Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Born in Jefferson City, Tennessee on March 2, 1957, Mark Dean found that success ran in his bloodlines. His grandfather was a high school principal and his father worked as a supervisor for the Tennessee Valley Authority Dam. A bright and energetic child, he often endured questions from grade school classmates, asking if he was really Black because Black people were not supposed to be that smart. Mark was an outstanding high school athlete as well as a straight A student. His success continued in college as he graduated at the top of his class with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Tennessee in 1979.
(con't.)
In 1980, Dean was invited to join IBM as an engineer. Despite his new position, he continued his education and received a Master's Degree in Electrical Engineering from Florida Atlantic University in 1982. In his capacity as an engineer for IBM, he didn't take long to make a big impact, serving as the chief engineer for the team that developed the IBM PC/AT, the original home/office computer. Along with his colleague Dennis Moeller, he developed the Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) systems bus, a component that allowed multiple peripheral devices such as a modems and printers to be connected to a PC, thus making the PC a practical and affordable component of the home or small business office. Dean would own three of the original nine patents that all PCs are based upon. Dean followed up with PS/2 Models 70 or 80, and the Color Graphics Adapter (which allowed for color display on the PC).
Mark DeanDespite his enormous success, Dean realized that there was more to learn and more than he could achieve, so he entered Stanford University and in 1992 received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering. Five years later he was named as the director of the Austin Research Laboratory and director of Advanced Technology Development for the IBM Enterprise Server Group. Under his leadership, in 1999 his team made several significant breakthroughs including the testing of the first gigahertz CMOS microprocessor. With this great success he was named the vice president for Systems Research at IBM's Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, then as a vice president in IBM's Storage Technology Group, focused on the company's storage systems strategy and technology roadmap.....Read More
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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How you can not know or recognize a chief in a department SUV with ID around his neck, I don't know. Daily News: Plainclothes officers in trouble - didn't recognize off-duty chief.
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At least one cop has been disciplined for ordering the NYPD's highest-ranking uniformed black officer out of his auto while the three-star chief was off-duty and parked in Queens, the Daily News has learned.
"How you can not know or recognize a chief in a department SUV with ID around his neck, I don't know," a police source said.
Chief Douglas Zeigler, 60, head of the Community Affairs Bureau, was in his NYPD-issued vehicle near a fire hydrant when two plainclothes cops approached on May 2, sources said.
One officer walked up on each side of the SUV at 57th Ave. and Xenia St. in Corona about 7 p.m. and told the driver to roll down the heavily tinted windows, sources said.
What happened next is in dispute.
In his briefing to Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, Zeigler said the two cops, who are white, had no legitimate reason to approach his SUV, ranking sources said.
After they ordered him to get out, one officer did not believe the NYPD identification Zeigler gave him.
Three-star NYPD Chief Douglas Zeigler
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National Review continues their long history of race baiting. Slate: National Review Reveals Obama's Secret Plan to Make You Live in an Apartment Full of Black People.
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Back on July 19, the Department of Housing and Urban Development published a new regulatory directive in the Federal Register to open the comment period, and nobody paid very much attention to it because it's a boring and not very important story. A handful of conservative media outlets did try to whip up a little old-fashioned white racial panic about the issue, but it didn't have the legs of a New Black Panther Party story or FEMA concentration camps. Into the breach steps National Review's Stanley Kurtz, who wants you to know that there's so much more to panic about than your daughter consorting with the new black neighbors:
Yet even critics have missed the real thrust of HUD’s revolutionary rule change. That’s understandable, since the Obama administration is at pains to downplay the regionalist philosophy behind its new directive. The truth is, HUD’s new rule is about a great deal more than forcing racial and ethnic diversity on the suburbs.
My advice to Kurtz is that he should come up with a more alarming name for this philosophy than "regionalism"—in a world where Obama is regularly accused of being a socialist or a crypto-Muslim, I'm not sure that the allegation that he believes regions are important will impress people all that much. Still, this regionalism is about something even more terrifying than race mixing. So that's somthing. As he explains:
The new HUD rule is really about changing the way Americans live. It is part of a broader suite of initiatives designed to block suburban development, press Americans into hyper-dense cities, and force us out of our cars. Government-mandated ethnic and racial diversification plays a role in this scheme, yet the broader goal is forced “economic integration.” The ultimate vision is to make all neighborhoods more or less alike, turning traditional cities into ultra-dense Manhattans, while making suburbs look more like cities do now. In this centrally-planned utopia, steadily increasing numbers will live cheek-by-jowl in “stack and pack” high-rises close to public transportation, while automobiles fall into relative disuse.
