From tiny insects to big ungulates, animals and their choice of chow can make ecosystems less or more prone to go up in flames.
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Thursday, March 5, 2020
Over 1,500 Professionals Are Gathering In Las Vegas for the Women of Power Summit
The day that we’ve been planning for a year with great intention has arrived. Today we are excited to kick off the 15th Annual Women of Power Summit hosted by ADP! Over 1,500 women are joining us at the Mirage in Las Vegas for the year’s most anticipated professional women’s conference.
This year marks two distinguished anniversary’s for BLACK ENTERPRISE as we embark on 50 years of serving the diaspora and 15 years of amplifying the voices of black women in corporate America through the Women of Power franchise.
Over the next three days, we will be celebrating the excellence of women leading in their industries and communities.
Tonight we will be honoring leaders Debbie Allen, award-winning actress, director, and producer; Gale King, EVP & chief administrative officer at Nationwide; Debra Lee, former chairman & CEO of BET Networks and the CEO of Leading Women Defined Inc.; and Myrtle Potter, former executive vice president & COO of Genentech and the CEO of Sumitovant Biopharma at the Legacy Awards Gala hosted by PepsiCo.
On Friday, Legacy Award winners Gale King and Myrtle Potter will be taking center stage to discuss relevance, leadership, and legacy. And women will hear from the one and only Misty Copeland, Glenda Squire, and Women of Power Chief Brand Officer Caroline Clarke for a conversation that counts on how to stay on point! ADP CEO Carlos Rodriguez will also be taking the stage with Debbie Dyson for a one-on-one conversation about innovation.
During the lunch hour, past Legacy Award winner Phylicia Rashad and Freda Lewis-Hall will take the stage for a conversation about the myth of the black superwoman and the importance of self-care and sisterhood presented by Pfizer.
Throughout the day there will be several executive sessions on visibility, self-advocacy, microaggressions, moving up the corporate ladder, and body language.
On Saturday, Donna Brazile is going to kick the morning off with a bang! And Mara Brock Akil and Jodie Patterson will take the stage for an authentic conversation on how to continuously build and believe in yourself along your journey hosted by AARP. We’ll also be paying tribute to the 50 most impactful women in business over the past 50 years hosted by Accenture.
Women will also receive the tools they need to reconstruct the corporate ladder during executive sessions centered on negotiating, getting ‘board ready,’ and what it takes to lead in global roles. And those who identify as intrapreneurs will have the opportunity to hear from angel investors at the highly anticipated SistersInc. session hosted by JPMorgan. There will also be a timely conversation about hair politics in the workplace.
Throughout the summit, attendees will also receive executive coaching, style coaching hosted by Macy’s, and financial coaching hosted by JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley.
It sounds like a great time right? It’s because it will be!
If you’re joining us, be sure to keep up with the latest information about the event. The app is available for Apple and Android.
If you aren’t able to make it to Vegas, tune into the Women of Power Summit Livestream to get your digital front row seat! Be sure to follow the conversation online by exploring and using the hashtag #BEWPS.
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Joy Reid urged as Chris Matthews’ replacement on MSNBC’s ‘Hardball’
MSNBC is reportedly looking at three possibilities to replace Chris Matthews on Hardball and people are pushing for Joy Reid to succeed him.
Reid, Steve Kornacki, and Shepard Smith are all being considered for the 7 p.m. nightly position, reported MSN. Reid hosts MSNBC’s weekend show, AM Joy. Kornacki is an NBC and MSNBC national political correspondent. And Smith formerly hosted Shepard Smith Reporting on Fox but he quit his show last October. He is prepping to return to TV soon.
READ MORE: Seriously? Trump supporter wants Joy Reid to give sworn testimony about so-called bias
Some are calling on the network to name a woman to the job and are lobbying for Reid.
“This slot should go to @JoyAnnReid!!! She’d be brilliant and MSNBC has no Black hosts in primetime. Shameful,” tweeted political commentator Aisha C. Moodie-Mills.
