COMMENTARY: AFRICAN AMERICAN SCIENTISTS AND INVENTORS
By Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Gerald Anderson "Jerry" Lawson (December 1, 1940 – April 9, 2011) was an American electronic engineer, and one of the few African-American engineers in the industry at that time. He is known for his work in designing the Fairchild Channel F video game console as well as inventing the video game cartridge.
Lawson was born in Queens, New York City on December 1, 1940. His father Blanton was a longshoreman with an interest in science, while his mother Mannings worked for the city, and also served on the PTA for the local school and made sure that he received a good education. Both encouraged his interests in scientific hobbies, including ham radio and chemistry. Lawson said that his first-grade teacher helped him encourage his path to be someone influential similar to George Washington Carver. While in high school, he earned money by repairing television sets. He attended both Queens College and City College of New York, but did not complete a degree at either.
In 1970, he joined Fairchild Semiconductor in San Francisco as an applications engineering consultant within their sales division. While there, he created the early arcade game Demolition Derby out of his garage. In the mid-1970s, Lawson was made Chief Hardware Engineer and director of engineering and marketing for Fairchild's video game division. There, he led the development of the Fairchild Channel F console, released in 1976 and specifically designed to use swappable game cartridges. At the time, most game systems had the game programming stored on ROM storage soldered onto the game hardware, which could not be removed. Lawson and his team figured out how to move the ROM to a cartridge that could be inserted and removed from a console unit repeatedly, and without electrically shocking the user. This would allow users to buy into a library of games, and provided a new revenue stream for the console manufacturers through sales of these games. The Channel F was not a commercially successful product, but the cartridge approach was picked up by other console manufacturers, popularized with the Atari 2600 released in 1977......Read More
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Twitter users sent a love letter to “Black Panther” in the form of #WhatBlackPantherMeansToMe, a hashtag filled with personal odes to the movie that trended on Twitter today (February 6).
The Root reports that Kayla Sutton, director of online marketing for Black Girl Nerds, created the hashtag after talking to her son about the “Black Panther” comics he was reading.
“As a young Black male with autism, I wanted to know what this movie meant to him,” she told The Root. “It got me thinking about the impact this movie is going to have on so many. And how much it means to us internally at Black Girl Nerds and to me personally as a Black woman. This film is so unapologetically Black, and growing up on the outside of the nerd community as an ‘other,’ to have a film filled with people that look like me and my family is the most amazing gift.”
Black Girl Nerds launched the hashtag this morning:
The responses poignantly address the superhero movie’s importance to moviegoers who yearn for complex and nuanced depictions of Black characters:
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he plan, released by the White House last month, would scale back a program that allows people residing in the United States to sponsor family members living abroad for green cards, and would eliminate the “diversity visa program” that benefits immigrants in countries with historically low levels of migration to the United States. Together, the changes would disproportionately affect immigrants from Latin America and Africa.
The Census Bureau projects that minority groups will outnumber non-Hispanic whites in the United States in 2044. The Post's analysis projects that, were Trump's plan to be carried out, the date would be between 2045 and 2049, depending on how parts of it are implemented.
(The Post's methodology for estimating the annual impact of Trump's proposed cuts is explained in more detail at the bottom of this report. Projecting this far into the future entails certain assumptions that could alter the range, but demographic experts said The Post's approach was reasonable.)
All told, the proposal could cut off entry for more than 20 million legal immigrants over the next four decades. The change could have profound effects on the size of the U.S. population and its composition, altering projections for economic growth and the age of the nation's workforce, as well as shaping its politics and culture, demographers and immigration experts say.
“By greatly slashing the number of Hispanic and black African immigrants entering America, this proposal would reshape the future United States. Decades ahead, many fewer of us would be nonwhite or have nonwhite people in our families,” said Michael Clemens, an economist at the Center for Global Development, a think tank that has been critical of the proposal. “Selectively blocking immigrant groups changes who America is. This is the biggest attempt in a century to do that.”
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Attention all Carnival revelers and masqueraders attending the Caribbean’s biggest bacchanal: Non-consensual grinding, the provocative hip-gyrating, free-for-all that’s known in Caribbean parlance as “wining,” can get you slapped with an assault charge.
Trinidad and Tobago, the two-island country that’s considered the birthplace of the modern-day Pre-Lenten Caribbean Carnival, is telling all attendees that before you back it up on someone, ask permission. And the same goes for twerking, when the street party kicks off Monday and Tuesday in Port-of-Spain.
