Tag: Morehouse College

BooksData ScienceHistorically Black Colleges

Black data science book giveaway

on July 5, 2019

The Atlanta University Center Consortium — the umbrella organization of Morehouse, Spelman, Clark Atlanta University, and Morehouse School of Medicine — just launched a Data Science Initiative. To celebrate, I am giving away two books!

Here’s an excerpt from the announcement:

The AUCC Data Science Initiative brings together the collective talents and innovation of computer science professors from Morehouse College and other AUCC campuses into an academic program that will be the first of its kind for our students,” said David A. Thomas, president of Morehouse College. “Our campuses will soon produce hundreds of students annually who will be well-equipped to compete internationally for lucrative jobs in data science. This effort, thanks to UnitedHealth Group’s generous donation, is an example of the excellence that results when we come together as a community to address national issues such as the disparity among minorities working in STEM.

Announcement of the Atlanta University Center data science initiative at http://d4bl.org/conference.html

To commemorate and honor the founding of this initiative, I’ve set up two book giveaways at Amazon. The first book is W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America. W.E.B. DuBois was a sociologist who taught at the Atlanta University Center. His visualizations of African American life in the early 20th century still set the standard for data visualization and this book is a collection of visualizations that he and his Atlanta University students produced for the 1900 Paris Exposition. If Atlanta University students were doing amazing data science 100 years ago without laptops, we can only guess what the future holds. Click this link to get your book.

The second book is Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life by Dr. Ruha Benjamin, a contemporary African American scholar at Princeton whose work addresses “the social dimensions of science, technology, and medicine”. Click this link to get a copy of Captivating Technology.

There is only one copy per book available so the first person to click gets the book.

If you want to know more about the work being done by Black data scientists, you should check out the DATA FOR BLACK LIVES III conference.

I’ll close with one of the sessions from the first Data for Black Lives conference. Where are the Black (data) scientists? Definitely at the Atlanta University Center!

Data ScienceHistorySocial Justice

Remembering Bill Jenkins

on May 17, 2019

As Chelsea Manning is again sent to jail for refusing to abandon basic press freedoms, I am reminded of Bill Jenkins.

Mr Jenkins passed away recently. He was an epidemiologist (and Morehouse graduate ) who bravely exposed the horrific Tuskegee experiments, as Ms Manning exposed egregious human rights violations that occurred during US military operations.

If you are not aware of the Tuskegee experiment, the US Health Service allowed Black men to be untreated for sexually transmitted diseases for three decades. It was a controlled experiment to determine the effects of untreated syphilis. The participants were all poor Black sharecroppers — men recruited through Tuskegee University, believing that they were getting free healthcare in exchange for helping to develop a drug to fight “bad blood”. None of those who had syphilis were given access to penicillin, even after the study supposedly ended. Many perished or suffered irreversible harm.

One outcome was the establishment of informed consent, and other ethical practices we take for granted when we walk into a doctor’s office, or signup for a clinical trial. Jenkins learned of the study, and started asking questions, despite being told to ignore it, or just “look the other way”. In the current climate, Mr Jenkins might have well faced prison. Some principles are worth suffering for, some causes are just that important.

Thank you Bill Jenkins, thank you Chelsea, and thank you to the others doing the right thing.