Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Mark Dean (born March 2, 1957) is an African-American computer scientist and inventor. Mark Dean is credited with helping to launch the personal computer age with work that made the machines more accessible and powerful.
The fact that a young African-American man went on to carve out such a significant niche in a field largely dominated by white engineers and scientists isn't all that surprising, given his background. From an early age, Dean showed a love for building things; as a young boy, Dean constructed a tractor from scratch with the help of his father, a supervisor at the Tennessee Valley Authority. Dean also excelled in many different areas, standing out as a gifted athlete and an extremely smart student who graduated with straight A's from Jefferson City High School. In 1979, he graduated at the top of his class at the University of Tennessee, where he studied engineering.
Not long after college, Dean landed a job at IBM, a company he would become associated with for the duration of his career. As an engineer, Dean proved to be a rising star at the company. Working closely with a colleague, Dennis Moeller, Dean developed the new Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) systems bus, a new system that allowed peripheral devices like disk drives, printers, and monitors to be plugged directly into computers. The end result was more efficiency and better integration.
But his groundbreaking work didn't stop there. Dean's research at IBM helped change the accessibility and power of the personal computer. His work led to the development of the color PC monitor and, in 1999, Dean led a team of engineers at IBM's Austin, Texas, lab to create the first gigahertz chip—a revolutionary piece of technology that is able to do a billion calculations a second.
In all, Dean holds three of the company's original nine patents and, in total, has more 20 patents associated with his name.....Read More
TIDBITS
In 1995, Dr. Dean was named an IBM Fellow in 1995, one of only 50 active fellows of IBM's 300,000 employees. Dean was the first African American to be honored with IBM Fellowship.
In 1997 Dean was Vice President of Performance for the RS/6000 Division and, along with his colleague Dennis Moeller, Dean was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame which has under 150 members. For inventing "a system that has allowed PCs to become part of our lives."
In 1999, as Director of IBM's Austin Research Lab (in Austin, Texas), he lead the team that built a gigaherz (1000mhz) chip which did a billion calculations per second.
In 2001 he was elected member of the National Academy of Engineers (NAE) .
In 2004, Dr. Dean was selected as one of the 50 Most Important Blacks in Research Science
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Comcast Corp. will begin the process of adding 10 new independent, minority-owned & operated channels by soliciting proposals from Hispanic & African-American networks. Multichannel News: Hispanic-, African-American Owned-Or-Operated Channels To Launch First
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Comcast Corp. will begin the process of adding 10 new independent, minority-owned and operated channels by soliciting proposals from Hispanic and African-American networks.
As part of its merger agreement with NBC Universal, Comcast pledged it would launch 10 new independent channels over the next eight years, including eight that are Hispanic- and African-American owned or operated. Comcast officials are now accepting proposals for the first three. The first, a channel that is "American Latino operated and programmed in English" -- will launch by July 28, 2012.
The other two will be majority African-American-owned and will launch by January 28, 2013. A suite of six 24-hour HD cable networks owned by African-American comedian Byron Allen and HBCU Net -- a 24-hour network featuring content from Historically Black College and Universities headed by former BET executive Curtis Symonds - are among the networks that could vie for those slots.
Of the 10 channels, four will be majority African-American owned, two will be majority Hispanic-owned and two will be operated by American Latino programmers. Each of the 10 networks will be added on select Comcast systems as part of the MSO's D1 digital tier.
"Comcast is committed to providing opportunities for diverse businesses to expand and grow," said David Jensen, vice president of content acquisition for Comcast in a statement. "We look forward to considering a number of fresh and viable programming proposals from Hispanic and African-American programmers to create new channels that will complement the robust lineup of programming choices we already offer our customers."
As part of its commitment, Comcast last week said it would expand carriage of Asian-themed network Mnet to four major markets, including Chicago, Boston, San Francisco and Sacramento, Calif.
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Most people have never heard of Harlem Renaissance Big Five. Washington Post: Abdul-Jabbar wants to make sure the Harlem Renaissance Big Five aren’t forgotten.
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The 63-year-old Hall of Famer has co-written and is the executive producer of a documentary called “On the Shoulders of Giants.” It tells the story of the Harlem Rens, an all black professional basketball team that defeated the Original Celtics for the world basketball championship in the 1930s.
“The primary reason that I did it was because the early days of professional basketball are almost totally unknown now to the public because it happened so long ago,” Abdul-Jabbar, in town for the Final Four, said in an interview with The Associated Press. “There’s no footage. It’s just fallen through the cracks of history.”
The Rens, who competed from the 1920s until 1949, were named after Harlem’s Renaissance Casino and played in its second-story ballroom. Jazz greats including Count Basie and Cab Calloway played at halftime of the Rens’ games, and they’d come on again after the game for a dance that lasted until the wee hours of the morning.
They won more than 2,000 games, including 88 straight in 86 days in 1932-33.
Abdul-Jabbar, who was born and grew up in Harlem, said he didn’t learn of the Rens until the summer before his senior year in high school.
