Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Kerrie Holley is a research computer scientist. Holley is an IBM Fellow, known for his contributions to the field of service-oriented architecture. He is a co-inventor of the Service-Oriented Modeling and Architecture, SOMA and the Service Integration Maturity Model (SIMM).
Holley received his B.A. from DePaul University and his Juris Doctorate from DePaul University College of Law. He joined IBM in 1986 where he currently serves as CTO for IBM’s SOA Center of Excellence. During his childhood, he attended the Sue Duncan Children's Center on the South Side of Chicago where he tutored the current United States Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.
Holley was appointed an IBM Distinguished Engineer in 2000 and in that same year elected to IBM’s Academy of Technology. He was appointed an IBM Fellow in 2006 by IBM’s Chairman and CEO, Sam Palmisano.
In 2004 he was named as one of The 50 most important blacks in Research Science. [ref. wikipedia]
(con't.)
....He [Kerrie Holley] already knows who he is. He wasn’t like a lot of the other IBM fellows. He grew up poor in the South side of Chicago.
He was raised by his grandmother. He never knew who his father was. He was lucky enough to attract the attention of Sue Duncan who had a children’s center and who is the mother of Arne Duncan, the US secretary of Education. She sent him to private school. She helped Holley advance in his studies by getting him tutoring from university students. She told him to always finish what he started, whether it be reading a book or completing a project. She helped discipline him in a world where violence and mayhem were the norm and young black men found themselves in gangs or worse.
....He is much sought after due to his contributions in the area of SOA development methods. He should be as he holds a co- patent for the first SOA maturity model and development method. He is a master at e-business Integration Solutions.
In 1986 he joined IBM and became CTO of IBM’s SOA Center of Excellence. He was chosen IBM’s distinguished Engineer in 2000. The fellowship he was appointed to in 2006, was founded in1962 by Thomas J. Watson, Jr., with the sole purpose of inspiring creativity and bringing together the most "Exceptional "technical minds in the company....Read More
============================================================
News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
============================================================
============================================================
Haitians have been marking the first anniversary of the earthquake that devastated their country and left some 250,000 of their fellow citizens dead. BBC: Haitians remember their earthquake dead a year on
=============================================================
A minute's silence was held at 1653 local time (2153 GMT) - the exact time the 7.0 magnitude quake hit last year.
Church services have also been held around the nation, including at the ruined cathedral in the capital, Port-au-Prince.
One year on, some 800,000 people are still living in temporary shelters.
Traffic stopped as the streets of Port-au-Prince turned quiet and businesses were closed.
It was haunting.
As the moment approached, a city of several million people fell silent.
There was little movement in the streets.
Watching from a hill top above Port-au-Prince one lone car drove slowly down a road.
Less than an hour before 4.53pm, the time at which the earthquake struck, one survivor simply said: "A year ago it was 45 minutes before 250,000 people died. And no-one knew it."
Then a bell chimed on the hillside. The city seemed to hold its breath for a moment.
And slowly the singing began. The voices echoing up from the camps down below.
People walked in solemn processions to prayer services marking the anniversary of the worst natural disaster in the nation's history. Many people wore white, a colour associated with mourning in Haiti, and sang hymns as they made their way to the services.
============================================================
============================================================
The president took the high ground at the Arizona memorial for the massacre victims -- and reminded us that he can be a powerful unifying force. The Root: Obama's Lincolnesque Speech
============================================================
One of the most challenging roles that American presidents must play is that of national healer in times of great tragedy. Barack Obama fulfilled that mission last night, perhaps as well as any U.S. president ever has, with a remarkably touching speech that echoed the redemptive tone of an earlier president from Illinois without quoting his eloquent words.
Given the poisonous character of today's partisan, intellectually bankrupt politics, Obama's call for us to forgo the "point scoring and pettiness that drifts away with the next news cycles," and seek instead to build a country that "lives up to our children's expectations," stands little chance of success. And yet he, like Lincoln in his first inaugural address on the brink of the civil war that erupted 150 years ago, suggests that we hearken to our better angels -- if we can still hear them.
Obama's deceptively simple remarks at the University of Arizona were politics at its best -- in part because they rose above conventional politics. Rather than sink into the abysmal back-and-forth between liberals and conservatives over which side is more responsible for the noxious tone of our public debate, and what role, if any, the over-the-top rhetoric of Obama's foes played in the senseless slaughter of last Saturday, the president focused on humanizing the victims and connecting them to the larger American family.
