Dwyane Wade and Rick Ross Drop Limited Edition ‘Way of Wade’ Sneaker

Three-time NBA Champion Dwyane Wade is collaborating with hip-hop heavyweight William Leonard Roberts Jr., better known as Rick Ross, on a new sneaker to continue the legacy of the Way of Wade sneaker line.

The retired Miami Heat legend hooks up with the Maybach Music Group mogul on a two-shoe collection that celebrates and commemorates their success and collective impact on the city of Miami. The duo designed new colorways of the Way Of Wade 7 (WOW7) performance shoe and the lifestyle-focused Essence Ace II silhouette.

 

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In celebration of two groundbreaking years, Dwyane Wade and Rick Ross have come together to commemorate the moment by collaborating on two limited edition Way of Wade sneakers. A partnership built on the impact each has had on Miami in their respective game, it only made sense to do something for the city they reign. From the Port to the Court, Make Your Own Way. ⠀ #WayOfWade #RRxWOW #GameChangerz #StayTuned

A post shared by WAY OF WADE by Dwyane Wade (@wayofwade) on Oct 6, 2019 at 6:36pm PDT

The Way Of Wade 7 is a black, purple, and gold reimagining of Wade’s seventh signature shoe. The performance basketball sneaker features a removable/replaceable crown that wraps along the midsole and heel, a nod to the artwork of Ross’ critically acclaimed album, Rather You Than Me. The Essence Ace II has a tonal red upper utilizing premium materials, such as reptile suede, tumbled leather, and reflective hits donning gold “Rick Ross” tags on each toe box, and co-branded logos throughout.

The collection, both on limited runs, is currently available for sale. The WOW7 is priced at $300 with the Ace II priced at $200. Both shoes are ready to be purchased online at www.wayofwade.com and locally in Miami at The Edition Boutique.

Way of Wade is more than a sportswear brand, it is a unique collaboration between Wade and Li-Ming, launched in 2012. Since then, Way of Wade has developed seven iterations of Wade’s high-performance basketball sneakers and created a fashion and lifestyle division that has grown with each year. The brand is a direct reflection of Wade’s passions and values, but the team runs a bit deeper. There is a roster of Way of Wade athletes competing at the highest levels, hand-picked by Wade himself.

Wade is a retired three-time NBA Champion (2006, 2012, and 2013) and 12-time All-Star selection. In 2006, three years after first joining the Heat as the No. 5 overall draft pick, he led the team to Miami’s first-ever NBA Championship and was named MVP of the Finals. In 2012 and 2013, Dwyane won his second and third NBA Championships. In 2004, he created the Wade’s World Foundation, which provides support to various educational, health, and family service programs, in particular, those that benefit underserved communities in Miami and his hometown of Chicago. In 2011, Wade was appointed to President Obama’s Fatherhood Task Force. In September 2012, he became a New York Times best-selling author, with the release of his first book, A FATHER FIRST: How My Life Became Bigger than Basketball.

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The Shady Cryptocurrency Boom on the Post-Soviet Frontier

Dodgy energy deals, loose regulation, and dubious characters—with links to the Hillary Clinton email hackers—are fueling a burgeoning crypto industry that could provide an end run around US sanctions.

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Bees, Please: Stop Dying in Your Martian Simulator

Future space colonists will need pollinators to grow food on the moon and Mars. But first scientists need to figure out how to keep them alive.

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Algerian giants USM Alger face uncertain future with owner in jail

Defending Algerian champions USM Alger are facing an uncertain future with the club's owner in jail facing fraud and money laundering charges.

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Meet the people of Tamba

Giovanni Hänninen says the portraits he shot in Tambacounda, Senegal "represent everyone's history".

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'Game changing' tuberculosis vaccine a step closer

TB is one of the top 10 causes of death worldwide and kills 1.5 million people each year.

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Fifa move could "kill" Africa Cup of Nations - LeRoy

Veteran coach worried the timing of the new Club World Cup could be the end of Afcon in its current form.

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Uber Eats Hopes Drones Can Lift It to Profitability

Uber reveals the design of a drone with six rotors that change position for vertical takeoffs and landings. It can stay aloft for 18 minutes, with a range of 18 miles.

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Ethiopia's 900-year-old Shonke village on a mountain

Residents say they prefer their traditional stone-built homes to Ethiopia's "shining cities".

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3 Questions: Ariel White on the impact of incarceration on voting

Ariel White is an assistant professor of political science at MIT, where she researches voting and voting rights, race, the criminal legal system, and bureaucratic behavior. White uses large datasets (and sometimes experiments) to measure individual experiences and to shed light on people's everyday interactions with government. Her research has appeared in the American Political Science Review, Science, Political Behavior, and other journals.

Q: Your research has shown that even brief jail terms can depress voting. Given the United States’ extremely high incarceration rate, what are the implications of this finding for representative democracy in this country?

A: First, we have an enormous — and enormously racially disparate — system of arrest, conviction, and incarceration in this country. We incarcerate far, far more people than comparable countries. And then we also deny more people the vote than other countries, because some U.S. states prevent people from voting after felony convictions. As a result, many people are caught up in this system, and millions are legally prevented from voting even after they get released.

People of color, particularly African Americans, are especially likely to be legally barred from voting — partly because of higher conviction rates, and partly because they’re especially likely to live in states with strict disenfranchisement laws. This isn’t a coincidence; felon disenfranchisement laws in the South have a fairly explicit history of being targeted at African-Americans.

What’s more, my work suggests that felony disfranchisement (legal restrictions on voting by people convicted of felonies) is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to voter participation. The people whose cases I studied were all facing misdemeanor, not felony, charges, which means that everyone sent to jail was still eligible to vote in the next election. These are people convicted of things like “stealing something worth less than $500,” which is not the sort of offense that we as a society have decided should result in disenfranchisement. Nevertheless, my research found spending time in jail was life-changing enough that these people became less likely to make it to the polls afterward.

Similarly, in states where people with felony convictions are allowed to vote, we still see them participating at really low rates. This means that there is an enormous number of people not voting, disproportionately concentrated in poor and minority neighborhoods. These neighborhoods may already struggle to get the attention of their elected representatives, and low voter turnout is not going to help the situation.

The story here is not just about whether people are legally allowed to vote, but about whether they are practically able to vote, whether they know they're allowed to vote, and whether they think they have any reason to do so. This is a question I'm working on right now: I’m trying to figure out whether there are ways to reincorporate people into the political system after they've had contact with the legal system.

Q: Are there proposals on the table that would allow more people to vote after having been incarcerated?

A: Yes. A number of states have been considering changes to their felony disenfranchisement policies to give more people the right to vote after a felony conviction, often by removing lifetime bans or by allowing people to vote while they are on probation or parole. Florida got a lot of attention last year when voters approved Amendment 4, which would allow people convicted of felonies to vote once they have completed their sentences. But it's not clear how many people have been re-enfranchised by this change — because after voters approved Amendment 4, the legislature decided that people won't be able to vote until they've paid any outstanding fines or fees they owe from their cases. With that barrier in place, it's hard to know how many people will actually qualify.

Also, felony disenfranchisement is just part of the story about how the criminal legal system affects democracy, as I’ve explained. I'm keeping a close eye on several other initiatives, including efforts to enable people to vote from jail. Many people serving time in jail have only been convicted of misdemeanor offenses; others may not have been convicted of anything at all, but are being held in jail while their cases proceed because they can't afford bail. In theory, people in both these categories have the right to vote. In practice, however, it can be very difficult to exercise that right.

