The new cinematic Spider-Man follows the comic-book tradition of putting characters in new clothes to illustrate character development.
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Wednesday, July 3, 2019
Georgia family fires contractor after seeing a Confederate flag on his truck
A Black woman in Georgia canceled a job before it even began after a white, independent contractor showed up to her house with a Confederate flag attached to his truck.
Allison and Zeke Brown of Atlanta hired the contractor, named Michael, to fix their golf cart brakes but when he got to their home on Saturday, they couldn’t help but notice the gigantic rebel flag hanging from the back, according to Yahoo.
READ MORE: Texas school district bristling after student wears Confederate battle flag to classes
Allison knew her family wouldn’t be doing business with Michael, and she told him as much. She later posted the encounter on Ring.
“Hi, you know what, I do apologize, I know you’ve come from a very long way, but we’re going to use someone else,” Allison, 40, told Michael, according to Yahoo.
“She’s upset with the flag,” explained her husband, Zeke, 48.
“No, I’m beyond upset with the flag,” the 40-year-old radiation therapist responds.
READ MORE: Georgia woman who faced backlash after taking photo of a homeless dad issues apology
Michael said he would remove the flag, but the damage was already done.
“No, you don’t need to take it down. You can continue to believe what you need to believe, sir. But no, I cannot pay you for your services. Thank you, have a good day,” Allison said, reported Yahoo.
After the video footage was posted on Ring, thousands viewed it and commented on how well she kept it together.
Allison explained how it all went down. She said when Michael first arrived, she didn’t initially see him because she was cleaning out her closet.
It was when her husband, Zeke, came into their bedroom and uttered: “God is testing me,” that she knew there was a problem.
“When my husband told me about the flag, I said, ‘Let me handle this,’” Allison said to Yahoo Lifestyle. She said the couple’s son left the house, sure of how his mom would respond.
“I didn’t want to be the ‘angry black woman’ but I wanted him to learn and feel that bottom-line loss,” Allison explains. “You don’t go to Germany and wave the Nazi flag. It’s the same thing.”
Zeke was left surprised. For three days, he had gone back and forth with the contractor over the logistics of the job. “He hadn’t been disrespectful prior, so seeing the flag did not fit my preconceptions,” Zeke told Yahoo. “The flag was absurd — I had to walk back into the house to calm myself down.”
The Browns said that they received another message from Michael after he left, which said: “I didn’t know the flag offended y’all.”
Chile.
The post Georgia family fires contractor after seeing a Confederate flag on his truck appeared first on theGrio.
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Tuesday, July 2, 2019
Ankita Reddy ’19 blends anthropology and biology to improve public health
Before she even set foot on the MIT campus, Ankita Reddy ’19 was exploring questions of medicine, public health, and social inequities. During high school, she produced a documentary about Henrietta Lacks, an African-American woman whose cell line has proved invaluable to medical research — but who never gave consent for its use in this way. And while interning in a lab at the National Institutes of Health, Reddy found her focus shifting to a societal picture, as federal budget reductions squeezed scientists:
"I was curious about the impacts of cuts on physicians and researchers who were struggling to sustain work on human diseases," she recalls. "I realized I was increasingly interested in finding meaningful intersections of science and the humanities."
Intersections of science and the humanities
At MIT, Reddy swiftly identified a path for pursing discipline-spanning studies. As a double major in anthropology and biology, she put her full range of interests to work. Her senior thesis involved hybrid research in these two areas: Reddy helped develop a rapid, inexpensive diagnostic for mosquito-borne disease, and she also performed field research and analysis looking at the potential deployment of this and other diagnostic devices in developing countries.
The efficacy and success of medical advances must always be evaluated within a larger social context, Reddy says. "Infectious diseases impact communities unequally — often hitting hardest those without resources," she notes. "In order to do the most good for individual patients and to slow the spread of disease, our interventions need to take into consideration the public health capacity of communities, as well as local ideas of health and sickness."
A foundation in anthropology
Reddy credits foundational anthropology coursework for her commitment to this kind of public health approach. As a first-year student, she took 21A.331[J] (Infections and Inequalities: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Global Health), which was taught by three professors: chemical engineer Arup Chakraborty; biologist and physician Dennis Kim; and medical anthropologist Erica Caple James, who became Reddy's advisor.
