Entrepreneurs, Leaders, and Investors in Innovation Hubs: How the Soviet Diaspora Contributes to Silicon Valley and Boston-Cambridge
Sheila M. Puffer is University Distinguished Professor at Northeastern University, Boston, where she is a professor of International Business at the D’Amore-McKim School of Business. She is also an Associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, and has served as program director of the Gorbachev Foundation of North America.
Puffer and two colleagues interviewed and listened to the stories of 150 entrepreneurs, investors, and other technical professionals who currently work in the innovation hubs of Silicon Valley-San Francisco and Boston-Cambridge. These stories yielded many details of these professionals’ activities in entrepreneurship, leadership, and investment in the high tech innovation economy, and led to the publication of the following book:
Sheila M. Puffer, Daniel J. McCarthy, & Daniel M. Satinsky. Hammer and Silicon: The Soviet Diaspora in the US Innovation Economy (2018). UK: Cambridge University Press
Around the World in 48 Days by Helicopter to Celebrate the 150th Anniversary of Canadian Confederation
Steven Dengler is a renowned Canadian entrepreneur, Fintech pioneer, and aviator. In 1993 he co-founded XE, now the world’s leading foreign exchange website and app. In 2017 he organized and flew C150 Global Odyssey, the first Canadian helicopter circumnavigation of the world.
Trust Is The Glue Of Life: A Perspective On Trustbuilding
Cecilia Sithembile (Thembi) Silundika, MSc, MA, is Ottawa Chair of the Women Economic Forum (WEF); and recipient of the award: Iconic Women Creating a Better World, India, 2017. WEF is part of the ALL Ladies League (ALL), the largest international network of women across the world which connects women of inspiration from ALL countries and cultures.
Cecilia’s expertise builds on over 20 years of experience working within the Canadian federal public service (where she is a Senior Circumpolar Analyst with the Crown and Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Department in Ottawa) and the promotion of international cooperation and sustainable development. Her expertise also includes fostering collaboration between international scientific research institutions, funding agencies and government.
Initiatives of Change International, based in Switzerland, is a global movement that promotes ethical leadership, sustainable living, and trust-building and reconciliation across social divides, to promote a just, peaceful, and sustainable world. Cecilia serves on the Board, where her key responsibilities include the promotion of good ethical governance (public and corporate) and economic empowerment of women.
Cecilia Silundika focused on trust-building for this talk. Whether it is the private or public sector, the most important pillar of leadership is trust. A leader can have a compelling vision, rock-solid strategy, excellent communication skills, innovative insight and a skilled team, but if people don’t trust their leader, the desired results will never be realized. On the other hand, leaders who inspire trust garner better output, morale, retention, loyalty and innovation. Conversely, mistrust fosters skepticism, frustration, low productivity and turnover. All these affect the leader’s impact.
Learning to Love Your Microbes
Jason Tetro started out in biochemistry but eventually found a home in microbiology and immunology. He worked in several fields including bloodborne, food and water pathogens; environmental microbiology; disinfection and antisepsis; and emerging pathogens such as SARS, avian flu, and Zika virus.
At the time of Tetro’s talk to Inquiring Minds, he was a Visiting Scientist at the University of Guelph. In addition to his academic work, Jason is the author of two bestselling books, has co-edited an academic book examining the human microbiome, and is frequently featured on popular social media outlets. Update October 2019: Jason Tetro is also the Host of Global’s Super Awesome Science Show podcast on the Curiouscast network. https://curiouscast.ca/podcast/321/super-awesome-science-show-sass/
Germs are everywhere including in and on each and every one of us. At one time, we thought they were nothing more than invisible killers. But research over the last three decades has revealed microbes play a much greater role in our health.
This has placed an onus on humanity to learn more about the germs that co-exist with us. We need to know how we can grow closer to the ones that can help us and ensure those that harm us are kept away.
This presentation opened up The Germ Files and took the audience under the microscope into an incredibly fascinating world of bacteria, viruses, and fungi.
Cartoons & Comic Art: An Afternoon of Conversation and Humour
Rina Piccolo is a cartoonist and writer in Toronto and has been in the industry for 30 years, Rina’s work includes cartoons, comics, illustration, and fiction writing. Her cartoons have appeared in The New Yorker, Barron’s Business Magazine, The Reader’s Digest, Parade Magazine, and more. Rina co-authored the book: Benjamin Bahr, Boris Lemmer, Rina Piccolo (2016), Quirky Quarks: A Cartoon Guide to the Fascinating Realm of Physics Berlin Germany: Springer-Verlag. Her daily comic strip Tina’s Groove was syndicated in newspapers and websites worldwide.
Rina explored topics that are most notable in the industry of comic art: the shrinking of markets, keeping the creative gas tank filled, and her favourite, sketchbook journaling. She shared many of her cartoons with the audience, and engaged us in a conversation about many aspects of life as a successful professional in a highly-competitive world. We heard about page fright, and about being in the green room at the New Yorker magazine offices on ‘cartoon vetting day’. We laughed together at some of her ‘think outside the box’ gags.
