Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Sylvester James Gates, Jr. (born December 15, 1950) 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 and serves on President Barack Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
Gates received BS (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.
Gates was a Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Scholar at MIT (2010-11) and is a Residential Scholar at MIT's Simmons Hall. He is pursuing ongoing research into string theory, supersymmetry, and supergravity at the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics.
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. During the 2008 World Science Festival, Gates narrated a ballet "The Elegant Universe", where he gave a public presentation of the artistic forms 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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While all eyes have been focused on New York City's "Stop and Frisk"policy, other states have copied it. Miami Herald: Florida Cops Arrest Man 62 Times For ‘Trespassing,’ Mostly At The Store Where He Works.
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Earl Sampson has been stopped and questioned by Miami Gardens police 258 times in four years. He’s been searched more than 100 times. And arrested and jailed 56 times.
Despite his long rap sheet, Sampson, 28, has never been convicted of anything more serious than possession of marijuana.
Miami Gardens police have arrested Sampson 62 times for one offense: trespassing. Almost every citation was issued at the same place: the 207 Quickstop, a convenience store on 207th Street in Miami Gardens.
But Sampson isn’t loitering. He works as a clerk at the Quickstop. So how can he be trespassing when he works there?
It’s a question the store’s owner, Alex Saleh, 36, has been asking for more than a year as he watched Sampson, his other employees and his customers, day after day, being stopped and frisked by Miami Gardens police. Most of them, like Sampson, are poor and black.
And, like Sampson, many of them have been cited for minor infractions, sometimes as often as three times in the same day.
Saleh was so troubled by what he saw that he decided to install video cameras in his store. Not to protect himself from criminals, because he says he has never been robbed. He installed the cameras — 15 of them — he said, to protect him and his customers from police.
Since he installed the cameras in June 2012 he has collected more than two dozen videos, some of which have been obtained by the Miami Herald. Those tapes, and Sampson’s 38-page criminal history — including charges never even pursued by prosecutors — raise some troubling questions about the conduct of the city’s police officers.
The videos show, among other things, cops stopping citizens, questioning them, aggressively searching them and arresting them for trespassing when they have permission to be on the premises; officers conducting searches of Saleh’s business without search warrants or permission; using what appears to be excessive force on subjects who are clearly not resisting arrest and filing inaccurate police reports in connection with the arrests.
Screenshot of Earl Sampson being arrested at work after taking out the garbage
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Getting ENDA passed into law is an urgent issue for People of Color. ColorLines: Why ENDA is an Urgent Issue for People of Color.
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The Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) narrowly passed in the Senate two weeks ago for the first time since a version was introduced in 1974. It was even more significant because it now includes transgender people. But House Speaker John Boehner insisted the act won’t come to a vote in the House, leaving those LGBT people living in the 34 states [PDF] without anti-discrimination laws at a stark disadvantage. And because people of color are more likely to face high unemployment and poverty, and have a harder time getting good, steady jobs, they are even more vulnerable.
Preston Mitchum, a Center for American Progress (CAP) policy analyst who leads CAP’s Workplace Discrimination Series says that in addition to high levels of poverty and unemployment, states without laws protecting LGBT people in the workplace are particularly concentrated in the South—an area with a high density of black and brown people. And he says the discrimination often goes beyond just a supervisor.
“Supervisors will often bring other people in the workplace on board [to harass LGBT employees]. They will bring other colleagues in, which increases a hostile work environment,” he says.
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The case against a teen who was arrested and spent three years in one of the country's most notoriously violent prisons was dropped, without apology. The Root: Teen Spent 3 Years at Rikers Without Being Convicted of Crime.
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In May of 2010, Kalief Browder, a 16-year-old sophomore in high school, was walking home in his Bronx, N.Y., neighborhood after a party. Someone told the police that Browder robbed him weeks ago. Cuffs were applied, and Browder was slammed behind one of the toughest prisons on the planet. The 16-year-old would stay there for three years without ever being charged.
"It's very hard when you are dealing with dudes that are big and have weapons and shanks and there are gangs," Browder told WABC-TV about his time in the notorious Rikers Island correctional facility, in an investigative exclusive. "You know if you don't give your phone call up, or you don't give them what they want you know they are going to jump you. And it's very scary," he said.
Browder's family couldn't pay the $10,000 bail at the time of his arrest so he sat in jail. He spent three birthdays in Rikers. He missed his sister's wedding and the birth of his nephew, he told WABC-TV.
Browder told the news station that at the time, with the stress being almost too much to bear, he tried to commit suicide.
"I mean like every time I go to court, I think I'm going home, and I go to court, and absolutely nothing happens," adds Browder. "I was feeling so much pain, and it was all balling in my head, and I just had to grab my head and I can't take it."
At one point the judge offered Browder time served if he would plead guilty to the crime. Browder refused and was sent back to prison. In June of this year he was freed with no explanation, WABC-TV reports.
"They just dismissed the case and they think it's all right. No apology, no nothing," he says. "They just say 'case dismissed, don't worry about nothing'. What do you mean, don't worry about nothing? You just took three years of my life."
Kalief Browder
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The number of random stops under the highly controversial stop-and-frisk method is on a downward spiral. Associated Press: NYPD Say Stop-and-Frisk Numbers Have Plummeted.
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The number of street stops under the police department's heavily criticized stop-and-frisk tactic has plummeted 80 percent in recent months compared with the same time last year, and officers are recovering fewer weapons, according to police department data obtained Monday.
