Hasta La Gadget!

Yet another issue has been reported with Windows 10 Anniversary Update. We have previously reported that some users experienced their machines freezing up while quite a lot of users found that the update broke their webcams. As Microsoft works to address those issues, latest reports reveal that plugging in an Amazon Kindle might cause a PC running Windows 10 Anniversary Update to crash.

PC owners are reporting that their machine throws up the infamous Blue Screen of Death when an e-reader like the Kindle Paperwhite and Voyage is plugged in. They can’t go without plugging in their Kindles because a PC has to be used in order to transfer ebooks.

Many users who have been experiencing this issue have raised their concerns on the official Microsoft support forums. Some have also provided workarounds that don’t appear to be working for everybody.

One of the workarounds involves leaving the Kindle plugged into the PC and allowing it to reboot fixes the crashing problem, while another workaround suggests plugging in the e-reader into a USB 2.0 port instead of a USB 3.0 port.

Naturally, Windows 10 users will be looking forward to getting a fix in the near future as this is no way to go about connecting a Kindle to PC. Microsoft is yet to acknowledge the issue so it can’t be said for sure at this point in time when a fix might arrive.

Plugging In A Kindle May Crash Windows 10 Anniversary Update PCs , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Victoria Rosborough working in a cleanroom where device processing is performed.

Victoria Rosborough’s brilliance was evident early on. She became a college student at age 16, bypassing both her junior and senior years of high school. She enrolled in a remarkable learning alternative at Mary Baldwin College (MBC) – their Program for the Exceptionally Gifted (PEG). This all-girls program is part of MBC’s residential women’s college, which is located in Staunton, Virginia.

After graduating in 2012 with a B.S. in physics, and a double minor in chemistry and mathematics, Victoria continued to excel in graduate studies. She next earned an M.S. in Applied Physics from the University of Oregon. But her sights are set on becoming a Photonics Engineer, and so to that end, she began a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 2014 and is currently a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She presented her first conference paper in July at the 2016 Advanced Photonics Congress. You can read it here: Integrated Indium Phosphide Pulse Position Modulation Transmitter for Free Space Communications.

I spoke with Victoria at length, and it was absolutely a no-brainer deciding to include her story in my 2016 blog series of amazing women’s college STEM alumnae. Below are selected highlights from our conversation.

What is a Photonics Engineer?

A photonics engineer designs and builds semiconductor devices that manipulate and route photons to perform a function. For example, a simple photonic integrated circuit (PIC) could consist of a laser and a modulator for generating and transmitting optical signals. Active components on a PIC are controlled electronically, thus integrated photonics is also referred to as optoelectronics. PICs are not as mature as electronic integrated circuits (ICs), so it’s an exciting time to be a part of the field. There are many opportunities for startup companies, new designs, and big ideas. For example, to keep up with growing Internet data traffic, many companies and universities are working to integrate an efficient laser on silicon. Silicon is a great material for fabricating ICs, but it’s not an efficient light emitter. Many different approaches to integrating lasers on silicon are being pursued and it’s not yet clear which technique will become the forerunner.

Why did you decide to skip two years of high school to attend college?

Around middle school and then into high school, my mom went looking for alternative educational programs because I wanted greater academic challenge and my school system didn’t have any gifted or accelerated programs in place. By the time I was in high school, I was taking college-level math and writing courses online through Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Talented Youth. Even so, I was still very unhappy at school, so my mom searched for more drastic options and that’s when she found The Program for the Exceptionally Gifted (PEG) at Mary Baldwin College (MBC).

My mom and I felt PEG was a good option because I would be learning from professors while belonging to a group of other bright and motivated young women. My parents felt comfortable sending me to MBC at a young age because it is an all-women’s college and the younger girls have their own dorm and staff with extra rules such as curfew. As far as I know, there aren’t any other programs quite like PEG in the U.S. Even though some traditional colleges may accept outstanding young students when it is a good fit, at PEG I got to learn and bond with other girls in the same boat as me.