This slot should go to @JoyAnnReid !!! She’d be briiliant and MSNBC has no Black hosts in primetime. Shameful. https://t.co/5sn1rIikIN
— Aisha C. Moodie-Mills (@AishaMoodMills) March 3, 2020
“@JoyAnnReid please but I feel like they will give it to white man,” wrote #EnoughisEnough.
This slot should go to @JoyAnnReid !!! She’d be briiliant and MSNBC has no Black hosts in primetime. Shameful. https://t.co/5sn1rIikIN
— Aisha C. Moodie-Mills (@AishaMoodMills) March 3, 2020
“Would love to see Joy Ann get his slot. I stopped watching him years ago. could not stand the way he interrupts people,” agreed Nancy Smart.
This slot should go to @JoyAnnReid !!! She’d be briiliant and MSNBC has no Black hosts in primetime. Shameful. https://t.co/5sn1rIikIN
— Aisha C. Moodie-Mills (@AishaMoodMills) March 3, 2020
Matthews announced his retirement during his show on Monday. He had faced recent allegations that he made inappropriate comments to freelance journalist Laura Bassett, then a guest on his show. Bassett wrote about the comments in a column in GQ. Matthews also received backlash for comments he made after Bernie Sanders (I-VT) won the Nevada caucuses, equating the win to the Nazi takeover of France. Matthews later apologized to Sanders.
Matthews opened his Monday night broadcast by stating, “I want to start with my headline tonight: I’m retiring.”
READ MORE: MSNBC host says she stuttered, but did not say the n-word during Kobe Bryant coverage
“This is the last ‘Hardball’ on MSNBC and obviously this isn’t for a lack of interest in politics,” he said, adding he was retiring to make way for “younger generations” who are “improving the workplace.”
In addition to hosting AM Joy, Reid also fills in for MSNBC hosts, including Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes.
The post Joy Reid urged as Chris Matthews’ replacement on MSNBC’s ‘Hardball’ appeared first on TheGrio.
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ADP Division President Debbie Dyson: Find Your Voice—People Want to Hear From You
Featuring a broad cross-section of women who have distinguished themselves across a rich variety of careers, our Portraits of Power series is a celebration of the 50th Anniversary of Black Enterprise, and of black women. It’s a place for today’s businesswomen to share their own favorite images and their own stories, in their own words. Today’s portrait is Debbie Dyson, who’s been with ADP for more than three decades and is a member of its senior executive team.
Debbie Dyson
President, National Account Services, ADP
Nickname The Doctor
My first job was Key Account Manager at ADP
My big break came when I saw the red sign of “ADP” and approached the interview table.
I’ve had to work hardest at my current job—most challenging in my 32 years.
I never imagined I would be sitting in the C-suite.
I wish I’d learned sooner that finding your voice is nothing to shy away from; people want to hear you.
The risk I regret not taking is … I learned early to not have regrets, as I cannot change the past.
If I could design my fantasy self-care day, it would be spent in Hawaii.
Nothing keeps me up at night. I don’t need a lot of sleep.
When I’m struggling, I say to myself, “You always have tomorrow; don’t let defeats get you down.”
I am unapologetically honest.
Portraits of Power is a yearlong series of candid insights from exceptional women leaders. It is brought to you by ADP.
Debbie Dyson will be a speaker at the 2020 Women of Power Summit, March 5-8 at The Mirage in Las Vegas. Register here to join us!
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Hillary Clinton doesn’t think Bernie Sanders is the strongest Dem nominee
Hillary Clinton said if Bernie Sanders receives the Democratic Party’s nomination, it lessens the party’s chances to defeat President Donald Trump.
“I don’t think he’d be our strongest nominee, no,” Clinton told Good Morning America in an interview on Super Tuesday. “And that’s what this primary process is about. Let’s see who emerges, but for everybody voting today or in any of the contests ahead of time, the most important issue is who can defeat Donald Trump.”
