example, prosthetic limbs might someday be printed using this method, not only matching the precise dimensions and contours of the patient’s limb, but with all the electronics to monitor and control the limb embedded in place.
Over the years, the group has developed a wide array of fibers containing different materials and functionalities. Loke says virtually all of these can be adapted for the new 3-D-printing technique, making it possible to print objects with a wide variety of different combinations of materials and functions. The device makes use of a standard type of 3-D printer known as a fused deposition modeling (FDM) printer, which is already found in many labs, offices, and even homes.
One application that may be possible in the future would be to print materials for biomedical implants that would provide a scaffolding for the growth of new cells to replace a damaged organ, and include within it sensors to monitor the progress of that growth.
The new method could also be useful for prototyping of devices — already a major application for 3-D printing, but in this case the prototypes would have actual functionality, rather than being static models.
The research team included MIT graduate student Rodger Yuan; former MIT graduate student Michael Rein, who now works at AFFOA; postdoc Tural Khudiyev, and undergraduate student Yash Jain at Stony Brook University in New York. The work was partly supported by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and the U.S. Army Research Office through the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies.
from MIT News https://ift.tt/30boA4b
via
Sexual violence in South Africa: 'I was raped, now I fear for my daughters'
California Bill Would Halt Facial Recognition on Body Cams
The Africans risking death in jungle trying to reach US
Trans actress Angelica Ross shares how Oprah helped her mother accept her
Pose star Angelica Ross is sharing her coming out story which includes a surprising tidbit about how talk show host Oprah Winfrey inadvertently helped heal her relationship with her mom.
In a recent episode of Black Women OWN the Conversation, the actress opened up about how coming out as trans at 17 transformed her relationship with her devout Christian mother who was, “definitely not accepting at all in the beginning.”
READ MORE: Laverne Cox opens up about planning her suicide: “I am angered, saddened, and enraged”
“My mom had her ideas that were fueled from the Bible and what the Bible says,” she explained during the show which according to a press release, is meant to give Black women of varying backgrounds a chance to speak with each other on “love and relationships, motherhood, beauty, and mind, body and soul.”
Ross’ mother — who was seated in the audience — was teary eyed as she explained how she struggled with the thought that her child would go to hell and fell into a deep depression. At one point, things were so precarious, she even advised her Ross to commit suicide, threatening that if she didn’t do it, she would take her own life instead.
READ MORE: Patti LaBelle wants a husband, optimistic that she’ll find the man of her dreams
“Me and my mother have a very loving, healed relationship.” – @angelicaross
Did you catch the last episode of #BlackWomenOWN the Conversation? This week, we are centering our conversation on Mind, Body and Soul. Be sure to catch the newest episode this Saturday, 10|9c on OWN. pic.twitter.com/AhxWncJfAu
— Black Women OWN the Conversation (@BlackWomenOWN) September 9, 2019
“It’s always preached: ‘You’re going to hell for this, you’re going to hell for that,’” Ross’ mother confessed. “I wasn’t knowledgeable. I didn’t know… And I hate that I missed so many years out of her life.”
Despite that initial visceral reaction, after years of tension Ross’ mother says her turning point happening unexpectedly came while watching an episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show in which a mother who had recently lost her LGBTQ son spoke of having an epiphany while at a Pride event.
READ MORE: Wendy Williams Lifetime biopic will address Notorious B.I.G. hook up allegations
“I gotta do something,” she thought to herself while watching Winfrey’s show, “because that could be my kid.”
“My mother and I have a very loving and healed relationship,” Ross said of their current relationship. And her mother also now sees her as her daughter and not her son.
This latest episode of Black Women OWN the Conversation airs on Sunday at 10 p.m. ET / 9 p.m. CT.
The post Trans actress Angelica Ross shares how Oprah helped her mother accept her appeared first on theGrio.
from theGrio https://ift.tt/2NaMniK
via
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)