The ask-permission edict from the police comes after years of protests by Trinidadian women who want to be free to dance without having to worry at Carnival, the annual cultural event that draws everyone from tourists to costumed diplomats two days before Ash Wednesday.
Like the song, the new consent rule is part of a Caribbean-wide push by women to have more say over their bodies, said Gabrielle Hosein, the head of the Institute for Gender and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad.
“What you’re getting is an argument that has been made by tens of thousands of women over three or more decades in the Caribbean, long before the me-too movement addressing sexual harassment,” Hosein said. “Women have a right to be sexual and feminine in public without that happening on terms set by male aggression.”
And what’s happening in Trinidad is more radical than the me-too movement, she said. It’s women, who often dress in racy costumes during the revelry, saying they have a right to express sexual freedom without fear of sexual violence.
The concern over sexual harassment during Carnival isn’t only in Trinidad. In 2016, 22-year-old college student Tiarah Poyau was fatally shot in Brooklyn during the J’Ouvert street party before the West Indian Day Parade after telling a man to stop rubbing against her and dancing provocatively close. Police later arrested 20-year-old Reginald Moise.
Hosein commended the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service for warning last month that those who “thief a wine” — or hip-grind on a person without consent — during the raucous street party can be charged with assault, based on a law prohibiting physical touching without consent.
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At rallies of Nigeria’s ruling party, for next year’s general elections, the list of speakers is often dominated by former members of the opposition People’s Democratic Party who switched sides. Bloomberg: In Nigerian ‘Cash-and-Carry’ Politics, Ambition Is Only Constant
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Former ministers, two-term governors and other senior officials who served with the PDP during its 16-year rule take turns to denounce the “corruption and waste” of their erstwhile party while touting the virtues of President Muhammadu Buhari’s ruling APC.
It’s an illustration of the state of Nigerian politics, where parties are merely a means to power and wealth, with actors propelled neither by ideology nor principle. Known locally as “cash-and-carry politics,” success is often measured by gaining access to the treasury and dispensing patronage. Fueled by the country’s oil wealth over the past 50 years, the presidency is the supreme prize.
“It’s a capture of state power for personal use rather than service to the people,” said Clement Nwankwo, executive director of Abuja-based Policy and Legal Advocacy Centre, who has monitored all Nigerian elections since the end of military rule in 1999. “When a chosen party is not delivering on those objectives, the average politician will look for what else could be the platform to achieve that.”
Buhari, a former general who overthrew an elected government in 1983, stood as a presidential candidate for three different political parties in elections from 2003 to 2011. It was fourth-time lucky three years ago when his was the first opposition victory since Nigeria gained independence from the U.K. in 1960.
A likely contender in next year’s vote is former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, 71. He defected to the PDP from the APC in December, the second time he returned to the party in a decade after pursuing his presidential ambition elsewhere. Abubakar even has an insurance policy. If he doesn’t win the PDP nomination this time, his loyalists have already lined up a new party for him -- the People’s Democratic Movement.
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STRONG, smooth, with notes of melon and a hint of a buttery aftertaste. Leopord Lema’s banana wine may not delight the critics, but it is a hit in northern Tanzania, where it sells for 500 shillings ($0.23) a bottle. It’s cheaper than beer, says Samuel Juma, a security guard, and “brings more energy”. Locals glug their way through 12,000 litres a day.
“I come from a family where we used to brew,” says Mr Lema, his office thick with the pungent smell of baked bananas. His wine keeps longer than homemade mbege, a banana beer, and is safer than local moonshine, which sometimes contains methanol. He has also devised a pineapple version, using up fruit which quickly rots after the harvest.
Mr Lema is not the first to bottle traditional African booze. In the 1950s Max Heinrich, a German, recorded the process of making sorghum beer in present-day Zambia; his chibuku (“by the book”) is now churned out by corporate brewers. Fruity firms are bubbling up elsewhere. Palm Nectar, in Nigeria, sells palm wine in bars and supermarkets, with plans to export to America and Europe. “It’s the same drink that comes out of the tree,” boasts Maraizu Uche, its boss.
In Mr Lema’s factory women funnel amber wine into recycled bottles. He employs more than 60 people. Mr Lema made 200m shillings ($90,000) in profit last year and is expanding into a new 8-acre site. His success shows that industrialisation is not just about vast sweatshops or belching chimneys. In much of Africa it is more likely to mean small businesses, processing agricultural products for local tastes. Bananas can also be turned into flour, crisps and jam. Yoweri Museveni, the Ugandan president, wants to use oil revenues to finance banana-juice projects, among other things.
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