Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Mark Dean (born March 2, 1957) is an African-American computer scientist and inventor. Mark Dean is credited with helping to launch the personal computer age with work that made the machines more accessible and powerful.
The fact that a young African-American man went on to carve out such a significant niche in a field largely dominated by white engineers and scientists isn't all that surprising, given his background. From an early age, Dean showed a love for building things; as a young boy, Dean constructed a tractor from scratch with the help of his father, a supervisor at the Tennessee Valley Authority. Dean also excelled in many different areas, standing out as a gifted athlete and an extremely smart student who graduated with straight A's from Jefferson City High School. In 1979, he graduated at the top of his class at the University of Tennessee, where he studied engineering.
Mark Dean
Not long after college, Dean landed a job at IBM, a company he would become associated with for the duration of his career. As an engineer, Dean proved to be a rising star at the company. Working closely with a colleague, Dennis Moeller, Dean developed the new Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) systems bus, a new system that allowed peripheral devices like disk drives, printers, and monitors to be plugged directly into computers. The end result was more efficiency and better integration.
But his groundbreaking work didn't stop there. Dean's research at IBM helped change the accessibility and power of the personal computer. His work led to the development of the color PC monitor and, in 1999, Dean led a team of engineers at IBM's Austin, Texas, lab to create the first gigahertz chip—a revolutionary piece of technology that is able to do a billion calculations a second.
In all, Dean holds three of the company's original nine patents and, in total, has more 20 patents associated with his name.....Read More
TIDBITS
In 1995, Dr. Dean was named an IBM Fellow in 1995, one of only 50 active fellows of IBM's 300,000 employees. Dean was the first African American to be honored with IBM Fellowship.
In 1997 Dean was Vice President of Performance for the RS/6000 Division and, along with his colleague Dennis Moeller, Dean was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame which has under 150 members. For inventing "a system that has allowed PCs to become part of our lives."
In 1999, as Director of IBM's Austin Research Lab (in Austin, Texas), he lead the team that built a gigaherz (1000mhz) chip which did a billion calculations per second.
In 2001 he was elected member of the National Academy of Engineers (NAE) .
In 2004, Dr. Dean was selected as one of the 50 Most Important Blacks in Research Science
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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In the early 1860s, photographs of children dubbed "white" slaves were circulated as part of a campaign to raise money for public schools for emancipated slaves. New Orleans was the one city in the South where the lines of demarcation between races was alwasy the most fluid. Black Voices: 'White' Slave Children Of New Orleans Used In Donation Campaigns In 1860s (PHOTOS)
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The group was first featured in an engraving of a photograph entitled "Emancipated Slaves, White and Colored" in an issue of Harper's Weekly in January 1864. According to an article titled "Portraits of Slave Children," the images were meant to evoke sympathy from wealthy Northerners for potential donations.
As writer Kathleen Collins explained, advocates hoped that "these enigmatic portraits of Caucasian-featured children" would encourage "Northern benefactors to contribute to the future of a race to which these children found themselves arbitrarily confined."
In the photos the children--who included a black boy named Isaac White, and four other bi-racial children Charles Taylor, Rebecca Huger, Rosina Downs and Augusta Broujey--were adorned in their Sunday's best, wrapped in American flags with captions that told readers of how they were turned away from a Philadelphia hotel "on account of color," and their struggles being sold as slaves.
In Harper's Weekly, the "white" slaves were described as:
as white, as intelligent, as docile as most of our own children...Yet, the chivalry the gentlemen of the Slave States, by the awful logic of the system, doom them all to the fate of swine, and, so far as they can, the parents and brothers of these little ones destroy the light of humanity in their souls.
As for Isaac, he was described as:
"black boy of eight years" who was "none the less intelligent than his whiter companions."
The campaign, which also consisted of a publicity tour in the North, was run by the National Freedman's Association, the American Missionary Association and officers from the Union Army, the Daily Mail reports.
The children's white faces were used in an attempt to point out the ridiculous nature of the "one-drop-rule," a social construct instituted during slavery that classified an individual with any amount of African ancestry as black, despite his or her physical appearance.
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Boston bank OneUnited has begun foreclosure proceedings against Roxbury’s historic Charles Street African Methodist Episcopal Church, one of Boston’s oldest and most-respected black churches, the Herald has learned. Boston Herald: Historic black church faces foreclosure
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OneUnited, the nation’s largest black-owned bank — which got millions in federal bailout money — is threatening to auction off the church March 22 to cover a $1.1 million “balloon” mortgage that recently came due.
