Christopher Wylie was the architect of Cambridge Analytica’s big plans and also its whistle-blower. His new book explores how he ended up being both.
from Wired https://ift.tt/2OZ6uk3
via
Intro Video
Tuesday, October 15, 2019
A Trove of Mouse Data Points Toward Brain-Computer Interfaces
WIRED25: Stories of People Who Are Racing to Save Us
It’s Time to Push Tech Forward, and Rebuild What It Broke
'Tortured' and shackled pupils freed from Nigerian Islamic school
Mohamed Salah: Electronics engineer stands in for striker as lookalike
Monday, October 14, 2019
CASTING NEWS: Zoe Kravitz to play Catwoman in new Batman flick
It looks like Zoe Kravitz is gearing up for a killer role and we are here for it.
According to reports, the actress has nabbed the role of Catwoman in Matt Reeves’ upcoming film The Batman.
Twilight star, Robert Pattinson, has already signed on th portray the Dark Knight in the Warner Bros. flick that is set to begin filming in January.
According to TheWrap, Jeffrey Wright is in talks to play Commissioner Gordon and Jonah Hill is in negotiattions to take on the role of The Riddler.
We can’t wait to see how Zoe Kravitz does as the feline femme fatale and this won’t be the first time a Black woman has taken on the iconic role. Eartha Kitt played Catwoman in the 1960s TV series and Halle Barry took on the character in 2004 in Catwoman.
Wedding bells or not? Did Zoe Kravitz get secretly married?
Oddly enough, Zoe Kravitz revealed that she couldn’t even get an audition for Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises during a 2015 interview with Nylon.
Apparently, her race was the problem.
“In the last Batman movie [The Dark Knight Rises], they told me that I couldn’t get an audition for a small role they were casting because they weren’t ‘going urban,’” she said. “It was like, ‘What does that have to do with anything?’ I have to play the role like, ‘Yo, what’s up, Batman? What’s going on wit chu?’”
Looks like she’ll be getting the last laugh.
The Batman is due out June 25, 2021.
The post CASTING NEWS: Zoe Kravitz to play Catwoman in new Batman flick appeared first on theGrio.
from theGrio https://ift.tt/2ML7Jk5
via
3 Questions: Alan Lightman’s new novel about Cambodia and family
MIT’s Alan Lightman is a physicist who made a leap to becoming a writer — one with an unusually broad range of interests. In his novels, nonfiction books, and essays, Lightman, a professor of the practice of the humanities at MIT, has explored many topics, from science to society. His new novel, “Three Flames,” recently published by Counterpoint Press, follows the fortunes of a family in post-civil war Cambodia. It’s a topic Lightman knows well: He is the founder the Harpswell Foundation, which works to empower a new generation of female leaders in Cambodia and across Southeast Asia. Lightman recently talked to MIT News about “Three Flames.”
Q: What are the origins of ‘Three Flames”?
A: I’ve been working in Cambodia for 15 years, and I’ve spent a lot of time there, and I’ve heard a lot of stories of families, particularly [about] the residue of the Khmer Rouge genocide in the mid-1970s. Just about anybody you meet in Cambodia today has a relative who was killed or starved or tortured over that period of time. So it’s affected everybody in the entire country. And I have been very interested in how a country can recover its humanity after that kind of devastation, when family members were turned against each other. The Khmer Rouge soldiers rounded up anybody that they had the slightest suspicion about, and encouraged families to turn in anybody that they had any suspicion about. It disrupted families and led to an every-person-for-themselves mentality, which still hasn’t disappeared.
In the face of all that destruction and moral degradation, I also heard stories of courage and resilience and forgiveness. After many years, I thought I was beginning to understand the culture enough to begin writing stories about it. But I waited 10 years before I started writing anything. You have to understand a culture much more deeply to write fiction about it than to write nonfiction, because fiction involves small daily mannerisms, which you have to get right. And you don’t pick that up from a couple of trips.
Q: There are many connected stories in this novel, and many distinctive characters. What is the main theme, and how did you weave that in throughout different parts of the book?
A: The overriding story is the struggle that women have in a male-dominated society. And that, of course, is true not only in Cambodia but in many countries, even the U.S. Almost every chapter of the book has that struggle in it. … A number of the [other] themes in the book are universal. I hope the themes of redemption, and forgiveness, and revenge, and women’s struggles will go beyond Cambodia.
Five years ago, I wrote the first chapter of the book, about the mother, Ryna. When I wrote that, it was a stand-alone short story [published in the journal Daily Lit, and as an Amazon Kindle single]. In that story, I mention other members of the family. One daughter is married off to a rubber merchant; another one went to Phnom Penh to work to pay off a family debt; the son is kind of a ne’er-do-well; the father is very ignorant, sexist, and condescending. About a year after writing the first story, I began wondering about the other family members. Once you write a character in fiction, they come to life and stay in your head. And so I decided I would write a story about each member of the family. Of course, I had to interweave all the stories, as they involve the same family.
