Photographer Ezio D'Agostino documents the tiny European country's space-mining ambitions.
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Thursday, August 29, 2019
Paul Mooney cancels comedy shows after explosive sex allegations with Richard Pryor’s son revealed
Paul Mooney is stepping away from the limelight for a bit after explosive rumors that he had a sexual encounter with Richard Pryor’s son went viral.
—Robin Thede wants Black women to feel seen on ‘A Black Lady Sketch Show’—
Although the comedy legend has denied Richard Pryor’s former bodyguard’s claims that he had sex with a young Pryor Jr. way back when, and that Pryor put a $1 million hit out on him, Mooney cancelled his Atlanta Comedy Theater appearance Wednesday and Thursday, August 29 due to “health reasons.”
According to TMZ, a sign on door of the comedy venue reads: “ATTENTION!! Paul Mooney is NOT on show tonight due to health reasons. We will transfer purchase to Faizon Love or Donnell Rawlings. Let box office know.”
According to the outlet, Mooney’s pulled out of several appearances following the heat he’s gotten over the alleged sexual relationship with Richard Pryor Jr made by Rashon Kahn, Pryor Sr former bodyguard.
As previously reported, Mooney’s publicist, Cassandra Williams spoke about the statement saying, “There is no validity to Rashon Kahn’s statement as it relates to Mr. Paul Mooney,” according to TMZ.
—Catholic church paid Black abuse victims $235K LESS than white victims—
The development comes after an interview of Kahn, went viral on YouTube after it was posted by Comedy Hype on Monday, where he details the reason why the relationship between Pryor and Mooney ended.
Kahn, who has an upcoming book titled Everything Wasn’t Funny, states in the video that the two comedians “relationship became fragile because Paul Mooney had f****d Richard’s son by that time. He violated … Paul took advantage of the situation.”
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PR firm says ‘Every iota’ of Jussie Smollett hate crime claim is true
Jussie Smollett’s PR team says “every iota” of his account of being the victim of a racist, anti-gay attack in Chicago is supported by police evidence despite police repeatedly saying it was all staged.
A statement emailed Wednesday follows a city filing Monday defending its lawsuit seeking to recoup costs of investigating what it says was a January publicity stunt.
The statement says “every iota of information … Smollett has stated has been fully corroborated.”
The statement didn’t say what evidence allegedly backs Smollett’s claim that masked men hurling racist and homophobic insults beat him and looped a noose around his neck.
The city says GPS data, video and other evidence prove Smollett paid the men to fake a hate crime.
State prosecutors abruptly dropped charges against Smollett in March. A special prosecutor is investigating that decision.
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‘David Makes Man’ Episode 103 Recap: ‘MJB’
The third episode of OWN’s powerful new drama David Makes Man gave us a closer look at David and Seren and illuminates truths that are hard to swallow.
David (Akili McDowell) is haunted by his recent behavior, including getting into a fight with his best friend, Seren (Nathaniel Logan McIntyre) and his argument with an imaginary Skye (Isaiah Johnson).
In one particularly poignant scene, we see David meeting his therapist (Ruben Santiago-Hudson) and he has a hard time being honest at first. When the doc seems concerned about David’s home life, we see both sides of his personality presented in the background, having different reactions to each topic they tackle. Throughout the episode, this device recurs and gives us a clear understanding about how his two personas navigate life, process experiences, and where they coincide.
Dr. Woods-Trap (Phylicia Rashad) decided to force David to work with Seven on his project, in an effort to make sure the boys have moved passed their fight. Unfortunately for David, Seren insists the only way he will help with the project is if David agrees to spend the night at his house. David is hesitant for obvious reasons (he’s scared about Saren’s too touchy stepfather, Ray, but he reluctantly agrees after Seren reveals his tormentor is out of town on a work trip.
David is awestruck when he sees Seren’s big, beautiful house and fridge full of snacks. They’re having a good time until Seren’s scary AF mother walks in and begins to torment him, showing us that she may be even more of a predator than her sicko husband. Her tone is terrifying and she doesn’t even try to hide her abusive behavior in front of David and proceeds to make small talk with him as if she didn’t just show her true colors a moment before.