Illinois recently passed a law to make it easier for people in these circumstances to vote, including setting up a temporary polling location inside the Cook County Jail. Some states have also introduced programs that inform people about their right to vote, such as when they are released from prison or complete parole. And, of course, broader criminal justice reform efforts that seek to reduce the use of jails and prisons could also have ripple effects for our electoral system.

Q: MIT President L. Rafael Reif has said that solving the great challenges of our time will require multidisciplinary problem-solving and “bilingual thinkers” — approaches that, from the beginning, bring together insights and expertise from the scientific, technological, and humanistic fields. In what ways do you think multidisciplinary collaboration can be used to improve American elections?

A: Multidisciplinary approaches can help us think both about frontline changes to election administration and about higher-level questions of voting policy. My colleague in political science, Professor Charles Stewart III, founded an amazing lab here at MIT — the MIT Election Data and Science Lab (informally, the MIT Election Lab) — that's a great example of this kind of collaboration.

The lab brings social scientists, computer scientists, and mathematicians together with election administrators and other practitioners, and they all dig into the nitty-gritty details of how to make elections run better. This can mean the ways we draw district maps, or how we choose voting machines, or how we tabulate votes and audit counts to make sure they're accurate. I think that's a great model for cross-disciplinary work.

There's also a broader lesson here for multidisciplinary work: While academics have useful tools and data, it's critically important to hear from people with personal knowledge of voting policies. Many of the proposals we've seen lately for making voting more accessible or re-enfranchising people have come from previously incarcerated people. So I think one important way to expand multidisciplinary thinking is for academic researchers to collaborate with people with a firsthand understanding of how policies play out on the ground.

 
Story prepared by MIT SHASS Commiunications
Editorial Team: Emily Hiestand and Kathryn O'Neill

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Nature can help solve optimization problems

Today's best digital computers still struggle to solve, in a practical time frame, a certain class of problem: combinatorial optimization problems, or those that involve combing through large sets of possibilities to find the best solution. Quantum computers hold potential to take on these problems, but scaling up the number of quantum bits in these systems remains a hurdle. 

Now, MIT Lincoln Laboratory researchers have demonstrated an alternative, analog-based way to accelerate the computing of these problems. "Our computer works by 'computing with physics' and uses nature itself to help solve these tough optimization problems," says Jeffrey Chou, co-lead author of a paper about this work published in Nature's Scientific Reports. "It's made of standard electronic components, allowing us to scale our computer quickly and cheaply by leveraging the existing microchip industry."

Perhaps the most well-known combinatorial optimization problem is that of the traveling salesperson. The problem asks to find the shortest route a salesperson can take through a number of cities, starting and ending at the same one. It may seem simple with only a few cities, but the problem becomes exponentially difficult to solve as the number of cities grows, bogging down even the best supercomputers. Yet optimization problems need to be solved in the real world daily; the solutions are used to schedule shifts, minimize financial risk, discover drugs, plan shipments, reduce interference on wireless networks, and much more.

"It has been known for a very long time that digital computers are fundamentally bad at solving these types of problems," says Suraj Bramhavar, also a co-lead author. "Many of the algorithms that have been devised to find solutions have to trade off solution quality for time. Finding the absolute optimum solution winds up taking an unreasonably long time when the problem sizes grow." Finding better solutions and doing so in dramatically less time could save industries billions of dollars. Thus, researchers have been searching for new ways to build systems designed specifically for optimization.

Finding the beat  

Nature likes to optimize energy, or achieve goals in the most efficient and distributed manner. This principle can be witnessed in the synchrony of nature, like heart cells beating together or schools of fish moving as one. Similarly, if you set two pendulum clocks on the same surface, no matter when the individual pendula are set into motion, they will eventually be lulled into a synchronized rhythm, reaching their apex at the same time but moving in opposite directions (or out of phase). This phenomenon was first observed in 1665 by the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens. These clocks are an example of coupled oscillators, set up in such a way that energy can be transferred between them. 

"We've essentially built an electronic, programmable version of this [clock setup] using coupled nonlinear oscillators," Chou says, showing a YouTube video of metronomes displaying a similar phenomenon. "The idea is that if you set up a system that encodes your problem's energy landscape, then the system will naturally try to minimize the energy by synchronizing, and in doing so, will settle on the best solution. We can then read out this solution."

The laboratory's prototype is a type of Ising machine, a computer based on a model in physics that describes a network of magnets, each of which have a magnetic "spin" orientation that can point only up or down. Each spin's final orientation depends on its interaction with every other spin. The individual spin-to-spin interactions are defined with a specific coupling weight, which denotes the strength of their connection. The goal of an Ising machine is to find, given a specific coupling strength network, the correct configuration of each spin, up or down, that minimizes the overall system energy.

But how does an Ising machine solve an optimization problem? It turns out that optimization problems can be mapped directly onto the Ising model, so that a set of a spins with certain coupling weights can represent each city and the distances between them in the traveling salesperson problem. Thus, finding the lowest-energy configuration of spins in the Ising model translates directly into the solution for the seller's fastest route. However, solving this problem by individually checking each of the possible configurations becomes prohibitively difficult when the problems grow to even modest sizes. 

In recent years, there have been efforts to build quantum machines that map to the Ising model, the most notable of which is one from the Canadian company D-Wave Systems. These machines may offer an efficient way to search the large solution space and find the correct answer, although they operate at cryogenic temperatures.

The laboratory's system runs a similar search, but does so using simple electronic oscillators. Each oscillator represents a spin in the Ising model, and similarly takes on a binarized phase, where oscillators that are synchronized, or in phase, represent the "spin up" configuration and those that are out of phase represent the "spin down" configuration. To set the system up to solve an optimization problem, the problem is first mapped to the Ising model, translating it into programmable coupling weights connecting each oscillator.

With the coupling weights programmed, the oscillators are allowed to run, like the pendulum arm of each clock being released. The system then naturally relaxes to its overall minimum energy state. Electronically reading out each oscillator's final phase, representing "spin up" or "spin down," presents the answer to the posed question. When the system ran against more than 2,000 random optimization problems, it came to the correct solution 98 percent of the time.

Previously, researchers at Stanford University demonstrated an Ising machine that uses lasers and electronics to solve optimization problems. That work revealed the potential for a significant speedup over digital computing although, according to Chou, the system may be difficult and costly to scale to larger sizes. The goal of finding a simpler alternative ignited the laboratory's research. 

Scaling up

The individual oscillator circuit the team used in their demonstration is similar to circuitry found inside cellphones or Wi-Fi routers. One addition they've made is a crossbar architecture that allows all of the oscillators in the circuit to be directly coupled to each other. "We have found an architecture that is both scalable to manufacture and can enable full connectivity to thousands of oscillators," Chou says. A fully connected system allows it to easily be mapped to a wide variety of optimization problems. 

"This work from Lincoln Laboratory makes innovative use of a crossbar architecture in its construction of an analog-electronic Ising machine," says Peter McMahon, an assistant professor of applied and engineering physics at Cornell University who was not involved in this research. "It will be interesting to see how future developments of this architecture and platform perform."  

The laboratory's prototype Ising machine uses four oscillators. The team is now working out a plan to scale the prototype to larger numbers of oscillators, or "nodes," and fabricate it on a printed circuit board. "If we can get to, say, 500 nodes, there is a chance we can start to compete with existing computers, and at 1,000 nodes we might be able to beat them," Bramhavar says.