READ MORE: Hillary Clinton says racism is why the press treats Meghan Markle poorly
The Sanders campaign offered no response to Clinton’s remark.
It’s no secret that Clinton is not a fan of “The Bern.” The former secretary of state and the Vermont senator were bitter opponents during the 2016 democratic presidential primary. Even though Clinton emerged victorious from that scrapple, the damage was already done.
On March 6, Hillary’s four-part docuseries, Hillary, will be released on HULU. But in January, her fierce criticism of Sanders from the series emerged.
“He was in Congress for years. He had one senator support him. Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it,” The Hollywood Reporter reported.
At the time, Sanders also declined to comment on the docuseries criticism, saying he was focused on beating Trump.
Since the criticism of Sanders surfaced from the docuseries, Clinton has said she will back the Democratic nominee whoever that is. And in Tuesday’s GMA interview, she didn’t go so far as to say Sanders couldn’t beat Trump.
She just made it clear that she doesn’t think he’s the party’s best option.
Clinton told GMA she’ll be “watching and hoping that we nominate whoever is the strongest candidate to take out the current incumbent.”
When the network asked Clinton her opinion on Sanders’ position that he should win the Democratic nomination if he receives a plurality of pledged delegates but doesn’t reach the golden number, Clinton laughed and told the morning show: “Let’s follow the rules. We’ve got rules.”
When asked if she still feels Sanders’ campaign in 2016 was “just baloney,” as she said in her docuseries, Clinton responded that she said what she said.
“That was my authentic opinion then. It’s my authentic opinion now.”
The post Hillary Clinton doesn’t think Bernie Sanders is the strongest Dem nominee appeared first on TheGrio.
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BMW Redesigns its Iconic Logo
BMW’s round logo is receiving its first redesign in more than two decades.
The German automaker’s refreshed logo ditches the black ring for a transparent circle. The rest of it, including the typeface, has a flatter and more modern look. The blue and white emblem inside the ring remains, according to CNN.
The new logo, which will be used in BMW’s communications efforts, including its social media platforms and website, is meant to “radiate more openness and clarity,” Jans Thiemer, BMW’s senior vice president of customer and brand, said in a statement. He added that the new look also symbolizes BMW’s “significance and relevance for mobility and driving pleasure in the future.”
Fans have speculated that the inside of the most recent logo represents a propeller, but BMW said the white and blue pattern represents its German home state of Bavaria. The “propeller myth” originated from the company’s old ads that promoted its airplane engines. Doug Sellers, executive creative director for design firm Siegel+Gale, told CNN Business that the new logo feels “more open and accessible” to younger customers that are digitally savvy.
Including segments MINI and Rolls-Royce, BMW (Bayerische Motoren Werke AG) generated around 97 billion euros in revenue in 2018. As of June 2019, the BMW marque is the third-most valuable automotive brand in the world, according to statista.com.
Furthermore, BMW has announced plans to double electric vehicle sales within two years. If successful, this should increase the company’s electric passenger car market share in Europe, which currently stands at 1%. Full electrification awaits the company’s MINI brand, and the company may even have ambitious ideas for fully electric, high-performance sports cars and motorbikes. The global electric fleet-size is expected to grow ten-fold to 127 million vehicles in 2030.
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Three Wrongly Convicted Men To Each Receive $2.9 million
Three Baltimore men were exonerated in November after serving 36 years in prison for a crime they didn’t commit. Now they are getting a huge settlement from the state of Maryland in an attempt to right a wrong.
In 1983, Alfred Chestnut, Ransom Watkins, and Andrew Stewart were 16 years old when they decided to skip school one afternoon.
On that day Baltimore police arrested them for the murder of 14-year-old DeWitt Duckett in the hallway of Harlem Park Junior High School. The case was plagued with problems from the start, according to The Washington Post. When defense attorneys asked for evidence about the other suspect, a Baltimore prosecutor lied to the judge, claiming there were no reports. Numerous witnesses that led to another person responsible for the murder were ignored.