“When I was still in high school I knew that they were a very good team,” he said. “But I didn’t know their relationship to professional basketball until much later, after having played professional basketball.”
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Radio personality Mister Cee's recent arrest has relaunched the popular conversation about the down low. But it's time to view the down-low brother for what he is: an urban exaggeration. The Root: Mister Cee and the Myth of the Down-Low Bogeyman
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The point? Sometimes misinformation will auto-correct in the public mind, as with the myth of the racist chicken proprietors. But sometimes it won't. Our fascination with the down-low brother is a prime example. To dismiss him as an urban legend would be to refute the facts of his existence, but it's certainly reasonable and, frankly, responsible to relegate him to an urban exaggeration.
The predicament in which DJ Mister Cee of New York's Hot 97 has recently found himself embroiled certainly doesn't help matters. The popular DJ's arrest last week for public lewdness involving the alleged receipt of oral stimulation from a male practitioner in his car has been red meat ever since for gossip sites and rival New York radio personalities. Even if the tawdry allegations are true, the reaction to it seems to say more about us than it says about him.
Stories like his always seem to dredge up discussions about the down low and all the misplaced blame for the health and relationship woes of black women, whose relationships with black men have been complicated by the down-low brother. They despise the idea of being betrayed by him and fear the consequences of his recklessness and deceit. Yet many black women are perversely entertained by his story from afar.
Oprah invites a down-low brother over for coffee, candor and cameras. He sits on her couch and dishes on the double life that some of his bisexual brethren, of all races, lead. His books are New York Times best-sellers. He confesses and confides. He explains and exploits his story simultaneously.
Black women are part horrified, part hypnotized. He's their tour guide to the underworld, where seemingly straight men go bump in the night. But he's something else, too, even though he may not mean to be. He's a public disservice announcement.
By now, we've all heard the reports. Black women disproportionately make up the fastest-rising demographic of new HIV cases. Their rate of infection is nearly 15 times that of their white counterparts. To call it alarming is an understatement. But is the relatively small percentage of bisexual black men the reason for the high rates?
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A great read! When ColorOfChange.org campaigned against conservative provocateur Andrew Breitbart's presence on Huffington Post, it was for what he's done, not what he feels, say leaders of the organization. The Root: Race-Baiting Is Different From Racism
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When more than 43,000 ColorOfChange.org members spoke up last week to demand that huckster Andrew Breitbart not be given a place of privilege on the Huffington Post, they weren't motivated by some desire to name-call. They weren't pretending to have some window into Breitbart's heart, or to understand his personal preferences or how he treats his neighbors.
But you wouldn't know that from watching how Breitbart -- and many in the media -- responded to the success of our campaign. Instead, the issue quickly became whether or not Breitbart is a racist, a claim that ColorOfChange.org has never made. What we have rightfully claimed is that Breitbart race-baits. What we mean by that -- just in case it's honestly a term that confounds the wordsmiths in the Beltway's media corps -- is that Breitbart is the latest in a long line of political operatives who take advantage of Americans' racial fears and anxieties for political, economic or personal gain.
Race-baiting is a tool that has propelled the careers of many men before Breitbart (see: Lee Atwater). And if journalists, pundits and political leaders aren't willing to acknowledge that Breitbart and his ilk willfully create false narratives that play on racial divisions, then our public discourse is doomed to continued pollution by these dirty tricks in an era where they simply have no place.
Here's how we described what Breitbart does in the original email message we sent our members: "His method is to pose as a journalist, and then use deceptive tactics to gin up race-based fears, protect racists, and demonize black political leaders and institutions." Race-baiting is what Glenn Beck did when claimed that Barack Obama has "a deep-seated hatred of white people, or the white culture." It's what Roger Ailes did with the "Willie Horton" ad and what he continues to promote in much of Fox News' programming, as we saw in Megyn Kelly's breathless coverage of the New Black Panther Party last summer. And it's what Breitbart did when he demonized ACORN, Shirley Sherrod and the NAACP under false pretenses.
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Unions Offer Protection and Access to the Middle Class. Center For American Progress: The Importance of Unions for Workers of Color
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Workers who lack the collective leverage that unions provide are more distanced from the middle-class earnings and resources their unionized peers have, and this is particularly true for workers of color. Indeed, numbers show that most nonunion, nonwhite public-sector workers today fall farther below the median income of their white coworkers than they would with a union safety-net. And workers of color, including Native Americans, African Americans, Latinos, and Pacific Islanders, are often concentrated at the low-end of the wage spectrum—jobs which often benefit the most from the protection of unions. [1]
In lower-wage industries where union busting dramatically tempers access to competitive benefits, workers of color slide even farther down the wage scale. In the case of Wisconsin, and the impending attempts to decimate unions' collective bargaining power in Indiana and Ohio, people of color are increasingly being shut out of decent work and incomes because of weakened standards and lowered wage floors. These shutouts undermine the concentrated efforts that slowly inched workers of color toward closing the racial wealth gap that plagues low and middle-income people of color the most.