Later in the therapy session, the therapist lands on the subject of Skye, and this guy seems to be see right through David’s attempts to sugar-coat the trauma of the loss. All of David’s personalities speak in unison when he’s explaining what kind of force Skye was in his lie and it’s clear he’s the reason David has his heart set on going to the exclusive high school, Hurston.
Tarell Alvin McCraney, Phylicia Rashad, and Akili McDowell dish on David Makes Man
Miss Elijah (Travis Coles) remains one of the show’s most intriguing characters and we learn how close her friendship with David’s mother, Gloria (Alana Arenas) really is.
When David and Serena are about to go to sleep, David urges his friend to tell an adult what’s happening to him at home. It is then that we learn that the abused kid doesn’t believe his mother knows that he’s being molested by her husband, Ray, but we also see that he may be more tormented by her abuse than the things his stepfather does to him.
Later, we learn all about David’s father who was one of Gloria’s professors. We see a flashback of what happened when she brought their young son to his home to meet him and how she was rejected and humiliated by him and his wife. “And that’s the story of how I came to be without a father,” David says at the end of his project. “I’m not nothing.”
Damn right, David.
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Wednesday, August 28, 2019
BLACK GLAM: Rebekah Aladdin on beautifying Black Hollywood
Johnny Wright is back with another installment of Black Glam and this time, he is sitting down with celebrity makeup artist, Rebekah Aladdin, to find out all about how she keeps Black Hollywood looking fab. Her long list of clients includes Lena Waithe, Winnie Harlow, and Kiki Layne among others.
The gorgeous guru who happens to have a twin sister keeps some of the most famous faces in Tinseltown looking flawless, but she didn’t set out on the path she wound up on. In fact, she has aspirations to become an architect and admits her first love is music. She decided to try her hand at doing makeup in the entertainment industry in hopes of meeting people who could help get her music career off the ground.
Black Glam: Johnny Wright peels back the curtain of Black beauty and fashion with industry experts
She has become a go-to makeup artist for celebrities who want to show off their natural beauty. “My specialty is natural glam,” she says.
Even though she started doing make up full-time just five years ago, she already has two Met Galas under her belt. She even managed to perfect two clients each time.
BLACK GLAM: Costume designer Brea Stinson reveals how she built her enviable empire
“My first Met Gala was with Lena Waithe and Winnie Harlow and it was also their first Met Gala as well,” she explained. “I did Kiki Layne and Lena [Waithe] this year.”
Find out how Rebekah Aladdin pulled it off and get her advice for aspiring makeup artists in the interview above.
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MIT’s fleet of autonomous boats can now shapeshift
MIT’s fleet of robotic boats has been updated with new capabilities to “shapeshift,” by autonomously disconnecting and reassembling into a variety of configurations, to form floating structures in Amsterdam’s many canals.
The autonomous boats — rectangular hulls equipped with sensors, thrusters, microcontrollers, GPS modules, cameras, and other hardware — are being developed as part of the ongoing “Roboat” project between MIT and the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS Institute). The project is led by MIT professors Carlo Ratti, Daniela Rus, Dennis Frenchman, and Andrew Whittle. In the future, Amsterdam wants the roboats to cruise its 165 winding canals, transporting goods and people, collecting trash, or self-assembling into “pop-up” platforms — such as bridges and stages — to help relieve congestion on the city’s busy streets.
In 2016, MIT researchers tested a roboat prototype that could move forward, backward, and laterally along a preprogrammed path in the canals. Last year, researchers designed low-cost, 3-D-printed, one-quarter scale versions of the boats, which were more efficient and agile, and came equipped with advanced trajectory-tracking algorithms. In June, they created an autonomous latching mechanism that let the boats target and clasp onto each other, and keep trying if they fail.
In a new paper presented at the last week’s IEEE International Symposium on Multi-Robot and Multi-Agent Systems, the researchers describe an algorithm that enables the roboats to smoothly reshape themselves as efficiently as possible. The algorithm handles all the planning and tracking that enables groups of roboat units to unlatch from one another in one set configuration, travel a collision-free path, and reattach to their appropriate spot on the new set configuration.
