Venezuela, a present legacy.

Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez has died according to news reports. Given the controversial statements he's made regarding the US and US leaders and his performance in his own country, he's definitely a mixed legacy he's leaving behind. As an international figure he was not afraid to speak truth to the larger powers of the geo-political stage and say what he felt needed to be said but at the same time domestically his efforts to move progress forward for the poor of Venezuela didn't seem to have the impact that one would have expected given the vast resource wealth that the country possesses.

I have always had a strong pull to that country, as a child I dreamed of going to see Angel Falls...the tallest waterfall in the world.

In what Sir Arthur Conan Doyle called "The Lost World" when he wrote about it. I made friends online and one was from Venezuela and she introduced me to a diversity of views on the country, an inside look into what it was like to be Venezuelan.

In 2011 I finally was able to make the trip and doing so changed my life in so many ways. I was able to see the stark contrast between the Venezuelan people in terms of economic conditions but I could also see an amazing pride in being who they were in all their diversity..economic and ethnic.

And talk about ethnic! I had once believed...being born and raised in Brooklyn...that I lived in the most diverse city in the world, the many people and cultures that I've encountered here, the food, the religions but there is a sort of separation between communities here that keeps us not as fully culturally mingled as we can be.

Venezuela showed without a doubt what the future could be, it was impossible to discern ethnic distinctions unless I was taking very long trips between regions (which I did) and even in that...the self identity was always Venezuelan first. Even in the deep heart of Canaima, the Pimon Indian natives...their blood barely mixed from Spanish and African and other influence considered themselves Venezuelans.

This stood as stark contrast to what I've heard from the mostly immigrant based population of NYC, granted it's been a long time since Venezuela had large amounts of immigration (the slave trade being the biggest) but it's amazing to see the results of the mixing of all that cultural and ethnic DNA to form the beautiful and proud rainbow that is the Venezuelan people. If anything, the US can learn from that lesson of inclusion...that we are better together than apart that it seems the Venezuelans have learned quite nicely. I hope for the sake of my friends there that this strength in unity overcomes this time of transition and allows them to move forward peacefully.

I went there and I didn't see the high crime in Caracas the capital city, recorded as having one of the highest murder rates in the world. I saw kindness and smiling face...I didn't see communism either as so many images from outside would have one believe...though in socialist policies that are economically naive the country suffers from less growth than it could achieve using more free markets. I ate amazing food (freshest chicken I ever had and oh cachapa!) but also had the worst bout of food poisoning I ever had during my 3 days in Canaima! I walked the busy streets of Caracas and the quite streets of Cumana and saw the same thing, a proud people trying to survive....at least they've got one hell of a daily view as backdrop!

I wanted to go back in 2012 but couldn't make it...that next visit is still waiting to happen but it will surely happen. The final legacy of Venezuela on me was the choice I made on a river (picture below) to leave the job that was stressing me at the time at McGraw Hill and focus on solving a big problem I identified, a week after getting back home I did just that..I quit. The startup I am working on now is based on that work, the extension of the Action Oriented Workflow paradigm to include autonomous work routing using the Action Delta Assessment algorithm...so Venezuela is still changing me for the better.

the attributes of web 3.0...

As the US economy continues to suffer the doldrums of stagnant investment in many industries, belt tightening budgets in many of the largest cities and continuous rounds of lay offs at some of the oldest of corporations, it is little comfort to those suffering through economic problems that what is happening now, has happened before. True, the severity of the downturn might have been different but the common factors of people and businesses being forced to do more with less is the theme of the times. Like environmental shocks to an ecosystem, stresses to the economic system lead to people hunkering down to last the storm, but it is instructive to realize that during the storm, all that idle time in the shelter affords people the ability to solve previous or existing problems. Likewise, economic downturns enable enterprising individuals and corporations the ability to make bold decisions with regard to marketing , sales or product focus that can lead to incredible gains as the economic ...

How many cofactors for inducing expression of every cell type?

Another revolution in iPSC technology announced: "Also known as iPS cells, these cells can become virtually any cell type in the human body -- just like embryonic stem cells. Then last year, Gladstone Senior Investigator Sheng Ding, PhD, announced that he had used a combination of small molecules and genetic factors to transform skin cells directly into neural stem cells. Today, Dr. Huang takes a new tack by using one genetic factor -- Sox2 -- to directly reprogram one cell type into another without reverting to the pluripotent state." -- So the method invented by Yamanaka is now refined to rely only 1 cofactor and b) directly generate the target cell type from the source cell type (skin to neuron) without the stem like intermediate stage. It also mentions that oncogenic triggering was eliminated in their testing. Now comparative methods can be used to discover other types...the question is..is Sox2 critical for all types? It may be that skin to neuron relies on Sox2 ...

AgilEntity Architecture: Action Oriented Workflow

Permissions, fine grained versus management headache The usual method for determining which users can perform a given function on a given object in a managed system, employs providing those Users with specific access rights via the use of permissions. Often these permissions are also able to be granted to collections called Groups, to which Users are added. The combination of Permissions and Groups provides the ability to provide as atomic a dissemination of rights across the User space as possible. However, this granularity comes at the price of reduced efficiency for managing the created permissions and more importantly the Groups that collect Users designated to perform sets of actions. Essentially the Groups serve as access control lists in many systems, which for the variable and often changing environment of business applications means a need to constantly update the ACL’s (groups) in order to add or remove individuals based on their ability to perform cert...

sent2null space

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