“I don’t honestly know why a bank would want to foreclose on a church. It doesn’t make any sense to me,” congregation lawyer Ross Martin said.
Founded in 1818, the Charles Street AME Church was a key player in the 19th century anti-slavery movement.
Abolitionists including Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison led rallies at the congregation’s original Beacon Hill home, while the church helped runaway slaves reach Canada.
Martin claimed the congregation has never missed a payment on its 5-year-old mortgage.
The lawyer said he considers the bank’s foreclosure threat a “negotiating ploy” in a long-running dispute with the church.
Charles Street AME took out a $3.6 million loan in 2006 to build an adjacent community center, but OneUnited shut off funding after three years. The bank sued to get its money back, making it hard for Charles Street AME to refinance a balloon mortgage that came due on the church itself and some adjacent storefronts.
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Project documents stories of 'ScienceMakers' but they're no Sephius1! Chicago Tribune: Showcasing work of black scientists
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Ask Julieanna Richardson about her ScienceMakers project, documenting the work of black scientists, and she has stories to tell.
There's the one about a researcher who recently gave a lecture regarding an herbicide that causes male frogs to have female parts.
There's another about a roboticist who builds robots that roam the Arctic, studying ice shelves and climate change. And another about a scientist who created a condenser microphone used in cellphones.
Her mission with the ScienceMakers focuses exclusively on blacks who work in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math. Although the ScienceMakers, which began in 2009, is credited with introducing people to little-known scientists, Richardson said the project is also responsible for injecting new life into the HistoryMakers.
"The HistoryMakers really has come back from the dead," said Richardson, 57, a Harvard-educated attorney. "Back in the beginning of 2008 we had to let go of much of our staff. We suspended our interview operations. For the last four years, we've done about 150 interviews, when we were doing about 400 a year. It was purely financial."
She said she used the downtime to organize and work on the company's digital archives, which launched in 2010 and are now being used in 51 countries around the world.
"Then we were blessed with a $2.3 million grant from the National Science Foundation," said Richardson. "The idea is that black students don't see enough people who look like them in the sciences, and if they don't see that, how can they pursue it?"
Julieanna Richardson runs a project called ScienceMakers, which interviews African-American scientists to promote their stories. (Alex Garcia, Chicago Tribune / February 17, 2012)
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Good ridance this guys wasn't a revolutionary he's a demagog! BBC: Julius Malema: ANC expels fiery youth leader
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South Africa's governing African National Congress (ANC) has expelled its controversial youth leader Julius Malema, who was appealing against his five-year suspension from the party. The ANC's disciplinary committee found him guilty of fomenting divisions and bringing the party into disrepute.
Once a close ally of President Jacob Zuma, Mr Malema is currently one of his strongest critics. The 30-year-old now has 14 days to appeal against the decision.
"In respect of the present disciplinary hearing, Comrade Julius Malema is expelled from the ANC," the disciplinary committee said in a statement late on Wednesday.
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A country with a bloody history seeks prosperity by becoming business-friendly. Economist: Africa’s Singapore?
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THE conference room resembles an old “Star Trek” set, with swivel chairs, laptops on desks and headsets that switch between Kinyarwanda and other tongues. Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s president, sits in the captain’s chair. His technocratic ministers sit nearby. When the talk turns to business, Mr Kagame becomes animated. It is his passion—he says he reads business case studies in bed. He wants to turn Rwanda into the Singapore of central Africa. He is nothing if not ambitious.
Rwanda is best known for the genocide that claimed at least 500,000 lives in 1994. It has been peaceful since then, but lacks nearly all of Singapore’s advantages. Singapore has the world’s busiest port; Rwanda is landlocked. Singapore has one of the world’s best-educated populations; Rwanda’s middle class was butchered in 1994. Singapore is a gateway to China; Rwanda’s neighbours are “less than ideal”, as a recent report from the Legatum Institute, a British think-tank, put it. Uganda is corrupt; Burundi a basket-case; Congo worse.
Yet Rwanda has one huge advantage: the rule of law. No African country has done more to curb corruption. Ministers have been jailed for it. Transparency International, a watchdog, reckons Rwanda is less graft-ridden than Greece or Italy (though companies owned by the ruling party play an outsized role in the economy). “I have never paid a bribe and I don’t know anyone who has had to pay a bribe,” says Josh Ruxin, one of the owners of Heaven, a restaurant in Kigali, the capital.
