Hasta La Gadget!

Most of the time, when people talk about the cutting edge gene editing technology CRISPR, they are actually talking about CRISPR-Cas9. CRISPR, you see, is just one half of the genome editing tool, the programming that instructs where a DNA edit will actually be made. The other part consists of proteins that actually…

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Us Earthlings are quite lucky to be living at around standard temperature and pressure. Life has evolved to comfortably handle the shapes in which most molecules have arranged themselves under temperatures of about 32 degrees Fahrenheit and atmospheric pressures of an average day at sea level. But on other planets, at…

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Policy surrounding the nation’s shortage of black teachers tends to focus around recruitment or retention. However, new research suggests that those two issues are only part of the problem. The other culprit is blatant racial discrimination. 

A Harvard Educational Review study looks at the hiring patterns of one large unidentified public school district. Job applicants in this district apply to a central office before human resources sends the relevant resumes to school principals. Principals then set up interviews with applicants and decide to whom they want to extend an offer. 

In 2012, the black and white teachers who applied for jobs in the district were equally qualified, researchers found. However, white teachers received a disproportional number of job offers. 

Although 13 percent of job applicants were black, only 6 percent received offers. On the other hand, 70 percent of applicants were white, and 77 percent received offers. Black teachers disproportionately received job offers from schools with black principals. Black teachers were also disproportionately hired in schools with high rates of low-income and minority students. 

Hispanic and Asians candidates were hired at a proportional rate to the number of applicants, making the imbalance unique to black teachers. 

District leaders were shocked by the results, said study author and researcher Diana D’Amico, who is an assistant professor at George Mason University. The district prides itself on its effort to recruit minority applicants and “created this story that there’s not more black teachers because black individuals are not applying,” said D’Amico. 

At first, district leaders suggested that perhaps 2012 had been an unusual year for hiring. But D’Amico found no evidence of this. 

“I think this is just another example of how ideas about race and racism, to be frank, are deeply embedded in the schools,” said D’Amico. “The other thing is, if there are these racial assumptions that inhibit the hiring of black individuals, I wonder how those same perceptions influence teachers once they’re already in the system.”

Indeed, minority teachers tend to have lower rates of retention than their white counterparts. Nationwide, during the 2012-2013 school year, the turnover rate for minority teachers was 19 percent, but only 15 percent for non-minority teachers. 

I think this is just another example of how ideas about race and racism, to be frank, are deeply embedded in the schools.
Diana D’Amico, Study Author

The lack of black teachers is a problem in this district and around the country. Although about 15 percent of American students are black, only 8 percent of American teachers are black. 

The stakes on this issue are high. Numerous studies have indicated that black teachers can have an enormous positive impact on black students. Having a black teacher in elementary school significantly increases the likelihood that a black student will graduate, a recent John Hopkins University study found. The impact is particularly acute for low-income black boys. For this demographic, having at least one black teacher from third through fifth grade reduced the likelihood of later dropping out of school by 39 percent. 

It’s unclear why having a black teacher early on in life would have such an immense impact on students in high school and beyond.

“I speculate these teachers are probably just as good as other teachers but there’s something special about race match effect,” said study co-author and John Hopkins professor Nicholas Papageorge.

“There has been a lot of scholarship and research on this idea of the role model effect. This idea that if you’re a poor black boy, you might not have a lot of contact with college educated folks who look like you, and spending a year with a teacher who is also black and who is college educated, might allow them to imagine themselves in that kind of a role, and shift their own expectations and aspirations,” Papageorge told the Huffington Post, although he does not know if the role model effect influenced his study. 

However, D’Amico thinks that the results of the latest study are problematic for both black and white students, since most black teachers were hired in minority schools. The fact that white students in some schools get nearly zero exposure to black teachers demands further interrogation, she says. 

“Black teachers are important for black kids, and that almost rationalizes the segregation we see,” said D’Amico. “Aren’t black teachers important for white students too?” 

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Every two seconds someone in the United States needs blood. In the U.S. alone, 41,000 donated pints are needed every day and although an estimated 38 percent of the population is eligible to donate blood, less than 10 percent of that eligible population actually do each year.

That’s why we need synthetic blood. There have been decades of failure in making a usable blood substitute but now, scientists from the universities of Bristol, Cambridge, and Oxford have isolated and manipulated stem cells in labs to produce red blood cells.

Their goal is to make red cells for patients with complex blood types because it can be hard for them to find donors. In the future, lab-grown blood could revolutionize medical care by providing a far reaching solution to keeping people in need supplied with blood regardless of type or donor.