How did you decide to major in physics?

When I began at Mary Baldwin College, I didn’t know what to declare as my major. I thought I might study writing and philosophy to become a novelist, but I also liked math and science. I left high school before taking any physics classes and I didn’t take general physics in college until my sophomore year. So when I did take physics, it seemed to challenge my thinking differently than other subjects. I really enjoyed the math and problem solving, but I also appreciated the philosophical nature of physics as a tool that can describe everything from subatomic particles to phenomena on the scale of the universe.

By my sophomore year, I knew I wanted to be a researcher, but had no idea what my specialization might end up being. Gradually, I learned about the subfields of physics where I could spend a research career. My adviser in physics, Professor Nadine Gergel-Hackett, taught me about her research with novel electronic devices.

What kind of research were you involved in as an undergraduate student?

The research I was involved with as an undergraduate revolved around Dr. Gergel-Hackett’s work with memristors. I was the first student to work with her after she came to Mary Baldwin College, so I spent a lot of time setting up the lab and characterizing devices fabricated at The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), where Dr. Gergel-Hackett has collaborators.

The goal of my project was to investigate the physical mechanism behind the device switching behavior. I was looking to see if a switch was triggered by applying a certain voltage or by applying current over a set amount of time. The idea was that, if we could demonstrate one case or the other, this would reveal something about what physically goes on in the material itself (titanium dioxide) during a switch.

I presented some background and results at an undergraduate session of the annual American Physical Society (APS) March Meeting in 2012: Electrical Characterization of Flexible Titanium Dioxide Memristors.

I also did an NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) in the Chemical and Environmental Engineering department at Yale University. Through the REU and conversations with Professor Gergel-Hackett at MBC, I became familiar with some materials and device topics. At this point, I knew I wanted to get an advanced degree after college, but still wasn’t quite sure what specialty to pursue.

How did you become interested in integrated photonics?

After graduating, I found a master’s program in semiconductor devices at the University of Oregon. As a part of this degree, I completed a year-long internship at IBM, where I had the opportunity to interact with Ph.D.’s in several areas of IC production expertise. When I applied to Ph.D. programs that year, I sent applications to electrical engineering and materials science departments. It was during this application process that I learned about integrated photonics. Photonics excites me because it’s on the cutting edge of research while combining physics and technology.

Along the way, although I wasn’t always quite sure where I’d end up, I kept pursuing the types of opportunities that excited me until I found my niche.

Victoria Rosborough in the device testing laboratory.

Now that Victoria has discovered her niche, I’m positive her career will continue to unfold, as a never-ending adventure steeped in physics.

In my next blog post I’ll share with you the awesomeness of Victoria’s alma mater, Mary Baldwin College–focusing on how the College for Women is expanding opportunities for their students, as well as other news-worthy announcements. News you won’t want to miss, so do stay tuned!

Follow Diane on Twitter @HerSTEMCareer where she celebrates and champions STEM women from around the world. To learn more about women’s colleges, visit Diane’s blog, Advantages of a Women’s College, where a complete listing of all women’s colleges in the United States is provided.

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By Erica Patel — a fourth year medical student at the Keck School of Medicine of USC

Photo Credit: Erica Patel

I love that medicine is a mixture of stories, in which patients’ narratives are woven into a physician’s understanding of humanity. Tales of sadness intermixed with accounts of joy provide a balanced perspective of the world, and give valuable insight into our existence. No place is richer with narratives than the LAC+USC Medical Center in Los Angeles, which taught me more about life than any experience to date. Working with a vulnerable, marginalized population with a slew of uncontrollable health issues, both mental and physical, has been a maturing experience. The unique life experiences of this patient population, many of which are homeless, uninsured, or undocumented are enough to fill an entire library’s worth of stories.

