Inspiring Solutions for a Better World Rotary eClub of Silicon Valley

Vahid Motazedian, serves as the executive director for Olinga Learning and the Foundation for the Application of Science (FAS), two California nonprofits dedicated to empowering youth to contribute to the social and economic development of their small, rural communities.

Vahid grew up in Iran, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and Oregon. His father studied agriculture and dedicated his life to helping small farmers in rural communities.

Vahid got his BS in electrical engineering from Oregon State University and worked in Silicon Valley for companies including Advanced Micro Devices, Synopsys, Oracle, and Salesforce.

He left high tech in 2015 and moved to Salinas to devote himself to nonprofit work. He dedicates his time and energy to advancing educational programs that equip youth with moral and scientific capabilities and to developing technology solutions that help farmers.

The Wings of Knowledge Initiative, which we'll learn about in his presentation, aims to empower youth to improve their rural communities through participatory action research projects.

It began with simple projects designed to improve some aspect of community life, such as painting murals, planting flowers, teaching children, and trash cleanups.

Over time it grew in scope and complexity to include engineering projects designed to help local farmers.

This presentation shares the story of how small teams of youth in California's forgotten towns are working together to advance processes of science research and technology development within a wider context of improving their communities and the lives of their families.

Video: https://youtu.be/EwuB3pr4FQ4

To learn more, go to:

https://www.wings.ngo

⁠⁠More about the Rotary eClub of Silicon Valley⁠⁠   


Website: ⁠⁠Rotary.cool⁠ or: https://www.siliconvalleyrotary.com/
Meetings’ ⁠⁠Video Archive⁠⁠: https://www.siliconvalleyrotary.com/meetings/
YouTubeChannel⁠⁠: https://www.youtube.com/@rotaryeclubofsiliconvalley824/videos
How to become a member in ⁠⁠this online Rotary eClub⁠⁠: https://www.siliconvalleyrotary.com/join

⁠⁠More about Rotary International:⁠⁠


Website: ⁠⁠https://www.rotary.org
Find a Rotary near you: https://my.rotary.org/en/club-search
Find an ⁠⁠online Rotary Club:⁠⁠ https://tiny.cc/rotaryonline

 

Podcast and Zoom Host, ⁠⁠Rushton Hurley⁠⁠: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rushtonhurley/

Podcast Producer, ⁠⁠Elton Sherwin⁠⁠: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eltonsherwin/

Audio edited and enhanced with ⁠⁠Descript Studio Sound ⁠⁠ 

#PositiveChange #Inspiration #Rotary

How does textile waste contribute to climate change?

FABSCRAP provides one solution.

Our speaker, Erin Wiens, is an ethical textile waste management advocate currently based in Brooklyn, New York. Her experience as a buyer in secondhand clothing spurred her interest in holding the fashion industry accountable for its environmental impact.

Currently, in Erin’s role as Community Lead at FABSCRAP, she works to educate local communities, schools, and designers about textile waste and hopeful solutions. Erin strives to make the fashion industry more equitable and sustainable through implementing circular design, redefining waste as a resource, and advocating for climate justice.

To learn more, go to:https://fabscrap.org/Their most recent annual report:https://tinyurl.com/FABSCRAP22

⁠⁠More about the Rotary eClub of Silicon Valley⁠⁠   


Website: ⁠⁠Rotary.cool⁠
Meetings’ ⁠⁠Video Archive⁠⁠
YouTubeChannel⁠⁠ 
How to become a member in ⁠⁠this online Rotary eClub⁠⁠

⁠⁠More about Rotary International:⁠⁠


Website: ⁠⁠www.Rotary.org⁠⁠
Find a ⁠⁠local Rotary club⁠⁠ 
Find an ⁠⁠online Rotary Club⁠⁠

 

Podcast and Zoom Host: ⁠⁠Rushton Hurley⁠⁠

Podcast Producer: ⁠⁠Elton Sherwin⁠⁠

Audio edited and enhanced with: ⁠⁠Descript Studio Sound ⁠⁠ 

#PositiveChange #Inspiration #Rotary

As AI tools become more prevalent, they raise important and complex questions about their intellectual property implications.

Who owns the works created using AI? Do AI-generated works violate IP rights? Do AI models violate IP rights when they use third-party works for training purposes?

This talk will answer these questions, and your own, in an effort to clarify these confusing IP topics.

Our speaker, Eric Goldman, is Associate Dean for Research, Professor of Law, Co-Director of the High Tech Law Institute, and Supervisor of the Privacy Law Certificate, at Santa Clara University School of Law.

His research and teaching focuses on Internet law, and he blogs on that topic at the Technology & Marketing Law Blog (see links below).

