Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Sylvester James Gates, Jr. (born December 15, 1950) known as S. James Gates, Jr, or Jim Gates, is an American theoretical physicist, known for work on supersymmetry, supergravity, and superstring theory. He is currently the John S. Toll Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland, College Park, a University of Maryland Regents Professor and serves on President Barack Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
Gates received SB (1973) and PhD (1977) degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His doctoral thesis was the first at MIT on supersymmetry. With M.T. Grisaru, M. Rocek, and W. Siegel, Gates co-authored Superspace (1984), the first comprehensive book on supersymmetry.
Gates was nominated by the Department of Energy as one of the USA Science and Engineering Festival's "Nifty Fifty" Speakers to present his work and career to middle and high school students in October 2010. He is on the board of trustees of Society for Science & the Public.
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Gates has been featured extensively on NOVA PBS programs on physics, notably "The Elegant Universe" (2003). He completed a DVD series titled Superstring Theory: The DNA of Reality (2006) for The Teaching Company consisting of 24 half-hour lectures to make the complexities of unification theory comprehensible to laypeople.[4] During the 2008 World Science Festival, Gates narrated [5] a ballet "The Elegant Universe", where he gave a public presentation of the artistic forms[6] connected to his scientific research. Gates also appeared in the BBC Horizon documentary The Hunt for Higgs in 2012......Read More
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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The city of Portland, Me., drew a big crowd for its class intended to help immigrants from warm countries cope with the cold. New York Times: Helping Immigrants Warm to Winter.
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Charlene Masengu left the Democratic Republic of Congo late last year, hoping to get asylum status in the United States after a wave of political violence made life at home unbearably dangerous. She made it to this coastal city last month, just before it was covered in more than 30 inches of snow, and she wondered, briefly, whether she had made a mistake.
“Deadly!” Ms. Masengu, 29, said in French, shaking her head as she remembered the snowstorm. “I didn’t feel good at all. I wanted to leave.”
Ms. Masengu was squeezed, notebook in hand, into a plain conference room at the city’s center for refugee services. She and dozens of others were here to be schooled in a central piece of Portland’s cultural curriculum for its growing population of new arrivals, many of whom are asylum-seekers from Central Africa: the art of handling a Maine winter.
The instructor, Simeon Alloding, a human services counselor here, sat at the front of the room, ticking off winter’s many perils as clip art images of a penguin and an elephant decked out for cold weather hovered in a PowerPoint presentation behind him. “Everyone here has fallen, right?” Mr. Alloding asked as he began a discussion on how to navigate the city’s icy sidewalks. “You don’t walk too fast, you don’t take long steps. You take shorter steps,” he said, dispensing advice that even the most seasoned New Englander would do well to remember.
Craig Dilger for The New York Times
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A row has broken out in Kenya over whether spoiled ballots should be included in the presidential vote count following tightly contested polls. BBC: Kenya elections: Row over spoiled votes.
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The coalition of candidate Uhuru Kenyatta accused the UK of playing a "shadowy" role by trying to deny him outright victory in Monday's vote.
The UK denied the allegation.
There have been severe delays in counting as the electronic system has crashed. Early results put Mr Kenyatta ahead of his rival Raila Odinga.
Continue reading the main story
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The Jubilee alliance is deeply concerned about the shadowy, suspicious and rather animated involvement of the British High Commissioner in Kenya's election”
Charity Ngilu
Jubilee Alliance official
On Tuesday, the election commission said the rejected votes would be included in the final tally - which could determine whether there is a presidential run-off.
So far about 6% of the total votes counted are spoilt ballots - well over double the number of votes cast for the third-placed candidate, Musailia Mudavadi.
With provisional results in from more than 40% of polling stations earlier on Wednesday, Mr Odinga had 42% of the vote compared with Mr Kenyatta's 53%.
There is growing anxiety about the delay in declaring the presidential winner. AP
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Canadian writer-director Kim Nguyen's fourth feature film stars young Congolese actress Rachel Mwanza, who was abandoned by her parents at age 6 and fended for herself on the streets of Kinshasa. LA Times: 'War Witch' brings together a jaded director, courageous actress.
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A decade ago, Canadian writer-director Kim Nguyen started working on the script that would become "War Witch," a film about a girl in sub-Saharan Africa who is kidnapped by rebels, conscripted as a child soldier and forced to commit horrific acts of violence.