While they’re about to go through human trials, there is still a long road ahead for a full-scale rollout of synthetic blood. However, these developments could possibly change the future of mankind itself. This could be the holy grail of science.

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WASHINGTON― Jennifer Rafieyan says she and her 12-year-old daughter were awaiting takeoff on a United Airlines flight from Newark, New Jersey, to Phoenix last month when they watched a flight attendant seat a visibly drunk man in the empty aisle seat next to them.

The man was intoxicated enough that the attendant had to guide him by his hips, Rafieyan recalled, and two attendants warned her about him.

“[One attendant] made some comment to me like, ‘This is going to be an interesting flight,’ and looked at him,” Rafieyan, 47, said. “And then the other flight attendant came up and said, ‘Let me know if you need anything. I mean it’― and she looked at him.”

Over the course of the next five and a half hours, Rafieyan says the 64-year-old repeatedly groped her and sexually harassed her. He rubbed her legs, grabbed her knee, kissed her hands, put his head on her shoulder and snatched her pen and notepad to add “PASIONAT NITE XX” to the to-do list she was writing, she said.

“That really grossed me out,” Rafieyan said. “My daughter was right there.”

Rafieyan, a married mother of two from Warren, New Jersey, said she was too “meek” to confront the man.

“I don’t react well. I freeze,” she said. “When a man is inappropriate with me, I usually just run from it and maybe tell somebody. But I felt trapped. I couldn’t leave the seat because I didn’t trust him near my daughter.”

That really grossed me out. My daughter was right there.
Jennifer Rafieyan, 47

Eventually, when her daughter asked to use the bathroom, Rafieyan says she was able to get up and report the groping to one of the flight attendants, who didn’t seem surprised. “She said, ‘I’m so sorry. We felt really bad putting him next to you, but there was nothing we could do. He was doing the same kind of stuff to the other flight attendant.’”

The Federal Aviation Administration prohibits boarding “a passenger who appears to be intoxicated” and serving additional alcohol to a passenger who becomes inebriated on a plane. United Airlines has a contract of carriage that says it can refuse to board passengers who appear to be intoxicated.

Rafieyan claims that even after she complained, the attendant served the already intoxicated man three more whiskey drinks and a small wine bottle. He became belligerent, accused several people of stealing his passport, and then refused to sit back down until the flight attendant threatened to divert the plane and land early because of his behavior.

Rafieyan detailed all of this in an official complaint to United Airlines on March 29.

“I would like to know what policies are in place that allow this to happen,” she wrote. “FAA regulations prevent the boarding of an intoxicated person and selling alcohol to him. The [flight attendants] knowingly put a drunk person who had sexually harassed the [flight attendant] next to me and my daughter. United jeopardized the safety of everyone on board.”

The airline responded by sending Rafieyan four $100 travel vouchers without acknowledging her accusations or the alleged groping. “I am sorry for your family’s disappointing and uncomfortable flight to Phoenix,” a customer service representative wrote in an email shared with The Huffington Post. “As a gesture of goodwill, a separate email with four electronic travel certificates will arrive soon to make amends.”

This response infuriated Rafieyan.

“I’m sorry but I find this unacceptable,” she responded in an email to the airline. “If you review the complaint, you will note that I did not ask for any monetary reimbursement but instead answers … I feel devalued as a human being.”

She then reported the incident to the Federal Aviation Administration, which said it would add the incident to its national sexual assault database. The FAA encouraged Rafieyan to file a report with the Federal Bureau of Investigations. (The FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division handles allegations of sexual assault on planes.) Because she had seen the man’s boarding pass, she was able to report his name to the FBI.

Rafieyan said she is now less upset about the incident itself than about United’s response to it, especially since the airline recently refused to board two girls because they were wearing leggings. United Airlines spokesman Jonathan Guerin said the airline barred them because they were using a United employee pass and “were not in compliance with our dress code policy for company benefit travel.” The airline did not explain why leggings are unacceptable attire.

United faced another public relations crisis this week, when security officers violently dragged a man off a plane at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport because the flight was overbooked and no one volunteered to give up their seats. The video of the incident went viral.

The airline did not respond to a request for comment about Rafieyan’s complaint.

Rafieyan said it really “disgusts” her that United would be picky about girls in leggings, but board inebriated men who are harassing women before the flight even takes off.

“It seems like they have their priorities totally warped,” she said.  

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.