In demonstrations in an MIT pool and in computer simulations, groups of linked roboat units rearranged themselves from straight lines or squares into other configurations, such as rectangles and “L” shapes. The experimental transformations only took a few minutes. More complex shapeshifts may take longer, depending on the number of moving units — which could be dozens — and differences between the two shapes.
“We’ve enabled the roboats to now make and break connections with other roboats, with hopes of moving activities on the streets of Amsterdam to the water,” says Rus, director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “A set of boats can come together to form linear shapes as pop-up bridges, if we need to send materials or people from one side of a canal to the other. Or, we can create pop-up wider platforms for flower or food markets.”
Joining Rus on the paper are: Ratti, director of MIT’s Senseable City Lab, and, also from the lab, first author Banti Gheneti, Ryan Kelly, and Drew Meyers, all researchers; postdoc Shinkyu Park; and research fellow Pietro Leoni.
Collision-free trajectories
For their work, the researchers had to tackle challenges with autonomous planning, tracking, and connecting groups of roboat units. Giving each unit unique capabilities to, for instance, locate each other, agree on how to break apart and reform, and then move around freely, would require complex communication and control techniques that could make movement inefficient and slow.
To enable smoother operations, the researchers developed two types of units: coordinators and workers. One or more workers connect to one coordinator to form a single entity, called a “connected-vessel platform” (CVP). All coordinator and worker units have four propellers, a wireless-enabled microcontroller, and several automated latching mechanisms and sensing systems that enable them to link together.
Coordinators, however, also come equipped with GPS for navigation, and an inertial measurement unit (IMU), which computes localization, pose, and velocity. Workers only have actuators that help the CVP steer along a path. Each coordinator is aware of and can wirelessly communicate with all connected workers. Structures comprise multiple CVPs, and individual CVPs can latch onto one another to form a larger entity.
During shapeshifting, all connected CVPs in a structure compare the geometric differences between its initial shape and new shape. Then, each CVP determines if it stays in the same spot and if it needs to move. Each moving CVP is then assigned a time to disassemble and a new position in the new shape.
Each CVP uses a custom trajectory-planning technique to compute a way to reach its target position without interruption, while optimizing the route for speed. To do so, each CVP precomputes all collision-free regions around the moving CVP as it rotates and moves away from a stationary one.
After precomputing those collision-free regions, the CVP then finds the shortest trajectory to its final destination, which still keeps it from hitting the stationary unit. Notably, optimization techniques are used to make the whole trajectory-planning process very efficient, with the precomputation taking little more than 100 milliseconds to find and refine safe paths. Using data from the GPS and IMU, the coordinator then estimates its pose and velocity at its center of mass, and wirelessly controls all the propellers of each unit and moves into the target location.
In their experiments, the researchers tested three-unit CVPs, consisting of one coordinator and two workers, in several different shapeshifting scenarios. Each scenario involved one CVP unlatching from the initial shape and moving and relatching to a target spot around a second CVP.
Three CVPs, for instance, rearranged themselves from a connected straight line — where they were latched together at their sides — into a straight line connected at front and back, as well as an “L.” In computer simulations, up to 12 roboat units rearranged themselves from, say, a rectangle into a square or from a solid square into a Z-like shape.
Scaling up
Experiments were conducted on quarter-sized roboat units, which measure about 1 meter long and half a meter wide. But the researchers believe their trajectory-planning algorithm will scale well in controlling full-sized units, which will measure about 4 meters long and 2 meters wide.
In about a year, the researchers plan to use the roboats to form into a dynamic “bridge” across a 60-meter canal between the NEMO Science Museum in Amsterdam’s city center and an area that’s under development. The project, called RoundAround, will employ roboats to sail in a continuous circle across the canal, picking up and dropping off passengers at docks and stopping or rerouting when they detect anything in the way. Currently, walking around that waterway takes about 10 minutes, but the bridge can cut that time to around two minutes.