As I begin my last year of medical school and reflect on my journey thus far, I have found that the most valuable experience has been third year clinical rotations at the LAC+USC Medical Center, where I rotated through all of the core services of medicine in the hopes of selecting a specialty that was the right fit for me. It was during this time that I stepped out of the classroom and into the hospital as a student-physician that I learned about empathy, respect, and what it truly means to be human.

Over the past year, I watched as countless patients with shocked faces were told they had incurable metastatic cancer. I stifled tears as they heard their death sentences, and laid awake in my room at night imagining them in their lonely beds thinking about their final days. On another rotation, I held a homeless woman’s hand as she wept because she had been beaten while sleeping on Skid Row. It made me sick to hear what they did to her, and I felt equally ill knowing that she would likely end back in the same place after being discharged with nothing more than a bus token and some bandages. Instances like these were difficult to grapple with, particularly in the beginning.

Seeing people die in front of me especially forced me to confront mortality in an unprecedented way. I remember sitting in my car in the hospital parking lot, sobbing for what felt like an eternity, after my first patient passed away. She was an alcoholic with decompensated liver failure that suddenly died after a week in our care. While initially guarded, she warmed up to me and would tell funny stories whenever I examined her. I surprised myself by how upset I was after she passed away; in many ways, she taught me that medicine cannot win each time, and the consequence of losing was often death. It was a harsh reality check for a bright-eyed almost doctor.

After so many difficult patient encounters, I knew that I needed to make a decision about the type of physician I was going to be. I initially tried viewing medicine as a job, where you maintain a distance to avoid the pain that comes with a patient’s illness. This seemed like a perfectly sensible option for a few weeks, but I found myself losing my passion for medicine. The science behind diseases is interesting, but I find the people with them to be even more fascinating. I shifted my focus to seeing illness as an inevitable part of existence, allowing myself to embrace the complexity of people’s lives and use their stories to humanize and learn from them. A 49-year-old with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma becomes an undocumented mother of five that is tired of staying in the hospital and wants to return home with her family. The latter brings more joy in treating her, in seeing her each morning, and motivation to get her treatment done so she can return back to her life. It also brought an immense amount of respect for the difficulties she experiences and the resilience she demonstrates by waking up each day ready to confront her disease. Fortunately, as my clinical year progressed, the tough situations became easier to digest. This is in part, acquiring more medical knowledge and feeling less helpless with patients, but also gaining empathy that can only come from hearing stories of those around you.

Confronting illness daily has taught me that the true tragedy in medicine, and life in general, is failing to recognize that there are lessons are all around us. It makes the hundredth patient you have seen with something as monotonous as diabetes no less satisfying than the first. Because you opened your eyes to their story and gained insight into some aspect of humanity you were not privy to before. I have watched people die and witnessed the miracle of life, both of which brought me to tears. I have heard patients’ stories, shared my own, and gained an immense respect for the most marginalized people in our society. This year has left me with empathy for patients, and has taught me that the best way to practice medicine is to see the humanity in those you treat. This allows me to leave each encounter with more valuable insight into the world that I otherwise would never have gotten, and I feel that I am a better person and physician because of it.

Erica Patel is a fourth year medical student at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California and Medical Director of Wema Children Center, a non-profit orphanage in rural Kenya, and plans to continue her work with vulnerable communities, both domestic and abroad, as a practicing physician.

CODE BLACK is a blog series about what really matters in healthcare by medical students and faculty at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California.

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Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) blamed the U.S. government for the 2008 financial crisis ― instead of big banks and Wall Street ― in a local radio interview last week.

“A lot of that was juiced by government policy that forced banks to make loans to people who couldn’t pay them off and then allowed banks to have mortgaged-backed securities without collateral so they didn’t have the capital to back it up,” Johnson said in response to a question about what caused the economic collapse during an Aug. 17 interview with WVRQ AM 1360.

Faulting the U.S. government for taking steps toward eliminating discriminatory lending practices seems to be a cornerstone of Johnson’s political career.

