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Mokena Makeka
Makeka is an architect from Cape Town, South Africa. The complex history of apartheid plays a vital role in his architecture because he removed symbols of segregation. He is responsible for redesigning the Railway Police Station and the Cape Town Railway Station.
Elephants and rhinos in Africa are increasingly threatened by poaching as ivory and rhino horns become more desirable, but a new method using drones has proven effective in stopping the poachers in their tracks — from thousands of miles away.
Source: Real News
Founder and CEO of Walker & Company, Tristan Walker, speaks with TJ Holmes at MSNBC about Bevel for its “The Big Idea” segment.
Source: Bevel
ADHD is a common learning disability that affects responsiveness at school and at home for children and adults. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, “attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is one of the most common childhood disorders and can continue through adolescence and adulthood. Symptoms include difficulty staying focused and paying attention, difficulty controlling behavior, and hyperactivity (over-activity).” Many of our favorite celebrities have ADHD, and they have went on to live full lives. Here are just a few of them.
Solange Knowles
Singer, actress and fashion icon Solange Knowles has ADHD. She says that she has always been full of energy and claims that sometimes her sporadic speech led people to believe she was on drugs.
Will Smith
Actor and rapper Will Smith wasn’t diagnosed with ADHD as a child. However, he was diagnosed as an adult.
‘Success Never Smelled So Sweet: How I Followed My Nose and Found My Passion’
by Lisa Price
Lisa Price is the founder of Carol’s Daughter, a company that creates hair, skin and bath products for women of color. In the book, she goes into great detail about the story of her life, starting from her time in Brooklyn to how she became the successful entrepreneur she is today. Through her book, Price’s personal philosophy comes to the forefront. She believes that life will guide all of us to our own inner truth regardless of the many obstacles that arise.
‘Black Business Secrets: 500 Tips, Strategies and Resources for the African American Entrepreneur’
by Dante Lee
Dante Lee is the CEO of Diversity City Media, a marketing and public-relations firm based in Columbus, Ohio. This book is a very thorough advice book that discusses the entrepreneurial skills that African-American business owners must master in order to compete in a world where most new companies fail within three years. The book covers an array of topics that start from personal branding to strategies designed to ensure business survival.
It has been more than a week since Dr. Levi Watkins Jr. passed away due to complications from a stroke, but both the Black community and the medical community are still feeling the sorrow of a great loss and the wonders of the legacy he left behind.
While there are still serious disparities in the medical world, it isn’t nearly as unusual today to come across Black physicians as it used to be.
Watkins is one of the many iconic figures the Black community has to thank for that now.
Watkins was a man who seemed to effortlessly break down barriers and pack his 70 years of life with historical achievements.
In 1980, Watkins solidified his place in history as he became the first surgeon to implant an automatic heart defibrillator in a patient suffering from irregular heartbeats. It’s an accomplishment that continues to impact millions of people today.
“His spirit lives on in the 3 million patients around the world whose hearts beat in a normal rhythm because of the implantable defibrillator,” a statement by Watkins’ brother posted on the American Heart Associate website explains.
But Watkins ground-breaking achievements were never limited to the surgery room or the confines of an office.
Those who may not remember his legacy as a medical icon will certainly recall his work as an activist and civil rights pioneer.
“Watkins joined Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1970 after having graduated from the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine where he was the first African-American admitted to the school,” according to NBC News. “At Hopkins, he became the first African-American to serve as the chief resident in cardiac surgery.”
Watkins could have easily touted such accomplishments as proof that Black people can achieve anything if they simply pull up their bootstraps and try harder. Like some accomplished Black stars today, he could have deemed himself the “new Black” and insisted that his ability to break down seemingly indestructible barriers was evidence that there were no real racial disparities barring Black people from the medical field.
Unlike today’s stars, however, Watkins knew that simply wasn’t true.
He used his role as a medical pioneer and civil rights leader to drastically increase the number of Black students attending Johns Hopkins University’s medical school.
“In 1979, he joined the admissions committee at Johns Hopkins University’s Medical School,” an article chronicling the history of Black students at the school noted. “Thanks in large part to his efforts, by 1983, minority representation at the school had increased by 400 percent.”
The president of the Johns Hopkins Hospital and Health System and executive vice president of the Johns Hopkins Medicine, Ronald R. Peterson, gives Watkins credit for drastically influencing the overall culture at the hospital.
“It is inarguable that Levi’s impact on our hospital — on its culture, on its care — will endure, just as will our immense admiration for him and thanks for all that he did here,” Peterson said of Watkins in a press release.
It’s proof that even as Watkins has been laid to rest, the impact of his lifetime continues to thrive in the medical field.
A memorial service for Watkins has been scheduled for April 21 at Union Baptist Church in Baltimore.
There is a reason Atlanta is called the Empire City of the South. Like New York City, Atlanta has become a cultural center for the arts and entertainment industry. Many celebrities make the city their home, such as rapper and actor T.I., director Tyler Perry, singer and actress Brandy and many others. The city has also been a mecca for the Southern rap and hip-hop scene. For these reasons, the city has attracted the movie and television industry. This list will give reasons why the industry continues to come back.
