After the death of Zoe Quinn's alleged abuser, the trolls have escalated their racket, raising the question of whose mental health society tries to protect.
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Intro Video
Friday, September 6, 2019
DJI Osmo Mobile 3 Review: My New Favorite Gimbal
South Africa's Refiloe Jane signs for AC Milan Women
Robert Mugabe: Zimbabweans remember the 'liberator and oppressor'
Caster Semenya signs for South African football team
Liberia expel midfielder Tonia Tisdell for indiscipline
Somalia win first ever World Cup qualifier
Madagascar withdraw from South Africa friendly
In pictures: The life of Robert Mugabe
Robert Mugabe: From liberator to tyrant
Obituary: Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's first post-independence leader
Thursday, September 5, 2019
Robert Mugabe, former president of Zimbabwe, has died age 95
Zimbabwe ex-president Robert Mugabe dies aged 95
Rihanna Secures Additional $50 Million Funding for Savage X Fenty Brand
We haven’t heard any new music from Rihanna in quite some time but don’t think that means she isn’t creating. The Bajan singer has secured $50 million in new funds from investors for her celebrity fashion line, Savage X Fenty.
According to The Wall Street Journal, her fashion line received monies from Jay-Z and his venture firm, Marcy Venture Partners L.L.C., as well as funding from Avenir Growth Capital. This latest round of finances brings the total amount to $70 million from investors. The Journal cited Savage X Fenty’s strong performance in its freshman year: annual revenues are projected to hit $150 million and average annual customer spend is beating market leader Victoria’s Secret.
After Forbes revealed that Rihanna is the richest female musician with a net worth of approximately $600 million, she is definitely claiming her stake and reaching for that billionaire status.
Savage X Fenty started in May 2018 as a joint venture between Rihanna and Techstyle Fashion Group; although this wasn’t her first endeavor—she launched her Fenty Beauty cosmetics sometime in 2017 to immediate success. And this past June, she made an announcement that she will collaborate with LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton to produce a Fenty luxury fashion label as well.
It was also announced recently that Amazon Prime Video will be streaming the premiere of Rihanna’s Savage X Fenty Show. That will take place Sept. 20, featuring her new Fall/Winter 2019 lingerie collection. The Savage X Fenty special will show the audience the behind the scenes of the making of the show and will be “a one-of-a-kind event blending music, fashion, and culture” with surprises and guest performances, according to a press release. It will be archived on Amazon Prime Video so customers can relive the experience over and over again.
With all the business moves she has made, will she ever have the urge or desire to record anymore? Apparently, all she does is “work, work, work, work, work.”
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When rats work to protect human safety
During a trip to Brussels in 2013, Jia Hui Lee decided to visit the Royal Museum of the Armed Forces and Military History. While there, he stumbled upon a poster depicting a rat on the ground next to a partially visible land mine. It was April 4, International Mine Awareness Day, and the poster was part of a display about the use of rodents to detect land mines.
“When you think about war, you think about these big technological tools, vehicles, and systems. Then to see this image of a rat, it was quite jarring and piqued my interest immediately,” says Lee, a fifth-year doctoral student in MIT’s History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS) program.
He had been thinking about humanity’s relationship with other animals and the environment during the era of climate change, and the display provided the kernel of his PhD thesis, which looks at human-rodent interactions in Tanzania, where humans are training rats to detect landmines, as well as tuberculosis.
As a queer man of color, Lee has frequently questioned ideas about power, privilege, and people’s places in society, including his own. With his graduate work, he is extending these questions to consider cross-species interactions and what they say about the impact of technology on society and politics. Throughout his studies, the ethical considerations of anthropology, including who gets to speak for the experiences of others and what experiences are studied in the first place, have remained central to Lee’s work.
