Luke Cage, wrongly convicted and unjustly imprisoned, was altered in a failed prison experiment that granted him bulletproof skin and superhuman strength. With his street smarts, and unending determination to do right, he fights for the common man. He also has a wife and child, showing his nature as a family man.
James Rhodes (Iron Patriot)
James Rhodes is Tony Stark’s personal pilot and one of the playboy’s oldest friends. Rhodes has often donned the Iron Man armor when the burden has been too much for his friend, but has also established his own identity as the Iron Patriot.
Source: Worldbank.org – “For Judith in Tanzania, a load of manure is a wonderful thing. She got a loan to buy a couple of cows so she could create homemade biogas fuel to save money on expensive and polluting cooking fuels. Watch how her life has been transformed — and learn why a program that encourages women to invest in sustainable energy is benefiting entire communities.”
A former teacher turned tech entreprenuer has found a way to help close the achievement gap for students of severely under-resourced schools by giving educators the power to track their students’ progress with nothing more than a smart phone.
In an interview with Blerds, former teacher and Quick Key creator Walter Duncan said that closing the achievement gap is his passion and this new app has certainly allowed him to do just that.
He explained that schools with more sufficient funding can incorporate technology in the curriculum and grading process in a way that under resourced schools can’t.
This, in turn, widens the achievement gap between well-funded and low-funded schools.
Quick Key is working to significantly reduce that gap.
“Quick Key turns a mobile device into a scanner that allows teachers to grade assessments in paper based classrooms with or without an Internet connection,” the self-proclaimed “teacherpreneuer” told Atlanta BlackStar. “It then gives teachers the student performance data right away. This tool allows a dedicated teacher to improve student performance, irrespective of their schools infrastructure and budget.”
After spending 15 years in the classroom, Duncan realized there was a serious need for teachers to have a tool like this in their hands.
Tracking students’ daily progress and understanding of intense lesson plans is a task that would be nearly impossible to do by hand.
On average, teachers already spend more than 10 hours every week grading papers and assignments, according to estimates.
Ducan’s revolutionary app, Quick Key, will give teachers back those precious hours and allow them to focus on “developing and executing creative and engaging lessons.”
The impact of such an app is even greater than just saving time.
In the long run, allowing teachers to track student progress, have more time to develop lesson plans and prevent any one student from falling too far behind has the potential to boost graduation rates on a global scale and save the futures of students who potentially could have slipped through the educational system’s cracks.
More traditional means of tracking student progress often allows many students to fly under the radar, which means it could be too late by the time their parents or teachers notice they have fallen behind.
The technology behind Quick Key also has the ability to revolutionize the way people track progress even outside the classroom.
“In terms of companies, I would say AT&T, Coca-Cola, Target, Best Buy and Starbucks could benefit from using Quick Key for customer feedback and corporate training feedback,” Duncan said.
The same way the app would help teachers identify areas where students are struggling, the app could allow higher ups at any given company to identify areas where their corporate training programs could use improvements.
“Corporate training is critical to successful companies,” Duncan said. “But tracking participant mastery of concepts can be time consumer and challenging. Quick Key allows companies to track mastery of corporate training in real time.”
Duncan also explained that the app is a tool that should be used to help improve relationships between teachers and students.
In fact, it was his own positive relationship with a former student from Los Angeles that helped bring Quick Key to the market.
“Over the course of my career, I built many healthy relationships with students,” Duncan explained. “These relationships persisted during the time after I had been their teacher. One such student, from Los Angeles, helped to change my life.”
Duncan explained that he had just created a “grainy” video with his iPhone that revealed the app’s prototype and overall vision for the app.
“I asked Jacob, my former student, to help me improve the video, and he agreed,” Duncan said. “I gave him my YouTube password (reluctantly) and went to bed.”
The next morning he “woke up to a different world than the one [he] went to bed in.”
Jacob had posted the video to Reddit along with a heart-warming message.
“The best teacher I ever had created this cool new app, let’s show him we appreciate his hard work,” Jacob wrote.
It wasn’t long before the video went viral and garnered the media attention of major outlets including Techcrunch.
So many teachers started signing up for the app that the servers crashed.
Today, more than 400,000 assessments in more than 40 different countries have been graded using the Quick Key mobile app.