In 2010, during his run for the U.S. Senate, Johnson said the passage of the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act was responsible for the financial crisis ― a theory that has also been floated by economists advising Donald Trump. The law discourages redlining and urges banks to meet the needs of borrowers in the communities they serve, including low-income and minority families.

“They threatened to bring the Department of Justice in to, I guess, to prosecute banks that would be accused of redlining,” Johnson said. “Not making loans to people in certain areas.”

During a chat with the Wausau Daily Herald’s editorial board in 2014, Johnson was more specific. He said that the 2008 crash wouldn’t have happened “had banks not been forced to make loans to people that couldn’t pay them back.” Even after a reporter pushed back saying that banks loved making loans to people who couldn’t afford them, Johnson stuck to his guns.

That was regulation that incentivized them to make those loans, force them to make those loans, and then package them up because no bank, no bank, no bank ― would your community bank have made loans to people that couldn’t pay it back? No. The only reason they made them is because the federal government forced them to do it, they were able to make commission off that and then the federal government made it possible for them to off-load that risk on the American taxpayer. So, it was, so it was regulation ― it wasn’t a lack of regulation ― it was the federal government regulation that caused the housing crash.

Johnson continued, saying that people of color were “enticed to take out these liar loans” and that the crash wouldn’t have happened had “the banking system not been manipulated by the federal government where we, we went away from good banking and loaning ― lending ― standards where you actually had to have a down payment on a loan.”

Redlining originated in 1934 with the creation of the Federal Housing Administration and allowed banks to lend white families the money they needed to buy homes while refusing to let black families borrow. The policy has aided in maintaining the de facto segregation of neighborhoods and schools while ensuring generational poverty.

Milwaukee, which is in Johnson’s own state, is a prime example. It’s the most racially segregated major metropolitan area in the country. Black kids in the city are some of the lowest performing students in the nation due to underfunded schools. And there is a 13-point employment gap between white and black workers. 

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Quite early on in Catherine Corsini’s embraceable French import Summertime (La Belle Saison), a group of young Parisian women run through the streets, laughing aloud while pinching male asses. The buttocks-ravished men are both startled and outraged. How dare they be made into sexual objects. One gent even starts whacking away at a lass, but to her rescue comes farm-girl/tractor-driver/physically strapping Delphine (Izïa Higelin).

Please note the year is 1971 and feminism is a-brewing, pleasantly knocking the closeted, recent rural-escapee for a loop. Suddenly, she’s not in a field with gaseous bovines but in a bus encircled by attractive, long-haired, rowdy, activist Amazons, who care not a whit whether one is into scissoring or the missionary position. All sex is good. All male subordination of the “fairer” gender is bad. They even sing, “Arise, enslaved woman.”

In Summertime, young feminists fight for their rights and smoke Gauloises.

Suddenly, our enthralled heroine is attending political conscious-raising groups, helping to cause havoc at anti-abortion lectures, and pasting women’s libber fliers on bare-bodied statues. She’s having a hoot . . . and even more so when she meets Carole (Cécile de France), a beautiful, blonde, free-spirited Spanish teacher, who is, unbeknownst to Delphine, hetero-inflexible.

Yes, Carole is leading a robust copulatory life with her live-in comrade, Manuel (Benjamin Bellecour), an easy-on-your-eyes Commie chap. Clearly, she adores her new friend from the fields, but in that angst-generating, hands-off platonic manner we all know so well.

Frustrated, especially after discovering Carole’s phallic leanings, a despondent Delphine no doubt recalls the conversation she had with her dad on the farm at the beginning of the film. He was prodding her to wed a former schoolmate, Antoine.

Delphine: I don’t want to get married.

Father: You can’t be alone forever. Loneliness is a terrible thing.

That’s one reason she no doubt left the countryside. Well, things have to change so she passionately kisses Carole on a Parisian side street, then takes her home for some life-changing lovemaking.