There were slightly more than 21,000 stops for July, August and September, after police changed training methods. There were 106,000 stops during the same months last year.
Officers recovered 99 firearms, down from 198 last year, and 463 knives, down from 1,016, according to the quarterly data provided to the City Council.
Police chief spokesman John McCarthy said there's no "predetermined or correct number of stops," just as there isn't with arrests.
"Ultimately, police officers make their decisions based on real-time observations from the field — and those stops are based on reasonable suspicion," he said.
The decline comes around a federal judge's August ruling that the police department's policy of stopping and questioning people based on reasonable suspicions a crime is about to occur or has occurred unfairly targeted minorities.
The judge ordered major reforms to the stop-and-frisk program after four men who argued they were unfairly targeted sued the city. Her ruling is on hold pending a city appeal.
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Busted for coke, Rep. Radel keeps his job, a reminder that it pays to be white in the criminal justice system. The Root: Trey Radel, Cocaine and Racial Double Standards.
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Rep. Trey Radel (R-FL) is now no stranger to the justice system.
On Wednesday afternoon, he pled guilty to a misdemeanor cocaine possession charge and was sentenced to a year of supervised probation. And by Wednesday night, in front of TV cameras, he was saying, “I’m sorry” at a hastily called press conference to announce a “leave of absence” from Congress.
But was this actually justice? Not really.
He’s only the second sitting member of Congress to be charged with a drug crime—and his plea bargain means his actions weren’t consequence-free—but Radel’s easy sentence illustrates the sorry state of race and drug sentencing in America.
Rates for drug usage, sales and possession are roughly the same across races, but blacks and Latinos are far more likely to be arrested, charged and incarcerated for drug-law offenses. But despite parity in drug usage, African Americans make up 45 percent (pdf) of those behind bars for drug violations, while representing only 13 percent of the U.S. population. Even before mandatory-minimum sentencing, average federal drug sentences were 11 percent higher for blacks than for whites. And after mandatory minimums were instituted, that disparity increased to an appalling 49 percent.
Even with the steps outlined by Attorney General Eric Holder this summer to alter “draconian mandatory minimums,” America’s a long way off from parity and justice.
Rep. Henry "Trey" Radel (R-FLA)
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One of two copies of the oldest known recording of a black vocal group in the U.S. is up for auction — a recording so rare and delicate that the auctioneer doesn’t dare try to play it. The Grio: 1893 recording of black vocal group up for auction.
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The 1893 recording of “Mama’s Black Baby Boy” by the Unique Quartet pre-dates vinyl recordings. The song was recorded on a wax-covered cylinder using technology invented by Thomas Edison. It can only be played on a special cylinder player that was a predecessor to phonographs, which played flat, vinyl discs, said Troy Thibodeau, manager of Saco River Auction Co.
The 120-year-old recording, along with a second Unique Quartet song, “Who Broke the Lock (on the Henhouse Door)?” from 1896, came from a Portland collector who amassed 3,000 of the old cylinder recordings.
“They’re in fantastic shape,” Thibodeau said Wednesday, carefully showing off the smooth cylinder covered in brown wax on which the music resides in etched grooves. “All it takes is a little bit of heat or a little bit of cold, and these things are junk. So, for more than 100 years, someone really took care of these things and treasured them.”
Both cylinders are up for auction on Saturday, along with hundreds of other items, including a shirt belonging to George Custer, the cavalry captain who died in 1876 while fighting Indians at Little Bighorn in Montana.
Cylinder recordings are becoming rare, and recordings of black artists even more rare.
There are so few cylinders that have the historical significance of the Unique Quarter recordings that it’s hard to know how much they might sell for. An appraiser believes they’ll go for $25,000 or more — apiece.
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New business opportunities in the motherland.... BusinessWeek: Trying to Build the Next Amazon—in Nigeria.
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When Gbemiga Omotoso bought a Samsung tablet last year, he handed over his cash to a man in a van. The transaction wasn’t illegal, though. It’s part of online retailer Jumia’s attempt to adapt its operation to the unique challenges of selling in Nigeria. With many of the country’s 160 million residents suspicious of paying online—yes, they get those fraudulent e-mails, too—the Lagos-based retailer wins over skeptical shoppers by accepting payment on delivery and offering free returns. “It’s very important that people know it’s not a scam,” says 29-year-old co-founder Tunde Kehinde. “Even though they want to buy, trust is still a very, very big issue.”
Jumia and local rival Konga.com have taken a page from the playbook of Amazon.com (AMZN): delivering electronics, clothes, and even refrigerators to the front doors of Nigerians. Shopping locally has usually meant higher prices, less selection, and often sitting in traffic for hours to get to stores, which rely on generators to cope with almost daily power outages.
“There’s a lot of appetite for consumption, but supply is terrible,” says Jeremy Hodara, founder and managing director of Africa Internet Holdings, an investor in online businesses across the continent and a shareholder in Jumia. “It’s expensive and cumbersome to buy abroad, but if there’s no choice, that is what people do.”
In the lead-up to Christmas, Jumia aims to boost revenue by 40 percent each month through December. Items featured in the site’s holiday section range from berry wreaths to MAC lipstick to kids’ bikes for 11,995 naira ($75). On a recent November day at Jumia’s warehouse—a stadium-size building down a muddy, potholed road in a Lagos commercial district—staffers pulled items to be stuffed into delivery vans or piled onto motorbikes.
Photograph by Pios Utomi Expei/AFP/Getty Images
Jumia delivery
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