Q: How did you then assemble those elements into a cohesive story? It must have been fairly complicated to place these parts of the story into a larger narrative.
A: After I had written the book, I decided to place the stories in the order where they would have the most dramatic impact. For the story about Pich, the father, I wanted to wait until that character had been developed to show how he became the person he is, because none of us are all good or bad. The story about Nita [a daughter of Pich], I wanted to save until the later part of the book because it’s such a shocking story. The story about Srepov has to come last, because she’s the only hope for the future. The date of each story is when the most dramatic action happened to each character, the most influential [moment] in shaping who they are.
[In books], there are two times that are important. There’s chronological time, and then the time of readerly experience. Taking the Pich story as an example, in my view as a writer it’s more powerful to first see Pich as he is today, an unsympathetic, dictatorial, cruel father, and to even grow to hate him. Then, only later in the book, we see him in childhood and see the forces that shaped him as he is. To save the childhood portrait for later, that’s a more powerful experience for the reader.
from MIT News https://ift.tt/2Big9tz
via
Texas officer charged with Atatiana Jefferson’s murder, resigns after shooting
A white Fort Worth police officer who shot and killed a black woman through a back window of her home while responding to a call about an open front door was charged with murder on Monday after resigning from the force.
Aaron Dean, 34, was booked into jail on a murder charge Monday afternoon. The police chief said earlier in the day that he acted without justification and would have been fired if he didn’t quit.
Police bodycam video showed Dean approaching the door of the home where Atatiana Jefferson, 28, was caring for her 8-year-old nephew early Saturday. He then walked around the side of the house, pushed through a gate into the fenced-off backyard and fired through the glass a split-second after shouting at Jefferson to show her hands.
Dean was not heard identifying himself as police on the video, and Interim Police Chief Ed Kraus said there was no sign Dean or the other officer who responded even knocked on the front door.
“Nobody looked at this video and said that there’s any doubt that this officer acted inappropriately,” Kraus said.
Earlier in the day, Jefferson’s family had demanded that Dean, a member of the force for 1½ years, be fired and arrested.
“Why this man is not in handcuffs is a source of continued agitation for this family and for this community,” family attorney Lee Merritt said, hours before Dean was booked into jail.
Police went to Jefferson’s home about 2:25 a.m. after a neighbor called a non-emergency line to report a door ajar. In a statement over the weekend, the department said officers saw someone near a window inside the home and that one of them drew his gun and fired after “perceiving a threat.”
The video showed Dean shouting, “Put your hands up! Show me your hands!” and immediately firing.
Jefferson was staying up late, playing video games with her nephew, when she was killed, according to the family’s attorney.
As for what, exactly, led Dean to open fire, the police chief said: “I cannot make sense of why she had to lose her life.” The chief said Dean resigned without talking to internal affairs investigators.
The video included images of a gun inside a bedroom. Kraus said he did not know whether Jefferson was holding the weapon. But he said the mere fact she had a gun shouldn’t be considered unusual in Texas.
“We’re homeowners in Texas,” the police chief said. “Most of us, if we thought we had somebody outside our house that shouldn’t be and we had access to a firearm, we would be acting very similarly to how she was acting.” Kraus said that, in hindsight, releasing the images of the weapon was “a bad thing to do.”
Mayor Betsy Price called the gun “irrelevant.”
“Atatiana was in her own home, caring for her 8-year-old nephew. She was a victim,” Price said.
Texas has had a “castle doctrine” law on the books since 2007 that gives people a stronger legal defense to use deadly force in their homes. The law was backed at the time by the National Rifle Association and is similar to “stand your ground” measures across the U.S. that say a person has no duty to retreat from an intruder.
Fort Worth is about 30 miles (50 kilometers) west of Dallas, where another high-profile police shooting occurred last year.
In that case, white Dallas officer Amber Guyger shot and killed her black neighbor Botham Jean inside his own apartment after Guyger said she mistook his place for her own. Guyger, 31, was sentenced this month to 10 years in prison.
A large crowd gathered outside Jefferson’s home Sunday night for a vigil after demonstrations briefly stopped traffic on Interstate 35. A single bullet hole was visible in the window of the single-story, freshly painted purple home, and floral tributes and stuffed animals piled up in the street.
The police chief said Dean could face state charges and that he had submitted a case to the FBI to review for possible federal civil rights charges.