Delphine (Izïa Higelin) and Carole (Cécile de France) have a transformative smooch.

Will the two become a couple in a few short scenes? Just check out the photos accompanying this review for the answer. Poor Manuel! What’s the lesbian version of that old chestnut, “If you go black, you’ll never go back”?

Anyway, here are some other pertinent questions you might just want to ask. Will Carole go out nude on a balcony after achieving yet another orgasm and scream, “Down with bourgeois society”? Will something unforeseen occur that will force Delphine to return to haystacking? Will Carole follow? And will happiness ensue? Well, remember the action takes place in the 1970s.

Delphine finds momentary bliss.

But whatever occurs, this well-directed and intensely convincing offering co-written by Corsini and Laurette Polmanss, might just be the Carol and Blue is the Warmest Color of 2016. The leads are enthralling, and the way the semi-rocky romance is handled makes this a perfect Sapphic date film.

Summertime also supplies a considerably important history lesson on how the Women’s Rights Movement was intertwined with the battle against homophobia. Without the former, there’d be no latter, a point many gay men are unaware of or simply refuse to acknowledge, which reminds me of The New York Times Op-Ed columnist Maureen Dowd’s mother.

Dowd recalled in her quick-witted collection of essays, Are Men Necessary? that in 1982, for her 31st birthday, her mom wrote her, “Women can stand on the Empire State Building and scream to the heavens that they are equal to men and liberated, but until they have the same anatomy, it’s a lie. It’s more of a man’s world today than ever. Men can eat their cake in unlimited bakeries.”

Buns aside, if watching Corsini’s Summertime is a beguiling experience — and it is — experiencing her garish 2001 self-hating-lesbian-themed flick, La Répétition, is a garish enjoyment, sort of like dreaming k.d. lang is topping you, only to wake up to discover your dachshund is where he shouldn’t be.

The tale begins with two smiling little girls playing footsy with each other. Cut. Next shot: Louise (Pascale Bussières) and Nathalie (Emmanuelle Béart) are now starring in an avant-garde college production. Louise, donning a huge pink wig that has to be held up by a clothesline, has the following memorable speech:

I’m dirty. Fleas devour me. When they see me, the swine vomit. The scabs and scars of leprosy have scaled my skin, covered with yellow pus. . . . In my right armpit, a family of toads have taken residence.

Her acting is as horrible as her lines while Nathalie, with a less macabre speech, is charismatic.

At a party afterwards, Louise has a jealous rage when she sees Nathalie dancing with a man. They battle, and Louise runs home, cuts her wrists, and decides never to see her friend again. Nathalie wonders why.

Louise (Pascale Bussières) learns unrequited love hurts so she starts making dentures.

Jump ahead a decade or so. Nathalie is a critically acclaimed avante-garde actress living with her director. Louise, however, has become a prosthodontist and married a prosthodontist. Nevertheless, she still loves Nathalie. Then after some touch and go, the pair meet again, have one night of sex, and Louise realizes she’s a lesbian. Nathalie though wants never to see her pal again, especially after she gets a bad stomachache, which she blames on same-sex coitus. It turns out to be appendicitis, which she also blames on lesbianism.

La Répétition asks, “What happens when a closeted prosthodontist bathes with an avant-garde actress?

One of the highlights is when Louise secretly fingers Nathalie’s undergarments in her bureau like a pedophile tenderly reaching for a “Tickle Me Ernie.” A low-rent take on Bernard Herrmann’s music plays in the background. Yes, La Répétition makes The Killing of Sister George seem like The Little Mermaid. Let’s hope in the very near future, the clearly first-rate Corsini takes on a contemporary project where two openly, well-adjusted lesbians meet, fall in love, and cohabitate forever more. Maybe if she needs a little drama, she can have –if she must — a meteor fall on their house, but only when the characters have reached their nineties.

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