The app is free to download from iTunes and truly harnesses the power to level the playing field for students at under-resourced schools.
One of the beautiful things about Afrofuturistic and Black nerd culture seems to be the fact that you can enter it from any point or perspective. Afrofuturism, whether applied retrospectively to the works of Sun Ra or used as a creative medium in the here and now, tracks what the future looks like across time, from various points and locations. If you apply the lens correctly, it can connect you to the speculative future from the imaginative standpoint of a Black woman writer by the name of Octavia Butler, born in California in 1947, or help you envision the future formed from the liberation philosophies of a political activist by the name of Marcus Garvey, born in Jamaica in 1887. Afrofuturism, in my opinion, functions as an open-source free space, where people can self-identify as Afrofuturists, craft their own modes of practice from some core, general principles, and participate in their own ways – either individually and/or as part of the broader community of Afrofuturists.
For the past four years, I have experienced the multifaceted expression of Afrofuturism through an event that I curate in Philadelphia called The AfroFuturist Affair Charity & Costume Ball. At the annual ball, we celebrate and bring awareness to this culture with a showcase of self-identified Afrofuturistic visual artists, musicians, performers and authors who all use the Black speculative imagination as vehicles for their work. Artists featured at the ball are diverse in their theories, topics and modes of expression, but all of their work embody common Afrofuturistic elements – tapping into our ancestral memory, while envisioning our personal and collective futures as African-descended people.
This year, the annual AfroFuturist Affair Charity & Costume Ball has expanded space-time from one evening to a monthlong celebration of Afrofuturism. In addition to the fourth annual costume ball on Saturday, Nov. 8, we will have events throughout November, including workshops, a dance party, readings, film screenings, art exhibits and a punk rock show, all exploring the theme of Black Holographic Memory, the collective unconscious memory of Black people throughout time and space contained within each individual, passed down through our shared ancestry. It is a conscious activation of ancestral memory through music and art.
The kickoff event will feature bodypainting, pop-up photoshoot, and live music and performance art from experimental group Visibly Inflight, hip-hop group Ganja Goons, soul and folk group Violet Marley, producer and musician Marlo Reynolds, experimental artist Moor Mother Goddess, author James L. Hampton III, performers from Cirque Mannik, poet Joy KMT, DJ and producer Wino Willy, experimental sound project Nyfolt, musician and artist John Wesley Moon, spoken word artist Warren C. Longmire, and hip-hop artist Sindian. This event will take place at Impact Hub in North Philly, which will also host a monthlong exhibition of Afrofuturist artwork, with pieces from Noni Red, Omi Urban Gypsy, Nyfolt, Selam Bekele, John Moon and Dezz Archie. At the Indigenous Futures afterparty on the same night, we will have DJ Haram, DJ PreColumbian, and DJ Nolita Selector, all women and genderqueer media activists and DJs of color who spin experimental, house, trap, bass, and global music.
We will be hosting a film screening event at Impact Hub on Nov. 13, which will feature Afrofuturist, speculative, Black sci-fi, and horror films. The screenings will include Prince of Nowhere by Selam Bekele; A Dangerous Cure by Kevin Jarvis, Last Man Standing by Stan West, NOISEGATE by Donovan Vim Crony , Walk With Me by Art Punch Studio, and other shorts. We will be Skyping in to talk with some of the filmmakers after the screenings.
The monthlong celebration will also feature an experimental space for social practices of Afrofuturism through cultural workshops and speculative fiction readings at A*Space on Nov. 15. There will be experimental workshops, mini-lectures, readings, and a musical performance. Activities will include time travel experiments, fiction after the end of history, a guided journey in order to find the oldest, blackest memory in the DNA museum, featuring Metropolarity Speculative Fiction collective, scholar Rone Shavers, Almah the Alchemist, poet and performer MMGZ, Afrofuturist author and healer DjaDJa Medjay, and music group BHTP. The final event for Black Holographic will be held on Nov. 19 at Dahlak Restaurant, in collaboration with community partner, Rockers!, a monthly DIY event in Philly that showcases Black and female-led punk bands from all over the country.