Dean has not yet hired an attorney but will have one provided with financial support from the state’s largest police union, the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas, according to Charley Wilkison, executive director.
Relations with the public have been strained after other recent Fort Worth police shootings. In June, the department released footage of officers killing a man who ignored repeated orders to drop his handgun. He was the fourth person Fort Worth police had fired upon in 10 days.
Of the nine officer-involved shootings so far this year in Fort Worth, five targeted African Americans and six resulted in death, according to department data.
Nearly two-thirds of the department’s 1,100 officers are white, just over 20% are Hispanic, and about 10% are black. The city of nearly 900,000 people is about 40% white, 35% Hispanic and 19% black.
Calling the shooting “a pivotal moment in our city,” the mayor said she was ordering a top-to-bottom review of the police force and vowed to “rebuild a sense of trust within the city and with our police department.”
Jefferson was a 2014 graduate of Xavier University in New Orleans and earned a bachelor’s degree in biology. She was working in pharmaceutical equipment sales and was considering going to medical school, according to the family’s lawyer.
___
Bleed reported from Little Rock, Arkansas.
___
Associated Press writers Nomaan Merchant in Houston and Adam Kealoha Causey in Oklahoma City contributed to this report.
___
For the latest updates: https://ift.tt/2MdpvNC
The post Texas officer charged with Atatiana Jefferson’s murder, resigns after shooting appeared first on theGrio.
from theGrio https://ift.tt/2IPhvjZ
via
Libra’s Ranks Shrink Again as Crypto Group Appoints a Board
New Birth Missionary Baptist church will re-direct Kanye’s hefty donation
New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Georgia is taking a financial contribution it received from Kanye West, and giving it to cash-strapped Morris Brown College to help establish scholarships.
READ MORE: Kanye West brings Sunday Service to Howard University, warns crowd to avoid ‘slave nets’
On Sunday, the Metro Atlanta based church’s venerable new pastor Rev. Jamal Harrison Bryant announced that the Grammy award winning rapper wrote a check to the church when he paid a surprise visit during a pop-up service Sept. 15, as part of his “Sunday Service”.
Originally the generous donation was slated to be redirected to Brown’s general scholarship fund, in honor of Donda West, the rapper’s late mother who worked for some 31 years in higher education, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.
What happen @newbirthmbc today was indescribable! morrisbrownatl came through to close out homecoming @SelmaUntold was in the building 69 souls were saved, established college scholarship endowments and the glory… https://t.co/6rrXJKEEqD
— jamalbryant (@jamalhbryant) October 13, 2019
However, later in a periscope live, Pastor Bryant said that the scholarship will be earmarked for English students. Donda West, an English professor, died at the age of 58 from complications after a plastic surgery procedure. She started her career in education in the 1970s teaching at Morris Brown an obituary states.
“I went into prayer, and it dawned in me in prayer that Dr. Donda West, who was the mother of Kanye West, is a former professor at Morris Brown College,” Bryant said during Sunday’s service.
READ MORE: Kanye West brings Sunday Service to Howard University, warns crowd to avoid ‘slave nets’
The amount of the benevolent gift hasn’t been announced just yet.
With a decade of fiscal woes, Morris Brown, an HBCU, is still trying to rise from the ashes and steady itself after losing its accreditation in 2002.
Kevin James recently took the leadership position as interim president on March 1 and says he has plans to seek accreditation for the college from the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools (TRACS), a federally recognized accreditation organization, according to Gale Gay, a spokeswoman for the school.
On Sunday, James was on hand and spoke with New Birth’s congregation and announced that the school was able to secure approval from the Nonpublic Postsecondary Education Commission as a higher learning institution.
“When you lose your accreditation, you close,” James said Sunday during service. “But for some reason, for the past 17 years, Morris Brown College has been able to survive. We will be the first historically black college in history … since 1837 to actually come back and be fully accredited under these circumstances.”
James also called the recent action a “major step” toward accreditation.
READ MORE: Queen Latifah to receive Harvard Black culture award
“I know what Dr. Donda West represented while at Morris Brown, and her mind for African American literature, was to empower, equip and engage students to be something radical that can change community and change society,” Bryant said.
The post New Birth Missionary Baptist church will re-direct Kanye’s hefty donation appeared first on theGrio.
from theGrio https://ift.tt/2VHPgsD
via
Nation’s Largest Black Bank Launches Campaign to Close the Racial Wealth Gap
It’s been more than 150 years, but black Americans still remain chained by the legacy of slavery. One of the most glaring effects of America’s original sin is the racial wealth gap. Because of centuries of economic oppression that intentionally barred African Americans from access to capital, white families today hold nearly 10 times the amount of wealth as black families as the median family wealth for white Americans is $171,000 compared to just $17,600 for blacks. Meanwhile, black Americans hold just 3% of the nation’s total wealth, despite being 13% of the population, according to the New York Times #1619 Project. That’s why the work of black banks is so important.
