David Guilbault

LESSONS ON HIV/AIDS & AFRICAN-AMERICANS

I was privileged and proud to have worked on the five-year documentary project, "Why Us: Left Behind and Dying."   The film and research project explored the myriad reasons why the HIV/AIDS epidemic is hitting the African-American community so hard.  Those reasons include poverty, incarceration, homophobia, gender inequality, shame, denial, secrecy, church dogma, drug use, incarceration, racism, and health disparities.

It became a critically-acclaimed documentary that played in film festivals around the world.  We were grateful for those appreciative audiences.

But, for the work to have real impact, it needs to be in the hands of educators and health care workers.  And it needs to be seen by Black youth.  To that end, a curriculum was developed for high schools.  Below are the videos that go with the lesson plan modules for that curriculum.

I invite you to explore this important health crisis through the eyes of disadvantaged high school students from the Homewood neighborhood in Pittsburgh.  They became the film's reporters and interviewers.  And one of them, the courageous and curious Tamira Noble, became the film's narrator, writer and production assistant.

The film was the project of director/writer/producer Claudia Pryor Malis, who sadly passed away recently from cancer.  She was a visionary, compassionate, creative journalist, dearly loved by all she touched.

I was a producer/writer/co-investigator on the project.  Editor for both the film and the curriculum video segments was Howard Malis.  Other major credits on the film were the late Nene Ofuatey-Kodjoe (Producer/Co-investigator), Vivian Siu (Producer), Robert Shepard (Director of Photography), Chris Ivey (Cinematographer) and Jeffrey Edrich (Sound Engineer).

The curriculum was developed by Dr. Kathryn Kailikole.  She is an experienced curriculum developer who holds a doctoral degree in education from the University of California San Diego, a masters degree in mathematics education from the University of California Santa Cruz, and a bachelors degree in applied mathematics from the University of California Berkeley.

 

Lesson One: The Project Begins 

Lesson Two: Genetic Variation 

Lesson Three: Poverty 

Lesson Four: Views of Black Sexuality
 

Lesson Five: Secrecy, Shame and Fear
 

Lesson Six: Gender Inequality
 

Lesson Seven: Masculinity
 

Lesson Eight: Sexual Orientation
 

Lesson Nine: The Church
 

Lesson Ten: Self-Hatred
 

Lesson Eleven: Drugs and Prison
 

Lesson Twelve: Migration
 

Lesson Thirteen: Access to Medicine
 

Lesson Fourteen: Distrust and Conspiracy
 

Lesson Fifteen: HIV and SIV
 

Lesson Sixteen: Subtypes
 

Lesson Seventeen: Natural Transfer Theory
 

Lesson Eighteen: Serial Passage Theory
 

Lesson Nineteen: OPV Theory
 

Lesson Twenty: Student Project Ends
 

THE OILY TRUTH

Sometimes there's just no fixing what went wrong.  Sometimes severe consequences cannot be avoided or mitigated.  That is becoming painfully clear in the Gulf of Mexico.

For over a month, untold gallons of crude oil have spewed from the ocean floor into the sea, the result of the failure of a fail-safe system.  Everyone assumes that the industries that have the technology to drill miles below sea level also have the technology to cap a leaking well.  It's not true.

We are lulled into that false belief by popular culture.  We watch TV dramas and movies where, with just the tappity-tap of a keyboard and exotic video screens and databases that can locate, identify, cross-reference and enhance, we can solve complex problems.  It just ain't so.

It is also becoming painfully obvious that the oil industry, the scientific community and the Obama administration all are in the dark about what to do and how to do it.  Yes, they are trying everything they know to do.  But, that's the point.  They don't really know what to do.  If they did, it would be done.

Technology went awry, as it always does.  The so-called safeguards failed.  And now, we and the planet suffer the inevitable disaster.  Also inevitable will be the blame game, and there is enough of that to go around.

But, in the end, the oily truth is, technology can not save itself from itself.  The lesson is that corporate greed usually prevails and government regulation and intervention usually fail.  A technological disaster can and will happen again.

DARWIN'S FINCHES

2009 is the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his "On the Origin of Species."  A few years ago I had the privilege and pleasure of shooting videos in the Galapagos Islands for Lindblad Expeditions.  There, on Isla Espanola, I encountered Darwin's finches and his theory of adaptive radiation.

 

and finches.

ENDING SPACE AND TIME

Well now, all you folks waiting for the Rapture, modern science might just be hurrying it along.  Tomorrow may be the beginning of the end of space and time.  The world's largest atom-smasher will fire up.

Fingers Crossed, Physicists Are Ready for Collider to Roll

'At roughly 3:30 a.m. Eastern time, scientists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, say they will try to send the first beam of protons around a 17-mile-long racetrack known as the Large Hadron Collider, 300 feet underneath the Swiss-French border outside Geneva. ...

The collider, 14 years and $8 billion in the making, is the most expensive scientific experiment to date. ... It is designed to accelerate protons to energies of seven trillion electron volts — seven times the energy of the next largest machine in the world, Fermilab’s Tevatron — and smash them together....

At stake is a suite of theories called the Standard Model, which explains all of particle physics to date, but which breaks down at the conditions that existed in the earliest moments of the universe. The new collider will eventually reach temperatures and energies equivalent to those at a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.

There are many theories about what will happen, including the emergence of a particle known as the Higgs boson, which is hypothesized to endow other particles with mass, or the identity of the mysterious dark matter that provides the invisible scaffolding of galaxies and the cosmos.

But nobody really knows for sure, which is part of the fun, but which has led to a few alarming claims that the collider could spit out a black hole or some other accidental phenomenon that could end the Earth or the universe."

- Dennis Overbye, The New York Times

When the first collisions start in a couple of weeks, the worry is that 'the collider could spit out a black hole or some other accidental phenomenon that could end the Earth or the universe'.

You can read more about it, before all about it is gone, in MSNBC Science Editor Alan Boyle's story 'Discovery or doom? Collider Stirs Debate'.