"It is fascinating to view infectious diseases through multiple lenses," says Reddy. "The goal is finding the synergy of anthropological and medical thinking to make interventions more tailored and culturally sensitive, so they can be deployed to effect widespread change," she says.
Combining anthropology with biology for a public health mission
As she honed her skills in Boston-area wet labs and pursued a developmental health clinical internship at a Johannesburg, South Africa, hospital, Reddy sought opportunities to realize her interdisciplinary ambitions. James sent Reddy to the lab of Lee Gehrke, the Hermann L.F. von Helmholtz Professor in the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science at MIT. There, she was recruited by senior researcher Irene Bosch to help design an inexpensive paper-based diagnostic for such diseases as Zika, dengue, and Chikungunya. This proved the ideal venue for Reddy to play out her fusion of anthropology and scientific interests within a public health mission.
Starting in 2017, Reddy helped tweak the diagnostics in the lab, and spent some frenzied months field-testing the devices internationally — all while carrying a full course load.
"In junior year, I took the devices to Brazil for a long weekend, and it was really challenging," she recounts. "I had to take 10 flights round-trip, which really tested my motivation and resilience."
These trips helped spark the idea behind her senior thesis in anthropology. While evaluating the efficacy of the diagnostic in the field, Reddy was also wondering how such tests "could be be meaningfully deployed in resource-poor areas."
Experience and intuition
So in 2018, with the help of an Eloranta Summer Research Fellowship, Reddy spent several months in Hyderabad and Bangalore, India, interviewing and observing physicians and medical students during rounds at infectious disease hospitals catering largely to poor populations. She hoped to learn whether mosquito-borne diseases posed a major issue for these hospitals; what kind of improvements in treatment, public health infrastructure, or diagnosis physicians might seek; and how they used technology or other methods to relieve the suffering of patients in their daily practice.
Drawing on ethnographic expertise garnered from such classes as 21A.802 (Seminar in Ethnography and Fieldwork), Reddy was able to tease out some central themes from interview transcripts and field notes.
"Experience and intuition play a huge role in medical expertise in these hospitals," says Reddy. "Everyone had a story about a physician who had a sixth sense, who knew from a glance — without using any technology — what disease a patient suffered from." Any attempt to bring new technologies into these hospital environments, she says, "must acknowledge the existing structures that are based on medical improvisation and intuition."
From diagnostics to doctor
These insights will prove useful as Reddy launches her post-graduation life as a researcher at E25Bio, a startup spun out of the Gehrke Lab. With her grasp of cultural context, Reddy hopes to help craft a realistic business model to attract funding and speed the dissemination of her team's diagnostic technology. She particularly looks forward to the project's next phase, where uploaded data from globally deployed diagnostic devices could provide a detailed picture of the spread or containment of mosquito-borne illnesses around the world.
But even as she helps advance this pathbreaking biotechnology, Reddy is intent on pursuing a more direct way of contributing to public health: She is applying to medical schools.
"I aspire to be a physician-anthropologist, because I don't think I can choose one or the other," she says. "I'd like to use the power of the white coat to listen to what people have to say, take care of them in a collaborative way, and maybe, while doing this, contribute a new perspective to both the medical and anthropology fields."
Story prepared by MIT Anthropology and MIT SHASS Communications
Communications Director: Emily Hiestand
Liaison: Irene Hartford
Writer: Leda Zimmerman
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Top Strategies to Have in Place Before You Start an Online Business
You can start an online business if you are willing to be strategic in your approach. Smart brand builders understand the need to develop strategies for continued growth. If you’re an online business owner who wants to do everything in your power to succeed, the following are the top strategies you need to have in place when building your company.
4 Strategies to Have in Place Before You Start an Online Business
Lead Generation
Without a sound lead generation strategy, your online business is likely doomed for failure. Customers aren’t going to discover your company magically. It would be best if you had a plan in place to acquire new customers. Even after you acquire customers, some of them will never return to your business. You can’t depend on existing customers to keep purchasing from your business. Lead generation is an ongoing component of building a successful company and is critical to long-term viability.
Content Marketing
Choosing to use content marketing to grow your business is only the first step. There is a massive amount of content already online. You need to develop a plan for your content marketing outreach. A ‘create it, and they will come’ strategy won’t work when today’s consumer has a sea of quality blog posts at their disposal. It would help if you determined in advance who will be responsible for content creation, how topics will be decided, and who will be responsible for monitoring the performance and ROI of your content.