To address the systemic issue, OneUnited Bank launched BankBlack X, a nationwide campaign that aims to close the racial wealth gap. The purpose of the campaign is to galvanize and educate black folks about money and make financial literacy a core value of the black community.
Related: Call the racial wealth gap what it is: a “pustulant cavity of economic apartheid.”
“We have many weapons to affect change, starting with the truth. The reality is that almost everything we have been taught about Black Americans and money has been wrong,” said Teri Williams, president and COO of OneUnited, in a press release. “We have been bamboozled and led astray…for 400 years. We need to share the truth to make financial literacy a core value of our community!”
According to the bank’s website, BankBlack X will use technology and tap new socially conscious leaders to promote a sense of black pride and the achievements of African Americans. “Despite facing discrimination for over 400 years, black Americans have been able to advance equality, for themselves and other communities that face rampant discrimination,” reads the press release.
BankBlack X will offer tools and resources to promote financial literacy, including the free online Financial Education Center, the new BankBlack Card, and new features like BankBlack Early Pay, which enables customers to get paid two days early. The Bank is also partnering with Sirius Radio Urban View to hold a town hall meeting on the New York Times #1619Project on November 5..
OneUnited Bank is the largest black-owned bank in the U.S. and ranks as no. 1 on BLACK ENTERPRISE’s BE 100‘s Bank List, with $656 million in assets. Founded in 1968, the financial institution has been at the forefront of promoting black economic empowerment. Earlier this year, the bank launched “The Queen Card,” a Visa debit card with the image of an iconic black woman, as part of the bank’s Royalty Campaign. In 2017, the bank partnered with The Breakfast Club to raise over $700,000 to support social justice initiatives and activists. Back in 2014, it launched the Unity Visa Card, to help people rebuild their credit through a secured credit card as an alternative to a prepaid debit card.
from Black Enterprise https://ift.tt/35yVFuy
via
'Fortnite' Disappeared Over the Weekend
Study reveals how mucus tames microbes
More than 200 square meters of our bodies — including the digestive tract, lungs, and urinary tract — are lined with mucus. In recent years, scientists have found some evidence that mucus is not just a physical barrier that traps bacteria and viruses, but it can also disarm pathogens and prevent them from causing infections.
A new study from MIT reveals that glycans — branched sugar molecules found in mucus — are responsible for most of this microbe-taming. There are hundreds of different glycans in mucus, and the MIT team discovered that these molecules can prevent bacteria from communicating with each other and forming infectious biofilms, effectively rendering them harmless.
“What we have in mucus is a therapeutic gold mine,” says Katharina Ribbeck, the Mark Hyman, Jr. Career Development Professor of Biological Engineering at MIT. “These glycans have biological functions that are very broad and sophisticated. They have the ability to regulate how microbes behave and really tune their identity.”
In this study, which appears today in Nature Microbiology, the researchers focused on glycans’ interactions with Pseudomonas aeruginosa, an opportunistic pathogen that can cause infections in cystic fibrosis patients and people with compromised immune systems. Work now underway in Ribbeck’s lab has shown that glycans can regulate the behavior of other microbes as well.
The lead author of the Nature Microbiology paper is MIT graduate student Kelsey Wheeler.
Powerful defenders
The average person produces several liters of mucus every day, and until recently this mucus was thought to function primarily as a lubricant and a physical barrier. However, Ribbeck and others have shown that mucus can actually interfere with bacterial behavior, preventing microbes from attaching to surfaces and communicating with one another.
In the new study, Ribbeck wanted to test whether glycans were involved in mucus’ ability to control the behavior of microbes. These sugar molecules, a type of oligosaccharide, attach to proteins called mucins, the gel-forming building blocks of mucus, to form a bottlebrush-like structure. Mucus-associated glycans have been little studied, but Ribbeck thought they might play a major role in the microbe-disarming activity she had previously seen from mucus.
To explore that possibility, she isolated glycans and exposed them to Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Upon exposure to mucin glycans, the bacteria underwent broad shifts in behavior that rendered them less harmful to the host. For example, they no longer produced toxins, attached to or killed host cells, or expressed genes essential for bacterial communication.
This microbe-disarming activity had powerful consequences on the ability of this bacterium to establish infections. Ribbeck has shown that treatment of Pseudomonas-infected burn wounds with mucins and mucin glycans reduces bacterial proliferation, indicating the therapeutic potential of these virulence-neutralizing agents.