The team sees a clear path forward to scaling up because the technology is based on standard electronic components. It's also extremely cheap. All the parts for their prototype can be found in a typical undergraduate electrical engineering lab and were bought online for about $20.

"What excites me is the simplicity," Bramhavar adds. "Quantum computers are expected to demonstrate amazing performance, but the scientific and engineering challenges required to scale them up are quite hard. Demonstrating even a small fraction of the performance gains envisioned with quantum computers, but doing so using hardware from the existing electronics industry, would be a huge leap forward. Exploiting the natural behavior of these circuits to solve real problems presents a very compelling alternative for what the next era of computing could be."

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Love & Hip-Hop’s Rich Dollaz arrested for missing child support court date

It seems that Love and Hip-Hop New York star Rich Dollaz is not ducking his child support obligations after all.

READ MORE: Rapper and ‘Love & Hip-Hop: NY’ star Juelz Santana begins 2-year prison sentence

Several media outlets have reported that the father of four was recently arrested for failure $125,000 of pay back child support. But Dollaz cleared the air saying that’s not totally the case.

In fact, he told Hollywood Unlocked that he hasn’t missed a child support payment since he got arrested in 2014 for late support payments. This time he said he was detained specifically for failure to appear in court. He blames this absence on work. His hit reality show was filming episodes in Miami.

Dollaz said his child support payments had increased, and he had not been paying the difference in his child support payments. He was due to appear in court to address it. He said he was in and out of custody within two hours and the whole ordeal was sorted out.

Rich says he plans to pay the new amount, which includes the extra cash and says he’s not the “deadbeat dad” that he was accused of being on social media.

Well good for him for getting things right.

Dollaz whose real name is Richard Trowers, is a father of four and is paying off his arrears to his baby mamas.

READ MORE: Former LHHNY star, Mendeecees Harris scheduled to be released from prison in 2020

He was arrested at his New Jersey home, Oct. 24^th, jailed and transferred to the Hudson County Family Court, where he made $20,000 bail, but again, it was all due to his failure to appear.

The 42-year-old who has two daughters and two sons has been down this road a few times before battling his exes over back child support payments.

In 2014, he got in trouble for owing $11,000 and then in 2015, one of his baby mamas Chaundrea Nicolle took him to task over $200,000 in child support money he owed.

The post Love & Hip-Hop’s Rich Dollaz arrested for missing child support court date appeared first on theGrio.

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Corporate executive, Curtis Symonds, launches new app that can potentially change the game for Black college athletes at HBCUs

In an era where the rewards of attending an HBCU are more apparent than ever, Black college athletes will soon have a platform to display their vast array of talents on a national scale.

Curtis Symonds, CEO of HBCU Network and a graduate of Central State University, is the mastermind behind the new HBCU Go ap which offers live broadcasts of Division I and II football and basketball games for free. Along with the ap, next year, Symonds plans to launch HBCU Go.TV, a streaming service which provides access to several channels of digital content, including live and recorded events that have been created and curated by current HBCU students.

Symonds matriculated his way through the cable television sales and marketing business as a senior executive at BET, and then began to see the lack of exposure those playing sports at HBCU’s were receiving. It was enough to influence the next phase of his career inspiring him to create a platform to provide these schools with some much needed national exposure.

“I strongly felt that there was not a true outlet for HBCU’s,” says Symonds, who also worked at ESPN for eight years followed by 14 years at BET.

Symonds thrived in advertising sales and marketing during his tenure with ESPN, before leaving the company to become the executive vice president of BET’S affiliate sales and marketing efforts department.

READ MORE: Enjoy the HBCU Experience During SpringComing in NYC

The concept of HBCU Network originated in 2011, and Symonds negotiated a deal with Comcast that would’ve offered him a linear channel, but when the company acquired NBC in 2013, he says the deal fell apart.

“I never wanted to let it die,” explains Symonds. “I called myself being ahead of the game and it kind of blew me when it happened because it broke everything up. It didn’t stop me though because I always had in my mind that I was going to do something in the HBCU circle.”

READ MORE: Oprah Winfrey gifts HBCUs with $1.15 million at United Negro College Fund event

The media industry itself was shifting towards the digital era, and Symonds believed creating a channel that could be viewed on computers, tablets and phones provided an enormous opportunity to reach more people.

Since its launch earlier this year, HBCU Go has gained approximately 2,000 users with a target of 25,000 by the end of 2019. The company’s current strategy is to tap in to every HBCU alumni base across the nation.

“As with anything else, our culture drives awareness,” says Symonds. “So, I’m hoping if I can get a buzz out there and draw more awareness of what I’m doing, other people will jump on the bandwagon.”

READ MORE: HBCUs are still vital to American education

Look for the app to also debut a new signature show in 2020 called “HBCU News on the Go,” which will highlight breaking news, entertainment and politics across various campuses, including any upcoming town halls during the 2020 presidential election.

According to general manager Clinton Evans, HBCU Go staffers will be deployed to several homecoming celebrations at various HBCUs this fall to spread the word about the company and its offerings.

“Our app is really providing a voice for the voiceless,” says Evans. “There’s not one true destination for all things HBCU. It’s going to take some time for us, but I think once the HBCU community adopts and embraces what we have, you’ll start to see it grow.”

As for the sports side of HBCU Go.TV, the goal is for recruiters, parents, students and alumni to become better informed on how well some Black students athletes are performing from the four major HBCU football conferences – the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association, Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference, Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference and Southwestern Athletic Conference.

With nearly 100 HBCUs in the country, Symonds expresses a strong desire for high-profile, Black high school athletes to consider attending one.

Citing an article written by Atlantic staff writer Jemele Hill, which explains how the current generation of high school athletes are starting to understand their importance to collegiate sports, Symonds points out that their options are better than ever.

READ MORE: Disqualification of curvy Black student athlete in Alaska gets reversed

“All Black kids are looking for is exposure,” says Symonds, who is also a high school basketball coach in Virginia. “I tell people all the time, ‘Go to the NFL Hall of Fame and you’ll see that the majority of the Black players came out of HBCU’s.’ That’s a fact.”

All Black kids are looking for is exposure—Curtis Symonds

Symonds’ declaration rings true across several sports, including NBA Hall of Famer Earl Monroe (Winston-Salem State), NFL Hall of Famers Jerry Rice (Mississippi Valley State) and Michael Strahan (Texas Southern), Olympic Gold Medalist Wilma Rudolph (Tennessee State) and many more.

Pay me the Money

Paying college athletes for their performance is a topic that has gained serious traction in recent years. On Sept. 30, California governor Gavin Newsom signed “The Fair Pay to Play Act,” a bill that grants college athletes the right to be compensated for their name, image and likeness, hire agents, receive money from their endorsements.

As a former Central State University basketball player, Symonds was thrilled to hear of Newsom’s decision to “step up” and reward students for their participation in collegiate sports.

“I think it’s been long overdue, I’m a big proponent of it,” says Symonds. “You know, the only thing that most people see is Saturday or Sunday, but they don’t realize the majority of college athletes today— even at PWI’s (predominantly white institutions) — are walking around going to McDonald’s to eat cause they ain’t got enough for food. Not to say in the least, their jerseys are being sold for big money and they can’t profit off of it. These kids need to be rewarded, so I’m totally for it.”

Often, student athletes from HBCUs aren’t getting the attention or accolades from professional scouts and major media outlets and Symonds believes HBCU Go.TV could be the game-changing opportunity that helps scouts find and evaluate new talent.