Around the same time, Rachel Mwanza was abandoned by her parents in the Democratic Republic of the Congo at age 6, living with her grandmother for a time and then fending for herself on the streets of Kinshasa, the capital.
Nguyen was finally able to put his film into production in 2011 and cast Mwanza in the title role. The experience has profoundly affected them both: "War Witch" has led to a caregiver and an education for Mwanza, now 16, and the movie, opening Friday in L.A., was nominated for an Academy Award for foreign-language film. (It is in French and Lingala.)
For Nguyen, the film is less about war and child soldiers than it is about an ordinary girl in extraordinary circumstances. "She's a child, she's an adult, she's a killer, she's a victim, and I thought that the film medium lended itself well to this," the director, 38, said in an interview on the pool deck of a Beverly Hills hotel.
courtesy of the LA Times
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Dangote, 55, is a household name in Nigeria and is seen as both a son of privilege who benefited from family connections and a striver who has earned his unprecedented wealth. BusinessWeek: Africa's Richest Man, Aliko Dangote, Is Just Getting Started.
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Six years ago, Aliko Dangote paid a visit to Tanzania, on Africa’s eastern coast, and shared his dream of having an African-run business empire that would manufacture products all over the continent. To assorted government and business leaders, he announced that he was prepared to make an investment of $600 million to build a cement factory in southern Tanzania, alleviating the shortage in that country’s domestic cement supply. The Tanzanians were skeptical. “They didn’t believe us at all. They thought I was one of these ‘Nigerian 4-1-9’ scammers who try to go and scheme people out of their money,” Dangote says. “Or just one of these clever Nigerians who would come and be lying to them.”
The Tanzania story is clearly one Dangote relishes telling—not least because of how it’s turning out. Not long after his visit, his name appeared on a list of the world’s wealthiest people, and the Tanzanians realized they had been negotiating with Africa’s richest man. As founder and chairman of Dangote Group, he’s worth an estimated $16.3 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. “They pieced the two together,” Dangote says, sitting in his expansive Lagos office in late January. The room is so gigantic it appears nearly empty, even with tall plants, a conference table, and a large-screen television. Three months ago, Dangote Cement signed a final agreement there, with plans to produce 3 million tons of cement a year.
Dangote Cement is Africa’s largest cement manufacturer; the Dangote Group employs 26,000 people in Nigeria alone. The company is constructing cement plants in Ethiopia, Zambia, South Africa, Senegal, Cameroon, the Republic of Congo, and several other African countries. “We want to be predominately in sub-Saharan Africa, and then we will move out of Africa,” he says. He announced plans last fall to construct plants in Iraq and Burma.
Dangote Group also mills flour, processes salt, produces fertilizer and pasta, and has big plans for sugar. The Nigerian sugar refinery, located at the port of Lagos, is the second-largest in the world. “The same revolution that we’ve had in cement, we want to replicate in sugar,” says Dangote, referring to his push to increase domestic production of a legacy import.
Photograph by Jane Hahn for Bloomberg Businessweek
Dangote (seated) at his office in Ikoyi, a Lagos suburb
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I think I'm going to ask about this on the White petition website. I'll keep everyone informed, this needs to stop. NewsOne: 8-Year-Old Handcuffed, Jailed For 2 Hours For Throwing Tantrum At School.
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An 8-year-old girl was handcuffed and jailed for two hours after she apparently threw a tantrum at her elementary school, KMOV-TV reports.
Jmyha Rickman‘s journey to her town’s city jail began at Love Joy Elementary School late Tuesday in Alton, Ill. At some point, school officials called the Alton Police Department to help handle the situation. It is not clear if the cops immediately took the child into custody or if they tried to calm her down.
Rickman reportedly has a history of throwing tantrums at the school.
Eventually, she was handcuffed, placed in the backseat of a police car and driven to jail, where she was held for two hours. The little girl said she was not allowed to put on her coat before being taken into custody. Neheniah Keeton, Rickman’s guardian, says the cops manhandled her.
“Her eyes were swollen from her crying and her wrists had welts on them,” Rickman said. “They cuffed her feet too and she asked to use the restroom several times and was ignored.”
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Welcome to the porch, where it's always warm, and the conversations are just fine.