Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Hildreth "Hal" Walker, Jr. has won fame as an innovative thinker, collaborator and role model, in the realm of energy technology, especially in applications of lasers.
Born in Alexandria, Louisiana in 1933, Walker faced two major challenges as a young boy. On the one hand, his family forebade him from seeing his estranged father; on the other, black persons were virtually forbidden from significant social or academic advancement. However, Walker visited his father on the sly, and on one memorable occasion received as a present a toy Buck Rogers ray gun; he also found a white family willing to let him work as an informal apprentice at their vacuum cleaner repair shop. Thus, by fighting the earliest obstacles he encountered, Walker gained both the inspiration and the experience that would lead him to a career in high technology.
Walker's family soon moved to Los Angeles, and through high school there, he sharpened his skills in mechanics and electronics. He had decided on a career in the film industry after graduating, but was shut out because he was black. He could find work only with the Navy, installing radar systems in fighter planes; but after the Korean War ended (1953), his four years' experience was ignored by employers.
In a few years, Walker got a long overdue big break. RCA hired him to help develop the US government's Ballistic Missile Early Warning System, designed to warn the US in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack (1959). Walker loved the work, and excelled at it; he went on to direct other global telecommunications projects, including the first television broadcast transmitted from Earth to a satellite and back to Earth again (1962).
In 1969 came Walker's most sensational success. Working for Union Carbide's Laser Systems division, he led a team that adapted a ruby laser for measuring the distance from the Earth to the Moon during the Apollo 11 mission. Walker's team trained a laser beam from Lick Observatory in California at a reflector mirror, only 18 inches wide, that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had set up on the Moon's surface. Walker's team recorded by far the most accurate measurement of the distance ever, exact to within 5 meters. The equipment used for the experiment is now on permanent exhibit in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.....Read More
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Political scientists use new tools — and draw on psychology — to explain how and why “social geography” shapes attitudes. Vox: How segregation leads to racist voting by whites
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In the early to mid-20th century, for example, they noticed how Southern white voters’ support for racist politicians seemed to be related to the nearby presence of African Americans. In the 1930s, using rudimentary statistics and data, combined with a deep ethnographic understanding, the political scientist V.O. Key argued that Southern politics “revolves around the position of the Negro.” He meant “position” literally. White Southerners in counties with large African-American populations, he found, were particularly animated to support a system of white supremacy, casting ballots for the racist candidates who supported that system.
In the past century, many of the most contentious important politics in the United States have been spurred by the movement of African Americans out of the South. In the 1940s and ’50s, when large numbers of African Americans migrated North and West, social scientists documented the resulting tension between blacks and whites in cities like Chicago and Detroit. “White flight” away from central cities stripped away much of the tax base those cities relied on, and with it many of the social services that residents needed. This, and the police brutality fueled by the white cops who stayed, led to riots and a conservative backlash in politics, starting with Richard Nixon, that still shapes politics today.
Today, we have a fuller understanding about how and why the spatial relationships between groups matters. It is the presence of a group that is proximate, yet segregated — close but far — that precipitates the politics of division. Sadly, it is when groups become close in space that they also can become politically, social, and psychologically divided, so long as also they remain segregated. This kind of relationship, the research shows, causes us to hold negative and racist attitudes about the other group: to not want to share with the other group, and, when it comes to politics, to vote against the candidate we think represents that group — or for the demagogues who attack them.
And this very situation — think a racially diverse central city and homogeneously white suburbs or an enclave full of newly arrived immigrants — is a geographic reality for most Americans.
Of course, it is not only the United States where this pattern holds: In Europe, immigration, the arrival of new groups segregated into enclaves, has become the centerpiece of many political campaigns.
You might assume that demographic change, and the proximity of different groups, would by itself breed familiarity. It turns out that’s true only in the rare cases in which those groups are integrated. When spatial patterns other than integration develop, diversity can drive us apart.
Consider how the 2016 election played out. Most white voters supported Trump and were at least willing to tolerate his xenophobic rhetoric, but his support disproportionately came from those who lived in places where the Latino population had rapidly expanded — whose social geography had changed. Many of these places experiencing a Latino boom were in states, such as Pennsylvania, crucial to Trump’s Electoral College victory. For example, in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, where the Hispanic population grew by almost 500 percent in the last 20 years, Trump’s vote increased by over 11 percentage points from Romney in 2012, taking it from a blue to a red county.
Centre County, in Pennsylvania, had a different trajectory. Like Luzerne, it voted for Obama in 2012 and, also like Luzerne, it was more than 90 percent non-Hispanic white 20 years ago. But Centre County experienced much more modest growth in the Hispanic population; there, Trump actually performed worse than Romney had in 2012.
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American Urban Radio Networks correspondent April Ryan says she wasn't to the annual White House Christmas party for the first time in 20 years because "they have disdain for me."
Ryan, who is also a CNN contributor, told The Washington Post she doesn't believe the omission was an accident.
“I don’t think I was overlooked,” she said. “I think they don’t like me. For whatever reason, they have disdain for me.”
