Joycelyn Harrison was born in 1964, and has bachelor's, master's and Ph.D. degrees in Chemistry from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Joycelyn Harrison has received the:
- Technology All-Star Award from the National Women of Color Technology Awards
- NASA's Exceptional Achievement Medal {2000}
- NASA'a Outstanding Leadership Medal {2006} for outstanding contributions and leadership skills demonstrated while leading the Advanced Materials and Processing Branch
Joycelyn Harrison has been granted a long list of patents for her inventing and received the 1996 R&D 100 Award presented by R&D magazine for her role in developing THUNDER technology along with fellow Langley researchers, Richard Hellbaum, Robert Bryant, Robert Fox, Antony Jalink, and Wayne Rohrbach.
THUNDER, stands for for Thin-Layer Composite-Unimorph Piezoelectric Driver and Sensor, THUNDER's applications include electronics, optics, jitter (irregular motion) suppression, noise cancellation, pumps, valves and a variety of other fields. Its low-voltage characteristic allow it to be used for the first time in internal biomedical applications like heart pumps.
The Langley researchers, a multi-disciplinary materials integration team, succeeded in developing and demonstrating a piezoelectric material that was superior to previous commercially available piezoelectric materials in several significant ways: being tougher, more durable, allows lower voltage operation, has greater mechanical load capacity, can be easily produced at a relatively low cost and lends itself well to mass production......Read More
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This was a great event, I got some feed back from some people who attended it. Washington Post: 'Brown bloggers' group gets a White House meet and greet
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Last week, President Obama drew notice for lunching with a group of A-list pundits at the White House.
But below the radar, his staff also has been reaching out to an array of less visible opinion-makers, including, for the first time, the long tail of the black blogosphere.
More than 60 small-site bloggers met Friday with Jesse Lee, director of the White House's Online Programs, and Corey Ealons, White House director of African American Media, while in the District for Blogging While Brown. The annual gathering of bloggers of color has become the largest get-together for black political bloggers in the nation.
"The media space is changing, and the bloggers in particular have unique audiences that they communicate with on a regular basis," said Ealons. The White House meeting was about "letting them know we are open and available for conversation -- a two-way conversation."
The meeting, brokered by Cheryl Contee of the blog Jack & Jill Politics and several months in the making, gave the White House a new audience for its health-care message -- an audience that Democrats believe will be critical in the fall elections. It also offered the bloggers a chance to connect with the administration and find ways to gain more White House access.
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TV Guide: Marvel Puts Black Panther Into Motion with Digital Series.
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Marvel continues to mine its vast collection of super heroes with a new motion comic, Black Panther: Who is the Black Panther? The 12-part series — debuting Tuesday on iTunes, Xbox Live, Microsoft Zune and PlayStation Network — is based on the 2005-08 comic book series written by Reginald Hudlin, the former entertainment president of BET. Hudlin is an executive producer and wrote the motion comic, which was originally planned as a TV series for BET. (A Marvel spokesperson says the series was shifted to digital following the success of previous motion comics Spider-Woman, Astonishing X-Men and Iron Man: Extremis.)
Black Panther, created in 1966 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, is the super-powered king of Wakanda, a (fictional) technologically advanced African nation that has never been conquered ("the Wakandans have a warrior spirit that makes the Vietnamese look like the French"), but has also never attacked others. In the motion comic, the United States eyes the nation as a potential threat (look for Lee in a hilarious cameo as a hawkish general), even as the assassin Klaw plans an attack on Wakanda. The series features the animated drawings of comic book artist of John Romita Sr. and a voice cast that includes Djimon Hounsou, Alfre Woodard and Jill Scott as Storm, a member of the X-Men portrayed by Halle Berry in the live-action movies.
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Too many lives were lost, so thank God it's over now. Jamaican Observer: Christopher 'Dudus' Coke-Jamaica's most wanted fugitive-was captured yesterday afternoon in a police dragnet along the Mandela Highway in St Catherine.
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Jamaica's most wanted fugitive — was captured yesterday afternoon in a police dragnet along the Mandela Highway in St Catherine.
The capture of Coke, who is wanted by United States authorities to answer drug-trafficking and gun-running charges, comes just short of a month after he escaped from his former stronghold of Tivoli Gardens in West Kingston when the security forces stormed the community to execute an arrest warrant on him and restore order after gunmen loyal to him barricaded all entrances to Tivoli and launched unprovoked attacks on the State.
Coke was travelling in a car with the Rev Al Miller when he was held at approximately 4:00 pm at a motor vehicle spot check set up by the police who apparently had information that he would be travelling on that road yesterday.
A cop, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told the Observer that the vehicle in which Coke was travelling was being escorted by two cars carrying gunmen and that police officers were following the convoy for several hours. The cop said the car in front of that in which Coke was travelling was allowed to get away as Coke's capture was their main focus.
