Invented an improved electrical resistor used in ALL electrical and Electronic circuitry today!
Few inventors have had the lasting impact of Otis Boykin. Look around the house today and you'll see a variety of devices that utilize components made by Boykin – including computers, radios and TV sets. Boykin's inventions are all the more impressive when one considers he was an African American in a time of segregation and the field of electronics was not as well-established as it is today.
Instead, Boykin went to work as an inventor. He received his first patent in 1959 for a wire resistor that allowed a precise amount of electricity to flow to a component. Two year later, he created an even better resistor that could be manufactured inexpensively and withstand extreme temperature changes and shock. A low-cost carbon based product that was more reliable, the invention brought Otis Boykin to the forefront of American electronics.
Consumer electronics manufacturers, the United States military and IBM all placed orders for the resistor. It would come to be used in household appliances, computers and guided missiles – and is still used in ALL of those devices to this very day. Perhaps most importantly, a version of his resistor was used in the invention of the pacemaker. That device, which keeps the heart beating regularly through electronic pulses, has helped to extend the lives of hundreds of thousands of individuals.
Otis Boykin's accomplishments didn't stop there. He continued to invent throughout the duration of his life (which ended in 1982), working as a consultant for firms in America and Europe. All in all, he earned 11 patents and invented 28 different electronic devices
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"...It would come to be used in household appliances, computers and guided missiles – and is still used in ALL of those devices to this very day..."
-------------------- Lionz Posts: 7419 | From: North America | Registered: Mar 2009
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Another black inventor developed the original DIODE. I'll pull his data and post it also.
Why is this significant?
Diodes and resistors are the basic elements of ALL electronics. Transistors are just a combination of the two, which makes these two African inventors the fathers of ALL modern electronics.
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This one's for the Afrocentric history books since it won't recieve much play anywhere else. African universities SHOULD be Afrocentric by de-facto.
Imagine how stupid it sounds to have an Afrocentric university in Africa? So what was it before??
-------------------- state of mind Posts: 1819 | From: odesco baba | Registered: Feb 2005
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quote:Originally posted by IronLion: Please post the data with its implications for modern electronics...
The Resistor has not changed since Boykins original design. It is the most fundamental component of electronics found within every piece of electronic equipment ever produced.
An example of a resistor is a simple light dimmer found controlling intensity of room lighting. That is a resistor varying electricity applied to the bulb.
It is the component behind the VOLUME control on your stereo or computer sound system. When you increase/decrease the volume control it is varying the voltage applied to the speaker outputs.
More on the resistor can be found here, but never expect to see anywhere that it was invented by an African.
This is a schematic for a simple, inexpensive 10 Watt Stereo Amplifier which would be found in a car stereo, a TV audio system, an Alarm system, or a modern MP3 player.
All the components mark Rn (R1, R2, Rn....) are Boykin's resistors. Resistor values are measured in OHMS. The higher the OHMIC value, the lower the current flow through the component.
Therefore, Resistors are used to fix specific voltage levels at specific junctions of a circuit by using the equation; Voltage (V) = Current (I) x Resistance (R): E=IxR. They are used virtually everywhere and in everything electrical.
In school (BSEE), I never heard of Otis Boykins. Of course his family SHOULD be Billionaires, but as usual, they are not.
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The truth is that there is a small critical mass of Europeans/whites who push the names of their inventors and scientists. In physics "newtons", "joules", "amps"[from Ampere], Plank's constant, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, La Place transforms, etc. are standard fare in any physics textbook.
But for some reason blacks who do outstanding things--using brain power a nd creativity--never get pushed by any critical mass of blacks. Maybe some kind of psychological disease.
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Likely because, there is no "critic Mass" of blacks.
All the electronics companies I've visited such as Raytheon, Lockheed, Boeing, General Electric, etc. are 90%-98% white, and even higher in the core management groups. Not because there are no qualified black engineers, but because they are inherently racist organizations...or at least their upper management is.
In fact, I'm not sure if there is even one HBCU in the country that carries an electronic engineering degree program on it's own. Usually, you may do your first two years at a HBCU before continuing at some perdominately white college/university.
For example, if attending Morgan State in Baltimore, you do your first 2 years towards BSEE there and the last two somewhere else such as University Of Maryland.
For some sick reason, Engineering is usually the first discipline to be cut from HBCUs when funding deficients are encountered.
