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More Than Bessie Coleman: 7 Other Famous Black Female Pilots

dto2-willa-brownWilla Brown (Jan. 22, 1906 – July 18, 1992)

In 1936, Brown became the first woman to obtain a private pilot’s license in the U.S. She was part of the National Airmen’s Association of America in 1939 whose sole purpose was to integrate army so that Black pilots could get the chance to fly. In her military career, Brown was an advocate for all Black pilots male or female.  Brown became the  head of the Civilian Pilot Training Program in Chicago where Black pilots were selected for the Tuskegee training program. She went on to become a coordinator for the Civil Aeronautics Authority and a member of the Federal Aviation Administration’s Women’s Advisory Board.

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Janet Bragg (March 24, 1907 — April 11, 1993)

Bragg was the first woman admitted to Curtiss-Wright School of Aeronautics in Chicago in 1928 and to hold a commercial pilot’s license. Bragg was rejected from four different organizations based on race. This rejection may have lead to her second career path as a registered nurse. After graduating from Spelman College, Bragg went to Illinois and continued practicing as a nurse until becoming an insurance health inspector in 1941.

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Dorothy Layne McIntyre (b. Jan. 27, 1917)

At 22 years-old, Layne McIntyre became the first Black woman to earn a pilot’s license under the Civil Aeronautics Authority (CAA). She ended up going into aircraft mechanics at the Baltimore War Production school.

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This Scientist Thoughts on How Human Cells Can Be Repaired Like Cars To Achieve Immortality Demands Your Attention

Scientist Aubrey de Grey, the chief science officer at SENS Research Foundation, believes that people can cheat death and live forever.

De Grey is a University of Cambridge-educated biomedical gerontologist who has researched and written three books about aging: “The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging” (1999), “Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence: Why Genuine Control of Aging May Be Foreseeable” (2004) and “Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime” (with Michael Rae) (2008).

His work has gained the attention of the larger scientific community because it is extremely controversial. He wants to use stem cells to repair old and dying cells like one repairs a car or leaky faucet. He believes that if dying cells are repaired with stem cells people can live longer. The whole idea is simple really. People in the modern world have cured most infectious diseases and the real cause of death is simply living. The cells will eventually wear down and then people will die.

Another aspect of his work revolves around moving away from the need of pharmaceuticals.

According to de Grey, “we will not cure cancer this way. We will not cure Alzheimer’s this way. The incentive structure for modern pharmaceuticals perpetuates this because it can be done reasonably quickly, sold for a lot of money and because people are desperate for anything.”

Controversy aside, de Grey wants people to live longer without dependence on medication and corporate exploitation. To some that is a great thing, but to others, he is playing God.

“We are talking about a world in which quality will confer quantity, in which you will live longer because you are living better. That’s the critical thing here,” says de Grey.

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Schools Use Drones to Spy on Cheaters

Drone technology has come a long way in just the past five years. Companies like Amazon plan to use drones to deliver packages in the near future. We already know that various armed forces around the world are using them for reconnaissance or for offensive purposes.

According to Wired writer Katie Collins, “every year in China millions of students sit a higher education access exam that is so stressful it has been linked to spates of suicides and frequently results in youngsters fainting in the examination room. Known as the ‘gaokao’, the exam is taken over two days, is based primarily on memorization and determines the course of the young students’ lives.”

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In the Chinese province of Luoyang, schools have decided to prove that they are a little smarter than cheating kids. The schools are aware that kids might try to use cellphones to find answers they just don’t know.

They plan on using drones to monitor examination rooms. This exam is essentially the SAT on steroids. It has been reported that many students have been so stressed about the test that they committed suicide to avoid shame.

In order to avoid cheating, the drones will hover 500 meters in the air over the test site. It can detect the cellphone and relay that message back to the test proctors via tablet.