Under a proposed compensation plan by the Board of Public Works, the three men are set to receive $2.9 million each. Maryland has no legal requirement for compensating wrongly convicted defendants. Instead, they are allowed to petition their case to the Board of Public Works.
The settlement mirrors a bill currently in the Maryland General Assembly that would require the state to pay wrongly convicted individuals a set amount for every year they were incarcerated. For this case, that would average out to $81,868. The figure is calculated based on the average state median household income over the previous five years. When you multiply that amount by 36 years, that total would be a little over $2.9 million.
Chestnut, Watkins, and Stewart are set to be paid in full by July 2025. The payment does not preclude lawsuits against the city of Baltimore or its police department. The three men have plans to take civil action, but no case has been filed as of yet.
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Wednesday, March 4, 2020
New approach to sustainable building takes shape in Boston
A new building about to take shape in Boston’s Roxbury area could, its designers hope, herald a new way of building residential structures in cities.
Designed by architects from MIT and the design and construction firm Placetailor, the five-story building’s structure will be made from cross-laminated timber (CLT), which eliminates most of the greenhouse-gas emissions associated with standard building materials. It will be assembled on site mostly from factory-built subunits, and it will be so energy-efficient that its net carbon emissions will be essentially zero.
Most attempts to quantify a building’s greenhouse gas contributions focus on the building’s operations, especially its heating and cooling systems. But the materials used in a building’s construction, especially steel and concrete, are also major sources of carbon emissions and need to be included in any realistic comparison of different types of construction.
Wood construction has tended to be limited to single-family houses or smaller apartment buildings with just a few units, narrowing the impact that it can have in urban areas. But recent developments — involving the production of large-scale wood components, known as mass timber; the use of techniques such as cross-laminated timber; and changes in U.S. building codes — now make it possible to extend wood’s reach into much larger buildings, potentially up to 18 stories high.
Several recent buildings in Europe have been pushing these limits, and now a few larger wooden buildings are beginning to take shape in the U.S. as well. The new project in Boston will be one of the largest such residential buildings in the U.S. to date, as well as one of the most innovative, thanks to its construction methods.
Described as a Passive House Demonstration Project, the Boston building will consist of 14 residential units of various sizes, along with a ground-floor co-working space for the community. The building was designed by Generate Architecture and Technologies, a startup company out of MIT and Harvard University, headed by John Klein, in partnership with Placetailor, a design, development, and construction company that has specialized in building net-zero-energy and carbon-neutral buildings for more than a decade in the Boston area.
Klein, who has been a principal investigator in MIT’s Department of Architecture and now serves as CEO of Generate, says that large buildings made from mass timber and assembled using the kit-of-parts approach he and his colleagues have been developing have a number of potential advantages over conventionally built structures of similar dimensions. For starters, even when factoring in the energy used in felling, transporting, assembling, and finishing the structural lumber pieces, the total carbon emissions produced would be less than half that of a comparable building made with conventional steel or concrete. Klein, along with collaborators from engineering firm BuroHappold Engineering and ecological market development firm Olifant, will be presenting a detailed analysis of these lifecycle emissions comparisons later this year at the annual Passive and Low Energy Architecture (PLEA) conference in A Coruña, Spain, whose theme this year is “planning post-carbon cities.”
For that study, Klein and his co-authors modeled nine different versions of an eight-story mass-timber building, along with one steel and one concrete version of the building, all with the same overall scale and specifications. Their analysis showed that materials for the steel-based building produced the most greenhouse emissions; the concrete version produced 8 percent less than that; and one version of the mass-timber building produced 53 percent less.
