Category: Forums

Guido Núñez-Mujica

April 15, 2018

Venezuela is currently going through the worst crisis of its history. People are starving, dying of malnutrition, medicines are scarce, crime is overwhelming and ubiquitous, hospitals are dirty places where people die in agonizing pain from curable and preventable diseases. How could this happen to the country with the largest reserves of oil in the world?

Ideological zealotry, dismissing expert knowledge, wishful thinking, promoting pseudoscience and opposing science and evidence were some of the reasons why Venezuelans are starving, and the signs were clear for those who were paying attention rather than looking for a messiah or trying to use local politics to make a point against the US. In this talk, Mr. Núñez-Mujica will discuss some of the early cases of embracing pseudoscience and rejecting evidence, and talk about how oil money was systematically used to dismantle the agricultural and manufacturing sectors, while also being used for political gains.

Guido Núñez-Mujica is a computational biologist, data scientist, and a science communicator. Previous to becoming a Silicon Valley data scientist working for Slice Intelligence, Guido was the founder of Lava-Amp, a healthtech start-up that applied data science to medical diagnostics and epidemiology. His work has been widely featured, including in Nature, Wired, IO9, BoingBoing, and Biotechniques. He is also the subject of a chapter in the book “Biopunk: DIY Scientists Hack the Software of Life” by Marcus Wolhsen.

As a prolific science communicator, educator, and activist, Guido founded the Rational Skeptic Association of Venezuela in 2001, and has been recognized as a TED Fellow and the Cornell Alliance for Science Fellow; he was also awarded a grant from Start-Up Chile, the leading Chilean business accelerator, in 2011 for his entrepreneurial endeavors. Currently, he is the founder of the Salto Project, a nonprofit to help Venezuelans emigrate, and he’s producing a documentary called “Silenced Crops” on the topic of low-cost biotechnology in Venezuela.

Guido holds an interdisciplinary degree in computational and physical sciences, and a licentiate degree in biology from the Universidad de Los Andes, in Venezuela.

After the Forum, please join us for a lunch at 12:30pm. The lunch is complimentary for first-time visitors and students.

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Byron Kerr

April 8, 2018

Byron Kerr first met Mykel Hall at the Santa Clara County Elmwood correctional facility in Milpitas. Mykel was serving a California state substance use related sentence in the county facility. Shortly after they met, Mykel was transferred to San Quentin for evaluation and assignment to another California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) facility. Mykel is now serving the remainder of his sentence at the High Desert prison in Susanville, CA.

Mykel explained to Byron that inmates are given time off their sentences for attending religious 12-step programs. But when Mykel attempted to get a secular option approved (in particular, LifeRing, www.LifeRing.org), he was declined. Byron has written to CDCR officials requesting secular options for inmates with no response. This is very clearly a state-sponsored, inherently religious activity.

Efforts to Get a Secular Addiction Recovery Program Accepted – Byron Kerr from Humanist Community-SiliconValley on Vimeo.

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Prof. Herman Winick

April 1, 2018

Physicist Herman Winick is professor emeritus at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, and the Applied Physics Department, Stanford University.

Sesame (www.sesame.org.jo) is a collaboration of 8 Middle East countries (Cyprus, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Pakistan, Palestinian Authority, and Turkey) modeled on CERN and under the auspices of UNESCO. It started in September of 1997 with Winick’s suggestion that an advanced synchrotron light source, using accelerator technology, be built in the Middle East using parts of a machine scheduled for decommissioning in Berlin. More than 50 such advanced sources are now in operation around the world, with SESAME adding one in the Middle East. They are called Advanced Light Sources since they provide intense electromagnetic radiation ranging from infra-red to X-rays. With an intensity more than one million times greater than conventional sources, such as medical and dental x-ray machines, these facilities are revolutionizing basic and applied research in many disciplines

This laboratory began operation in Jordan in 2017 and is now used by Middle East scientists to carry out studies in a broad range of science, including structural biology, environmental science, materials science, archaeology, and human heritage. It is an example of Science Diplomacy and a model for the African Light Source (africanlightsource.org) using science to bring together groups with different ethnicities, religions, etc.

In this talk Winick will cover these projects, as well as light sources in Brazil, Korea and Taiwan, which were started in the 1980’s. These came into operation in the 1990’s, and have since trained hundreds of local students in these many disciplines, and have attracted dozens of their mid-career scientific diaspora to return home.

This talk will cover the main properties of synchrotron radiation and why they are having such an impact in the developed and developing world.

The SESAME Project – Science in the Developing World – Prof. Herman Winick from Humanist Community-SiliconValley on Vimeo.

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