Social Media Marketing
If you are building an online business, social media outreach needs to be part of your marketing plans. Even if you’re only on Facebook, your business needs a sound social media marketing strategy to ensure your posts reach your target customers. Consider everything from which social platforms you’ll use to the types of posts you’ll share. If your company isn’t active on social media, your competitors will beat you to prospective customers.
Search Engine Optimization
SEO is another essential component of building a profitable online business. It’s not enough to use content marketing and social media marketing to attract consumers; you need to integrate SEO into both of those outreach efforts. Ensure that your social media posts are optimized for keywords your customers will use, and your blog posts contain long-tail keywords search engine users will hunt for. Today’s consumers are using platforms like Twitter and Facebook as search engines; your social media posts need to be optimized for discovery just like your blog posts.
Building a successful online business requires that you have several marketing strategies in place. In an increasingly contentious business environment, it is the savviest brand builder who will succeed.
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Tiny motor can “walk” to carry out tasks
Years ago, MIT Professor Neil Gershenfeld had an audacious thought. Struck by the fact that all the world’s living things are built out of combinations of just 20 amino acids, he wondered: Might it be possible to create a kit of just 20 fundamental parts that could be used to assemble all of the different technological products in the world?
Gershenfeld and his students have been making steady progress in that direction ever since. Their latest achievement, presented this week at an international robotics conference, consists of a set of five tiny fundamental parts that can be assembled into a wide variety of functional devices, including a tiny “walking” motor that can move back and forth across a surface or turn the gears of a machine.
Previously, Gershenfeld and his students showed that structures assembled from many small, identical subunits can have numerous mechanical properties. Next, they demonstrated that a combination of rigid and flexible part types can be used to create morphing airplane wings, a longstanding goal in aerospace engineering. Their latest work adds components for movement and logic, and will be presented at the International Conference on Manipulation, Automation and Robotics at Small Scales (MARSS) in Helsinki, Finland, in a paper by Gershenfeld and MIT graduate student Will Langford.
Their work offers an alternative to today’s approaches to contructing robots, which largely fall into one of two types: custom machines that work well but are relatively expensive and inflexible, and reconfigurable ones that sacrifice performance for versatility. In the new approach, Langford came up with a set of five millimeter-scale components, all of which can be attached to each other by a standard connector. These parts include the previous rigid and flexible types, along with electromagnetic parts, a coil, and a magnet. In the future, the team plans to make these out of still smaller basic part types.
Using this simple kit of tiny parts, Langford assembled them into a novel kind of motor that moves an appendage in discrete mechanical steps, which can be used to turn a gear wheel, and a mobile form of the motor that turns those steps into locomotion, allowing it to “walk” across a surface in a way that is reminiscent of the molecular motors that move muscles. These parts could also be assembled into hands for gripping, or legs for walking, as needed for a particular task, and then later reassembled as those needs change. Gershenfeld refers to them as “digital materials,” discrete parts that can be reversibly joined, forming a kind of functional micro-LEGO.
The new system is a significant step toward creating a standardized kit of parts that could be used to assemble robots with specific capabilities adapted to a particular task or set of tasks. Such purpose-built robots could then be disassembled and reassembled as needed in a variety of forms, without the need to design and manufacture new robots from scratch for each application.
Langford's initial motor has an ant-like ability to lift seven times its own weight. But if greater forces are required, many of these parts can be added to provide more oomph. Or if the robot needs to move in more complex ways, these parts could be distributed throughout the structure. The size of the building blocks can be chosen to match their application; the team has made nanometer-sized parts to make nanorobots, and meter-sized parts to make megarobots. Previously, specialized techniques were needed at each of these length scale extremes.
“One emerging application is to make tiny robots that can work in confined spaces,” Gershenfeld says. Some of the devices assembled in this project, for example, are smaller than a penny yet can carry out useful tasks.
To build in the “brains,” Langford has added part types that contain millimeter-sized integrated circuits, along with a few other part types to take care of connecting electrical signals in three dimensions.
The simplicity and regularity of these structures makes it relatively easy for their assembly to be automated. To do that, Langford has developed a novel machine that's like a cross between a 3-D printer and the pick-and-place machines that manufacture electronic circuits, but unlike either of those, this one can produce complete robotic systems directly from digital designs. Gershenfeld says this machine is a first step toward to the project's ultimate goal of “making an assembler that can assemble itself out of the parts that it's assembling.”
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