READ MORE: Sports celebs cheer Beto O’Rourke’s dialogue on NFL kneeling controversy

“I feel very strongly that people — especially in the HBCU circle — are looking for another outlet that has some meaning behind it,” he says.

“And if we can get people watching, it’s going to do nothing but open up more doors. When people start seeing that students are providing the content, then it becomes even more meaningful at the end of the day.”

HBCU Go: A Hangtime Experience’s live-streaming service is slated to launch within the app and can be found in the App Store and Google Play in the first quarter of 2020 during the 75th anniversary of the CIAA Basketball Tournament.

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Mike Curtis is high school sports reporter for Syracuse.com. In addition to theGrio, he has written for Bleacher Report, The Tennessean and Fansided. Follow him on Twitter at @MikeACurtis2.

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104 year old Nigerian on how farming has kept her young

Nigerian centenarian Jessie Onuigwe still works the land to provide for her 120-strong family.

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Alniesha Carter Owns the First Black Woman-Owned Tax Franchise System in the Country

According to BlackBusiness.com, Alniesha Carter’s TaxPrep Evolution Inc. (TPE) is the first black woman-owned tax franchise system in the nation.

Founded by Carter in 2015, TaxPrep Evolution Inc. (TPE) aims to create exceptional franchising opportunities that give its consumers financial freedom. Unlike most competitors, TPE franchising does not require a costly initial investment. TPE is committed to guiding entrepreneurs from startup to stable profitable tax preparation businesses. Future plans include assisting over 100 women and men in obtaining financial freedom by creating TPE franchise owners across the nation.

Carter’s expertise in her field inspired her to help other entrepreneurs who aspired to own their own tax business as well. In 2015, she created and licensed her business model and partnered with other business-minded individuals who shared a vision and same mindset as her and the TaxPrep Evolution brand. This led to the opening of multiple tax offices in various states, which have now transitioned into TaxPrep Evolution Franchise Locations. This has led to positioning her to become the first black woman-owned tax franchise system in the United States.

Outside of her burgeoning tax franchise business, she is also a life coach for hire. “A life coach can support you in finding and staying on your path. By building a relationship with my clients, I can help you stay motivated and on-task, helping you move toward your long term far-reaching goals,” says Carter.

Carter also states on her website, “My goal is to help you re-imagine your life. With extensive experience in life coaching and a vast history of client success, my individualized positivity approach will help you attain your goals. As a professionally trained and experienced life coach, I have the tools and understanding to help you to create the life you imagine and get a renewed sense of self. Committing to a healthier lifestyle is just that—a commitment, and it’s a big one that will take a lot a dedication. My commitment is to provide you with accountability, understanding, and support.”

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National Day of Outrage kicks off in fifteen different cities

Today, Oct 28, marks the National Day of Outrage, a collective effort across a number of cities to take action, and bring attention to the crisis of cop-involved shootings that have claimed the lives of Black people.

READ MORE: Atatiana Jefferson was laid to rest, remembered as smart and caring

The grassroots rallies are being led by Tamika Mallory, who heads up Until Freedom. The effort is particularly significant because it will honor 28-year-old Atatiana Jefferson, who was shot and killed earlier this month by a Fort Worth cop, who was dispatched to a call at her home.

“It is absolutely outrageous to consider that less than one week after Officer Amber Guyger was found guilty of murdering Botham Jean in his home in Dallas, that another Texas police officer could fire with impunity into the home of another innocent Black person,” says Mallory, adding “We demand answers, but more importantly, we demand change. We will not allow Black people to continue to be preyed upon by those committed to protecting and serving them.’

Mallory and Until Freedom’s Co-Founder Linda Sarsour, Mysonne Linen and Angelo Pinto will lead the charge in NYC at Foley Square, along with “the Arc of Justice, Justice League NYC and other leading activists, advocates, elected officials, faith and community leaders, artists and more,” according to a press release.

Jefferson’s death is just the latest in what seems to be a constant stream of killings of people of color at the hands of law enforcement. The rallies were organized to shed light on a persistent problem that a Georgia-based activist Marcus Coleman says needs immediate attention, 11 Alive reports.

“You can sit back on your behind and say, ‘what makes this rally different?’ Or you can notice the aggressive and the egregious behavior, and then think what the hell can we do to not just curb this, but to stop it,” Coleman said, lead organizer from group Save Our Selves, who is leading the Atlanta rally at the Georgia state Capitol.

Activists are asking participants to also dress in all Black.

Although Jefferson’s recent death has captivated the headlines, Coleman said there are a number of local police-involved killing of people of color that are just as noteworthy.

“A number of families have been affected right here in Georgia. We got the family of Kendrick Johnson. His mother is coming up from Valdosta. Jamarion Robinson, Nicholas Thomas, Jimmy Atchison,” Coleman listed. “We felt like being in the capitol of Georgia. Being in the city of Atlanta, as far as what that means, as far as the birth place of the civil rights movement.”

READ MORE: OP-ED: Why Do Atlanta Police Killings Get Overlooked?

“Recently, California passed a state legislation as it deals with the usage of deadly force … we will be calling for an adoption of that legislation here in Georgia,” Coleman said. “The takeaway is that these black lives are dying at a very rapid rate.”

The rally will kick off Monday night at 5:30 p.m. at the state capitol.

Here are the confirmed cities so far:

NEW YORK

Foley Square

111 Worth Street

New York, NY

Contact: untilfreedomofficial@gmail.com

 FORT WORTH (2 LOCATIONS)

OUTDOOR LOCATION

DETAILS TO BE ANNOUNCED

Contact: clhughes77@gmail.com

HARVEST UNITED METHODIST CHURCH

6036 Locke Avenue

Fort Worth, TX

Contact: bcarter@valueofalife.us

 HOUSTON

Houston City Hall

901 Bagby Street

Houston, TX

Contact: amfannin.htx@gmail.com

 SEATTLE

Seattle Police Department East Precinct

1519 12th Avenue

Seattle, WA

Contact: konikkita@gmail.com

 ATLANTA

City Capital

206 Washington Street SW

Atlanta, GA

Contact: marcuscoleman@ymail.com

 PHOENIX

School of Hip-Hop

1634 E. Southern Avenue

Phoenix, AZ

Contact: motiv8university@gmail.com

 JACKSON

Jackson, MS

More detail to be released

KNOXVILLE

2340 Martin Luther King, Jr.Blvd

Knoxville, TN

Contact: brittany@highlandercenter.org

 LAS VEGAS

Las Vegas Regional Justice Center

200 Lewis Avenue

Las Vegas, NV

Contact: marciewells1@gmail.com

 RALEIGH

Raleigh Police Department

More details to be released

Contact; gerald@raleighapexnaacp.org

 MIAMI

Miami Workers Center

720 NW 55th Street

Miami-Dade, FL

Contact: rgilmer@dreamdefenders.org

 FAYETTEVILLE, AR

Good Shepard Lutheran Church

2925 Old Missouri Rd

Fayetteville, AR

Contact: catherinesnyder74@gmail.com

 WASHINGTON, DC

DC Police Headquarters

300 Indiana Avenue

Washington, DC

Contact: karish.mehta@gmail.com

 BALTIMORE

Baltimore City Police Headquarters

700 East Joppa Road, Towson

Baltimore, Maryland

Contact: statevsusmag@gmail.com

DETROIT

Spirit of Detroit Plaza

2 Woodward Avenue

Detroit, MI

Contact: aharveyquinn@faithinaction.org

SHREVEPORT

Life Changing Solutions

331 Milam Street, 3rd Floor

Shreveport, LA

Contact: omari@asapworldwide.org

 SPRINGFIELD

BLACK WOMEN’S MONUMENT

Symphony Hall

34 Court Street

Springfield, MA

Contact: tanisha@arisespringfield.org

 DAYTON

McKinley United Methodist Church

196 Hawthorn Street

Dayton, OH

Contact: daytonunifiedpower@gmail.com

 NEWARK

Details to be announced

 CHARLOTTE

Police Department

Details to be announced

The post National Day of Outrage kicks off in fifteen different cities appeared first on theGrio.