Simultaneous Interpreting: The Race between the Human Brain and Artificial Intelligence
Rony Gao is a practicing conference interpreter and a cross-cultural consultant based in Toronto. As a Chinese-English conference interpreter, Rony has worked for a wide array of political and business leaders. Rony is also a passionate trainer, podcast host, and entrepreneur.
Simultaneous interpretation, where the interpreter orally translates a speech into another language in real time, has been considered an impossible job by outsiders.
Rony’s presentation demystified the work of simultaneous interpreters and then offered a close look at the race between human interpreters and artificial intelligence in dominating the future of real-time language conversion. His talk addressed several questions: What is conference interpreting? How has technology impacted interpreting? What is the current state of speech recognition and machine translation technologies? and lastly: Will human interpreters be replaced?
Watch the video of Rony’s Inquiring Minds presentation on the Mensa Canada YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4WY9wXFQUKZ5AUq9JU6LvA
Tell the World Your Story: The Creative Process, Self-Publishing, and a Global Opportunity
Self-publishing (“Indie publishing”) has become a global phenomenon made possible by digital technologies but fueled by people’s ancient need to tell stories.
Bill Prentice is a successful crime fiction author and freelance writer specializing in international trade and investment marketing, public-private sector partnerships and public policy. His thriller “Why was Rachel murdered?” was shortlisted by the Crime Writers of Canada for the 2019 Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Crime Novel. It earned excellent reviews and has sold in the UK, Australia, Japan, across the US and Canada.
In his engaging presentation to Inquiring Minds, Prentice told us that, with Indie publishing, it is possible for the author to receive a royalty of up to 70% of the retail price, while maintaining close control of the cover, design, editing, formatting, and retail price. Whereas you might invest $5000 for professional editing and design, you might receive six-figures income at the end of the process. That is the high end of expectations, of course; you might not get much.
Before you start writing a work, ask yourself how you intend to measure “success”. Break even on your costs? Have a book “out there”? See it on amazon and in the public library?
Bill Prentice described three routes to self-publishing; he chose the third route by establishing his own company, Echo Road. He spent three years writing “Rachel” and another eighteen months founding his company and learning the ropes of Indie publishing at a professional level. Visit his webpage here: https://billprentice.com/
If you keep writing, it is imperative that you keep yourself updated on changes in software so that when you are ready to publish, your pages and artwork are still in usable format.
Sports and Canadian Values: Baseball in Hockey’s Shadow
Dr. Robert Elias is Professor of Politics and Chair of Legal Studies at the University of San Francisco.
Dr. Robert Elias received a B.A. in History/Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. and PhD. in Political Science from Penn State University, and a Certificate in International Human Rights from the University of Strasbourg.
He has taught at universities in the USA, Europe, and Canada. He’s also held positions at the Vera Institute of Justice (New York), Oxfam-America (Boston), Institute for Defense & Disarmament (Boston), Center for European Studies (France), and the Graduate Institute of International Studies (Switzerland). Besides his dozens of published articles and essays, he’s the long-time Editor-in-Chief of Peace Review: An International Journal of Social Justice, and he’s the author of ten books, including The Empire Strikes Out (New Press).
While his past research emphasized human rights, criminal justice, constitutional law, and political movements, his current interests focus on sports and society, including athletics and national values, sports and foreign policy, and political activism in sports. He was the Eakin Fellow and Visiting Professor at the Institute for the Study of Canada at McGill University in 2018, where he completed much of the research for this presentation to Mensa Canada.
Besides a nation’s literature, music, and art, its sports can both reflect and help shape a culture. If sports matter, then what do they represent about Canadian society, and what difference does it make?
Canada’s official national sports are hockey and lacrosse, yet few Canadians either play or follow lacrosse, and baseball—rather than hockey—has the deeper historical legacy in the nation.
Why has baseball been left out? If sports reflect a set of values for its games and for the society, then which sport best represents the values that characterize Canada and that Canadians hold dear?
In this talk, Dr. Elias explored the popularity but also growing concerns about Canadian hockey, the hidden history of Canadian baseball, the sport’s contribution to the Canadian values of tolerance and multiculturalism, the conventional explanations for Canadian baseball’s subordination, the sport’s place in the Canadian literary imagination, the false god of American baseball, the significance of the sport’s recent Canadian resurgence, and the prospects for returning Major League Baseball to Montreal and perhaps to other Canadian cities.
Baseball has a legitimate claim on the Canadian soul, and need not linger in the shadow of hockey. Does it matter?
Dr. Elias spoke to Inquiring Minds from San Francisco. You can view the recording of this webinar at this link: https://mensa.ca/2021/02/03/sports-and-canadian-values-baseball-in-hockeys-shadow/