Atlanta Is a Hub for Tech and Business Innovators
According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “Booming professions include sound engineering technicians, camera operators and producers. Audio and video equipment technicians are expected to lead the pack, with a projected 22 percent growth in jobs over the next seven years.” It’s more than that though. Atlanta is home to many Fortune 500 companies that have pumped billions of dollars into the state. Georgia has a consumer market valued at more than $73 billion. The top five companies that have made their headquarters in Atlanta are Home Depot, Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, United Parcel Services and The Southern Company.
The education system has a very limited view of autism. It’s seen solely as a disorder. Children who have it are treated like they have been given nothing more than a disadvantage. Their alternative ways of thinking are not praised but rather questioned and often scrutinized.
Some would argue, however, that autism deserves a completely different kind of reaction from the public.
Some of the world’s greatest minds belong to autistic people like Temple Grandin, a professor of animal science at Colorado State University.
She is hailed by many as an incredible asset when it comes to research, and famed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson pondered the impact of her autism during the latest episode of Star Talk.
“Does [autism] give something to her or take something away,” he questioned before his guest joined him.
Her mind is “fascinating,” in Tyson’s words, but is that the result of her autism or just her “insightful” nature.
Grandin, an autism activist whose own life was chronicled by HBO in a self-titled film, joined Tyson and explained that she indeed offers a different way of thinking that is absolutely necessary in the world of science.
“In science we need both kinds of thinking,” Grandin told Tyson.
The two kinds of visual thinking she was referring to are “object photo-realistic thinking” and “more visual, spatial, where you are in space thinking.”
Object photo-realistic thinking is often associated with more artistic minds. This is the kind of thinking that makes Grandin stand out in science.
The latter form of visual thinking is more typically associated with math and science.
“What I’m really good at, when I read a journal article, is the methods — because when I read the methods section of an animal science or biology paper, I want to be able to understand how they did that experiment,” Grandin said.
That’s where other researchers tend to fail by focusing too closely on statistics and programs.
“Yes, you need to do statistics — that’s why I work with a statistician —but you also need my kind of mind to make sure people are fully describing how they did an experiment,” she added.
She believes that many more great minds like hers could be innovating STEM fields if they were pushed and shown their true potential.
Unfortunately, much more focus is placed on the areas where autistic people struggle rather than where they can excel.
“I’m worried that with all the emphasis on math, my kind of mind is being pushed off the team because we can’t do the algebra,” she added.
Tyson even noted that in his own field of astrophysics, much of the field is visual.
“You have to get into the computer and program it, but there are things we can only look at — you can’t poke it, you can’t stick it in a petri dish,” Tyson said as he cut away from the interview to insert commentary that was added later. “So it would be really cool if there were more visual thinkers in the world.”
Getting more of the visual thinkers who operate the way Grandin does even has the potential to vastly improve research and expedite scientific discoveries.
The key, Grandin says, is to make sure children with autism are being encouraged to try new things and expand their minds.
“I’m seeing far too many smart, geeky kids ending up in the basement playing video games because things aren’t being done to nurture their [visual] ability,” she added.
That’s because they aren’t being encouraged the way Grandin says her mother encouraged her.
“When I was a child my mother nursed my ability with art,” she added. “A lot of these kids want to draw the same thing all the time, and I did horse heads — but I was encouraged to draw lots of other things,” she continued. “I was taught to broaden that fixation out, to turn it into a skill you can use.”
It seems like such a simple solution, but it’s effective nonetheless.
Grandin just hopes that as time goes on, the stigmas around autism will vanish and more unique visual thinkers will find their place in the sciences.
If you were to ask most parents about their feelings toward social media, they would likely express some disdain toward the way the youth interact online. They may express their concerns about teens being too engulfed in such sites or discuss the unhealthy relationships that could form in cyberspace.
What some parents fail to realize, however, is just how mentally and emotionally devastating social media can be for teens as they navigate through middle school and high school.
Social media abuse is far from something that happens in occasional isolated incidents, and it is by no means something users can protect themselves from by toggling privacy settings or blocking certain users.
Whether it’s a classic example of one person bullying another or more extreme cases of “expose pages” that dedicate an entire social media profile to exposing a teen’s alleged promiscuous behaviors or slamming his or her physical appearance, social media abuse is extremely prevalent even after years of warnings and initiatives aimed at improving the digital landscape for young people.
The abuse of social media is even using “games” as a disguise. Users will start group messages rating different users’ appearances and share screenshots of the often-insulting conversations with their social media followers.
With a plethora of social media sites to pick from, online attacks are now rampant, especially among middle school and high school-aged children, and have even been the cause of many teenage suicides.
According to a survey led by Poco Kernsmith, an associate professor of social work at Wayne State University, roughly 54 percent of students at low-risk schools, which tend to be in wealthy areas with low crime rates, admitted to misusing social media.
Roughly 45 percent of students in high-risk schools admitted to the same thing.