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Trump draws boos when introduced to crowd at World Series

By AAMER MADHANI Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s low-profile appearance Sunday night at Game 5 of the World Series came at a high-profile moment of his presidency. Yet he still drew loud boos and jeers when introduced to the crowd.

Wearing a dark suit and a tie, Trump arrived at Nationals Park just before the first pitch of the Houston Astros-Washington Nationals matchup. Hours earlier, he had announced that U.S. forces had assaulted the hiding place of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who was killed in the raid in northeast Syria.

A military success against a most-wanted enemy of the U.S. and its allies could have provided the president a rare moment of bipartisan comity, especially amid a divisive impeachment inquiry.

Trump and first lady Melania Trump entered a lower-tier box to the left of home plate as the game got underway. At that point his presence wasn’t formally announced, but baseball fans in the section just below Trump’s suite turned to look toward the box as he arrived. Some waved at the president as he smiled and gave a thumbs-up.

At the end of the third inning, ballpark video screens carried a salute to U.S. service members that drew cheers throughout the stadium. When the video cut to Trump and his entourage and the loudspeakers announced the Trumps, cheers abruptly turned into a torrent of boos and heckling. Chants of “Lock him up!” broke out in some sections.
Trump appeared unfazed and continued waving. Later, some fans behind home plate held a sign reading “VETERANS FOR IMPEACHMENT”. Another banner appeared during the game: “IMPEACH TRUMP!”

The president was on hand for seven innings before heading back to the White House. The Astros took a 3-2 series lead with a 7-1 victory in Game 5.

Until Sunday night, Trump had yet to attend a major league game as president even though the White House is a few miles northwest of Nationals Park. A dozen or so congressional lawmakers accompanied the president, according to a list provided by the White House, including Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and David Perdue Georgia.

“I think everybody is excited,” Nationals star pitcher Stephen Strasburg said before the game. “It’s the president of the United States. So there’s obviously beefed-up security. So usually the dogs that are sniffing in our clubhouse are these nice Labs that are super friendly. And today there was a German shepherd that I didn’t really feel comfortable petting.”

Nationals manager Dave Martinez said: “He’s coming to the game. He’s a fan. Hopefully he cheers for the Washington Nationals, and I hope he enjoys the game.”

Trump’s staff has long tried to shield him from events where he might be loudly booed or heckled, and he has rarely ventured into the neighborhoods of the heavily Democratic city. He won just over 4% of the vote in the District of Columbia in 2016.

Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred said he discussed with Trump whether he’d like to throw out the ceremonial first pitch, but the president declined while citing the disruption that would cause fans getting to the ballpark.

Washington Nationals principal owner Mark Lerner told the Washington Post that Trump should be at the game, but he made clear that he did not invite Trump to throw out the first pitch, saying there were many other candidates that should be considered before Trump.

Jose Andrés, a prominent local restaurant owner and humanitarian, threw out the first pitch to a roaring, sustained ovation. He has a history with Trump, too, both in business and in politics.

Andrés has repeatedly opposed Trump’s immigration policies and his administration’s response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. Four years ago, he withdrew from plans to open a restaurant in the Trump International Hotel in Washington following Trump’s controversial comments about Mexican immigrants during the presidential campaign. Legal action ensued and the dispute was settled in 2017.
___
Follow Aamer Madhani on Twitter at https://twitter.com/AamerISmad
___
This story has been corrected by deleting Sen. Marco Rubio from attendance because of uncertainty.

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Disney\+ Is Getting a Puppet Talk Show

*Earth to Ned*, a collaboration with Jim Henson Co., will launch in 2020.

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Shaquille O’Neal’s younger sister dies from cancer

Shaquille O’Neal is grieving the loss of his sister Ayesha Harrison-Jex, 40, who succumbed to cancer last Thursday, three years after she was first diagnosed.

READ MORE: Shaquille O’Neal donates a year’s rent to family of paralyzed 12-year-old shooting victim

The tributes and words of support and encouragement have poured in for the retired NBA star. His Inside the NBA colleagues offered condolences on Thursday’s episode and explained to viewers about why O’Neal wasn’t in his co-hosting seat, PEOPLE reports.

“We have to tell you why you’re not seeing Shaquille O’Neal here on the set tonight,” co-host Ernie Johnson began. “Basically the ‘Big Fella,’ who I’ve described as ‘the biggest kid in the world,’ his heart is breaking tonight. He said his world revolves around his brother and two sisters. And he lost one of his sisters this morning,” he explained.

“Big Fella, you hang in there.”

Ernie, Kenny, Charles & Commissioner Silver’s thoughts are with the O’Neal family pic.twitter.com/5yUtdhjWkZ

— NBA on TNT (@NBAonTNT) October 24, 2019

“I’m trying to put into words the way Shaquille has reacted to this, and he’s struggling,” Johnson said. “And when he struggles, we struggle with him. Because he’s one of our brothers and we feel for him tonight.”

Johnson and O’Neal, along with Charles Barkley and Kenny Smith, round out the TNT’s Inside the NBA roundtable.

“I want to just give a special shout-out to his mom, Miss Lucille, who was best friends with my mom,” Barkley said. “When my mom passed away, she came and spent her last few days with my mom. So I just want to give Miss Lucille a hug and tell her I love her. What she did for my mom at the end … I can never thank them enough, and I feel for her and Shaquille. And the rest of the family also.”

“He’s … the big family guy,” Smith added. “We always see his kids, his family always around. One of the most difficult things about being close to someone and working with them this many years — you get to know them and their family and their friends, so you hurt so much more just as much as you have the pain, just as much as you have the joy … That’s part of being a family, experiencing the joy and the pain.”

READ MORE: Deputy ‘Super’ Shaq consoles children after head-on collision in Florida

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver also offered his support for the O’Neal family.

“We always talk about the NBA as a family and it’s times like this where we’re together and we’ve all known Shaq’s mom Lucille since he came into the league and I met his sister many times,” Silver said. “So from everyone at the league, but me personally, my condolences to Shaq … to his family.”

O’Neal responded to the barrage of love and support.

Thanks for the condolences and the love. If I had older brothers, it would be you 3. Love y’all and love you more Candice.

— SHAQ (@SHAQ) October 25, 2019

Shaq’s sister, Harrison-Jex leaves behind a son, Bryce, according to Johnson said. She was also a Florida A&M University graduate, having earned both a bachelor’s degree and master’s degrees. Her final resting place will reportedly be next to O’Neal’s stepfather, Sgt. Phillip Harrison, in a military cemetery.

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The Best Fanny Packs: Cheap, Waterproof, and More

Whether you call it a fanny pack, a waist bag, or a hip sling, these are our top picks for you.

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T.I. says half of his wife’s private parts belong to him

T.I. and Tiny are turning heads after the rapper told his wife that half of her body belongs to him.