“We’ve seen that intact mucins have regulatory effects and can cause behavioral switches in a whole range of pathogens, but now we can pinpoint the molecular mechanism and the entities that are responsible for this, which are the glycans,” Ribbeck says.
In these experiments, the researchers used collections of hundreds of glycans, but they now plan to study the effects of individual glycans, which may interact specifically with different pathways or different microbes.
“This is an important paper, as it shows that bacterial biofilm formation is inhibited by normal mucus, and especially its glycans. [Ribbeck] has now once more shown that normal mucus has beneficial effects on bacteria and that mucus is more complex than mostly appreciated,” says Gunnar Hansson, a professor of medical biochemistry at the University of Gothenburg, who was not involved in the study.
Bacterial interactions
Pseudomonas aeruginosa is just one of many opportunistic pathogens that healthy mucus keeps in check. Ribbeck is now studying the role of glycans in regulating other pathogens, including Streptococcus and the fungus Candida albicans, and she is also working on identifying receptors on microbe cell surfaces that interact with glycans.
Her work on Streptococcus has shown that glycans can block horizontal gene transfer, a process that microbes often use to spread genes for drug resistance.
Ribbeck and other researchers are now interested in using what they have learned about mucins and glycans to develop artificial mucus, which could offer a new way to treat diseases stemming from lost or defective mucus.
Harnessing the powers of mucus could also lead to new ways to treat antibiotic-resistant infections, because it offers a complementary strategy to traditional antibiotics, Ribbeck says.
“What we find here is that nature has evolved the ability to disarm difficult microbes, instead of killing them. This would not only help limit selective pressure for developing resistance, because they are not under pressure to find ways to survive, but it should also help create and maintain a diverse microbiome,” she says.
Ribbeck suspects that glycans in mucus also play a key role in determining the composition of the microbiome — the trillions of bacterial cells that live inside the human body. Many of these microbes are beneficial to their human hosts, and glycans may be providing them with nutrients they need, or otherwise helping them to flourish, she says. In this way, mucus-associated glycans are similar to the many oligosaccharides found in human milk, which also contains a wide array of sugars that can regulate microbe behavior.
“This is a theme that is likely at play in many systems where the goal is to shape and manipulate communities inside the body, not just in humans but throughout the animal kingdom,” Ribbeck says.
The research was funded by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, and the MIT Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation.
from MIT News https://ift.tt/2MEMBM3
via
Astronomers use giant galaxy cluster as X-ray magnifying lens
Astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have used a massive cluster of galaxies as an X-ray magnifying glass to peer back in time, to nearly 9.4 billion years ago. In the process, they spotted a tiny dwarf galaxy in its very first, high-energy stages of star formation.
While galaxy clusters have been used to magnify objects at optical wavelengths, this is the first time scientists have leveraged these massive gravitational giants to zoom in on extreme, distant, X-ray-emitting phenomena.
What they detected appears to be a blue speck of an infant galaxy, about 1/10,000 the size of our Milky Way, in the midst of churning out its first stars — supermassive, cosmically short-lived objects that emit high-energy X-rays, which the researchers detected in the form of a bright blue arc.
“It’s this little blue smudge, meaning it’s a very small galaxy that contains a lot of super-hot, very massive young stars that formed recently,” says Matthew Bayliss, a research scientist in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. “This galaxy is similar to the very first galaxies that formed in the universe … the kind of which no one has ever seen in X-ray in the distant universe before.”
Bayliss says the detection of this single, distant galaxy is proof that scientists can use galaxy clusters as natural X-ray magnifiers, to pick out extreme, highly energetic phenomena in the universe’s early history.
“With this technique, we could, in the future, zoom in on a distant galaxy and age-date different parts of it — to say, this part has stars that formed 200 million years ago, versus another part that formed 50 million years ago, and pick them apart in a way you cannot otherwise do,” says Bayliss, who will be moving on to the University of Cincinnati as an assistant professor of physics.
He and his co-authors, including Michael McDonald, assistant professor of physics at MIT, have published their results today in the journal Nature Astronomy.
A candle in the light
Galaxy clusters are the most massive objects in the universe, composed of thousands of galaxies, all bound together by gravity as one enormous, powerful force. Galaxy clusters are so massive, and their gravitational pull is so strong, that they can distort the fabric of space-time, bending the universe and any surrounding light, much like an elephant would stretch and warp a trapeze net.
Scientists have used galaxy clusters as cosmic magnifying glasses, with a technique known as gravitational lensing. The idea is that if scientists can approximate the mass of a galaxy cluster, they can estimate its gravitational effects on any surrounding light, as well as the angle at which a cluster may deflect that light.