All proceeds from the Black Holographic Memory events will benefit the Futurist Fund, a grassroots-style community grant dedicated to serving the needs of an underserved or marginalized member of the community with an immediate and demonstrated need, and without other available funds or resources to meet that need. This allows the proceeds from the events to cycle directly back into the communities where the events are held. The grant seeks to connect the philosophies of Afrofuturism to principles of liberation and upliftment of disenfranchised communities. The DIY/grassroots principles of the organization do not require corporate backing. We are proud to receive support for the events from women-owned small businesses and community organizations such as Philadelphia Printworks, Lissa Alicia IMM, Metropolarity, Rockers, and FanBros.com.
The AfroFuturist Affair Charity & Costume Ball – and Afrofuturism in general – engages the Black community as a vehicle through which people can push beyond the confines of the mainstream narratives and stereotypes that have marginalized their interests, experiences, and their very existences. In the form of art, critical analysis, music, fashion and literature, Afrofuturists correct the records of our histories and interrogate the present structures and institutions of modern-day society, all while building future worlds where Black people have agency and a significant presence.
Star Trek is a science-fiction franchise spanning comics, books, film and television. These are some of the main Blerd figures from the Star Trek saga.
Nyota Uhura
Nyota Uhura is a character in Star Trek: The Original Series, Star Trek: The Animated Series, the first six Star Trek films, the 2009 film Star Trek, and its 2013 sequel Star Trek Into Darkness.
In 2266, Uhura (played originally by Nichelle Nichols and later by Zoe Saldana) began her Starfleet career as a communications officer aboard the USS Enterprise with the rank of lieutenant in the command division.
In the following years of that vessel’s historic five-year mission, she was transferred to the operations division where she proved to be a proficient technician and was considered by Captain Kirk to be a capable and reliable bridge officer, manning the helm, navigation and main science station when the need arose.
Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge
In Star Trek: The Next Generation, which aired from 1987 to 1994 and was the basis of four Star Trek movies, Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge is the chief engineer of the Starship Enterprise.
In Star Trek: First Contact, La Forge (portrayed by LeVar Burton) and the Enterprise-E travel back in time to the 21st century to stop the Borg from preventing mankind’s first warp space flight. The inventor of the warp drive is a financially motivated, white alcoholic named Zefram Cochrane who lives in Bozeman, Montana. La Forge has to hold his hand to get him to launch the Phoenix and make “first contact” with the Vulcans.
One Milwaukee high school is ready to foster the next generation of tech entrepreneurs and skilled developers thanks to a unique, rigorous new program that will be available to 10 schools nationwide.
The Washington High School of Information Technology will be one of the few lucky schools that will offer the new mobile app development and entrepreneurship curriculum, the Milwaukee Community Journal (MCJ) reported.
Students at the school will be teaming up with major technology firm Lenovo and the nonprofit education group National Academy Foundation (NAF) to participate in the program of a lifetime.
This won’t be any average course either.
While tech students at other schools will be flipping through textbooks or penning essays, these students will be working on developing their very own mobile app.
According to the MCJ, students will also be working alongside the Massachusetts Institute of Technology “App Inventor” developers and will create a business plan for bringing their app to the market.
It’s the kind of program that has the potential to make every single student the face of true innovation in the technology industry.
“We’re honored to be one of 10 schools in the nation to be able to provide our students with this exciting, hands-on opportunity to broaden their knowledge of information technology and strengthen their preparation for college and careers,” Washington Principal Tonya Adair told the paper. “This is another important piece in the strong information technology programming our students can access.”
The school has already been adamant about allowing its students to garner real world experience that will help them make an easy transition into the science, technology, engineering or math career of their choice.
The school partners with local businesses that in turn offer job shadowing opportunities to students.
Then there is also the twice-annual Information Technology and Engineering Career Fair that allows students to network with each other as well as the figures behind major companies in the technology and engineering field.
Local firms such as Direct Supply and Northwestern Mutual have already offered internships to many of the students and helped prep them for their college years and future career goals.
With the school having a predominantly Black student body, the revolutionary program will be yet another step at closing the diversity gap in Silicon Valley.
Time after time, tech experts have mentioned education and access to major tech companies as reasons Black children are at a major disadvantage when it comes to getting jobs in the technology space.
For these students, however, that certainly won’t be an issue.
“Our collaboration with companies like Lenovo supports our goal of graduating more students college and career ready, particularly in growing STEM industries,” NAF President JD Hoye told the MCJ. “The Lenovo Scholar Network is a prime example of how businesses and education can work together to provide students with the skills and knowledge they need to succeed in today’s fast-paced world.”
