Commentary: African American Scientist and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Joycelyn Harrison is a NASA engineer at the Langley Research Center researching piezoelectric polymer film and developing customized variations of piezoelectric materials (EAP). Materials that will link electric voltage to motion, according to NASA, "If you contort a piezoelectric material a voltage is generated. Conversely, if you apply a voltage, the material will contort." Materials that will usher in a future of machines with morthing parts, remote self-repairing abilities, and synthetic muscles in robotics.
Concerning her research Joycelyn Harrison has stated, "We're working on shaping reflectors, solar sails and satellites. Sometimes you need to be able to change a satellite's position or get a wrinkle off of its surface to produce a better image."
(con't.)
Joycelyn Harrison was born in 1964, and has bachelor's, master's and Ph.D. degrees in Chemistry from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Joycelyn Harrison has received the:
- Technology All-Star Award from the National Women of Color Technology Awards
- NASA's Exceptional Achievement Medal {2000}
- NASA'a Outstanding Leadership Medal {2006} for outstanding contributions and leadership skills demonstrated while leading the Advanced Materials and Processing Branch
Joycelyn Harrison has been granted a long list of patents for her inventing and received the 1996 R&D 100 Award presented by R&D magazine for her role in developing THUNDER technology along with fellow Langley researchers, Richard Hellbaum, Robert Bryant , Robert Fox, Antony Jalink, and Wayne Rohrbach....Read More
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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If blacks aren’t perceived as middle class, our upward mobility is limited. I'm a Black Gentrifier, But My Success Is Invisible.
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In a typical night in 2009, I finished work around 10 p.m., collapsed into a cab I’d expense the next morning with my work laptop and a set of legal files in hand, took off my Manolos so they’d stop crushing my feet, watched baseball on my phone to signal to the driver that he shouldn’t bother starting a conversation on my ride home to New York City’s East Village, and grimaced when he asked me halfway through our unwanted chat if I grew up in my neighborhood.
I always rolled my eyes before saying no and returning to my baseball. It was objectively clear that, in 2009, a young black lawyer probably wasn’t originally from the East Village. After the neighborhood’s crime rate went down in the nineties, its rents skyrocketed, which encouraged lawyers and hedge fund traders to move in, and established residents and punk/beatnik/bohemian transplants to leave. Nowadays, the East Village is about 8 percent black, a combination of new arrivals like me and longtime residents of the Avenue D projects. At that point, East Village natives were being priced out of the neighborhood because of the astronomical rents people like me paid willingly.
While I’d practiced law long enough to understand that as a black lawyer, I was pretty rare, I had assumed my suits, shoes and demeanor made it clear that I was a professional. Especially in 2009—NYC had suffered enough recession casualties that people looking for cabs outside Sixth Avenue corporate towers at 10 p.m. were either tourists or billing their companies.
So when cabbies and bodega owners and random people on the street repeatedly asked me if I was an East Village native, they erased my profession and demeanor and mentally stuck me out on Avenue D instead of calling me what I was: a black gentrifier. While I wasn’t proud to be part of a demographic that kicked people out of their apartments, I had trouble feeling guilty about being my family’s first college graduate, first lawyer, and first person who was financially able to call a desirable New York City neighborhood home.
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Adenah Bayoh has a million-dollar real estate portfolio, a thriving restaurant business and a life journey that began in Liberia. The Root: Liberian Civil War Escapee-Turned-U.S. Entrepreneur Named to Advisory Council of Federal Reserve Bank.
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Adenah Bayoh immigrated to the U.S. when she was just 13 years of age, escaping a civil war in her native land, Liberia. She put herself through college by working three jobs, one of which was a bank teller, where she rose up the ranks, became an executive, and saved up enough money to begin her foray into real estate--first by becoming a landlord for small, residential properties, and then multi-family homes.
After leveraging that initiative into a full-blown real estate portfolio, Bayoh told NJ BIZ that she began to grow fond of her time working in her grandmother’s restaurant in Liberia, and soon became an IHOP franchisee. Her location in Irvington, N.J., is one of the fastest growing locations in the Northeast and the second-largest employer in Irvington.