For instance, imagine if an observer, facing a galaxy cluster, were trying to detect an object, such as a single galaxy, behind that cluster. The light emitted by that object would travel straight toward the cluster, then bend around the cluster. It would continue traveling toward the observer, though at slightly different angles, appearing to the observer as mirrored images of the same object, which in the end can be combined as a single, “magnified” image.
Scientists have used galaxy clusters to magnify objects at optical wavelengths, but never in the X-ray band of the electromagnetic spectrum, mainly because galaxy clusters themselves emit an enormous amount of X-rays. Scientists have thought that any X-rays coming from a background source would be impossible to discern from the cluster’s own glare.
“If you’re trying to see an X-ray source behind a cluster, it’s like trying to see a candle next to a really bright light,” Bayliss says. “So we knew this was a challenging measurement to make.”
X-ray subtraction
The researchers wondered: Could they subtract that bright light and see the candle behind it? In other words, could they remove the X-ray emissions coming from the galaxy cluster, to view the much fainter X-rays coming from an object, behind and magnified by the cluster?
The team tested this idea with observations taken by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, one of the world’s most powerful X-ray space telescopes. They looked in particular at Chandra’s measurements of the Phoenix cluster, a distant galaxy cluster located 5.7 billion light-years from Earth, which has been estimated to be about a quadrillion times as massive as the sun, with gravitational effects that should make it a powerful, natural magnifying lens.
“The idea is to take whatever your best X-ray telescope is — in this case, Chandra — and use a natural lens to magnify and effectively make Chandra bigger, so you can see more distant things,” Bayliss says.
He and his colleagues analyzed observations of the Phoenix cluster, taken continuously by Chandra for over a month. They also looked at images of the cluster taken by two optical and infrared telescopes — the Hubble Space Telescope and the Magellan telescope in Chile. With all these various views, the team developed a model to characterize the cluster’s optical effects, which allowed the researchers to precisely measure the X-ray emissions from the cluster itself, and subtract it from the data.
They were left with two similar patterns of X-ray emissions around the cluster, which they determined were “lensed,” or gravitationally bent, by the cluster. When they traced the emissions backward in time, they found that they all originated from a single, distant source: a tiny dwarf galaxy from 9.4 billion years ago, when the universe itself was roughly 4.4 billion years old — about a third of its current age.
“Previously, Chandra had seen only a handful of things at this distance,” Bayliss says. “In less than 10 percent of the time, we discovered this object, similarly far away. And gravitational lensing is what let us do it.”
The combination of Chandra and the Phoenix cluster’s natural lensing power enabled the team to see the tiny galaxy hiding behind the cluster, magnified about 60 times. At this resolution, they were able to zoom in to discern two distinct clumps within the galaxy, one producing many more X-rays than the other.
As X-rays are typically produced during extreme, short-lived phenomena, the researchers believe that the first X-ray-rich clump signals a part of the dwarf galaxy that has very recently formed supermassive stars, while the quieter region is an older region that contains more mature stars.
“We’re catching this galaxy at a very useful stage, where it’s got these really young stars,” Bayliss says. “Every galaxy had to start out in this phase, but we don’t see a lot of these kinds of galaxies in our own neighborhood. Now we can go back in time, look in the distant universe, find galaxies in this early phase of their life, and start to study how star formation is different there.”
This research was funded, in part, by NASA, and by the Space Telescope Science Institute.
from MIT News https://ift.tt/2IR0CW5
via
Florida State Senator files complaint against judge who jailed a Black man for missing jury duty
Florida State Senator Bobby Powell has taken action against a judge who sentenced a 21-year-old Black man to jail time for missing jury duty.
—Outrage after Black man sentenced to 10 days in jail for missing jury duty—
Powell filed a formal complaint with the Judicial Qualifications Commission, against Judge Kasternakes, who is on the hot seat for how he handled Deandre Somerville, a non-violent, first time offender and handed him a 10-day sentence after he overslept on the day he was supposed to report to serve jury duty.
“The thought that a judge would sentence a young man who had no previous history or incident with law enforcement to jail time, I was outraged,” Powell told ABC News.
“I know him, I know this young man for many, many years. When I saw his picture on the front page of the local paper, I was very much not only hurt and disappointed but heartbroken. I’m at a loss for words about how I felt.”
I have known Deandre and his family for many years. He is a terrific young man who has led a respectful, law-abiding life. We should all be respectful of the judicial system. With that said, in my opinion the punishment was too severe and unfair. https://t.co/4yo0gRiBpI
— Rep. Lois Frankel (@RepLoisFrankel) October 10, 2019
Somerville said he has never been arrested, and works for a youth after-school program for the City of West Palm Beach and Recreation Department. In his naiveite he said he overslept and when he woke out, he thought it was too late to report to court. So he went to work for his afternoon shift thinking that it was pointless to try to attend the trial so late.