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At least the black star of Ghana is still waving after the first round. LA Times: Africans cheer for their teams, their continent, despite a lack of faith.
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Reporting from Johannesburg, South Africa — Despite disappointment over the performance of Africa's World Cup teams, the competition here appears to be bringing out a keen sense of Pan-African pride, a border-transcending spirit and attitude that one would almost surely not encounter on most other continents.
When any of the six African squads has scored a goal, shouts of joy have erupted across the continent, in exuberant food and beer joints like Mama's Place in Lagos, Nigeria, in shops converted into mini-screening rooms in the narrow streets of Freetown, Sierra Leone, in the pubs of Nairobi, Kenya, and in open air, vuvuzela-infested parks in the townships of Johannesburg.
The idea of South Koreans rooting for Japan or the French cheering on England may be far-fetched. But in Africa, even those who don't normally follow the game are praying that at least one African team will make it to the quarterfinal in the first World Cup on African soil. Or even to the round of 16.
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Race Talk: NCAA reform would reduce exploitation of Black athletes
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I recently wrote about a new book regarding the NCAA’s alleged exploitation of black athletes, written by University of Georgia Professor Billy Hawkins. In his recently-released book, "The New Plantation," Hawkins goes out of his way to help us understand that the method by which the NCAA does business is not much different from the mindset of plantation owners of the old south.
The analogies used by Professor Hawkins are thought-provoking and appear to be alarmist at first glance. After all, citizens are commonly comparing nearly every modern-day injustice to slavery in order to make a dramatic point. But in this case, the analogies are appropriate, in large part because slavery is not a dichotomy. Instead, it is actually a continuum, with complete freedom on one end and total servitude on the other. One could even argue that slaves themselves were not completely devoid of freedom, since they could have always chosen to run away, buy their freedom, maim themselves or even commit suicide as a way to escape their condition. The point of this very grim example is not to say that slavery was not entirely horrific; rather, it is to say that something does not have to be entirely horrific to be compared to slavery.
While most of us would agree that the NCAA does not enslave college athletes, we can agree that athletes are not completely free. Their labor rights are stripped in a way that would be disallowed in almost any other industry in America, and each coach and player is expected to memorize a long list of rules and regulations that are designed to keep athletes under the control of the league itself. Additionally, athletes are not compensated according to fair market value, but forced to allow others to earn millions from the fruits of their labor. All the while, they are given no option other than to accept the dryly consistent payment being offered by the league, which would be a chance to go to college for free. Nearly all free-market options are eliminated for the athlete, since universities are allowed to collude to keep from having to compete for the services of the player. To make a long story short, the freedoms of the college athlete are stripped by a nexus of rules designed to ensure that they remain powerless.
Most of us agree that a college education can be valuable, but the education is hardly free for the college athlete, particularly those in revenue generating sports. If the athlete doesn’t perform at the level coaches expect, the scholarship can be revoked. If they miss a practice, get a free meal from the wrong person, or earn a single non-sanctioned cent from their own labor, they are going to lose their chance to get their "free" education. So, not only do athletes not experience the essence of freedom in their endeavors, even the "free" stuff isn’t free at all.
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Loop 21: There's a relationship between freedom and mental health
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Last week, while celebrating his first NBA championship, Ron Artest made a different kind of history within the Black community. During his post-game interview, the mercurial Los Angeles Lakers star gave a public shout-out to his psychiatrist, whom he credited for helping him successfully navigate the pressures of playing on one of the biggest stages in professional sports. In doing so, as Mychal Denzel Smith brilliantly points out in his recent essay, Artest may have created new space within the public sphere for discussing Black mental health without fear and shame.
The need for reshaping and reinvigorating the public conversation on Black mental health could not come a moment sooner. Despite comprising only 12 percent of the United States population, Black people represent more than 25 percent of the nation’s mental health needs. Over the past 30 years, Black male suicide rates have climbed by more than 200 percent. The depression rate among Black women is 50 percent higher than their white counterparts. Rates of somatization — the emergence of physical illness related to mental health — occur at a rate of 15 percent among both Blacks and women, as opposed to 9 percent among Whites.
The rising mental health needs among Black people are further compounded by the continued lack of mental health service utilization within the community. While only one-third of all Americans receive care for mental illness, Blacks remain statistically less likely to access proper mental health services than other racial groups.
These numbers suggest that the Black community is in the midst of a full-fledged mental health crisis.
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[] FINALLY! Black Leaders Unite To Counter Glenn Beck's August Rally by KingOneEye
[] Religious Racism: South African Apartheid by Ojibwa
[] How The French Right Wing uses "Les Bleus" defeat to race-bait by LaurenMonica
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FRIDAY'S WAKE-UP MUSIC
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