FollowingFaye

Wednesday, December 20, 2017

Black Excellence in Science

An excerpt from OZY -

THE SEGREGATED BLACK SCHOOLS THAT DOMINATED IN SCIENCE
By Daniel Malloy

The segregation that built Sumner also fueled its excellence. The best-educated white minds of the time could become lawyers and doctors and business leaders. The cream of the African-American intellectual crop was blocked from many such opportunities, so they often became educators. In the 1930s, at a time when many white high school teachers did not have bachelor’s degrees, 44 percent of Sumner’s teachers had master’s degrees, according to research by Frank Manheim of George Mason University and Eckhard Hellmuth of the University of Missouri, Kansas City.

A history of Sumner written by its students in 1935 quotes an unnamed African-American educator: “Sumner is a child not of our own volition but rather an offspring of the race antipathy of a bygone period. It was a veritable blessing in disguise — a flower of which we may proudly say, ‘The bud had a bitter taste, but sweet indeed is the flower.’”

In 1952, the school systems on both sides of the Kansas-Missouri state line joined the International Science Fair movement. The Greater Kansas City Science and Engineering Fair went on to become one of America’s biggest. The prizes it handed out in the 1950s, according to Manheim and Hellmuth, went largely to Sumner students. Then the baton was picked up by Lincoln High, a Black school in Kansas City, Missouri, which dominated the competition into the 1960s. In 1963, Lincoln’s Vernice Marie Murray won a national first place in physics with a project called “Experimental Methods of Verifying Force.”

http://www.ozy.com/flashback/the-segregated-black-schools-that-dominated-in-science/79621

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Malcolm Gladwell does a podcast entitled "Miss Buchanan's Period of Adjustment" - number 8 on the list below - that does a masterful job of explaining the error in thinking that is associated with the Brown vs the Board of Education Supreme Court ruling. Having been raised in segregated schools, it supports what I already knew to be true.

YouTube - The World's Best Film School?

An excerpt from Wired -

THE WORLD'S BEST FILM SCHOOL IS FREE ON YOUTUBE
By AUTHOR: DAVID PIERCE

Lessons from the Screenplay launched on June 8, 2016, with a video called "Gone Girl—Don't Underestimate the Screenwriter." In it, Tucker explains why screenplays matter more than you think, and dissects the techniques Gillian Flynn used in adapting her novel for the film. As Tucker narrates over clips from the movie, the corresponding lines and notes from the original screenplay appear underneath. The video blew up immediately, climbing the r/movies Subreddit and eventually landing on Reddit's front page. Lessons from the Screenplay had 8,000 subscribers after just one day, and the Gone Girl video racked up 200,000 views in a week.

With that, Tucker had found himself part of a rich, growing corner of YouTube. You could call it YouTube Film School, staffed by creators all over the platform who spend their time helping viewers understand how film and TV work. YouTube is rich with movie reviews, hilariously re-cut trailers, and haphazardly uploaded clips of dubious quality and legality. But the best channels are the ones that teach film as an art form, that help you understand why a particular cut or camera move makes you feel the way it does.

https://www.wired.com/story/youtube-film-school/

2017 Photos

From the Atlantic -

https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2017/12/the-most-2017-photos-ever/548789/

Tuesday, December 19, 2017

How can groups make good decisions? | Mariano Sigman and Dan Ariely

Let’s face it — American breakfast is really dessert

Boy Calls 911 on the Grinch

From USA Today -

To save Christmas, boy calls 911 on the Grinch and then helps cops nab him
By Therese Apel, The (Jackson, Miss.) Clarion Ledger

JACKSON, Miss. — It's actually a story of saving Christmas from the Grinch.

TyLon Pittman, a 5-year-old Mississippi boy, knew he was too little to take on the Grinch all by himself, so having identified the threat, he took action. TyLon called 911 to report that he did not want the Grinch to come steal his Christmas.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/12/18/boy-calls-911-report-grinch/960746001/