The country is blessedly free of red tape, too. It ranks 45th in the World Bank’s index of the ease of doing business, above any African nation bar South Africa and Mauritius. Registering a firm takes three days and is dirt cheap. Property rights are strengthening, as well—the government is giving peasants formal title to their land.
The startling improvement in Rwanda’s business climate is largely thanks to Mr Kagame. Rwanda’s president is a controversial figure. A tough-as-Kevlar bush fighter, he stopped the genocide and chased the militias who carried it out into neighbouring Congo. His forces killed huge numbers of people. His enemies are terrified of him. The elections he holds are a sham.
On the plus side, he has overseen dramatic improvements of Rwanda’s institutions. He understands that his country may collapse again if it does not grow richer, and he is determined to make it easier for businesses to operate. The average income has more than doubled since 1994.
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Is the Obama administration so worried about the radical conservatives on the court, that they aren't being more agressive on Voter rights issues? Slate: Obama doesn't want a landmark civil rights law to die on his watch—so he's letting it wither away.
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When Georgia’s Republican leaders redrew the state’s election-district maps last year, Democrats and minorities instantly cried foul. In an increasingly diverse state where 47 percent of voters chose Obama in 2008, the new maps looked likely to hand the GOP 10 of the state’s 14 seats in Congress. Perhaps even more significantly, they were drawn so as to give Republicans a shot at a two-thirds majority in both chambers of the state legislature, allowing them to pass constitutional amendments unilaterally. They achieved this in part by “packing” the state’s black voters (who overwhelmingly vote Democratic) into a handful of districts in order to make others more solidly white (and Republican).
Fortunately for the state’s Democrats, federal law seemed to offer a time-tested remedy. Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, a landmark civil rights bill passed in 1965 to crack down on poll taxes and other discriminatory practices, requires Georgia and a number of other Southern states to get federal approval for any changes to their voting laws. Any that harmed minorities’ chances of fair representation were to be thrown out. And that’s exactly what Georgia Democrats expected Obama’s Department of Justice to do with Republicans’ new maps. Just two years earlier, it had invoked Section 5 to block two Georgia voter-verification laws. Liberals gleefully predicted the Republican gerrymanders would likewise be “DOA at the DOJ.”
The Republicans held a trump card, however: the threat of a lawsuit challenging the Voting Rights Act itself. If the Justice Department didn’t clear their maps, they warned, they’d pursue their case and seek to have the VRA’s Section 5 struck down by the Supreme Court.
Five years ago, that threat might have rung hollow. Yet the DoJ quickly approved the maps. The state’s Democratic and black leaders were stung by what they saw as a capitulation. “The DoJ’s decision was disappointing, because Republicans took it as an approval of their resegregation strategy,” says Stacey Abrams, leader of the Democratic minority in the Georgia House. So why did the DoJ acquiesce?
It’s possible, of course, that it thought the maps were just fine. While many believe packing contradicts the spirit of Section 5, it’s not prohibited per se. If anything, it provides near-certainty that at least some minorities will be elected to Congress and the statehouse. In Georgia, it’s white Democrats who are likely to be squeezed out as previously diverse districts become whiter and more conservative. The upshot is that black legislators may end up as a powerless Democratic minority in the Statehouse. So is that racial discrimination, or just gerrymandering as usual?
But Georgia is not the only state where the DoJ has disappointed Democrats by signing off on Republican-drawn redistricting maps. Virginia, South Carolina, and Louisiana all got green lights after adopting the same stance as Georgia: Approve or we sue. For Louisiana, it was the first time its state House of Representatives maps had ever won approval on the first try. And last month, the assistant attorney general for civil rights hinted the department might drop its Section 5-based challenge to a North Carolina town’s election law.
The real reason for that laissez-faire approach, Democratic leaders suspect, is that the DoJ is loath to test Section 5 in court. If so, there’s good reason for its reticence. Over the past few years, the law has come under assault from conservatives across the country, who see it as an outdated federal intrusion on state’s rights. The movement has been emboldened by the John Roberts-led Supreme Court, which in 2009 stopped just short of overturning it. The talk among legal experts now is that it may not survive another frontal assault. The obvious conclusion is that Attorney General Eric Holder is picking his Section 5 battles in a bid to spare a vulnerable law from destruction.
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The Front Porch is now open!
Grab a seat and get a plate! If you are new-introduce yourself and join in.
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