(emphasis where mine, dopper0189)
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Cheryl Boone Isaacs has been elected president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She’s the first African-American and third woman to lead the powerful 86-year-old organization that’s responsible for the Oscars. ColorLines: Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Elects First Black President.
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Boone Isaacs, a marketing executive who has served stints at Paramount and New Line, is the first African-American to head the 86-year-old Academy and only the third woman to serve as president.
Boone Isaacs succeeds Hawk Koch, who served as Academy president for the past year, but ran up against term limits after completing nine successive years on the board. A longtime Academy insider, Boone Isaacs represents the public relations branch on the board and is currently serving her 21st year as a governor, having returned to the board in 2011 after a hiatus. For the past year, she served as first vp while also producing the fourth annual Governors Awards in December.
It’s an important moment atop Hollywood’s hierachy. As we pointed out last year, the group that votes for the Oscars is 94 percent white — despite a rapidly diversifying movie-going demographic.
Toby Canham/ Getty Images
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Race, class, education, and the battle over opportunity. New York Times: In Missouri, Race Complicates a Transfer to Better Schools.
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When the Missouri Supreme Court upheld a law in June allowing students from failing school districts to transfer to good ones, Harriett Gladney saw a path to a better education for her 9-year-old daughter.
But then she watched television news clips from a town hall meeting for the Francis Howell School District, the predominantly white district here that her daughter’s mostly black district, Normandy, had chosen as a transfer site. Normandy, in neighboring St. Louis County, has one of the worst disciplinary rates in the state, and Francis Howell parents angrily protested the transfer of Normandy students across the county line, some yelling that their children could be stabbed and that the district’s academic standards would slip.
“When I saw them screaming and hollering like they were crazy, I thought to myself, ‘Oh my God, this is back in Martin Luther King days,’ ” said Ms. Gladney, 45. “ ‘They’re going to get the hoses out. They’re going to be beating our kids and making sure they don’t get off the school bus.’ ”
Public schools here in the St. Louis region, as in many other metropolitan areas across the country, have struggled for decades to bridge a wide achievement gap between school districts — a divide that often runs along racial and socioeconomic lines. By affirming the right to transfer students out of failing school districts, the State Supreme Court opened the doors for hundreds of families to cross the lines and move their children into better schools.
But the ensuing contention has shown that the process remains a tricky one, complicated by class, race, geography and social perceptions.
Dan Gill for The New York Times
A parent at a Normandy School District meeting signals his approval for a plan to allow students there to transfer to an accredited district. Normandy has one of Missouri’s worst disciplinary rates.
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The Republican speaker's vague praise for the March on Washington carefully stayed away from issues. The Root: Celebrating Civil Rights, Boehner-Style.
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So it's no surprise that, at a congressional ceremony Wednesday observing the 50th anniversary of one of the landmark civil rights events of the century -- the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom -- Boehner made an awkward show of delivering the praise for the march that the event demanded, while entirely avoiding acknowledgment of its specific goals or the obvious links to modern policy issues.
Here are the components of the ceremony that made sense: A video presentation featuring sights and sounds from the march, in which more than 200,000 demonstrators converged on Washington, D.C., and where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech; Grammy Award-winning soprano Jessye Norman singing the spiritual "He's Got the Whole World in His Hand," which Marian Anderson performed at the event in 1963; and members of Congress connecting the issues addressed by the march and connecting them to those that are relevant today, most notably voting rights.
Here's where it was weird: While Boehner had nothing but compliments for those who organized the event, saying that he wanted to start by "acknowledging the debt we owe to all those men and women" and encouraging the crowd to "start by thanking John Lewis," it was never clear exactly for what, and when exactly he stopped thinking the battle for civil rights was a good thing.
"It was a day for the ages," he said. OK, no one would really disagree with that. He lauded "chapters of struggle by ordinary Americans committed to the promise that all men are created equal." Oh, interesting. That sounds good. But equal in what ways? How does that play out in terms of policy?
Crickets.
Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner greet John Lewis. (Getty Images)
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