Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Guion S. Bluford was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on November 22, 1942. Bluford became the first African American to travel in space in 1983, as a mission specialist aboard the space shuttle Challenger. He later participated in three other missions. His career began as a pilot in the U.S. Air Force, flying 144 missions during the Vietnam War, before becoming a NASA astronaut in 1979.
(con't.)
Guion Stewart Bluford Jr. was born on November 22, 1942, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Bluford studied aerospace engineering at Pennsylvania State University, graduating in 1964. A distinguished U.S. Air Force Reserve Officers' Training Corps member in college, he joined the U.S. Air Force and served in the Vietnam War. Flying more than 140 combat missions, he won several medals, including the Vietnam Cross of Gallantry with Palm.
After the war, Bluford enrolled at the Air Force Institute of Technology, where he received a master's degree in aerospace engineering in 1974. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in the same subject in 1978, the same year that he was picked for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's space program.
Guion S. Bluford made history on August 30, 1983, when he became the first African American to experience space travel. Bluford was a mission specialist aboard the space shuttle Challenger, which took off from the Kennedy Space Center.......Read More
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Rightwing fantasy and science fiction fans, can deal with worlds filled with aliens, elves, and monsters, they just can't deal with a real world filled with woman and brown people. This one is a must read. The New Republic: The Hugo awards and the history of science fiction culture wars.
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Science fiction often achieves the remarkable feat of being both futuristic and reactionary at the same time. The history of the genre is replete with writers who have given us glittering visions of radically different tomorrows, of robots and androids, aliens and galactic empires. Yet the people who are most closely engaged in the creation of science fiction remain mired in the mundane political realities of the existing world.
Currently, the science fiction world is being torn asunder by a cultural war over diversity, with a hot battle going on over the Hugo Awards, the long-running and prestigious fan-selected awards given out every year at the World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon). Reflecting the demographics of the larger field, the Hugo Awards have traditionally gone to white men, but nominations for women and non-whites have risen in recent years. That trend has upset right-wing fans who say they've been marginalized by affirmative action gone mad—and who organized a successful nomination campaign to undo these gains in diversity, creating an unprecedented party-line slate which has led to the stacking of this year's Hugo ballot largely with white men once again.
“When I heard about this, I was sick at the thought of what they’d done and at all the damage they’d caused,” sci-fi author Connie Willis, who has won eleven Hugos, wrote on her blog. Willis had been asked to be a presenter at this year’s ceremony—Worldcon is scheduled for late August in Spokane, Washington—but has refused, in protest against what she sees as a subversion of the awards. Two writers have been so embarrassed to be on the ballot that they've withdrawn their nominations. And George R.R. Martin, author of Game of Thrones, responded to the fans' demographic anxiety by writing on his blog, “We’re SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY FANS, we love to read about aliens and vampires, and elves. Are we really going to freak about Asians and Native Americans?”
To outside eyes, the struggle over the Hugo can be confusing. It involves the arcane details of a complex nomination procedure, and factions with names like Sad Puppies 3 and Rabid Puppies. But the ruckus makes a lot more sense in the context of science fiction's historical lack of diversity, and there's perhaps no better illustration of that problem then the career of Samuel R. Delany.
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Often times the implications of these type of rulings get overlooked. But a recent Supreme Court ruling allows the kind of traffic stop that led to Walter Scott’s death. Slate: Ignorance of the Law.
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The dashcam video leaves no doubt as to why Slager pulled over Scott: “The reason for the stop is that your third brake light’s out,” Slager told Scott, minutes prior to the fatal shooting.
Slager’s asserted “reason” had no premise in South Carolina law: Scott’s vehicle was in full compliance. Lacking reasonable suspicion that Scott was doing something illegal, Slager should’ve never pulled him over in the first place, unless his true motive was something other than a concern for enforcing the laws he took an oath to uphold.
Policing minor traffic violations as a pretext for more intrusive, “crime-fighting” stops is a real and dangerous problem—Slate’s Jamelle Bouie broke down the numbers of how people of color are hit hardest by this rampant style of roadside discrimination.
But there’s another problem: The legal pretexts police use for such traffic stops can be plainly mistaken or made up.
South Carolina law is straightforward on the issue of third brake lights. Motor vehicles must be equipped with “a stop lamp on the rear”—a singular brake light, which is to be maintained in good working order. A South Carolina appeals court confirmed this reading: A single operating brake light means a vehicle is “in full compliance with all statutory requirements regarding rear vehicle lights,” and a stop premised on requiring anything more is “unreasonable” and thus a violation of the driver’s constitutional rights. However, the decision was later overturned on appeal.*
So why did Slager pull over Scott? If what he said, as captured on the dashcam account, is to be believed, Slager made a mistake and decided to “seize” Scott for a law not in the books. In a perfect world, such errors should never give a police officer an opportunity to stop anyone.
That perfect world was shattered in December, when the Supreme Court blessed the shady police practice of pulling someone over for breaking a law that doesn’t exist. The case was Heien v. North Carolina, involving the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures—the only shield against police overreach during close encounters with law enforcement. In an 8-to-1 decision, the court ruled that “reasonable” mistakes about what the law is can justify police stopping an otherwise law-abiding citizen.