“This will be the world’s first bridge comprised of a fleet of autonomous boats,” Ratti says. “A regular bridge would be super expensive, because you have boats going through, so you’d need to have a mechanical bridge that opens up or a very high bridge. But we can connect two sides of canal [by using] autonomous boats that become dynamic, responsive architecture that float on the water.”
To reach that goal, the researchers are further developing the roboats to ensure they can safely hold people, and are robust to all weather conditions, such as heavy rain. They’re also making sure the roboats can effectively connect to the sides of the canals, which can vary greatly in structure and design.
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New science blooms after star researchers die, study finds
The famed quantum physicist Max Planck had an idiosyncratic view about what spurred scientific progress: death. That is, Planck thought, new concepts generally take hold after older scientists with entrenched ideas vanish from the discipline.
“A great scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it,” Planck once wrote.
Now a new study co-authored by MIT economist Pierre Azoulay, an expert on the dynamics of scientific research, concludes that Planck was right. In many areas of the life sciences, at least, the deaths of prominent researchers are often followed by a surge in highly cited research by newcomers to those fields.
Indeed, when star scientists die, their subfields see a subsequent 8.6 percent increase, on average, of articles by researchers who have not previously collaborated with those star scientists. Moreover, those papers published by the newcomers to these fields are much more likely to be influential and highly cited than other pieces of research.
“The conclusion of this paper is not that stars are bad,” says Azoulay, who has co-authored a new paper detailing the study’s findings. “It’s just that, once safely ensconsed at the top of their fields, maybe they tend to overstay their welcome.”
The paper, “Does Science Advance one Funeral at a Time?” is co-authored by Azoulay, the International Programs Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management; Christian Fons-Rosen, an assistant professor of economics at the University of California at Merced; and Joshua Graff Zivin, a professor of economics at the University of California at San Diego and faculty member in the university’s School of Global Policy and Strategy. It is forthcoming in the American Economic Review.
To conduct the study, the researchers used a database of life scientists that Azoulay and Graff Zivin have been building for well over a decade. In it, the researchers chart the careers of life scientists, looking at accomplishments that include funding awards, published papers and the citations of those papers, and patent statistics.
In this case, Azoulay, Graff Zivin, and Fons-Rosen studied what occurred after the unexpected deaths of 452 life scientists, who were still active in their disciplines. In addition to the 8.6 percent increase in papers by new entrants to those subfields, there was a 20.7 percent decrease in papers by the rather smaller number of scientists who had previously co-authored papers with the star scientists.
Overall, Azoulay notes, the study provides a window into the power structures of scientific disciplines. Even if well-established scientists are not intentionally blocking the work of researchers with alternate ideas, a group of tightly connected colleagues may wield considerable influence over journals and grant awards. In those cases, “it’s going to be harder for those outsiders to make a mark on the domain,” Azoulay notes.
“The fact that if you’re successful, you get to set the intellectual agenda of your field, that is part of the incentive system of science, and people do extraordinary positive things in the hope of getting to that position,” Azoulay notes. “It’s just that, once they get there, over time, maybe they tend to discount ‘foreign’ ideas too quickly and for too long.”
Thus what the researchers call “Planck’s Principle” serves as an unexpected — and tragic — mechanism for diversifying bioscience research.
The researchers note that in referencing Planck, they are extending his ideas to a slightly different setting than the one he himself was describing. In his writing, Planck was discussing the birth of quantum physics — the kind of epochal, paradigm-setting shift that rarely occurs in science. The current study, Azoulay notes, examines what happens in everyday “normal science,” in the phrase of philosopher Thomas Kuhn.
The process of bringing new ideas into science, and then hanging on to them, is only to be expected in many areas of research, according to Azoulay. Today’s seemingly stodgy research veterans were once themselves innovators facing an old guard.
“They had to hoist themselves atop the field in the first place, when presumably they were [fighting] the same thing,” Azoulay says. “It’s the circle of life.”
Or, in this case, the circle of life science.
The research received support from the National Science Foundation, the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, and the Severo Ochoa Programme for Centres of Excellence in R&D.
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