Commentary: African American Scientist and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Aprille Ericsson-Jackson was the first African-American female to receive a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Howard University and the first African-American female to receive a Ph.D. in Engineering at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. She has worked at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center as an aerospace engineer for over five years, and has taught at both Howard University and Bowie State University. In 1996 and 1997 Ericsson-Jackson was named one of the top fifty minority women working in the Science and Engineering fields by the National Technical Association.
Ericsson-Jackson was born in Brooklyn, New York, the oldest of four daughters. Raised in the Bedford Styvesant neighborhood in the Roosevelt projects on Dekalb Avenue, she started out her educational career being bussed to the P.S. 199 elementary school in Brooklyn. It did not take long for Ericsson-Jackson to realize that she had an aptitude for Mathematics and Science. While she was in her last year at Marine Park Junior High School, she won 2nd place in the Science Fair and scored in the 90s on all her regent and citywide exams. Not content just to receive high honors for her grades, Ericsson-Jackson was also a member of the junior high school band, the science club, the honors club, and the girl's basketball team. She passed all the entrance exams for New York's technical high schools, including the Bronx School of Science, Stuyvesant, and Brooklyn Technical. Instead of attending one of these schools, however, Ericsson-Jackson decided to move out of New York State.
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After graduating from high school with honors, Ericsson-Jackson was accepted to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) where she received her Bachelor of Science degree in Aeronautical/Astronautical Engineering. While attending M.I.T., she was involved in several prestigious and important research projects. One of these projects, at the Applied Psychics Laboratory, allowed Ericsson-Jackson to assist in developing a fiber optic laser gyroscope, while a project at the Space Systems Laboratory involved creating a database for EVA neutral buoyancy data that was calculated at the NASA Johnson Space Center. For her Senior Project, Ericsson-Jackson researched Manned Mars Mission crew systems for interplanetary vehicles.
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Ericsson-Jackson was also involved in several summer programs, including SEICA and the NASA Space Academy. She traveled to Germany, Canada, England, and throughout the United States to present papers on her research, and won first place in the Ph.D. student competition at the 6th International Space Conference for Pacific-Basin Societies. In addition to receiving funding from the Goddard Space Flight Center, Ericsson-Jackson also held an internship at that organization while she was finishing school. It is because of this internship, she said, that she was offered a full-time job there after she received her Ph.D. "That's how I did it," she told the Graduating Engineer and Computer Careers website, "Once you get your foot in the door and meet people, you can show them that you are capable of doing the type of work that's done here."
Working as an aerospace engineer at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in the Guidance, Navigation, and Control department has presented Ericsson-Jackson with many opportunities to fulfill her dream of forwarding space flight. Some of the satellite projects she has worked on include the X-Ray Timing Explorer (XTE), the Tropical Rain Forest Measurement Mission (TRMM), and the MIDEX project called MAP, or Microwave Anisotropy Probe. For these projects, Ericsson-Jackson has developed and used programs for dynamic modeling simulation. "The programs," she explained to the Graduating Engineer website, "are invaluable in predetermining the dynamics and structural reactions of the spacecraft....Read More
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Study suggests that PBS news shows fall short of the network's promise of diversity. Fair.org Taking the Public Out of Public TV
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A multi-part FAIR exposé of PBS's most prominent news and public affairs programs demonstrates that public television is failing to live up to its mission to provide an alternative to commercial television, to give voice to those "who would otherwise go unheard" and help viewers to "see America whole, in all its diversity," in the words of public TV's founding document.
In a special November issue of studies and analyses of PBS's major public affairs shows, FAIR's magazine Extra! shows that "public television" features guestlists strongly dominated by white, male and elite sources, who are far more likely to represent corporations and war makers than environmentalists or peace advocates. And both funding and ownership of these shows is increasingly corporate, further eroding the distinction between "public" and corporate television. There is precious little "public" left in "public television."
FAIR undertook the examination following news last fall that PBS was canceling Now and that Bill Moyers was retiring from Bill Moyers Journal. PBS announced that it was replacing the two shows, which exemplified the public broadcasting mission, with Need to Know, a news magazine launched in May and anchored by two journalists from the corporate media world.
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If his Fox News gig or opinions were unwelcome at NPR, they should have cut ties with Williams a long time ago. The Root: NPR Should Have Dumped Juan Williams -- but Not Today.
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Is Juan Williams a bigot? Probably not. Should National Public Radio have fired him for his anti-Muslim comments on Fox News? Not this time.