“We’ve all made mistakes. You would think, ‘OK, if I go to court, the judge sees me in court,’ what’s the worse thing you think could happen? When Deandre went back to court he had on his work uniform, we thought the judge would see he is working and see he is a good young man,” Powell said.
Judge Kastrenakis didn’t let Powell off the hook, and instead sentenced him to 10 days in jail, one year of probation and 150 hours of community service and $223 in court fines.
According to the judge, Somerville “inconvenienced the court” for at least 45 minutes, and that rubbed the judge the wrong way.
—Youth hockey coach says he was criticized by racist parents—
The case prompted nationally outrage which ultimately caused the judge to throw out the ruling and he said Somerville was “totally rehabilitated,” ABC News reports.
Powell is “strongly considering” to later file for the judge’s impeachment with the legislature.
“What I would like to see is Judge Kasternakes removed from the bench,” Powell said.
“He has indicated to me through this decision that he is not qualified to make a fair and impartial decision.”
The post Florida State Senator files complaint against judge who jailed a Black man for missing jury duty appeared first on theGrio.
from theGrio https://ift.tt/31fhf42
via
Listen to an Underwater Volcano Burp 750-Foot Bubbles
Youth hockey coach says he was criticized by racist parents
A Pakistani-born Canadian Muslim, Talha Javaid who uses his own money to help aspiring hockey players better their game, is fuming after he says a parent criticized him and suggested he shouldn’t be teaching because he’s not white.
—New research confirms self-reported suicide attempts on the rise for Black teens—
Javaid, a respected hockey youth coach in the Windsor-Detroit community, says he was appalled when he received a bitter and rather racist text message on Oct. 9, slamming him with xenophobic messaging about his efforts to teach white kids hockey.
“I was like, ‘What. The. Hell,’” he told Yahoo Sports Canada about the text message. He explained that the message began with, “I’m not a racist but…”
However it was filled with racist messages. He posted about the hurtful text saying,
“man imagine waking up on a friday and essentially being like “yooo, im gonna go be a racist ass muppet today and tell someone they shouldnt coach hockey because they’re not white, cant wait!!”
man imagine waking up on a friday and essentially being like “yooo, im gonna go be a racist ass muppet today and tell someone they shouldnt coach hockey because they’re not white, cant wait!!” pic.twitter.com/cNYEbsMB8t
— Talha (@flowseidon65) October 11, 2019
The 23-year-old hockey player and youth coach checked his phone, he stopped in his tracks.
Even more upsetting, Javaid said he and a close friend use their own funds to pay for ice time, just to host free clinics so they can teach kids critical skills to play hockey. Javaid and his best friend Sebastian Nystrom teach kids ages five to eight in East Lansing Michigan.
And while the sessions are totally held because of Javaid’s big heart, one father named Chase tore into the Javaid for daring to teach his son since he practices the Muslim religion.
Chase said he doesn’t “feel comfortable” and believes Javaid’s faith will have some influence on his son Riley.
Insinuated that hockey,, a predominately white sport traditionally doesn’t include people of color.
“Tradition is coded language for whiteness and the way things have always been,” said Dr. Courtney Szto, assistant professor at the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies at Queen’s University and assistant editor of the Hockey in Society blog. “And a Muslim coach throws a wrench into the whole thing. It doesn’t jive with our dominant narrative of who gets to participate in that culture.”
Despite the nasty message, Javaid said he has been inundated with community support, even from white people.
Stanley Cup champion and Hall of Fame goalie Grant Fuhr tweetd his support out of Javaid after hearing about the incident
There are no words for a moron like that. https://t.co/01CmxG7DmM
— Grant Fuhr (@grantfuhr) October 12, 2019
Javaid is one of a small fraction of people of color who play ice hockey in the region. He’s been a avid player since he was a tot, learning how to play that game thanks to a program called “Fajr Quran Hockey” (FQH) at his mosque.
The 23-year-old manages to give back to his community and balance being a full-time economics student at the University of Windsor.
Sadly, Javaid said racism and discrimination is something he has endured for years.
“After Trump was elected, one of the guys on my rec team told me he didn’t want a Muslim guy being his captain,” Javaid recalled. “I told him ‘this is a you problem.’ I had the most points on the team and he had like two. I got the playing time I deserved, and I didn’t even bring it up with the coach.”
The post Youth hockey coach says he was criticized by racist parents appeared first on theGrio.
from theGrio https://ift.tt/2Bd3CaQ
via
Report: Russian Internet Trolls Targeted African American Voters More Than Any Other Group
The bipartisan U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee has concluded that Russian trolls used the Internet—specifically Facebook—to influence African American voters during the 2016 presidential election.
