Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
James Edward Maceo West (born February 10, 1931 in Farmville, Prince Edward County, Virginia) is an American inventor and acoustician. Along with Gerhard Sessler, West developed the foil electret microphone in 1962 while developing instruments for human hearing research. Nearly 90 percent of more than two billion microphones produced annually are based on the principles of the foil-electret and are used in everyday items such as telephones, camcorders, and audio recording devices among others. West received a BS in Physics from Temple University in 1957. He holds over 250 foreign and U.S. patents for the production and design of microphones and techniques for creating polymer foil electrets.
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In 2001, West retired from Lucent Technologies after a distinguished 40-year career at Bell Laboratories where he received the organization's highest honor, being named a Bell Laboratories Fellow. West then joined the faculty of the Whiting School at Johns Hopkins University where he is currently a research professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
In addition to his many contributions to acoustical science, throughout his career West has been a fervent advocate for greater diversity in the fields of science and technology. While at Bell Laboratories, West co-founded the Association of Black Laboratory Employees (ABLE), an organization formed to "address placement and promotional concerns of Black Bell Laboratories employees." He was also instrumental in the creation and development of both the Corporate Research Fellowship Program (CRFP) for graduate students pursuing terminal degrees in the sciences, as well as the Summer Research Program, which together provided opportunities for over 500 non-white graduate students.......Read More
Other resource [ John Hopkins article about West ]
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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How It Feels To Be A Problem. Code Switch: The Fear Of Black Men In America.
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Over the past several days, Michel Martin has been leading a conversation across various NPR shows about how black men navigate a world that so often sees them as dangerous. When it was announced that that convo was going to move over to Twitter, the #FearAndRace hashtag spurred a flurry of tweets in which people were sharing their personal experiences even before it got underway, and it's still going on long after it officially ended.
But the observation from these conversations that most jumped out at me came from Paul Butler, the Georgetown law professor who talked to Michel on Tuesday's Morning Edition. "One problem with conversations like this is it doesn't get across that I love being a black man," Butler said. "I feel connected, like when I see President Obama's swag, I get that as a black man. When I hear Jay Z's cool ... I kind absorb and relate as well. Sometime we don't talk about the joy of this identity, and how proud I am to be African-American and a man."
That quote resonated so much because it's what I imagine is closer to the default setting for so many of us. The notion that black men are dangerous is one of our country's foundational, organizing principles. The omnipresence of those notions makes them invisible, sanctioned and cosigned by people who don't know better and a whole lot of people who should. The pseudoscience that props it up gets its regular updates, as might the particulars around what constitutes a sign of menace. Whatever the moment, it remains one of our society's great givens.
And yet, being a problem is a strange experience. As Butler said, I doubt many of us so situated think our lives solely as a parade of miseries, even though it seems to be central to way those lives are broadly discussed. Even the black cool Butler refers to — whether we're talking about jazz musicians in the 1930s or hip-hop artists today — is animated by notions of black menace. Even our genius, then, is shaded by it.
A protester stands in front of police vehicles with his hands up during a demonstration in Ferguson, Mo., where in August 2014 a white police officer shot and killed an 18-year-old black man.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
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Fighting World hunger helps actress Viola Davis heal ET: Viola Davis On Surviving a Hungry, Impoverished Childhood: 'It's My Way of Healing'
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One in five children in America lives in a household without enough food. Viola Davis was once one of them.
The movie and TV superstar has an incredible resume: She's been nominated for two Academy Awards and three Golden Globes and has taken home trophies from the SAG Awards, the Tonys, the People's Choice Awards, the NAACP Image Awards, and many others. Her starring turn in How To Get Away With Murder drove one of the biggest breakout hits of the year.
But as a young girl growing up in Central Falls, Rhode Island, Davis lived in extreme poverty. Her house had no plumbing, no phone, and was infested with rats. She's been candid about how she was so hungry she resorted to stealing food or diving for scraps in maggot-filled dumpsters.
As a child, the hunger would impact her basic ability to function. "I would go to school at 8 a.m., and by 8:15 I was sleepy, I couldn't wake up," Davis tells ET. "I remember I fell asleep during my SATs!"
But an "a-ha" moment that gave her something to work toward.
"I saw the [TV movie] The Autobiography of Miss. Jane Pittman with Cicely Tyson, so in the midst of all of that poverty, a dream was born," she says. "Your dreams have to be bigger than your circumstances."
Honoree Viola Davis speaks onstage at the Beverly Wilshire Four Seasons on October 10, 2014 in Los Angeles, California. Joe Scarnici/Getty
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The star of Fuse's groundbreaking reality show is adjusting to big-time fame. The Advocate: Big Freedia: This Queen Will Make You Bounce.
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Fans of Big Freedia know the New Orleans native works nonstop. The self-described Queen of Bounce music, born Freddie Ross, became legendary in her hometown for her frequent, rollicking stage shows, which include plenty of vigorous twerking from both the Queen and her backup dancers, the Divas.
In 2012, Freedia (pronounced FREE-duh), got her big break appearing on the HBO series Treme as well as nabbing a live performance spot on Jimmy Kimmel Live.
In 2013 she toured as an opener for the indie rock band the Postal Service and appeared on the RuPaul track "Peanut Butter."
That was also the year the Fuse channel begain airing the groundbreaking reality show Big Freedia: Queen of Bounce, which gives viewers an all-access pass to the flamboyant performer's life onstage and off. The show, now in its third season, consistently breaks Fuse's ratings records.
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Welcome signs from Africa's most populace country. Slate: What if Democracy’s Not Actually Declining?