READ MORE: After divorce filing, Tiny says T.I. ‘needs to come back’

The rapper, 39, had quite a spicy conversation with Tiny, 44, on his ExpediTIously podcast. Listeners got an earful as they tuned in to hear the couple’s thoughts on sex, and what makes their marriage tick.

The two have had a rocky marriage wrought with cheating claims that caused the high-profile couple to split a few times. However, Tip said that since a marriage in a binding contract agreement, sex is a major part of the contract deal.

“So sex is important? (in marriage),” Tip asks Tiny.

“Yeah, sex is very important. I’m not saying that the woman that marries down don’t do nothing cause she still run it. She still like the breadwinner. She still may come home and cook for you. Give you sex and do everything.”

But that last “give you sex” comment rubbed Tip the wrong way.

“Give you sex? What do you mean? Give you sex? Man, that’s in the contract. Man.” he says.

“Make sure you are pleased,” Tiny says clearing up her previous comment.

Tip then lays down his man-law, letting Tiny know that he’s got the upper hand on the sex situation.

“I don’t give you nothing. See, you can’t be rationing out stuff, talking about what you’re going to give nobody because what’s yours is mine and what’s mine is yours. That means that little thing you got, that little sex box you got is half mine. So you pick which side you want, and that’s yours. The rest of it is mine. We can split it right down the middle of the…What do they call it? The, the, the, is it the, ‘Uvula’?

For the people in the back, Tip meant the vulva area which is a woman’s outside genitalia which includes the labia, clitoris and vaginal opening in a woman.

“Wait, wait, What?” Tiny says shocked.

READ MORE: Tameka ‘Tiny’ Harris reports $750k worth of jewels stolen from Lambo including wedding ring from TI

“The ‘Uvula,” Tip continues. “What I’m saying is, it’s half mine. And my half is on the inside….”

And for the record, the Uvula is that teardrop thing in the back of your throat.

T.I and Tiny have seemingly worked through their tough times instead of officially calling it quits. Back in 2016, Tiny filed for divorce. Tip praised Tiny for being “tolerant” of him for the last nine years.

“I can tell everyone how great it’s been to spend the last 9 years with such a tolerant woman. I will say she is very tolerant. Not very patient — but she is very tolerant, and accepting of who I am within my transition.”

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The 12 Best Foreign Horror Movies You Can Stream Right Now

Dim the lights, grab some popcorn, and hold on tight as you travel the world in search of some Halloween frights.

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NYC leaders call for investigation into fight between cops and teens

A melee in a NYC subway has prompted city officials to call for a probe to investigate what actually sparked a brawl between a crowd of teens and several NYPD cops.

READ MORE: Teen girls who started violent brawl at California McDonald’s sought by police

On Friday, multiple videos surfaced on social media sites featuring teens getting into fisticuffs with cops at the Jay Street-MetroTech Station in Brooklyn around 2:20 p.m.

In one particular video, an NYPD cops gets into a very physical confrontation with a teenager, which has upset many on social media and community leaders, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, NYC Council Speaker Corey Johnson, and Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, NBC NY reports.

“The officer who punched the two teens should immediately be placed on modified assignment until a complete investigation can be carried out. At best, his actions were off base and reflect poorly on the men and women of the NYPD,” Adams said.

“I am also concerned about what led up to this melee. Reports indicate a group of teens were assaulting a young lady, which led to a teen spraying mace throughout the station. We can’t have innocent people placed in harm’s way from police or civilians,” Adams concluded.

According to reports, the officers were on hand to disperse a gathering of youths who were reportedly fighting at the station. A 15-year-old was said to have hit an officer, which reportedly ignited the fight.

READ MORE: Video of special needs girl brutally beat by bullies goes viral with #JusticeforJanise

In the end, five teens ages 15 to 18 were arrested and face multiple charges including resisting arrest, disorderly conduct and assault on a police officer, the NYPD said.

“Officers responded to a fight between two large groups, during which individuals began to interfere with police action and the situation escalated. Publicly available video does not show the entirety of the incident, and the department is conducting a review,” the NYPD said in a statement late Sunday.

The post NYC leaders call for investigation into fight between cops and teens appeared first on theGrio.

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Egypt recall Mohamed Salah after his international rest

Egypt coach Hossam El Badry recalls Liverpool striker Mohamed Salah after resting him for a recent international friendly.

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What's Blockchain Actually Good for, Anyway? For Now, Not Much

Not long ago, blockchain technology was touted as a way to track tuna, bypass banks, and preserve property records. Reality has proved a much tougher challenge.

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Today’s Cartoon: Murder Podcast

They’ll clean it up in postproduction.

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Why Are Parking Lots So Tricky for Self-Driving Cars?

Here’s why Tesla’s “Smart Summon” feature is taking them on anyway.

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Aristide Bance stars for Horoya in Confederation Cup play-offs

Veteran Burkina Faso striker Aristide Bance scores a hat-trick for Guinea's Horoya in the first leg of a Confederation Cup play-off.

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'I was whipped with metal chains in an Egyptian prison'

For Ibrahim Halawa, what began as a family holiday in 2013 became four years in an Egyptian prison.

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Supercomputer analyzes web traffic across entire internet

Using a supercomputing system, MIT researchers have developed a model that captures what web traffic looks like around the world on a given day, which can be used as a measurement tool for internet research and many other applications.

Understanding web traffic patterns at such a large scale, the researchers say, is useful for informing internet policy, identifying and preventing outages, defending against cyberattacks, and designing more efficient computing infrastructure. A paper describing the approach was presented at the recent IEEE High Performance Extreme Computing Conference.

For their work, the researchers gathered the largest publicly available internet traffic dataset, comprising 50 billion data packets exchanged in different locations across the globe over a period of several years.

They ran the data through a novel “neural network” pipeline operating across 10,000 processors of the MIT SuperCloud, a system that combines computing resources from the MIT Lincoln Laboratory and across the Institute. That pipeline automatically trained a model that captures the relationship for all links in the dataset — from common pings to giants like Google and Facebook, to rare links that only briefly connect yet seem to have some impact on web traffic.  

The model can take any massive network dataset and generate some statistical measurements about how all connections in the network affect each other. That can be used to reveal insights about peer-to-peer filesharing, nefarious IP addresses and spamming behavior, the distribution of attacks in critical sectors, and traffic bottlenecks to better allocate computing resources and keep data flowing.

In concept, the work is similar to measuring the cosmic microwave background of space, the near-uniform radio waves traveling around our universe that have been an important source of information to study phenomena in outer space. “We built an accurate model for measuring the background of the virtual universe of the Internet,” says Jeremy Kepner, a researcher at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center and an astronomer by training. “If you want to detect any variance or anomalies, you have to have a good model of the background.”

Joining Kepner on the paper are: Kenjiro Cho of the Internet Initiative Japan; KC Claffy of the Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis at the University of California at San Diego; Vijay Gadepally and Peter Michaleas of Lincoln Laboratory’s Supercomputing Center; and Lauren Milechin, a researcher in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences.

Breaking up data

In internet research, experts study anomalies in web traffic that may indicate, for instance, cyber threats. To do so, it helps to first understand what normal traffic looks like. But capturing that has remained challenging. Traditional “traffic-analysis” models can only analyze small samples of data packets exchanged between sources and destinations limited by location. That reduces the model’s accuracy.

The researchers weren’t specifically looking to tackle this traffic-analysis issue. But they had been developing new techniques that could be used on the MIT SuperCloud to process massive network matrices. Internet traffic was the perfect test case.