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Again, for some strange reason blacks/Africans believe in "racial equality" snd social justice when it comes to whites. But the past and present evidence just doesn't support that that belief is a rational one. The better of blacks in South Africa, Brazil and the U.S. believe social utopia is integration with whites but whites in majority don't go for that. That's why "the black problem" is not being solved.
Maybe it's just fear, subconscious white worship, lack of self-confidence or just a conditioned psychological laziness. Think of the praise that people like Mandela and Desmond Tutu get from whites. They just don't seem to smell a rat in this instance.
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Advanced Stockholm Syndrome Plus, the slave trade depleted Africa of it's most strong and most intelligent. What was left there was the least marketable and those thought not to be able to make the transatlantic crossing. Oh..oh, did he say dat!
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Re that required "critical mass" of blacks who would foster and promote blacks who excel in certain areas, it is just amazing that black/African cultures which are so disgustingly anti-intellectual could produce so many outstanding intellects. Unfortunately, such men/women lead very lonely and alienated lives in their own cultures--submerged in a sea of useless religion and affective behaviour.
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It's the backwards European educational system we are submerged in. The system has us trapped between a Rock and a very hard place. Once a black completes their degree they are invested within the system, and unconsciously work to maintain it as well as the other European inspired corrupt systems.
Plus, the system has adapted and weeds out emerging potential Marcus Garvey's or Malcolm X's before they can mature and do their thing. As example, the US financial system implemented the "accredited Investor" laws just to halt the emergence of another Marcus Garvey (Black Star) like investment scheme designed to enable INDEPENDENT black business development.
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Its just that the whites are extremely cunning when it comes to maintaining and defending their interests.
Some history: when blacks in the U.S. were pushing for desegregation followed up by so-called Affirmative Action, the white governing structures, instead of investing massively in black education in crucial areas such as medicine and the sciences, quickly expanded the unrepresented group from "blacks" into "minorities". This allowed other groups such as white women, non-whites from Asia and blacks from Africa and the Caribbean to be used to partially fill areas where blacks were woefully under-represented. This had a double negative effect of luring relatively small numbers of blacks from Africa to go to the West to offer their skills to white society. The impact on the societies from which they came was negative in the sense that it assured the continuing underdeveloped status of their societies of origins. Examples: more medical doctors from Ghana in the U.K than in the whole of Ghana. And it's worse for Ethiopia.
Just sheer animal cunning with a winning smile. And the blacks naively step into the quicksand.
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quote:Originally posted by MelaninKing: Advanced Stockholm Syndrome Plus, the slave trade depleted Africa of it's most strong and most intelligent. What was left there was the least marketable and those thought not to be able to make the transatlantic crossing. Oh..oh, did he say dat!
You're far too intelligent to believe dat.
Posts: 1819 | From: odesco baba | Registered: Feb 2005
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LOL, You are right on all BUT the Advanced Stockholm Syndrome comment!
Yet, there is something amiss in Africa which makes Africans not make the correct choice about their destinies. As you point out, many are exhibiting classic identification with the aggressor symptoms, as well as protecting their oppressor. Here's an ad from South Africa.
They lack even a rudimentary understanding of the wondrous melanin they possess.
This ad appears in the US Ebony and Essence magazines.
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Yep, the stockholm syndrome is real and very surreal...
These are clearly psychological/EDUCATIONAL problems.
When we Blacks start to educate our own children by not sending our children to schools in the West and, NOT using heavily Western influenced educational material in Africa, then we will begin to fix the psychological issues.
But we have to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. As the topic of this thread indicates, a lot of the progresses claimed by white folks are actually by us. Therefore we should embrace everything of value and we need not re-invent the wheel when there is no need to. Sometimes, however, there is a need to re-invent the wheel. For example, based on my knowledge of computers, I say, it is never secure to use a computer you have not manufactured if you have something to hide. And all sovereign states naturally have secrets and information they rightly may not wish to share. The computer is going to be the basis of the future civilisation I see emerging and if we don't build our own (hardware too, not just software - the lines are blurred these days making hardware as invadable as software), we might as well give up going in that direction because it will get very nasty. In fact it already is. I am beginning to see some wisdom in Africa's "slow" pace in this new age of computers. But we can no longer afford to be slow just because we don't want to be caught up in the trap. We simply need to side-step the trap by building our own from scratch.