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There's the gender gap and then there's the gender gap. The New Republic: The Gender Pay Gap Is Bad. The Gender Pay Gap for Women of Color Is Even Worse.
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Women, on average, earn 22 percent less than men, or 78 cents for every white man’s dollar. This fact is everywhere, especially on Tuesday, Equal Pay Day. The day itself is meant to symbolize this figure, as it takes women three-and-half extra months of work to earn what men make year-round.
Critics love to quibble that a few factors easily explain this gap. They say women work fewer hours, and have less experience than male counterparts because they leave the workforce to raise children, and seek jobs and careers that may have flexible hours but pay worse. Per a “fact check” from the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler in early April: “Unless women stop getting married and having children, and start abandoning careers in childhood education for naval architecture, a large gap in wages will almost certainly persist.” While blaming politicians for trotting out this statistic without “proper context,” somehow fails to mention his own context. The lack in the United States of policies that guarantee paid parental leave and childcare helps explain why some women have no choice but to exit the workforce or curtail their career options. The option, in realistic terms, is that women wouldn't have children, yet critics seem fine with penalizing women economically for being caretakers and continuing the existence of the human race.
There is a problem with the 78 percent statistic, but not the one critics say. That figure obscures the fact that most women of color fare worse than white and Asian women. It is a national average, across all races, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Compared to what a white man makes: Hispanic women earn 54 percent, followed by black women at 64 percent, and Native American at 65 percent. (The wage gap closes somewhat for women of color vs. men of the same race or ethnicity).
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A vivid reminder of how corruption slows African progress. The Guardian: Kenyan police chief's misuse of plane fuels anger over Garissa massacre.
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Criticism of the Kenyan authorities’ slow response to the Garissa massacre has reached new heights after a police chief admitted that a plane meant to transport commandos to the scene was instead being used to fly his family back from holiday on the coast.
The revelation on Tuesday fed growing fury at the government’s failure to intervene during the day-long slaughter at Garissa University by al-Shabaab militants on 2 April, which cost 148 lives.
Some of the victims had initially managed to hide from the killers after the assault began at dawn, but were discovered and murdered in the afternoon, many hours later. The police commandos only arrived seven hours after the attack started, finally breaking the siege in the evening.
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South Africa suffers another spasm of xenophobia. LA Times: South Africa grapples with outbreak of anti-immigrant violence.
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began after the Zulu king, Goodwill Zwelithini, told his followers last month that foreigners in South Africa should pack up and leave. President Jacob Zuma’s eldest son, Edward, chimed in that foreigners were “taking over the country” in a “ticking time bomb.”
Then last week, violent attacks on immigrant shopkeepers in Durban townships exploded and have continued since. Dozens of immigrants in Johannesburg and other cities shuttered their shops Wednesday as anonymous cellphone text messages warned that Zulu people were coming to kill immigrants in neighborhoods with large migrant populations.
One message read: “Wednesday, Zulu people are coming to town starting from Market (Street) their mission is to kill every foreigner on the road please pass this to all your contacts in case they come people should be on alert.”
APphoto_South Africa Imiigrant Attacks
Immigrant men armed with machetes make their way onto a Durban, South Africa, street during clashes with police on Tuesday. (Tebogo Letsie / AP)
Another referred to an attack that “will be more destructive than ever before,” and warned immigrants to stay indoors. “Take (it) serious our friends r killed like Cockroaches.”
Violence spread in central Durban on Tuesday, after looters attacked shops owned by immigrants, some of whom armed themselves with machetes and knives. Five have died in the recent violence near Durban, along the country’s southeast coast.
Foreign nationals hold a placard during an anti-xenophobia march outside Durban City Hall in South Africa on April 8. (Rajesh Jantilal / AFP/Getty Images)
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Mobile technology is changing the face of banking. FiveThirtyEight: Mobile Phones Are Revolutionizing Personal Finance In Sub-Saharan Africa.
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Until a few years ago, three-quarters of people in sub-Saharan Africa were cut off from the financial system. They had no relationship with a bank, making it difficult to send and receive money, or to get credit. But then a new, cheap device came along and quickly began improving the financial lives of millions of people. In a short span of time, mobile phones have radically altered personal finance in the region.
Twelve percent of all adults in sub-Saharan Africa use their phones for non-bank financial transactions, by far the highest rate of any region in the world, according to a report released Wednesday by the World Bank.
The mobile revolution there is part of a broader trend of democratization of finance around the globe that’s giving far more people a first step into the financial world. The number of adults worldwide with a bank account grew by 700 million between 2011 and 2014, according to the World Bank, an 11 percentage point rise to 62 percent of all adults.
These figures come from the World Bank’s Global Financial Inclusion database, known as the Findex. It’s composed of over 100 indicators and is based on interviews with about 150,000 adults across 143 countries. That makes it by far the largest and most comprehensive study of financial inclusion — the marker for whether people are connected to the formal financial system.
Financial inclusion means having an account of some sort, either at a traditional institution like a bank or credit union or through a mobile money account. (Mobile money accounts are phone-based services, untethered to a financial institution, for paying bills and sending cash.) Either method allows people to pay bills more efficiently; to send and receive remittances; and to take the first step toward accessing credit to make larger purchases or start a business.
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