Helpers, friends, vermin, enemies
For his thesis, Lee completed 15 months of field research in Tanzania examining how trainers interacted with, talked about, and ultimately conditioned rats in order to get them to find land mines. He later spent two months in Cambodia to see how the animals worked in the field. The Tanzanian-trained rats were deployed in an area to clear possible land mines, and after they determined that there were no active mines in that site, Lee took a walk through the area. He jokes that the fact that he’s still alive to talk about the experience demonstrates the success of the training.
Lee is very careful about how he talks about the nonhuman animals in his research, to acknowledge the cross-cultural differences in how humans think about them. For instance, many people in Tanzania consider rats to be intelligent and helpful, whereas in New York City, for example, they are more commonly viewed as vermin. Likewise, Lee notes that in the U.S. and European countries, dogs are generally viewed as humans’ best friends and treated as part of the family. In places like Tanzania and Kenya, however, he says dogs are often viewed as vicious and fierce, because of the historic use of dogs by colonial British police officers to violently control anticolonial protesters, and later as guards against theft.
“The knowledge I hope to produce out of this research is in conversation with zoology, biology, and cognitive science. It includes histories of human-animal interactions which are usually left out in other kinds of disciplines,” Lee says.
His focus on East Africa grew in part out of previous research on the growing science and technology markets in the region. Although the technology scene in East Africa is flourishing, he notes, this growth doesn’t get the same recognition as tech hubs in the West.
“You see a really exciting embrace of science and technology in this region. It’s interesting to think about these types of science and technology projects in East Africa — not Cambridge, Massachusetts, or London. It’s really important to think of East Africa as a location of critical thinking and knowledge production,” he says.
Equity on campus
As a person who is concerned with power and privilege, it is no surprise that Lee has advocated on behalf of the Institute’s graduate community. As a graduate fellow for the Institute Community and Equity Office, Lee worked with Professor Ed Bertschinger and other fellows to find ways to candidly discuss the state of diversity and inclusion at MIT.
“Over the course of a semester, we hosted discussion lunches that included students, staff, and faculty to share best practices in different departments that foster inclusion at the Institute,” Lee says.
He also served on the Working Group on Graduate Student Tuition Models to gather data about grad students’ experiences with some of the Institute’s funding structures. He compiled the stories of various members of the graduate community to present to the Institute’s administration in order to demonstrate the ways that students’ well-being could be enhanced. MIT’s senior leadership has now begun seeking ways to alleviate financial insecurity faced by some of the Institute’s graduate students and has also launched a new effort to better support those with families.
Citizen of the world
Lee has wide-ranging interests in history and culture, and one of his favorite things to do in his free time is to walk around and analyze Boston’s architecture. After living in the area on and off for about a decade, he says he really enjoys getting to know Boston and its physical changes intimately. He thinks it’s fascinating to think about the city’s transformation from a part of the sea hundreds of years ago to the urban hub it is now. Throughout his travels the past few years, he has picked up bits of art and architectural history that have informed his understanding of some of Boston’s iconic landmarks.
“In Boston, there's a lot of Italian influences on certain architecture, so the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum looks like an Italian Renaissance palazzo, which is so quirky. But then Back Bay, especially Commonwealth Avenue, was designed to resemble a French boulevard,” Lee explains.
Beyond Boston and Tanzania, Lee has been all over the world, and picked up various languages in the process. He speaks Malay, Swahili, French, English, Hindi, and Urdu, and a bit of several Chinese dialects. In his adventures, Lee has also recognized the value of being alone, and he advocates for solo travel. It invites unique experiences, he says, which for him has included being brought to dance clubs and even a Tanzanian wedding.
“I feel like the likelihood of randomly meeting a person or stumbling into an event or a festival is so much higher than if you're traveling with somebody. And when you're alone, I think people do draw you into whatever events they are going to,” Lee says.
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Africa's week in pictures: 30 August-5 September 2019
Facebook Dating Arrives in the US. Here's How It Works
Sonos Move Portable Speaker: Price, Specs, Release Date
How YACHT Used Machine Learning to Create Their New Album
Cold War Analogies are Warping Tech Policy
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