Posts: 1819 | From: odesco baba | Registered: Feb 2005
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Stereotype threat is when a person, who belongs to a group that has a negative stereotype attached to it, subconsciously conforms to the negative stereotype by performing a task to a lesser degree than they would otherwise. For example: black people have the "less intelligent" stereotype attached to them, so a black person might perform poorly on an IQ test. If said person was either unaware of the stereotype or knew the stereotype to be wrong (stereotype threat is not present) then they would perform better.
Stereotype threat "is a disruptive concern, when facing a negative stereotype, that one will be evaluated based on this stereotype." [1] One published meta-analysis conducted by Walton & Spencer (2009) found significant evidence that stereotype threat impairs the standardized test performances of African Americans and women on the SAT.
Stereotype threat is "a disruptive concern, when facing a negative stereotype, that one will be evaluated based on such a stereotype." [3] Stereotype threat has been shown to undermine the performance of members of a number of groups in a number of domains. “[C]ulturally-shared stereotypes suggesting poor performance of certain groups can, when made salient in a context involving the stereotype, disrupt performance of an individual who identifies with that group” [4](Steele, Aronson 1995).
Although Steele and Aronson focused on the emphasis on race affecting test performance, similar studies have demonstrated the same results for emphasis on gender. In other studies, researchers found that “consistent exposure to stereotype threat (e.g., faced by some ethnic minorities in academic environments and women in math) can reduce the degree to which individuals value the domain in question” [4](Aronson, et al. 2002; Osborne, 1995; Steele, 1997). Also, research has found that there are varying degrees of an individual on a certain group to be affected by stereotype threat:
"…some members may be more vulnerable to its negative consequences than others; factors such as the strength of one’s group identification or domain identification have been shown to be related to one's subsequent vulnerability to stereotype threat" (http://www.reducingstereotypethreat.org/definition.html)
Further research has also found that when an individual identifies with a specific group, performance can be negatively affected, because of concerns that they will, in fact, confirm the negative stereotypes of that group.
quote:Originally posted by Peul Mercenary: Yep, the stockholm syndrome is real and very surreal...
These are clearly psychological/EDUCATIONAL problems.
When we Blacks start to educate our own children by not sending our children to schools in the West and, NOT using heavily Western influenced educational material in Africa, then we will begin to fix the psychological issues.
But we have to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. As the topic of this thread indicates, a lot of the progresses claimed by white folks are actually by us. Therefore we should embrace everything of value and we need not re-invent the wheel when there is no need to. Sometimes, however, there is a need to re-invent the wheel. For example, based on my knowledge of computers, I say, it is never secure to use a computer you have not manufactured if you have something to hide. And all sovereign states naturally have secrets and information they rightly may not wish to share. The computer is going to be the basis of the future civilisation I see emerging and if we don't build our own (hardware too, not just software - the lines are blurred these days making hardware as invadable as software), we might as well give up going in that direction because it will get very nasty. In fact it already is. I am beginning to see some wisdom in Africa's "slow" pace in this new age of computers. But we can no longer afford to be slow just because we don't want to be caught up in the trap. We simply need to side-step the trap by building our own from scratch.
True dat!
I agree with this and by no means am I proposing a complete abandonment of sensible educational programs or aids. So much of the quality of the American education system is determined by external political influences which have nothing to do with providing a decent education as we have just seen with Washington D.C. throwing out Republican Education Director Michelle Rhee, an privatization advocate.
The path America is heading with privatization will only see further erosion of the educational system as we are currently seeing in Privatization bandit controlled states such as Texas or Washington D.C.
The problem with privatization is the state or government ends up actually paying 2-3x more for an inferior service whose price will swiftly increase over a short period of time and the service itself is far less capable then what it meant to replace. As everyone knows, Republicans are incompetent, especially in business matters.
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LOL, ask the Russians. When they privatized their Socialist state, the businesses stole everything that wasn't nailed down. Interestingly, one of those businessmen,Boris Berezovsky, is Neil Bush's (George Bush's younger brother) business partner and is a wanted man in Moscow. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_oligarchs
Privatization in Russia led to it's economic collapse,due to the creation of a small group of business oligarchs (many with ties to the Russian Mob) who stole everything. Russian's collapse is due to privatization, not Ronald Reagan. As the USA privatizes more of it's government, the same thing will occur here.
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