Chris Womack has become president and CEO of Southern Company, joining a small group of Black chief executives leading major publicly traded corporations. Based in Atlanta, Southern Company is a prominent energy provider, generating $22.4 billion in annual revenue in 2021, and through its subsidiaries, it serves approximately 9 million customers. Three Decades of experience A 35-year company veteran, Womack previously was chairman, president, and CEO of Georgia Power, the Southern Company’s largest subsidiary. Before that, the Greenville, Alabama native was executive vice president and president of external affairs for Southern
Basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal, who had been evading process servers for months, was served with two complaints during a game between the Miami Heat and Boston Celtics at the Kaseya Center—formerly named the FTX Arena. The complaints are related to his involvement with the now-bankrupt crypto exchange FTX and second NFT venture with his son. The process server, who O’Neal later kicked out of the venue, captured the event on film to eliminate any ambiguity, attorney Adam Moskowitz told PEOPLE. FTX Class Action Lawsuit One of the complaints against O’Neal
The Mellon Foundation has awarded a $3.3 million grant to the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) to continue its Digital Justice Grant Program for three more cycles. Supporting digital projects Launched in 2021, the Digital Justice Grant Program supports digital projects in the humanities and social sciences that focus on historically marginalized communities. These include Black, Latine, and Indigenous communities, people with disabilities, and queer, trans, and gender nonconforming individuals. In addition to financial support, the ACLS Digital Justice Grant Program provides tailored coaching from the Nonprofit Finance Fund to help grantees
Cornerstone VC has completed a pre-seed investment into Storia, the guided journaling app created by five-times bestselling author Elizabeth Uviebinené, to help people unleash their inner voice. The Power of storytelling Elizabeth Uviebinené, known for her bestselling book “Slay in Your Lane,” co-authored with Yomi Adegoke, has been at the forefront of literature catered to young Black women. Inspired by the impact storytelling had on her own life, Uviebinené developed the idea of Storia to help people uncover the stories that shape their lives. The journaling app combines AI-guided prompts,
34-year-old Jamira Burley, a Strategic Initiatives Lead at Apple, has come up with a truly inventive way to navigate her career. For the past ten years, Burley has been operating with a secret weapon—a fictional personal assistant named Matt. Creating Matt Burley told the Business Insider that it all started when she received an email assuming that a male assistant managed her contact email. But, instead of correcting the assumption, she decided to roll with it and embraced the persona of Matt. “Having “Matt” on my side — a person
More and more prominent tech figures are voicing concerns about superintelligent AI and risks to the future of humanity. But as leading AI ethicist Timnit Gebru and researcher Émile P Torres point out, these ideologies have explicitly racist foundations. TESCREAL “So another “godfather” of AI, Turing Award Winner Yoshua Bengio has decided to FULLY align himself with the #TESCREAL bundle, writing about “rogue AI” and prominently citing people like Nick Bostrom,” tweeted Gebru, founder of yjr Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR). TESCREAL, coined by Émile Torres and Gebru, stands for Transhumanism, Extropianism,
The rise of AI-generated music has sparked both excitement and concern within the music industry. From calls for legal action to taking advantage of opportunities to revolutionize music creation and revenue generation, the relationship between Black artists and AI-generated music is, well, complex. Ice Cube: “AI is Demonic” Ice Cube, during an appearance on the Full Send podcast, told listeners: “I think AI is demonic, I think AI is going to get a backlash from real people.” Ice Cube voiced concerns about the unauthorized manipulation of original voices without proper
Uber’s Chief DEI Officer Bo Young Lee has been placed on a leave of absence following employee complaints about “Don’t Call Me Karen” events which aimed to explore the “spectrum of the American white woman’s experience.” Concerns raised by Black and Hispanic employees prompted Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and Chief People Officer Nikki Krishnamurthy to request Lee’s temporary step back while they assess the situation. “We have heard that many of you are in pain and upset by yesterday’s Moving Forward session,” they wrote in an email seen by The
The SANS Institute and Sinclair Community College have teamed up with the National Science Foundation (NSF) to launch the JumpStart into Cyber summer program for underrepresented student groups. The program aims to “engage and empower underrepresented student groups, including women, Black, African American, Latino(a), Hispanic, and Indigenous students” by providing them with a two-step cybersecurity summer experience which leverages the gamified learning experience of CyberStart. Hacking simulations The program kicks off with CyberStart, an online gamified learning platform created by experts at SANS, the world’s largest provider of cybersecurity training
Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, recently visited Lagos, Nigeria, as part of his global tour to promote AI adoption and understand diverse perspectives. However, concerns have been raised about the exploitation of Kenyan content moderators and the impact of OpenAI’s technology on marginalized communities. Nigeria: Africa’s biggest OpenAI adopter Over the weekend, Altman took part in a two-day exclusive event at Muson Centre, Lagos, Nigeria. “Nigeria, among all of the countries on the continent, I believe has been the biggest adopter of our technologies,” Technext reports Altman told