The speech was larded with personal detail that made each of the slain a real person whose loss could be powerfully felt. Thus, Obama spoke of how George Morris, a former Marine, instinctively "tried to shield his wife, Dot, when the shooting broke out." And of how Phyllis Schneck, mother of three, grandmother of seven, great-grandmother of one, "sewed aprons with the logos of the Jets and the Giants to give out at the church where she volunteered." And of how retired construction worker Dorwan Stoddard's "final act of selflessness was to dive on top of his wife," Mavy, sacrificing his life for hers.
============================================================
============================================================
New York Times: Federal Report Highlights Racial Disparities in Health
============================================================
Whites in the United States die of drug overdoses more often than other ethnic groups. Blacks are hit proportionately harder by AIDS, strokes and heart disease. And American Indians tend to die in car crashes.
To shed more light on the ills of America’s poor — and occasionally its rich — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday released its first report detailing racial disparities in a broad array of health problems.
While some are well known, others have had little attention; there were also a few surprises.
The agency did not delve into why suffering is so disproportionate, other than to note the obvious: that the poor, the uninsured and the less educated tend to live shorter, sicker lives. (Some illnesses were also broken down by income level, by region, by age or by sex, but the main focus was on racial differences.)
"Some of the figures, like the suicide rate for young American Indians, are just heartbreaking," said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the C.D.C. director, who ordered the report compiled.
============================================================
============================================================
As detailed by Deoliver47 in her diary Update:Tea Party Republicans abolish school integration policy Washington Post: Republican school board in N.C. backed by tea party abolishes integration policy
============================================================
The sprawling Wake County School District has long been a rarity. Some of its best, most diverse schools are in the poorest sections of this capital city. And its suburban schools, rather than being exclusive enclaves, include children whose parents cannot afford a house in the neighborhood.
But over the past year, a new majority-Republican school board backed by national tea party conservatives has set the district on a strikingly different course. Pledging to "say no to the social engineers!" it has abolished the policy behind one of the nation's most celebrated integration efforts.
And as the board moves toward a system in which students attend neighborhood schools, some members are embracing the provocative idea that concentrating poor children, who are usually minorities, in a few schools could have merits - logic that critics are blasting as a 21st-century case for segregation.
The situation unfolding here in some ways represents a first foray of tea party conservatives into the business of shaping a public school system, and it has made Wake County the center of a fierce debate over the principle first enshrined in the Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education: that diversity and quality education go hand in hand.
============================================================
============================================================
[] Outmanned and Outgunned: Gun Control in Black History by EarthTone
[] Whitewash by juliewolf
[] Race and Class in America: The Scottsboro Boys to the Scott Sisters by Baracktopian
[] Update:Tea Party Republicans abolish school integration policy by Deoliver47
====================================================================
Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
On the evening of 4 June 1968, at the age of thirteen, I accompanied my father to the Ambassador Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. For several years, he had been writing policy and research papers for the California State Democratic Steering and Platform Committees. I had walked precincts and volunteered at the Kennedy Campaign Headquarters in the San Gabriel Valley for the preceding two months, so as a sort of reward, I was allowed to stay up past my regular bedtime to go with my father to what was, we were certain, to be a victory celebration.
Dad and I had been at the Ambassador since around 8:30 p.m. It was a huge and boisterous crowd. Normally, I retired before 10 p.m., so by the time Kennedy entered the ballroom around 11:30 p.m., I was pretty bushed. His speech would be broadcast on the radio, so Dad and I headed home. On the way, we heard Kennedy and five others had been shot.
I was at a department store near our home, in the television department when the news of Martin Luther King's assassination was broadcast on 4 April 1968. Dad had been teaching his history classes at Cal State Fullerton that day and evening; and had not heard the news, so my revelation was the first he had heard of it. I never had seen my Dad cry, but he teared up when I told him. At that point, I had been a Eugene McCarthy aficionado, but I changed allegiances after listening, with my Father, to Kennedy's speech in front of a black audience in Indiana, informing them of MLK's assassination.
Kennedy is reported to have questioned earlier, when informed of King's killing, "When will this violence stop?" It is a question that is still shouted to high heaven today.
So it is in Tucson, yet again more people are maimed and dead in a political shooting; and damn! When will it stop?
Dirge Without Music
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.
The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay
=====================================================================
FRIDAY'S "OLD SKOOL" MUSIC