No doubt Williams' bosses at NPR hated it when he was introduced several times each week on Fox News as "NPR's Juan Williams." (In fact, last year they asked him to stop identifying himself as a NPR correspondent when he appeared on Fox.) But if working for NPR and Fox News simultaneously is impossible, then NPR should have cut ties with him a long time ago. Letting him go now makes NPR look biased -- the very thing they strive not to be.
Williams was let go after telling Bill O'Reilly the following:
"I mean, look, Bill, I'm not a bigot. You know the kind of books I've written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous."
Sorry, Juan, but Fox is the only place where that kind of analysis is called "fair and balanced." It doesn't make him a bigot, but as Adam Serwer blogged today at The Washington Post, "Whether or not Williams 'is a bigot' is beside the point, this is a bigoted statement." Indeed. Being "nervous" about someone wearing "Muslim garb" is profiling, plain and simple.
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My personal feeling is that too many of Africa's borders are based on European pens and not designed to build stable nation. BBC: Will independence vote bring war or peace to south Sudan?
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It is a common message plastered on posters and banners here in the southern capital, Juba, as the war-damaged region prepares for a historic vote due on 9 January 2011.
Excitement is high, with many believing the south will choose secession and divide Africa's largest nation in two.
Every month hundreds take to the streets in cities across the south waving flags and chanting slogans demanding the vote is held on time. But with just over 80 days to go, much preparation still needs to be done.
"We have fought and waited for years for the chance to decide our future," said Mr Dhel, whose shirt carries a logo showing chains being cut from black fists, set against a backdrop of the southern flag.
The referendum is part of the 2005 peace deal that brought to an end more than two decades of civil war fought over ethnicity, oil, religion and resources.
More than two million people died in the conflict between the Arab-dominated, Muslim government in the capital, Khartoum, and rebels from the marginalised south, where most are Christians or follow traditional beliefs.
"Too many people have already died to let this chance to choose go to waste," the soldier-turned-independence campaigner adds.
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A new play, opening at the University of South Carolina, recalls the events surrounding the killing of three black students at a civil-rights demonstration in 1968. New York Times: A Time of Darkness Illuminated Onstage.
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Even many South Carolinians barely remember the night when two unarmed black college students and a high school senior were killed, and 28 others injured, after state troopers opened fire at a civil-rights demonstration on Feb. 8, 1968. It was the first incident of its kind on an American campus, but the news was swamped by the Tet Offensive a week earlier and the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. two months later.
There was no heavy news coverage like the Jackson State killings in Mississippi received in 1970, no unforgettable photograph like the image that burned the Kent State shootings into the American consciousness that same year.
Among those unaware of the incident, in spite of growing up two miles from where it happened at South Carolina State University in Orangeburg, was Calhoun Cornwell, a budding student playwright there. But he was gripped by classroom lectures on the ’68 shootings that had become known as the Orangeburg Massacre, and in 2009, at the urging of classmates, he wrote a play about the event.
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The NAACP today issued a report detailing "the links between certain Tea Party factions and acknowledged racist hate groups in the United States." CBS: NAACP Issues Report on Links Between Tea Party Factions and "Racist Hate Groups".
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"These links should give all patriotic Americans pause," NAACP president and CEO Benjamin Jealous writes in a forward.
Jealous allows that that "the majority of Tea Party supporters are sincere, principled people of good will." He urges "the leadership and members of the Tea Party movement [to] read this report and take additional steps to distance themselves from those Tea Party leaders who espouse racist ideas, advocate violence, or are formally affiliated with white supremacist organizations."
These groups and individuals are out there, and we ignore them at our own peril," Jealous said in a statement before the report was released. "They are speaking at tea party events, recruiting at rallies, and in some cases remain in the tea party leadership itself."
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The ugly, racist undertone of some Tea Party elements could come back to bite those intellectual conservatives who think they can contain it. The Root: There's No Taming the Tea Party Dragon
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Intellectual libertarians and conservatives ignore the reality of their Tea Party shock troops at their peril. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat is only the latest conservative unwilling to believe his lying eyes.
Inconveniently for him, the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights and the NAACP just released the most comprehensive report to date about Tea Party nationalism that unequivocally refutes Douthat's and other dissembling intellectual conservatives' dangerous equivocation.
Intellectual conservatism was absolutely lost in a wilderness of irrelevance before the Tea Party exploded onto the 24-hour news cycle. Indisputably, what made the movement such catnip to the news media were the controversial placards -- many, many, many of which spouted the most unabashedly racist sloganeering this nation has seen outside of a Klan rally. Hyperbole, Mr. Douthat? Remember the president gussied up as a coal-black African witch doctor with a bone in his nose? David Duke was more subtle.