To learn more: https://blog.ericgoldman.org/

⁠⁠More about the Rotary eClub of Silicon Valley⁠⁠   


Website: ⁠⁠Rotary.cool⁠
Meetings’ ⁠⁠Video Archive⁠⁠
YouTubeChannel⁠⁠ 
How to become a member in ⁠⁠this online Rotary eClub⁠⁠

⁠⁠More about Rotary International:⁠⁠


Website: ⁠⁠www.Rotary.org⁠⁠
Find a ⁠⁠local Rotary club⁠⁠ 
Find an ⁠⁠online Rotary Club⁠⁠

 

Podcast and Zoom Host: ⁠⁠Rushton Hurley⁠⁠

Podcast Producer: ⁠⁠Elton Sherwin⁠⁠

Audio edited and enhanced with: ⁠⁠Descript Studio Sound ⁠⁠ 

#PositiveChange #Inspiration #Rotary

Although the harms of tobacco use are well-known to almost everyone, the harms that tobacco causes to the environment are less recognized.

These harms start with tobacco growing, which is very hard on soils and woodlands, diverts agricultural efforts away from food production, and harms farmers and their children who are engaged with this cash crop.

Tobacco product manufacturing is a dirty business, now moving away from the US and to countries where environmental regulations may be lacking.

Smoking itself creates health risks through environmental contamination of air (secondhand smoke) and living spaces (thirdhand smoke). The aftermath of smoking, both for traditional and for many types of electronic cigarettes, is a huge, preventable source of waste made up of plastics, metals, packaging, toxic chemicals, and in the case of e-cigarettes, lithium batteries.

Now, there are international efforts involving environmental groups, public health advocates, multinational organizations, and governments to do something about this unnecessary environmental insult. This effort involves countries, advocates, and scientists who have come together under a United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) treaty negotiation to address the enormous and growing problem of environmental plastic waste.

Filtered cigarettes are part of this problem, and if they can be eliminated as a single-use, toxic plastic product, there will be significant benefits to both human health and the environment.

Our speaker, Dr Thomas Novotny, is Professor Emeritus of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the San Diego State University (SDSU) School of Public Health.

He is a graduate of the University of Nebraska Medical Center (MD 1973) and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (MPH Epidemiology 1992). Previously, he served as an epidemiologist in the CDC's Office on Smoking and Health and as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health in the US Department of Health and Human Services. He co-directed the Joint PhD program in Global Health at SDSU/UCSD from 2009-2015, and he has done extensive research on tobacco and the environment.

In 2010, he founded the Cigarette Butt Pollution Project, a research, educational, and advocacy non-profit organization that addresses tobacco's impact on the environment.

He is a member of the American Public Health Association, the American College of Preventive Medicine, the US Public Health Service Commissioned Officers Association, and the Council on Foreign Relations.

To learn more:


https://www.cigwaste.org


https://ash.org/plastic-pollution/
⁠⁠More about the Rotary eClub of Silicon Valley⁠⁠   


Website: ⁠⁠Rotary.cool⁠
Meetings’ ⁠⁠Video Archive⁠⁠
YouTubeChannel⁠⁠ 
How to become a member in ⁠⁠this online Rotary eClub⁠⁠

⁠⁠More about Rotary International:⁠⁠


Website: ⁠⁠www.Rotary.org⁠⁠
Find a ⁠⁠local Rotary club⁠⁠ 
Find an ⁠⁠online Rotary Club⁠⁠

 

Podcast and Zoom Host: ⁠⁠Rushton Hurley⁠⁠

Podcast Producer: ⁠⁠Elton Sherwin⁠⁠

Audio edited and enhanced with: ⁠⁠Descript Studio Sound ⁠⁠ 

#PositiveChange #Inspiration #Rotary

Our speaker today, Siddhu Pachipala, will make the argument that we can do far better identifying and treating suicide risk.

For all the radical leaps forward we've seen in machine learning, biotechnology, and renewable energy over the past 70 years, it feels like psychiatry is sitting firmly in the dust. Just look at the way we handle suicide.

The moment a patient walks into the clinic, they're asked to bullet off their symptoms for the clinician to analyze, a process subject to so much bias that it lets the vast majority of high-risk patients go unnoticed. For the few high-risk patients that do get spotted, clinicians are supposed to take their symptoms and use the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) to pick out treatment, but the DSM is so arbitrary that the process is little more than guesswork—with billions of dollars in debts, years of delays, and millions of deaths as the result.

It's been more than a decade since the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) announced that our risk assessments and treatment appraisals have reached their limits. But there hasn't been a viable replacement… until now. SuiSensor brings psychiatry right where it belongs: here, in the 21st century. Instead of ticking off monthly or yearly one-size-fits-all boxes, SuiSensor gives custom, real-time reports, outperforming our current assessments by a whopping 92.65%.