Although some wage gaps have been narrowed, it remains evident that the middle-class status-markers of competitive industry wages, comprehensive healthcare, and retirement benefits continually prove elusive for workers in lower-wage industries and public-sector work. Where workers of color are occupationally segregated—statistically crowded out of higher-wage, predominately white worker occupied jobs—available positions are decreasingly unionized (if at all) in addition to being low-income-earning positions with little to no benefits.[2] In this context, the success of unions in boosting socioeconomic mobility becomes inarguably apparent.
Without union leadership and protection, many people of color—with particular historical emphasis on African Americans—would not have accessed the middle class. [3] Black workers fought hotly contested, deadly fights for access to unions in order to secure basic protections and economic equity. The successful unionization of integrated workplaces over the last 140 years not only increased the wages of African Americans—who were otherwise making nickels to white workers dollars—but it also raised the overall floor for antidiscriminatory labor standards in hiring and benefit distribution. African-American workers collectively leveraged their arduous labor in exchange for safer conditions and better compensation by forming and joining unions— gaining standard protections historically denied to American workers descended of America's enslaved.
Léalo en español
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Many gay people have spoken on the difficulty of coming out. The first video is about a brave man who has chosen to do so in one the toughest places to do so, in order to serve as a roll model. The second video is about an underground church. Changes is coming no matter how slow around the world.
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Jamaica is often said to hold the world record for the most churches per square mile. There’s a public place of worship for almost everyone — unless you’re gay. If you are, you must worship in secret.
Correspondent Lisa Biagiotti, producer Micah Fink and director of photography Gabrielle Weiss report on the secret underground church that is welcoming gay men and women to practice their faith. Reverend Robert Griffin, an American priest, leads the secret church. He believes religion is at the heart of Jamaica culture of homophobia, and the time has come to reinterpret the Bible for modern times.
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An aide for Mirlande Manigat says she will not contest preliminary results that showed popular singer Michel Martelly defeating her by a 2-1 margin to become Haiti's next president. LA Times: No challenge to Michel Martelly's election in Haiti expected
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Michel Martelly, the popular singer turned improbable candidate, was all but assured of becoming Haiti's next president Tuesday after his opponent's camp appeared to rule out challenging vote tallies issued a day earlier.
Martelly, who ran as an outsider trumpeting change, sounded triumphant in his first public comments since preliminary results showed him easily defeating Mirlande Manigat, a university executive and former first lady.
"You have chosen to break with our old quarrels, our artificial divisions, the prevailing negativity," Martelly told Haitians from the stage at a restaurant in Petionville, a wealthy suburb in the hills above the capital, Port-au-Prince. His name was emblazoned on the backdrop.
"You wanted change, you voted change, change in our political practices, in our economic choices and in our social organization," Martelly said.
On Monday, the country's Provisional Electoral Council announced that Martelly, 50, had defeated Manigat by more than 2 to 1 in the March 20 vote. Results are preliminary to allow for appeals before the final outcome is announced April 16.
Jean-Junior Joseph, communications advisor for the Manigat campaign, said she would not contest the results.
Michel Martelly will have to govern a country still struggling after the earthquake in January 2010
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Editor
I've been in some heated discussions with, predominately white liberal men, who maintain that race is no longer an issue and Obama's election is proof. Additionally, they insist, is that younger folks are increasingly crossing racial and cultural lines, marrying and raising children. They point to my own family as evidence that times have truly changed.
But have times truly changed? A new poll shows that 46% of GOP voters in Mississippi want interracial marriages made illegal.
I point this out; and the fact that Obama is a result of an interracial marriage, yet my white liberal male friends deny a connection. But the connection is clear. Racial animus has definitely increased since even before Obama was elected; and has only gotten worse.
Hate is a corrosive. It needs to be rubbed out and continuously fought. Hate cannot be made shiny and clean in one area and then ignored. Hate, like rust, never sleeps; it corrodes and destroys and weakens the fabric, the very structure of society.
We know then, that there is no rest against hate, bigotry and racism.
Mulatto
Grandma is washing me white. I am the color of hot sand in the bleached sea light. I am a stain on the porcelain, persistent as tea. Stay in the shade. Don’t say she was the only one. Cousins opposite say: you too white. I am a night-blooming flower being pried open in the morning. My skin a curtain for a cage of bones, a blackbird coop. My heart is crusty bread, hardening. Hardening. This way, I feed my own fluttering. Under shade, the day looks like evening and I cannot bear the darkness. Don’t say, I can’t stand to be touched. Say, I stare into the sun to burn off the soiled hands that print my body with bloody ink. Don’t say, Mulatto. Say, I am the horse in Oz turning different colors, each prance brightening flesh. A curiosity. Don’t say, Bathwater spiraled down into the pipes. Say, I never did fade. Say, Skin holds the perseverance of my days. Folding, folding, the water continuously gathers, making wrinkles in a map.
-- Roxane Beth Johnson
(I've pledged the minimum $150 to help heat freezing folks in need on the Rosebud Reservation. Navajo has an important diary posted with all the particulars. Even a small amount can work towards building the minimum. Could you please help?)
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