On Tuesday the Federal Reserve Bank of New York named Bayoh to their Small Business and Agricultural Advisory Council.
In a press statement, Bayoh described her excitement, and said she is looking forward to representing working-class communities and small business owners.
“As an entrepreneur operating in disadvantaged urban communities, I look forward to being a voice and an advocate for these communities as well as for other small business owners,” Bayoh wrote.
Adenah Bayoh
FEDERAL RESERVE BANK OF NEW YORK
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It should be harder for the New York City Police Department to go back to “business as usual” once it has resolved its issues with the mayor. The Root: The NYPD Slowdown Is Proving That ‘Broken Windows’ Is a Failure. Isn’t It Time to Drop It?
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As the New York City Police Department continues its standoff with Mayor Bill de Blasio over his perceived lack of support, the conversation caused by the police slowdown is providing strong ammunition for critics of overly aggressive law-enforcement tactics within urban communities.
At this point, there has been no significant impact to public safety because of the slowdown—during which tickets and summons for minor offenses have dropped more than 90 percent—and we’ve seen anything but the doomsday crime spree that Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association President Patrick Lynch seemed to hope might cause widespread fear among New Yorkers.
Lynch, who leads the NYPD’s largest and most influential union, has been very critical of de Blasio in past weeks, accusing him of expressing anti-policing sentiments in his remarks after the Staten Island grand jury’s nonindictment in the Eric Garner choke hold case.
Lynch’s inflammatory sentiments have intensified in the wake of the slaying of two NYPD officers in late December while they were on duty in Brooklyn. According to the New York Post, leaders of the five police unions have orchestrated what amounts to a work stoppage of NYPD officers (the PBA denies that the work stoppage is orchestrated). Still, the effect on the crime rate has been minimal. This strongly suggests that the NYPD’s typical over-policing—particularly within communities of color—is hardly as necessary as many have previously suggested.
In many ways, the slowdown is backfiring terribly and should force a bigger discussion about not only the need to revisit the “broken windows” approach to law enforcement in urban communities but also the age-old trend of funding America’s cities on the backs of the poor.
An NYPD officer on a motorbike keeps track of anti-police-brutality protesters as they march through the Upper East Side in New York City Dec. 23, 2014.
MICHAEL GRAAE/GETTY IMAGES
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The United States is calling on Haiti’s politicians to make the necessary compromises to avoid one-man rule by President Michel Martelly on Monday, and the country slipping deeper into political chaos. Miami Herald: U.S. wants to avoid one-man rule in Haiti.
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We want to see elections happen, agreement on elections, and we also want to avoid rule by decree,” said the State Department’s Haiti Special Coordinator Thomas Adams. “We think its better if all three branches of government are existing and functioning.
“We think there is a fair chance that they can reach that kind of agreement by Monday,” he added. “We’re certainly urging them on.”
On Thursday, opposition groups demanding Martelly’s resignation took to the streets of the capital, accusing him of corruption and delaying elections. The president has denied the accusations, accusing six senators of holding the country hostage by refusing to vote an electoral law that is needed for elections to be held.
After meeting with senators and opposition parties Wednesday, Martelly resumed meetings Thursday. Former Senator Edmonde Supplice Beauzile, who heads the opposition party Fusion Social Democrats, said on a morning Port-au-Prince Creole radio program that an agreement had been reached about which sectors the nine members of a new Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) would be drawn.
But Beauzile said consensus still had not been reached on Martelly’s choice of prime minister, Evans Paul. Paul was tapped to replace former Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe, who resigned last month amid domestic and international pressure. Opposition groups have objected to Paul saying he wasn’t picked as a result of political negotiations..
In a statement, the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Primce said it is encouraged by the ongoing negotiations to resolve the impasse.
Young men run from tear gas during an anti-government protest in downtown Port-au-Prince, Haiti on Saturday Dec. 13, 2014. As Haiti approaches the fifth anniversary of its devastating Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake, growing discontent among Haiti’s poor, black masses is fueling increasing demonstrations and calls for Pesident Michel Martelly to step down. PATRICK FARRELL MIAMI HERALD STAFF
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Pull up a chair and sit down a while and enjoy the company.