Networks are usually studied in the form of graphs, with actors represented by nodes, and links representing connections between the nodes. With internet traffic, the nodes vary in sizes and location. Large supernodes are popular hubs, such as Google or Facebook. Leaf nodes spread out from that supernode and have multiple connections to each other and the supernode. Located outside that “core” of supernodes and leaf nodes are isolated nodes and links, which connect to each other only rarely.

Capturing the full extent of those graphs is infeasible for traditional models. “You can’t touch that data without access to a supercomputer,” Kepner says.

In partnership with the Widely Integrated Distributed Environment (WIDE) project, founded by several Japanese universities, and the Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA), in California, the MIT researchers captured the world’s largest packet-capture dataset for internet traffic. The anonymized dataset contains nearly 50 billion unique source and destination data points between consumers and various apps and services during random days across various locations over Japan and the U.S., dating back to 2015.

Before they could train any model on that data, they needed to do some extensive preprocessing. To do so, they utilized software they created previously, called Dynamic Distributed Dimensional Data Mode (D4M), which uses some averaging techniques to efficiently compute and sort “hypersparse data” that contains far more empty space than data points. The researchers broke the data into units of about 100,000 packets across 10,000 MIT SuperCloud processors. This generated more compact matrices of billions of rows and columns of interactions between sources and destinations.

Capturing outliers

But the vast majority of cells in this hypersparse dataset were still empty. To process the matrices, the team ran a neural network on the same 10,000 cores. Behind the scenes, a trial-and-error technique started fitting models to the entirety of the data, creating a probability distribution of potentially accurate models.

Then, it used a modified error-correction technique to further refine the parameters of each model to capture as much data as possible. Traditionally, error-correcting techniques in machine learning will try to reduce the significance of any outlying data in order to make the model fit a normal probability distribution, which makes it more accurate overall. But the researchers used some math tricks to ensure the model still saw all outlying data — such as isolated links — as significant to the overall measurements.

In the end, the neural network essentially generates a simple model, with only two parameters, that describes the internet traffic dataset, “from really popular nodes to isolated nodes, and the complete spectrum of everything in between,” Kepner says.

The researchers are now reaching out to the scientific community to find their next application for the model. Experts, for instance, could examine the significance of the isolated links the researchers found in their experiments that are rare but seem to impact web traffic in the core nodes.

Beyond the internet, the neural network pipeline can be used to analyze any hypersparse network, such as biological and social networks. “We’ve now given the scientific community a fantastic tool for people who want to build more robust networks or detect anomalies of networks,” Kepner says. “Those anomalies can be just normal behaviors of what users do, or it could be people doing things you don’t want.”

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Helping autonomous vehicles see around corners

To improve the safety of autonomous systems, MIT engineers have developed a system that can sense tiny changes in shadows on the ground to determine if there’s a moving object coming around the corner.  

Autonomous cars could one day use the system to quickly avoid a potential collision with another car or pedestrian emerging from around a building’s corner or from in between parked cars. In the future, robots that may navigate hospital hallways to make medication or supply deliveries could use the system to avoid hitting people.

In a paper being presented at next week’s International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), the researchers describe successful experiments with an autonomous car driving around a parking garage and an autonomous wheelchair navigating hallways. When sensing and stopping for an approaching vehicle, the car-based system beats traditional LiDAR — which can only detect visible objects — by more than half a second.

That may not seem like much, but fractions of a second matter when it comes to fast-moving autonomous vehicles, the researchers say.

“For applications where robots are moving around environments with other moving objects or people, our method can give the robot an early warning that somebody is coming around the corner, so the vehicle can slow down, adapt its path, and prepare in advance to avoid a collision,” adds co-author Daniela Rus, director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “The big dream is to provide ‘X-ray vision’ of sorts to vehicles moving fast on the streets.”

Currently, the system has only been tested in indoor settings. Robotic speeds are much lower indoors, and lighting conditions are more consistent, making it easier for the system to sense and analyze shadows.

Joining Rus on the paper are: first author Felix Naser SM ’19, a former CSAIL researcher; Alexander Amini, a CSAIL graduate student; Igor Gilitschenski, a CSAIL postdoc; recent graduate Christina Liao ’19; Guy Rosman of the Toyota Research Institute; and Sertac Karaman, an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT.

Extending ShadowCam

For their work, the researchers built on their system, called “ShadowCam,” that uses computer-vision techniques to detect and classify changes to shadows on the ground. MIT professors William Freeman and Antonio Torralba, who are not co-authors on the IROS paper, collaborated on the earlier versions of the system, which were presented at conferences in 2017 and 2018.

For input, ShadowCam uses sequences of video frames from a camera targeting a specific area, such as the floor in front of a corner. It detects changes in light intensity over time, from image to image, that may indicate something moving away or coming closer. Some of those changes may be difficult to detect or invisible to the naked eye, and can be determined by various properties of the object and environment. ShadowCam computes that information and classifies each image as containing a stationary object or a dynamic, moving one. If it gets to a dynamic image, it reacts accordingly.

Adapting ShadowCam for autonomous vehicles required a few advances. The early version, for instance, relied on lining an area with augmented reality labels called “AprilTags,” which resemble simplified QR codes. Robots scan AprilTags to detect and compute their precise 3D position and orientation relative to the tag. ShadowCam used the tags as features of the environment to zero in on specific patches of pixels that may contain shadows. But modifying real-world environments with AprilTags is not practical.

The researchers developed a novel process that combines image registration and a new visual-odometry technique. Often used in computer vision, image registration essentially overlays multiple images to reveal variations in the images. Medical image registration, for instance, overlaps medical scans to compare and analyze anatomical differences.

Visual odometry, used for Mars Rovers, estimates the motion of a camera in real-time by analyzing pose and geometry in sequences of images. The researchers specifically employ “Direct Sparse Odometry” (DSO), which can compute feature points in environments similar to those captured by AprilTags. Essentially, DSO plots features of an environment on a 3D point cloud, and then a computer-vision pipeline selects only the features located in a region of interest, such as the floor near a corner. (Regions of interest were annotated manually beforehand.)

As ShadowCam takes input image sequences of a region of interest, it uses the DSO-image-registration method to overlay all the images from same viewpoint of the robot. Even as a robot is moving, it’s able to zero in on the exact same patch of pixels where a shadow is located to help it detect any subtle deviations between images.

Next is signal amplification, a technique introduced in the first paper. Pixels that may contain shadows get a boost in color that reduces the signal-to-noise ratio. This makes extremely weak signals from shadow changes far more detectable. If the boosted signal reaches a certain threshold — based partly on how much it deviates from other nearby shadows — ShadowCam classifies the image as “dynamic.” Depending on the strength of that signal, the system may tell the robot to slow down or stop.

“By detecting that signal, you can then be careful. It may be a shadow of some person running from behind the corner or a parked car, so the autonomous car can slow down or stop completely,” Naser says.

Tag-free testing

In one test, the researchers evaluated the system’s performance in classifying moving or stationary objects using AprilTags and the new DSO-based method. An autonomous wheelchair steered toward various hallway corners while humans turned the corner into the wheelchair’s path. Both methods achieved the same 70-percent classification accuracy, indicating AprilTags are no longer needed.

In a separate test, the researchers implemented ShadowCam in an autonomous car in a parking garage, where the headlights were turned off, mimicking nighttime driving conditions. They compared car-detection times versus LiDAR. In an example scenario, ShadowCam detected the car turning around pillars about 0.72 seconds faster than LiDAR. Moreover, because the researchers had tuned ShadowCam specifically to the garage’s lighting conditions, the system achieved a classification accuracy of around 86 percent.