Kernsmith believes the difference is simply caused by the different levels of access students have to new technology that connects them to social media but ultimately proves that cyberbullying and social media abuse plagues teens of all socioeconomic backgrounds.
One 14-year-old from Allen Park, Michigan, Taylor Goodwin, said she witnesses the negative effects of social media abuse all the time.
She told researchers that talking trash online “causes all kinds of drama” and incidents of “throwing shade” have frequently sparked bigger brawls in person.
“It spreads around the school like wildfire,” she said of the subliminal social media attacks that refer to a specific person but doesn’t necessarily include that person’s name.
“It gets pretty nasty out there,” Chad Gross, an 18-year-old who graduated from Annapolis High School in Dearborn Heights, Michigan, told USA Today. “Everyone feels invincible behind a computer screen.”
That feeling of invincibility is quickly eradicated once some students come face to face with their online attackers.
Students admit to seeing how online attacks sparked fights at school or influenced suicide attempts by classmates.
“These kids don’t think about the very real impact that these little messages and s**t have,” said one Georgia mother who chose not to be identified.
Her daughter, a 14-year-old girl who attends a middle school in Gwinnett County, was subjected to cyberattacks after an ex-boyfriend spread rumors about her throughout the school.
“She refused to go to school. … I asked her why and she showed me her [Twitter] account,” the Georgia mother said. “I mean there were pictures, videos, messages everything. Kids were making like edited images of her and they thought it was funny. This little knucklehead lied about my daughter, and it took so long for her to get past it.”
She went on to express concerns about the fact that social media has helped to divert students’ attention away from learning and forced them to focus on what kind of personas they have to take on in order to avoid falling victim to cyberattacks.
As the popularity of social media continues to grow and certain platforms inadvertently make it easier to facilitate online bullying and sexting, parents are scrambling to find a solution.
For some parents, they host frequent conversations with their teen about the proper way to behave online and trust their child to follow the rules presented to them during such discussions.
Others may have the same talks but also insist that their children hand over their social media passwords and usernames.
“I only go in there if I suspect something is wrong,” Melissa Goodwin, Taylor’s mother, told USA Today. “I try to give her her privacy… We have conversations about what you can and can’t do.”
Kernsmith urges parents to remind their kids that “nothing is private online, remember nothing online can be taken back, be aware of pressure and coercion, consider the reaction and feelings of others and remember nothing is truly anonymous.”
She hopes that with those tips in mind fewer teens will engaged in the harmful behaviors that lead to bullying, sexting and other negative trends that could push some young social media users into the depths of depression.
The rules and etiquette behind using LinkedIn are relatively simple when compared to other social media sites that are plastered with unwritten, unspoken rules.
The one gray area that still confuses users on the professional networking site, however, lies in the decision to accept or reject invitations from people you don’t actually know.
The very principle of LinkedIn encourages users to grow their network on the site for the sake of possible opportunities and positive partnerships.
The idea of having a vast network of hundreds of professionals can be enticing and often drives people to accept invitations from almost anyone who comes across their page.
After all, there can’t be a real downside to expanding your connections, right?
Of course not. The problem is that you aren’t actually expanding your connections by blindly accepting invitations from strangers on LinkedIn.
That’s because many things tend to be true of those anonymous connections.
For one, you probably won’t ever interact with those people, which makes their presence in your list of digital connections relatively worthless and potentially dangerous.
“I soon discovered the downside to getting linked with people I didn’t know,” USA Today’s Steven Petrow writes. “… If I did connect with someone I didn’t know, I felt even more uncomfortable — you know that old saying about being judged by the company you keep? I realized I didn’t want to be professionally associated with people I don’t know (especially when I heard that one of my connections had been fired from her job for dealing drugs in the workplace!).”
That’s the reality of those seemingly harmless digital connections.
They are real enough that when one of your connections earns a troubling reputation, it could also cause other LinkedIn users to question your integrity as well.
Not to mention the fact that linking with people you don’t really know often just leads to a pointless virtual relationship that eventually gets lost in the sea of faces that are actually familiar to you.
It all points to the fact that there should be some sort of caution in selecting who you want to link with on the site, but that doesn’t mean you should deny every invitation that comes from a person you haven’t shaken hands with.
LinkedIn gives you access to people you may have never had the chance to meet otherwise.
If you are going to accept invitations from strangers, make sure those decisions are industry specific.
Is there something for you to gain from that connection and is there a reason you would want to reach out to them relatively soon?
These types of pairings could lead to potential clients or mutually beneficial professional relationships.
Perhaps the best tool to navigating the tricky waters of “accept or not to accept” is to invest in going premium on the site and first communicate with people via InMail.
It will allow you to actually have an interaction with that person before connecting with them, eliminating the problem of connecting with “strangers” all together.
Other than that, don’t let the desire to have a large number of connections fool you. That number may impress LinkedIn newbies, but the business veterans on the site won’t be moved by a staggering number of accepted invitations paired with a body of work that shows a stunning lack of real connections and face-to-face networking.