The first question people tend to ask about the idea of building tall structures out of wood is: What about fire? But Klein says this question has been thoroughly studied, and tests have shown that, in fact, a mass-timber building retains its structural strength longer than a comparable steel-framed building. That’s because the large timber elements, typically a foot thick or more, are made by gluing together several layers of conventional dimensioned lumber. These will char on the outside when exposed to fire, but the charred layer actually provides good insulation and protects the wood for an extended period. Steel buildings, by contrast, can collapse suddenly when the temperature of the fire approaches steel’s melting point and causes it to soften.
The kit-based approach that Generate and Placetailor have developed, which the team calls Model-C, means that in designing a new building, it’s possible to use a series of preconfigured modules, assembled in different ways, to create a wide variety of structures of different sizes and for different uses, much like assembling a toy structure out of LEGO blocks. These subunits can be built in factories in a standardized process and then trucked to the site and bolted together. This process can reduce the impact of weather by keeping much of the fabrication process indoors in a controlled environment, while minimizing the construction time on site and thus reducing the construction’s impact on the neighborhood.
Animation depicts the process of assembling the mass-timber building from a set of factory-built components. Courtesy of Generate Architecture and Technologies
“It’s a way to rapidly deploy these kinds of projects through a standardized system,” Klein says. “It’s a way to build rapidly in cities, using an aesthetic that embraces offsite industrial construction.”
Because the thick wood structural elements are naturally very good insulators, the Roxbury building’s energy needs for heating and cooling are reduced compared to conventional construction, Klein says. They also produce very good acoustic insulation for its occupants. In addition, the building is designed to have solar panels on its roof, which will help to offset the building’s energy use.
The team won a wood innovation grant in 2018 from the U.S. Forest Service, to develop a mass-timber based system for midscale housing developments. The new Boston building will be the first demonstration project for the system they developed.
“It’s really a system, not a one-off prototype,” Klein says. With the on-site assembly of factory-built modules, which includes fully assembled bathrooms with the plumbing in place, he says the basic structure of the building can be completed in only about one week per floor.
“We're all aware of the need for an immediate transition to a zero-carbon economy, and the building sector is a prime target,” says Andres Bernal SM ’13, Placetailor’s director of architecture. “As a company that has delivered only zero-carbon buildings for over a decade, we're very excited to be working with CLT/mass timber as an option for scaling up our approach and sharing the kit-of-parts and lessons learned with the rest of the Boston community.”
With U.S. building codes now allowing for mass timber buildings of up to 18 stories, Klein hopes that this building will mark the beginning of a new boom in wood-based or hybrid construction, which he says could help to provide a market for large-scale sustainable forestry, as well as for sustainable, net-zero energy housing.
“We see it as very competitive with concrete and steel for buildings of between eight and 12 stories,” he says. Such buildings, he adds, are likely to have great appeal, especially to younger generations, because “sustainability is very important to them. This provides solutions for developers, that have a real market differentiation.”
He adds that Boston has set a goal of building thousands of new units of housing, and also a goal of making the city carbon-neutral. “Here’s a solution that does both,” he says.
The project team included Evan Smith and Colin Booth at Placetailor Development; in addition to Klein, Zlatan Sehovic, Chris Weaver, John Fechtel, Jaehun Woo, and Clarence Yi-Hsien Lee at Generate Design; Andres Bernal, Michelangelo LaTona, Travis Anderson, and Elizabeth Hauver at Placetailor Design; Laura Jolly and Evan Smith at Placetailor Construction; Paul Richardson and Wolf Mangelsdorf at Burohappold; Sonia Barrantes and Jacob Staub at Ripcord Engineering; and Brian Kuhn and Caitlin Gamache at Code Red.
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Here’s how Lena Waithe made Disney history in ‘Onward’
Lena Waithe is a trailblazer in more ways than one.
The writer, producer, and actor is making history in Pixar’s latest offering, Onward. In it, she voices Disney’s first-ever openly LGBTQ animated character, Officer Spector.
The big reveal in the film that also stars Octavia Spencer, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Tracey Ullman, and Ali Wong is pretty understated, with her purple cyclops policewoman character casually saying, “My girlfriend’s daughter got me pulling my hair out,” while discussing the trials of becoming a new parent.