Next, the researchers are developing the system further to work in different indoor and outdoor lighting conditions. In the future, there could also be ways to speed up the system’s shadow detection and automate the process of annotating targeted areas for shadow sensing.

This work was funded by the Toyota Research Institute.

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Nigeria's 'torture houses' masquerading as Koranic schools

Parents find their children maltreated in what they thought were Islamic rehabilitation centres.

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Michigan Rep. John Conyers dies at age 90

Former Michigan Representative John Conyers passed away on Sunday at aged 90, his family announced.

According to the Huffington Post, the Democratic congressman served in the House from 1965 until December 2017, becoming the longest serving Black congressman until when he resigned following allegations that he sexually harassed several female staffers.

READ MORE: John Conyers will reportedly retire, grandson expected to run for seat

Born in Highland Park, Michigan in 1929, Conyers saw himself thrusted into the political arena during a tumultuous time during the Civil Rights Movement. During his first year in office, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, an important piece of legislation that guaranteed voting rights to Black Americans, which the new congressman helped to introduce.

Conyers would go on to be one of the founding members of the Congressional Black Caucus. The Huffington Post noted that during his final three years in office, he was the “dean” of the House, a title given to the longest continuously serving member.

Yet Conyers’ longevity and legacy was not without its controversy, as the congressman was accused of giving female employees unwanted sexual advances and mistreating them, according to the Washington Post. Eighty years old at the time of his resignation, Conyers was hospitalized shortly after his resignation for what his attorney described as a stress-related illness.

READ MORE: House leaders Nancy Pelosi, Paul Ryan call for John Conyers’ resignation

“My legacy can’t be compromised or diminished in any way by what we’re going through now,” Conyers told a radio station, according to the New York Times.

It was later found that Conyers reached a $27,000 settlement with a former female staffer, which the Washington Post noted intensified scrutiny of Congress for its secretive system of settling harassment complaints. Yet, he still had many supporters.

It has not yet been revealed what caused Conyers’ death.

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Kamala Harris’ boycott threats got group that gave Trump criminal justice award the boot

Presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ scheduled appearance for a forum at Benedict College took a turn when she found out that the event’s sponsor, the 20/20 Bipartisan Justice Center, celebrated Donald Trump for his “criminal justice reform.”

A criminal justice forum slated Harris and nine other Democratic presidential candidates to speak, but Harris on Friday threatened to boycott the event after learning that the sponsor gave Trump an award, according to the Washington Post. Trump made a controversial appearance at the historically Black college that same day, which was marred by even more controversy when news got out that most of Benedict’s students were not allowed to attend the event, TIME reported.

READ MORE: Kamala Harris and Cory Booker blast Comcast in $20B Byron Allen civil rights lawsuit

During his speech at the event, Trump claimed that he has been an ally to the Black community without forgetting to acknowledge his disdain for the investigation into his competency as a president.

“All my life, I’ve been committed to advancing fairness and opportunity for the African American community,” Trump said. “You know that, you see what’s going on with the witch hunt. It’s a terrible thing that’s going on in our country. No crimes there; it’s an investigation in search of a crime. But in America, you’re innocent until proven guilty, and we don’t have investigations in search of that crime.”

Harris released a statement about her thoughts on Trump being honored.

“Donald Trump is a lawless President. Not only does he circumvent the laws of our country and the principles of our Constitution, but there is nothing in his career that is about justice, for justice, or in celebration of justice,” Harris said.

According to the Washington Post, Harris said on Saturday afternoon that the college dropped 20/20 Bipartisan Justice Center and opened the event to the larger student body. Although it is unclear in what way the organization was dropped, the Washington Post also reported that a banner with its name was still displayed and members of the organization were present at the event, some even shared pictures on social media.

READ MORE: Sen. Kamala Harris home state poll numbers see significant dip

Harris did not hold her tongue about her confusion on why Trump had been honored with an award regarding criminal justice reform at the event.

“I just couldn’t believe that Donald Trump would be given an award as it related to criminal justice reform,” she said. “This is somebody that has disrespected the voices that have been present for decades for criminal justice reform. The people that have sacrificed to create justice in this system.”

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Bernie Sanders tells Black student ‘respect’ police to avoid being shot

Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has been a popular option among Black voters, but that may change after a video surfaced of him making controversial comments to a Black student about policing.

During an appearance at the Second Step Presidential Justice Forum at HBCU Benedict College, a Black student asked Sanders what advice he would offer him on encounters with police, if he was Sanders’ son. According to CBS News, the presidential candidate struggled to answer. Sanders began his answer by advising the student to be polite and things got worse from there.

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“I would respect what they are doing so that you don’t get shot in the back of the head, but I would also be very mindful of the fact that as a nation, we have got to hold police officers accountable for the actions that they commit,” he continued. “I would be very cautious if you were my son in terms of dealing with that police officer, but I would also defend my rights and know my rights and make sure if possible that police officer’s camera is on what goes on.”

He was not met with much crowd approval.

Democratic presidential front runner, former Vice President Joe Biden was asked the same question and seemed to be more confident as a Black female student asked him what she should do when pulled over by police, if she was his daughter.

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“If you were my daughter, you’d be a Caucasian girl and you wouldn’t be pulled over,” Biden said. “That’s what’s wrong.”

Biden went on to post a clip of his answer to Twitter. Sanders did not post his answer, but instead tried to clean up the mess by posting a clip of his take on the criminal justice system. Social media users were not having it.

In 2015 Bernie said black people were locked up more often than whites for drug crimes because “most drug dealers are African American”https://t.co/TcWnx1FL8n

— chris evans (@notcapnamerica) October 26, 2019

POLICE WILL SHOOT YOU WHETHER OR NOT YOU MAKE SUDDEN MOVEMENTS WTF do you know how ignorant you have to be about race relations not to understand that

— David Dennis Jr. (@DavidDTSS) October 27, 2019

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Second-time SNL host Chance the Rapper brings awareness to Chicago teachers

It is no secret that Chance the Rapper is passionate about contributing to his hometown of Chicago, so it came as no surprise that he used his platform on this week’s Saturday Night Live to bring awareness to the struggles faced by Chicago teachers.

The second-time SNL host came out during his opening monologue wearing a red Chicago’s Teachers Union sweatshirt. He also began by reminding the audience of his $1 million contribution to Chicago Public Schools in 2017.

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“I’m happy to say it completely fixed everything,” he said ironically, which USA Today noted was his way of acknowledging that his contribution hasn’t solved all the school system’s problems.

He also gave a shoutout to the Chicago teachers that were on strike and said to the camera that he “fully” supports them.

According to the Chicago Tribune, the strike has been ongoing for seven school days. Teachers are looking to address class size and daily access to nurses, social workers and librarians.

READ MORE: Will Smith, Chance the Rapper and Childish Gambino nominated for 2019 Webby Awards

In addition to the SNL episode’s social awareness plug, Chance is being praised for his solid performance in the sketches and as a host.

Chance did a rap honoring Chicago, also known as the Second City, paying homage to things and places considered to be second best. USA Today noted that the rapper went on to recite his favorites — Bing over Google; Burger King’s French fries over McDonald’s; Pepsi over Coke; Adam Carolla over Jimmy Kimmel and so on — as cast members Heidi Gardner and Melissa Villaseñor flipped picture cards detailing each example.

He was showed his comedy chops in several sketches where he played an array of characters that ranged from being a judge to a dance student.

 

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