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5 Interesting Reasons People Give for Hating Educated Black People

There are some stigmas educated Black people have to deal with that other educated groups don’t. You can’t speak proper English or wear clothing outside of hip-hop styles without being labeled as trying to be white. Most people should know that white people don’t have a monopoly on education, intelligence or class.

_DSC0433Name Assimilation  

When people of color have children, they have to decide whether to give their child a name that is stereotypically white or a name representative of their culture and people. “Creative naming has reached every race and class, but it is largely and profoundly the legacy of African-Americans,” writes Eliza Dinwiddie-Boyd in her baby-naming book “Proud Heritage.” However, there are issues with this. In the documentary Freakonomics, economist Steven Levitt put it to the test. People with white-sounding names got more callbacks from future employers than Latinos and African-Americans with non-white names. The facts are clear: racism and prejudice are real. Parents have every right to give their children whatever name they choose, but the world isn’t always an accepting place. Hopefully, one day no one will be judged based on their name, but that day has yet to come.

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4 Apps To Vastly Increase Your Child’s Black History Knowledge

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‘Black Inventors Match Game’

Available on: Android and iOS

This app, for younger children around ages 7-12, features the characters Myles and Ayesha as interactive teachers. They will help kids learn about Black inventors and their inventions, such as the doorknob, traffic light, lemon squeezer and many more. Then users can test their knowledge with a matching game. This app is only 99 cents.

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Chicago’s Ambitious Computer Science Program Could Help Close Diversity Gap in STEM Careers

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has launched an extremely ambitious computer science program and it could ultimately help increase diversity in the tech field.

It was only a few months ago that major tech companies like Facebook and Google revealed that only about 2 percent of their employees are Black.

Since those diversity reports were made public, people have been scrambling to find the solution to the lack of diversity in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) careers.

One solution has always stood out above the rest, however, and that’s education.

Experts believe the key to generating more diversity in STEM careers is to first make sure minorities have access to the type of education that could prepare them for such a career path.

Thanks to Emanuel, Chicago’s youth will have that type of access.

According to NationSwell.com, the Chicago mayor has teamed up with Code.org to bring computer science classes to every public school in the Windy City.

Every grade from kindergarten to high school will soon have computer science classes as a mandatory part of their curriculum.

CNN Money revealed that high school students won’t even be allowed to graduate without meeting certain computer science requirements.

“In three years’ time, you can’t graduate from high school in the city of Chicago if you didn’t take code writing and computer science,” Emanuel announced at a tech conference. “We’re making it mandatory.”

Emanuel announced the plan last December and now there is an increasingly large need for the plan to come to fruition.

Nearly 40 percent of Chicago’s public school students are Black. More than 45 percent are Hispanic.

If computer science programs are successfully integrated into the school’s curriculum, that means thousands of minority students will be given the type of skills that could eventually grow into a budding career in Silicon Valley.

Perhaps the most important aspect of the plan is to have computer science incorporated in the schools’ curriculum even at the elementary level.

“Just having kids jump into computer science at the high school level, they don’t have a good context for it,” said Cameron Wilson of Code.org to CNN Money. “Having them exposed early and building on concepts year after year is really important.”

And that’s exactly what the mayor and Code.org authorities have in mind.

Code.org has already successfully partnered with 30 school districts in order to promote computer science education, but the partnership with Chicago is the most ambitious one yet.

“This plan will also compete with countries where children take coding classes as early as first grade and create an environment where we can support the next Bill Gates and Marissa Mayer,” Emanuel added.

In addition to being a major step toward adding diversity to the tech industry, this could also help close the major deficit of workers needed in computer science careers.

It was recently revealed that by 2020, there will be 4.2 million job positions for computer science. Based on the current number of computer science students in college and employees already working in the computer science field, there won’t be enough people to fill all those positions.

Exposing students to computer science at a young age and building on those skills throughout their years in school, however, could spark an interest in the field and make the future graduating classes out of Chicago viable candidates to fill those positions.