When it comes to our trial-and-error appraisals, the results speak for themselves: SuiSensor's machine-learning algorithms can interpret patients' underlying etiologies and deliver optimal treatment modalities with 86.75% accuracy. The future of psychiatric diagnosis and treatment could rest in the very words we write.

Siddhu Pachipala is an Indian-American innovator and an MIT student, and was named one of Change.org's Top 10 Changemakers Under 25. His vision is to use hard data to "bring some sense to our senseless state of affairs here in America." By morning, Siddhu is talking civic tech with National Geographic as one of Regeneron's Top 40 Young Scientists... and by night, he's building coalitions of working-class Texans with his NGO, Embolden. When Siddhu finally collapses, sometime around 1:22 AM, his bed might be in Cambridge, but his home? Still Conroe, Texas.


To learn more: https://www.npr.org/2023/05/20/1176438893/this-high-school-seniors-science-project-could-one-day-save-lives

⁠⁠More about the Rotary eClub of Silicon Valley⁠⁠   


Website: ⁠⁠Rotary.cool⁠
Meetings’ ⁠⁠Video Archive⁠⁠
YouTubeChannel⁠⁠ 
How to become a member in ⁠⁠this online Rotary eClub⁠⁠

⁠⁠More about Rotary International:⁠⁠


Website: ⁠⁠www.Rotary.org⁠⁠
Find a ⁠⁠local Rotary club⁠⁠ 
Find an ⁠⁠online Rotary Club⁠⁠

 

Podcast and Zoom Host: ⁠⁠Rushton Hurley⁠⁠

Podcast Producer: ⁠⁠Elton Sherwin⁠⁠

Audio edited and enhanced with: ⁠⁠Descript Studio Sound ⁠⁠ 

#PositiveChange #Inspiration #Rotary

Two billion people globally suffer from malnutrition, aka hidden hunger, hitting Africa the hardest. Many lack access to healthy food, relying on starchy flour for every meal. This poor diet, lacking vital nutrients, tragically leads to 8,000 preventable child deaths daily.

While developed nations enjoy fortified foods like cereal, milk, and salt, two billion people worldwide lack this basic human right. In parts of East Africa, as many as 95% of the population depend on small rural flour mills for their food source to survive.

Sanku enables local flour mills throughout East Africa to produce fortified flour, currently reaching approximately six million people with healthier meals everyday. Adding life-saving nutrients to food means children can fight disease, grow up healthy and educated, and live productive lives. By preventing health problems before they occur, Sanku's solution may have more sustained impact at scale on the lives of people living in rural sub-Saharan Africa than any current health intervention today.

Our speaker, Felix Brooks-church, strongly believes that access to nutritious food should be a right, and not a privilege, and has dedicated his life to developing a technology and business model capable of providing the basic human right to better nutrition to the millions of children and adults excluded by status-quo efforts.

Felix co-founded the social enterprise called Sanku in 2013 with the mission to end malnutrition by guaranteeing that every meal, for every mother and child, contains life-saving nutrients, forever.

For the last seventeen years, Felix has lived in the Global South, refining micronutrient delivery systems and developed economic models for sustaining food fortification at scale for small mills throughout East Africa. He led all aspects of product development and engineering for the award-winning Sanku Dosifier technology, and designed the innovative business model that will ultimately sustain Sanku's operations at scale with minimal external investment.

Felix has grown the organization from a two-man start-up to over 100 East African employees, passionately dedicated to ensuring close to six million people now have access to nutritious food every day. Sanku's big bet vision is to end malnutrition for 100 million people by 2030.

To learn more, go to:

https://projecthealthychildren.org/

⁠⁠More about the Rotary eClub of Silicon Valley⁠⁠   


Website: ⁠⁠Rotary.cool⁠
Meetings’ ⁠⁠Video Archive⁠⁠
YouTubeChannel⁠⁠ 
How to become a member in ⁠⁠this online Rotary eClub⁠⁠
     

⁠⁠More about Rotary International:⁠⁠


Website: ⁠⁠www.Rotary.org⁠⁠
Find a ⁠⁠local Rotary club⁠⁠ 
Find an ⁠⁠online Rotary Club⁠⁠

 

Podcast and Zoom Host: ⁠⁠Rushton Hurley⁠⁠

Podcast Producer: ⁠⁠Elton Sherwin⁠⁠

Audio edited and enhanced with: ⁠⁠Descript Studio Sound ⁠⁠ 

#PositiveChange #Inspiration #Rotary