“It just kind of happened,” the film’s producer, Kori Rae, told Yahoo! Entertainment.
“The scene, when we wrote it, was kind of fitting and it opens up the world a little bit, and that’s what we wanted,” added the film’s director Dan Scanlon. “It’s a modern fantasy world and we want to represent the modern world.”
Lena Waithe on the “ballsy” choices she made for ‘Queen & Slim’: “Hopefully this works”
Aside from the groundbreaking move toward representation and inclusion, Onward is a pretty spectacular sight to behold.
Check out the description:
Set in a suburban fantasy world, Disney and Pixar’s Onward introduces two teenage elf brothers who embark on an extraordinary quest to discover if there is still a little magic left out there.
The film is a visual masterpiece and the story is full of twists, turns, and heart-stopping moments that will likely prompt some serious tears.
Onward is in theaters now.
The post Here’s how Lena Waithe made Disney history in ‘Onward’ appeared first on TheGrio.
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Cast of BET’s ‘Twenties’ opens up about the groundbreaking new series and working with Lena Waithe
Ever since news broke that Twenties was on the way, we’ve been waiting to see how the groundbreaking concept from Lena Waithe would turn out.
The comedy series executive produced by the Emmy-winner premieres on BET on March 4 and theGrio caught up with the cast to find out what we can expect.
Twenties is BET’s first series to be lead by a masculine-presenting lesbian and it’s sure to make huge strides in terms of representation for the LGBTQ community.
SNEAK PEEK: Lena Waithe drops trailer for BET series ‘Twenties’
The eight-episode series will star Jonica “JoJo” T. Gibbs as Hattie. She’s an aspiring television writer who dreams of glory, but seems incapable of holding down a regular job. Not one to sweat the small stuff — like being evicted — Hattie doesn’t let much faze her, and when in doubt or trouble, she turns to her best friends, Nia and Marie for help. She’s a lesbian who always falls for straight women. Out of cash and desperate for a break, Hattie interviews with Ida B., a successful Black television writer/producer who calls her out on some shady tweets Hattie made some years prior. But when Ida B. offers Hattie a job as a writer’s PA, Hattie may finally have her foot planted firmly on the ladder of Hollywood success.
“This show definitely represents a chapter in my life. I definitely slept on a friend’s couch and definitely been broke,” Gibbs told theGrio. “She just so happens to be queer.”
The show’s lead admitted that there was a lot of pressure considering her role is based on the real-life of the show’s famous creator.
“Playing a character loosely based off of Lena, I thought it would be important for me to make sure that I imitated her as much as possible,” she continued. Graciously, she gave me the free range to make the character my own in a lot of ways.”
Her BFF, Marie is played by Christina Elmore. She’s a young feature film executive at Monument Pictures with a seemingly perfect life with her seemingly perfect boyfriend, Chuck. One of Hattie’s best friends, Marie does everything by the book, and although she loves Hattie, she is always lecturing Hattie about her carefree lifestyle. She and Chuck reluctantly take in Hattie while she gets on her feet.
“I think what’s so brilliant about this show is that yes, it is loosely based on her life and it’s definitely her story to tell that she’s been trying to tell for a while but she has a lot of collaboration,” Elmore explained. “She brought in people who really knew their stuff and so it has just been a dream.”
Hattie’s other best friend, Nia (Gabrielle Graham) is described as a “Trinidadian goddess” and “a lady in every sense of the word” who has been taught by her female relatives in the islands to hold herself in high esteem, especially in her dealings with men. Best friends with Marie and Hattie, Nia is an evolved, serene yet delightfully offbeat yoga instructor who longs to meet her ideal mate and get back to her true passion, acting.
Check out our full interview with the cast of Twenties above.
The post Cast of BET’s ‘Twenties’ opens up about the groundbreaking new series and working with Lena Waithe appeared first on TheGrio.
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