As the number of Black people working in technology increases, we continue to see more rise to the upper echelons of the tech world. Here is a list of 13 Blacks influencing technology today, according to BusinessInsider.
Condoleezza Rice, Board of Directors, Dropbox
Earlier this month, online storage startup Dropbox added Condoleezza Rice to its board of directors.
As the former secretary of state and an adviser to the National Security Agency, having someone like Rice as a liaison to Washington, D.C., could be very helpful to Dropbox.
At the same time, though, her history as an official in the Bush Administration is stirring up controversy. Protests on social media say she is a controversial figure after revelations of widespread wiretapping on US citizens during her time in office, as reported by BBC News.
Dropbox has raised over $1 billion to date and employs 698 people.
Ade Olonoh, CEO, Formspring
Ade Olonoh is the co-founder and CEO of Formspring, a social network that helped people find out more about each other.
Prior to founding Formspring, Olonoh founded online form building Formstack. Formspring has taken $14.3 million in funding and has about 12 employees. In 2013, Spring.me acquired Formspring’s assets and rebranded it.
Sheldon Gilbert, Founder and CEO, Proclivity
Sheldon Gilbert is the founder and chief executive of Proclivity Media, a company that specializes in digital advertising technologies.
Founded six years ago, Proclivity uses a retailer’s e-commerce data to best predict and match companies with ad placements that will bring in the most sales.
Proclivity has raised $8.82 million in funding and has eight employees.
As the holiday shopping season begins, many people will be looking for an iPhone 6 Plus for a loved one. Apple products always create a lot of buzz, and this one is no different. Here are a few things iPhone 6 Plus users may hear often from non-users.
Facebook’s global head of diversity, Maxine Williams, is taking a different approach to addressing the discussion of race in Silicon Valley, and, according to her, there’s no room for people to be sensitive about the subject.
It’s been a year since Williams was given the task of improving diversity within Facebook and creating a space that welcomed employees from a variety of different backgrounds.
Needless to say, the task certainly wasn’t going to be an easy one.
While the company still isn’t anywhere near as diverse as it has the potential to be, Williams may have unlocked the secret to really getting things moving forward – stop being so sensitive.
Williams sat down with Forbes and explained that many of the white people in the office were uncomfortable about discussing race.
At one point, she recalled that one white employee asked her if it was OK for them to even use the word “Black.”
“I would literally have conversations with people where they would say to me, ‘Can I say the word Black?’” Williams recalled. “And I was like, ‘Wow, these were the conversations we’re having?’”
Williams said years of sensitivity training and lawyers ready to pounce at the sign of any relatively offensive remark has white people terrified of even bringing up diversity and race in the workplace.
The idea of talking to a Black person in the office becomes a game of social Mine Sweeper where any wrong move can end in absolute disaster.
Williams says that to a certain extent that idea needs to be pushed out of the workplace.
“This needs to be a space where people can ask stupid questions and then be forgiven,” Williams said. “In the typical workplace that has employment lawyers, nobody wants you asking stupid questions because they could be offensive. You won’t want to ask that Black person, ‘Do you wash your hair?’ You just don’t. It raises risk … so we become hesitant to engage.”
Williams has flipped that philosophy on its head at Facebook.
“We’ve flipped that around,” she continued. “I’ve said to people: It’s OK to ask those things, but then I want you to forgive people when they ask stupid questions. What I came to see is the hesitation came because I’m operating in a country that has a heightened sensitivity around race, where, quite frankly, white people are afraid to engage. They’re afraid of stepping in the wrong place.”
According to Williams, the push for diversity in the tech sphere will fall short if people continue to be too sensitive about the subject.
“I think sensitivity was holding us back from being bold on diversity,” Williams said about Facebook. “We were bold on products, right? We would achieve things that you never thought were achievable. But on these issues of identity, there was hesitation and sensitivity.”
Williams explained that many times white people were “well intentioned” because they didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings or make a remark that could be perceived as racist.
In the end, all that really did was hinder progress.
Williams continues to push employees to be open and honest and ask those “stupid questions.”
That, she says, is the only way to truly get everyone engaged in a much-needed conversation about race.