Its new report, released earlier this week, states that the Internet Research Agency, a front for a Russian troll farm, used social media to post subtly racist content to incite conflict within the black community. Thousands of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube accounts were created with the aim of harming Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and supporting the election of Donald Trump.
“By far, race and related issues were the preferred target of the information warfare campaign designed to divide the country in 2016” the report stated. ″(N)o single group of Americans was targeted by IRA information operatives more than African Americans.”
The Russian posts and ads mirrored social justice movements that were already prominent in the black community like “Black Lives Matter” with the goal of creating a negative response from other ethnic groups.
Social media companies like Twitter and Facebook have come under fire from politicians and activists about their roles in the election interference in 2016. The social media giants have been scrutinized about their lack of control and policing of their platforms in ridding bad actors.
Facebook and Twitter said they removed thousands of troll accounts leading up to the 2018 elections. “Through ongoing analyses and investigations, we continue to build on our contextual understanding of these networks of accounts to improve our ability to find and suspend this activity as quickly as possible in the future,” Twitter’s director of public policy Carlos Monje Jr. told NBC News.
In 2016, Facebook users engaged over 11.2 million times with a page called “Blacktivist,” which was actually a troll account from Russia targeting African American voters. Almost all of the account’s YouTube content involved violent acts against black men, the report stated.
The social media giants are now more aware of the potential risk and vow to be much better during the 2020 presidential election cycle. “We have stepped up our efforts to build strong defenses on multiple fronts…We have also invested in technology and people to block and remove fake accounts; find and remove coordinated manipulation campaigns; and bring unprecedented transparency to political advertising.” Facebook said in a statement.
from Black Enterprise https://ift.tt/2q8FWlH
via
New research confirms self-reported suicide attempts on the rise for Black teens
New research shows a disturbing trend in Black teens: their suicide attempt rates are going up, while suicide rates in other groups continue to diminish.
According to a new study released on Monday by researchers at the McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy and Research at New York University, there is a growing crisis of suicide attempts among Black high school students.
Michael A. Lindsey PhD, MSW, MPH, who is the executive director of the McSilver Institute and the Constance and Martin Silver Professor of Poverty Studies at NYU Silver School of Social Work is the lead researcher on the study along with YunYu Xiao. The two uncovered that self-reported suicide attempt rates for Black adolescents rose 73% over the study period of 1991-2017. By comparison, self-reported suicide attempt rates fell 7.5% in white adolescents.
“Further research must be done into why traditional precursors to suicide attempts, such as thinking about it or making plans, are decreasing while actual attempts are going up. It’s important that we identify the signs before young people attempt to end their lives,” said Lindsey.
READ MORE: Too many of our babies are killing themselves – Here’s what we can do about it
“Youth suicide is very real and must be addressed,” said New York State Senator David Carlucci, Chair of the NYS Senate’s Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities Committee. “The numbers are staggering among Black youth, and just one life lost is one too many. We need a task force to specifically investigate the causes of Black youth suicide.”
To that point, the findings, which were published in the November 2019 issue of Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, also uncovered:
- Self-reported suicide attempts increased at an accelerating rate in Black female teenagers as well, even as overall female suicide attempts declined.
- There was a significant increase in injuries from self-reported suicide attempts in Black male teenagers.
- A surprising dynamic in the relationship between self-reported suicide thoughts (ideation), plans and attempts was revealed: ideation and plans decreased while actual attempts increased.
READ MORE: N.C. schools investigated after Black student uncovers racist group chat
“The number of Black youth who are tragically taking their own lives is rising at an alarming rate, and that is why I sponsored legislation to establish a Black Youth Suicide taskforce here in New York State,” says New York State Assemblywoman Kimberly Jean-Pierre of the 11th Assembly District.
Judge Ronald E. Richter, CEO and Executive Director of JCCA and former Commissioner, NYC Administration for Children’s Services, agrees, urging the need for to urgently address these findings.
“The McSilver Institute’s findings of increased suicide attempts and self-injury among Black young adults are important and tremendously concerning, particularly for those of us who work in New York’s child welfare community where Black families are chronically, disproportionately overrepresented,” said Richter.
READ MORE: Humiliated after period shaming, Kenyan girl commits suicide
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suicide was the third-leading cause of death in 2017 among Black youth ages 15-19.
If you or someone you know is in crisis, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255, text HOME to 741741 or visit The Suicide Prevention Resource Center for additional resources.
The post New research confirms self-reported suicide attempts on the rise for Black teens appeared first on theGrio.
from theGrio https://ift.tt/2IQoh8V
via
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)