Obviously, not even a majority of Tea Partiers are racist; however, the Tea Party, the GOP and intellectual conservatives feign ignorance of an unquestionably racist strain in the Tea Party movement. The Tea Party brand of right-of-the-GOP conservatism is particularly unsympathetic to the African American, the poor and the immigrant.
More than half of Tea Party supporters surveyed by The New York Times think the government favors blacks over whites, a rate five times higher than that of the general public. Tea Party leaders -- from former Tea Party Express spokesman Mark Williams to former national coordinator of the Tea Party movement Amy Kremer; white nationalist Billy Roper; Wood County Tea Party leader and "official supporter" of the KKK Karen Pack; and New York gubernatorial Tea Party candidate Carl Paladino -- have a nasty habit of disseminating nasty, racist e-mails. (If you'd like to read the report's exhaustive list, click here.)
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Augusta's African-American landmarks get attention. Augusta Chronicle: Aging structures are focus of 2-day conference.
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There's an abandoned two-story house at 1011 Laney-Walker Boulevard with a porch roof that seems ready to collapse off its columns.
Most driving by would not realize this was the home of a man whom The New York Times declared the greatest African-American preacher of his time when it published his obituary in 1921.
The Rev. C.T. Walker's home and seven other endangered historic properties will be featured in This Place Matters: Preserving Augusta's African-American Communities on Friday and Saturday. The conference includes a bus tour of African-American historic sites and is being co-sponsored by Historic Augusta and the Lucy Craft Laney Museum of Black History.
Though Historic Augusta has previously listed all eight properties as places that ought to be saved, funding for historic rehabilitation in Augusta's African-American neighborhoods so far has lagged. The challenge has been to attract private investment.
"Often African-American neighborhoods are places that have had disinvestment over the years. It's difficult to get an investor willing to take a risk there," said Erick Montgomery, the executive director of Historic Augusta. "Our role is to tell investors these places have value."
African-Americans want to preserve their historic buildings just like any other community, said Christine Miller-Betts, the executive director of the Lucy Craft Laney Museum of Black History, but oftentimes don't know how to do it.
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[] Surviving in Haiti by Bev Bell
[] Fox "News" sued for racial discrimination by ex-employee by boofdah
[] Thousands of Blacks fought for the Confederacy? Really, VA? by Musket Man
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Editor
I was thinking about Kurt Vonnegut the other day. I was thinking about the firebombing of Dresden and the burning of Beatles albums in the South. I was thinking about the destruction of the Library in Alexandria and dynamiting of the Buddhas of Bamyan. I was thinking of laws that prevented blacks from reading; and if there were no laws, the local Citizens Council made sure no reading occured.
Vonnegut was not the only one to call the bombing of Dresden an act of terror. Even British Air Commodore Colin McKay Grierson, a confidant of Churchill, admitted to AP war correspondent Howard Cowan, that the raid also helped destroy...
... what is left of German morale.
Cowan then filed a report that the allies had resorted to terror bombing.
The firebombing of Dresden, a center for Art and Literature, was a strategic act of terror. The burning of Beatles albums was a conscious act by white supremacists and one meant to intimidate. Laws to prevent the education of blacks and brown peoples are making a virulent resurgence. In fact, there are calls by the TeaBirchers to defund the Department of Education and to also limit funds for any education measure on the local level.
In the historic center of Baghdad, on a street named after the tenth century classical poet, Al-Mutannabi, a street filled with bookstores and outdoor book stalls, an area often referred to as the heart and soul of the Baghdad literary and intellectual community; a car bomb exploded and killed 26 people on 5 March 2007.
on the day Al-Mutanabbi street was bombed
did you notice
how quickly the open sky
folded in upon itself
the flaking burnt pages
like torn moth wings
flying up the fetid smoke
then drifting
down
the broken teacups
and coffee stained saucers
the splintered chairs
empty shoe
splattered blood
and
just before
that moment
did you hear the
euphony of the street
as men wrangled
and summoned
swore and cajoled
addressed
if not solved
defined
if not created
the problems
and the promise
of their country's
tomorrow
did you even know
of the dreams imploded
inside the molten iron
across the narrow
book lined street
as debate turned
to barbed screeches
philosophy
into choked smoke
and a thousand
years of history
was buried in the rubble
or was there
nothing
except an inexorable
deadly silence
-- devorah major
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