Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Clarence "Skip" Ellis (born May 11, 1943, in south Chicago, Illinois) is an American computer scientist, a professor of computer science at the University of Colorado at Boulder.[1]
Ellis had four brothers and sisters who were all raised by their single mother. At 15, Ellis got a job at a local company to help with the family bills. He worked the graveyard shift, working all night long. His main priority was to prevent break-ins and to watch over, but not touch, the company's new computer. In 1958 computers were very rare to own, so the protection of it was imperative. In Ellis's spare time at the insurance company he began to read the computer manuals that came with the machines. He taught himself the intricacies of the computer and became an expert.
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The computer used punched cards to record and enter data. One day at work, Ellis single-handedly saved the company by fixing a crisis with the computer. They had run out of punch cards, but with a quick change of some of the settings on the computer, he found a way to make the old punch cards work perfectly.In 1964 he received a BS degree major in math and physics, from Beloit College. Clearance Ellis attended graduate school and received his PhD in computer Science from the University of Illinois where he worked on hardware, software, and applications of the IIIiac 4 Supercomputer. Clearance Ellis is the First African American to receive a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1969. After his Ph.D., he continued his work on supercomputers at Bell Telephone Laboratories. Ellis has worked as researcher and developer at IBM, Xerox, Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation, Los Alamos Scientific Labs and Argonne National Lab. His academic experience This experience changed his life and threw him into the computer science field.
Throughout high school, Ellis's teachers recommended that he attend summer school programs at the local universities in Chicago. This was his first encounter with college-level students and university life. Though poor, Ellis was able to obtain a scholarship to attend Beloit College in the fall of 1960.
In Ellis's junior year, a computer was donated to the college. He and his chemistry professor were asked to set it up. This single computer was the start of the campus's computer lab. This provided him the opportunity to develop his interest in computing......Read More
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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19 years ago Essence magazine launched its first festival in New Orleans to "party with a purpose" and celebrate black culture, music and people. Washington Post: 19 years later, Essence Festival still holding strong despite competition.
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The city’s hotels are showing healthy bookings, and music fans are ready to party. Many are arriving early to catch the Essence Festival’s outdoor celebration on the riverfront on Thursday.
Hotel occupancy is at 97 percent for Friday and Saturday, said Kelly Schulz, spokeswoman for the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau. She said Essence brought 413,000 people to New Orleans last year and generated an economic impact of more than $100 million.
Ebanks said the 19th annual festival is “shaping up to be one of the biggest we’ve ever had.”
“The numbers aren’t in but the level of talent on tap is an extraordinary testament to Essence and what it means to its community,” she said.
Besides Beyonce, Essence’s nightly concerts held in the Superdome will include performances by Maxwell, Jill Scott, Charlie Wilson, LL Cool J, New Edition, Emile Sande, Trey Songz, Janelle Monae and several others.
Beyoncé is the headliner at this year's Essence Music Festival. (Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images)
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Deliberative impoverishment and racial profiling. Race-Talk: Immiseration.
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Immiseration?
Don’t panic. If you are like me, you have probably not run across the word immiserate. And until I began online reading of Johnathon Kozol’s 2012 novel, Fire in the Ashes: Twenty-Five Years among the Poorest Children in America, I probably would have missed the occasion to look it up. Webster’s definition of immiserate implies causation, to cause impoverishment and severe hardship and misery. Economics, the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services, plays an essential role in the political actions causative of impoverishment among populations of humans. Fire in the Ashes concerns such a population, a Manhattan neighborhood of American children and their families living in “third world” settings located less than five (5) blocks from Fifth Avenue. Some years before, I also read a 1991 novel by Alex Kotlowitz about the lives of children in cities like Chicago, Baltimore, and Washington DC, urban places where young children yet speak in “If” language. “If I grow up, I’d like to be a bus driver…
Immiseration terminology quickly draws attention to the “misery” core of the word—an immediate connection between immiseration and Victor Hugo’s fictional tales of Les Misérables, the dramatic story of 19th century France in rebellion, featuring the peasant ex-convict, Jean Valjean, imprisoned for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister’s starving children. At the end of his prison service for bread-theft, Valjean was consigned to perpetual carrying of le ticket jaune, the yellow passport that forever branded him as a criminal. Today, four million USA ex-felons are denied the right to vote.
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Pass the word! The Root: 'Shark Tank' Wants Black-Owned Businesses.
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Like most mainstream reality-competition shows, Shark Tank on ABC seems to suffer from a lack of diversity, but the show's producers, Mark Burnett and his company One Three Media, are determined to change that next season. On Aug. 23, casting directors will be on hand at the Kingonomics Innovation, Entrepreneurship & Investment Conference in Washington, D.C., for an open casting call, according to an official statement released by Shadow and Act.
According to an official statement by conference organizers "The Kingonomics conference ... will bring together experts in innovation, entrepreneurialism, crowd funding and in investment from all over the world to train minority business owners, start-ups, investors, youth entrepreneurs and veterans on how to access capital, invest and obtain personal and business wealth."
Adding: "Now thousands of minority and women entrepreneurs will have the chance to fulfill their own dreams with a chance to audition for ABC’s Shark Tank, providing an opportunity for them to gain the much needed capital for growing their businesses."
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Forty years after the founding of their regional trade bloc, leaders of the Caribbean Community returned to its birthplace Wednesday to mark the historic occasion. Miami Herald: Caribbean Community leaders return to Trinidad to mark 40 years.
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The gathering in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad features presidents and prime minister from the 15 mostly English-speaking Caribbean nations that make up the community known as Caricom. In an opening ceremony, leaders paid tribute to the past, while looking ahead.
“As small nations we benefit from sharing our common and not so common experiences,” Bahamas Prime Minister Perry Christie said. “It is a work in progress, a continuing conversation around common themes and experiences from which we all benefit. In recent years, there has been some marked and open impatience with the pace of the Caricom project, but I am pleased to recognize that the journey continues.”
Caricom was founded July 4, 1973 in Trinidad and Tobago at a gathering of four Caribbean leaders — Jamaica, Barbados, Guyana and Trinidad — who signed the Treaty of Chaguaramas. The signing of the treaty will be re-enacted Thursday.
Christie was among several leaders who spoke, including outgoing chairman, Haiti President Michel Martelly. Before turning the leadership reins over to incoming chair, Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Persad-Bissessar, Martelly commended the bloc’s work this year and efforts in furthering Haiti’s integration.
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Most people would say a therapist's office is a safe place to talk about anything. But what happens when discrimination and racism get in the way? Psychology Today: How Therapists Drive Away Minority Clients.
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Racial discrimination is pervasive, and minorities regularly experience it in blatant ways (e.g., old fashioned racism) and subtle ways (e.g., microaggressions). In the US, African Americans experience the most discrimination, followed by Hispanic Americans and Asian Americans (Chao et al., 2012), although discrimination against other groups, such as women and sexual minorities is common as well.
The therapeutic relationship is unfortunately not immune to this problem, despite the best intentions of therapists who think they would never act in a racist manner. One example of this can be seen in the experience of race-based trauma, as many White therapists are dismissive of the impact of racism on their minority clients. Having never been subjected to the minority experience, it may not have occurred to them that racism could be traumatic.These are typically therapists who ascribe to a colorblind approach as their method of choice for working with people who are culturally different. However, colorblind ideology is actually a form of racism (Terwilliger et al., 2013), as it provides an excuse for therapists to remain ignorant of the cultures and customs of their non-White fellow human beings.
Generic image (Thinkstock)
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Welcome to the Black Kos Community Front Porch!
Pull up a chair and sit down a while in the cool shade.