Ryan has clashed repeatedly with former White House press secretary Sean Spicer, who departed in August, and current press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders during daily press briefings for much of the year.
Last month, Ryan asked Sanders if the Trump administration "thinks that slavery is wrong."
“I think it’s disgusting and absurd to suggest that anyone inside of this building would support slavery,” Sanders responded.
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CASSAVA and sweet potatoes. Lablab beans and water berries. Bitter gourds and sickle sennas. Elephant ears and African locusts. Some will be familiar to readers in rich countries. Others, probably not. Elephant ears, for example, are leafy vegetables. African locusts are tree-borne legumes. All, however, are standard fare in various parts of Africa. What they also have in common is that they are, from the point of view of plant breeders, orphans. They are neglected by breeders because they are not cash crops. Conversely, they are not cash crops because they are neglected by breeders.
That neglect matters. The cereals which dominate human diets—rice, wheat and maize—have had their yields and nutritional values boosted over the years by scientific breeding programmes. In the modern era of genomics, they have had their DNA scrutinised down to the level of individual base pairs, the molecular letters in which genetic information is written. They are as far removed, nutritionally, from their ancestors of as little as two centuries ago as those ancestors were from the wild plants which begat them. Orphan crops have yet to undergo such a genetic revolution.
Even for adults, a lack of calories and essential nutrients is harmful. For children it can be devastating. Poor childhood nutrition leads to stunting—inadequate bodily development, including the development of the brain. A report published by the World Health Organisation on November 16th suggests that almost a third of Africa’s children, nearly 60m of them, are stunted. And stunted children grow into adults unable to achieve their potential. Researchers at the World Bank reckon the effects of stunting have reduced Africa’s GDP by 9-10% from what it would otherwise be.
One way to reduce stunting would be to improve the crops that Africans, particularly those in the countryside, actually eat—in other words, orphan crops. Such improvement is the purpose of two recent, interrelated projects that are now getting into their strides. Both are based in Nairobi and are conducted under the auspices of the World Agroforestry Centre, an international non-governmental research organisation. One is the African Orphan Crops Consortium (AOCC). The other is the African Plant Breeding Academy. The AOCC’s task is to obtain complete sequences of the DNA of 101 neglected food crops. The academy’s is to disseminate those (and much else besides that relates to crop breeding) to young scientists from universities and other institutes around the continent, who visit Nairobi for the purpose.
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For 37 years, it was the official newspaper of Robert Mugabe. Then, this month, the staff of the Zimbabwe Herald got an impossible assignment: They would have to cover the downfall of their benefactor.
In the days after Mugabe was detained by the military, editors and reporters gathered in a wood-paneled newsroom in an old office building downtown, trying to figure out what to do. Should they back Mugabe or the military takeover? Did they still have to echo the party line? What was the party line, anyway? Suddenly, a newsroom that had been the mouthpiece of the regime was without a censor.
“In the past we could never criticize the president,” said Felex Share, a political reporter, in the hours before Mugabe’s resignation. “Right now, we can touch anything.”
Phyllis Kochere holds the newspaper announcing the resignation of Robert Mugabe in the newsroom of the Zimbabwe Herald. (Kevin Sieff/The Washington Post)
The rapid descent of the world’s oldest head of state came as a shock to many Zimbabweans who assumed Mugabe would rule the country until his death.
The Herald, which is owned by the government, had advanced the idea that his rule was untouchable. Until two weeks ago, the paper was printing laudatory stories and editorials about the country’s despotic leader.
“President Mugabe deserves Nobel Peace Prize,” said one headline last month. “He is undisputedly the most exceptional figure in the history of our country,” another article said in September.
The paper’s editors and reporters didn’t usually agree with those messages, but working for the Herald meant shelving your own politics. It was the best-paying newspaper in Zimbabwe, and in a country with a soaring unemployment rate, that meant something.
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Beyond the sign reading “Military Zone,” beyond the olive-green Humvees patrolling near a security tower, rows of tan tents stretch across the desert. For nearly two years, the remote, barren site has been home to several hundred U.S. troops working around the clock to turn it into a high-tech, multimillion-dollar drone base.
Mohamed Seraji doesn’t like what he sees.
Dust kicked up by the construction makes the 29-year-old vendor cough. At night, the noise keeps him awake. But his biggest worry is that the facility — as well as Nigeriens like him who live in this city, just minutes away — will become a target for Islamist extremists.
“The base is too close,” Seraji said. “If there’s an attack on it, the people are exposed.”
Such concerns have escalated since an ambush last month by Islamist militants that killed four U.S. and five Nigerien soldiers in the village of Tongo Tongo, along the Niger-Mali border. Agadez is in north-central Niger, more than 600 miles from that attack site, but the militants have also targeted this region in recent years.
Now, the growing perils faced by U.S. troops here are intensifying questions about the decision to build a drone base near Agadez — the second such facility in Niger, an impoverished West African country twice the size of Texas.
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