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Given the daily headlines from the Middle East and the former Soviet Union, it’s not hard to conclude, as the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman did, that “democracy is in recession” around the world. That impression is largely borne out by data. This year’s Freedom in the World report from Freedom House, for instance, found that the number of countries becoming less free outnumbered those becoming more free for the ninth consecutive year.
But there’s an equally significant but less remarked-upon trend going on at the same time: The world’s largest countries have been getting more democratic.
On Tuesday, Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan conceded defeat to Muhammadu Buhari. This is the first time a sitting Nigerian president has ever been defeated by an opposition candidate. Despite a six-week delay caused by the ongoing insurgency in the country’s North and scattered complaints of technical glitches and violence, international monitors say the vote was largely orderly and fair.
The advent of genuine competitive elections is a major development in Africa’s largest country, a place that will likely have more people than the United States in a few decades. And it’s not just Nigeria: 2014 was a huge year for voting in the world’s biggest countries. India held the largest elections ever, in which the party that had dominated its politics for most of its post-independence history was defeated. Indonesia now appears to be a consolidated democracy after its third presidential election since the overthrow of dictatorship in 2008. In October, Dilma Rousseff was elected in Brazil’s seventh democratic election since its return to democracy. And in 2013, Pakistan saw its first ever peaceful transfer of power from one civilian government to another.
Women show their new electoral cards while queuing at a accreditation center in Abuja on March 28, 2015.
Photo by -/AFP/Getty Images
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After months of anti-government protests and demands that he resign from office, Haitian President Martelly still remains popular, according to a new public opinion survey. Miami Herald: Haiti poll shows Michel Martelly still popular but elections up for grabs.
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For all the anti-government protests and demands that he resign from office, Haitian President Michel Martelly remains popular, according to a new public opinion survey.
Martelly, who will begin the final year of his five-year term in May, got a 57 percent job approval rating. But it’s an open question whether his popularity will give his choice of presidential candidate the win. Martelly is barred from running again, and Haitians are waiting to see which candidate gets his support.
More than half of Haitians believe the country is headed in the wrong direction, while nearly 70 percent do not believe things are going well today.
Martelly “has support,” said Eduardo Gamarra, a Florida International University international relations professor who conducted the survey. “You see it in his approval rating and in the coattail question, but that is where it ends. Even with the 57 percent who say they support Martelly, it isn’t enough because of everything else that is in the poll.”
The majority of those polled, 80 percent, said they were unemployed and list the high cost of living, unemployment and hunger as the main problems facing the country.
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The musical artist chose to fund a super PAC through opaque, legal, and increasingly popular means. Slate: How the Founder of the Fugees Became a Big-Time Political Donor Without Anyone Knowing.
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t was less than a month before the 2012 election when a spokesman for Black Men Vote, a political group backed by hip-hop musicians including Common and Pras Michel, publicly announced: “I want a $500,000 donor.”
Three days later, his wish was all but granted.
That’s when a cool $400,000 landed in the bank account of Black Men Vote, a super PAC whose goal was mobilizing young black men to support President Barack Obama’s re-election.
The source of the money? An obscure limited liability company identified as SPM Holdings LLC with an address in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. By Election Day, SPM Holdings would double down and make an additional six-figure contribution, bringing its total financial support of Black Men Vote to $875,000.
It was one of the largest donations to a super PAC ever by a limited liability company, according to a Center for Public Integrity review of federal campaign finance records. Moreover, the LLC money represented two-thirds of the $1.3 million Black Men Vote raised in 2012. That’s a larger portion of money than any other top-tier super PAC has received from limited liability companies—business entities that can be used to shield the identities of people making large political contributions.
Federal records would eventually show that Pras, a Grammy-winning rapper and founding member of the Fugees, provided $250,000 in seed money for the super PAC’s efforts and another $100,000 before Election Day. “The best way we can make a change is empowering one another,” Pras told the Center for Public Integrity in a recent interview. “I put my money where my mouth was.”
But the donor (or donors) behind SPM Holdings would remain—until now—a mystery.
Pras Michel poses for a portrait during the 2015 Sundance Film Festival on Jan. 25, 2015, in Park City, Utah.
Photo by Larry Busacca/Getty Images
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Even socially conservative highly religious blacks STRONGLY oppose discrimanation against the LGBT community. FiveThirtyEight: African-Americans Are An Outlier On Indiana’s Religious Freedom Law.
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A recent Public Religion Research Institute poll found 39 percent of African-Americans supported same-sex marriage. Based on that number, we would expect only 42 percent of African-Americans to support laws requiring businesses to serve same-sex couples the same way they would opposite-sex couples.
That’s not the case.
African-Americans are by far the largest outlier of any of the 15 demographic groups (people were sorted according to age, race, religion and party affiliation) studied, according to Pew Research. Overall, African-Americans’ views resemble those of young adults and nonreligious Americans: 61 percent of black respondents favored laws requiring businesses to serve same-sex couples.
If you set aside responses from African-Americans, 83 percent of the variation in support for laws requiring businesses to serve same-sex couples just like straight couples is explained by support for same-sex marriage. Including African-Americans drops the variation explained to just 52 percent.
Why are African-Americans so much more in favor of anti-discrimination laws than same-sex marriage? That’s hard to say, but there are at least two opposing demographic forces at work.
On the one hand, the fact that African-Americans are more likely to be religious also makes them more likely to oppose same-sex marriage. On the other — as Claire Gecewicz and Michael Lipka of Pew Research point out — African-Americans (perhaps based on their own history of being discriminated against) are more likely than white people to say that gay Americans face discrimination.
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