Inspiring people: Jerry Yang

Jerry Yang is a Taiwanese-born American Internet entrepreneur, the co-founder and former CEO of Yahoo! Inc. He created the company together with David Filo.
While studying at Stanford University, he and David Filo created a website consisting of a directory of other pages in April 1994, initially called «Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web.» . The definitive name of the site, Yahoo! is the acronym for «Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle», taken from copying «Yet Another Compiler Compiler». Although Yang and Filo also affirm that they chose this name because they liked the general definition of a yahoo: «rude, unsophisticated, uneducated».

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Inspiring people: David Ho

Dr. David Ho is a Taiwanese scientist and doctor known as an AIDS researcher who is famous for being among the first to use peptidase inhibitors in the treatment of HIV-infected patients.
Dr. David Ho has been at the forefront of AIDS research for 26 years and has published more than 350 investigations. His elegant studies, which began in 1994, uncovered the dynamic nature of HIV replication in vivo and revolutionized the way we think about this horrendous disease. These insights led Dr. Ho to experiment with a combination of antiretroviral therapy, resulting in unprecedented HIV control in patients. AIDS mortality in wealthy nations has dropped sixfold since 1996, and a titanic international effort is underway to bring this lifesaving treatment to millions of people in developing countries. Dr. Ho has been the prime mover in this medical revolution against perhaps the worst plague in human history.
Ho changed his work technique and instead of treating the disease belatedly, he set out to find a way to fight it in the early stages. It was he who devised the method of treating HIV with «cocktails» of drugs, also known as Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy. He theorized that combining potent peptidase inhibitor drugs with other anti-HIV drugs could more effectively treat the disease, and after some trial and error, his assumption turned out to be correct.
Dr. Ho’s research team is currently working on developing a vaccine to stop the spread of the HIV / AIDS pandemic. In addition, Dr. Ho is at the head of a consortium of Chinese and American organizations to help combat the HIV / AIDS epidemic in China.

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Inspiring people: Chien Shiung Wu

Chien-Shiung Wu is known primarily for one particular experiment, the first experiment to show unequivocally and definitively that the previous assumption that parity was preserved in the weak nuclear force was invalid. However, at that time she had already made many other substantial contributions to nuclear physics and she was recognized as one of the greatest experimental physicists of her time. She had an unparalleled ability to assess the demands of the experiment, as well as the capabilities and limitations of the tools at her disposal. She easily identified possible sources of error, both in her own work and that of others, and used that knowledge in planning the next experimental investigation. When she tested theoretical models by searching for phenomena not yet observed, she was always alert to pitfalls or difficulties that could invalidate the investigation, and she did what was necessary to avoid them. A great scientist whose story began on May 31, 1912.

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Movements from the last year: #StopAsianHate

Stop Asian Hate is a movement against racism, hatred and mistreatment towards the Asian community in the United States has been growing in recent days and has spread through the Internet. Over the past year, harmful rhetoric and attacks on this population have increased, in part, due to the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic.

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Movements from the last year: #BlackLivesMatter

The Black Lives Matter movement began in 2013 as a hashtag a year after Trayvon Martin’s death in Florida.
Martin, a 17-year-old black man, was killed in 2012 by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch captain in Sanford, as he was walking back to the home of his father’s fiancee in Sanford, Florida, after stopping at a store at buy some sandwiches. Zimmerman acknowledged that he shot Martin claiming self-defense, but was acquitted after a media trial.
The movement, whose motto is «Black Lives Matter,» was founded «in response to the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s killer.»
As the co-founder of the Patrisse Khan-Cullors movement wrote in 2019, the original phrase was written in a letter to the black community by Alicia Garza, a black writer and speaker, who lives in Oakland, California, after Martin’s death. And Khan-Cullors made it a hashtag so that through social media the community could help combat racism against black people around the world.
What started as a social media movement took off after the death of young black Michael Brown in 2014 at the hands of a white policeman. Since then, it grew into an organization that has since expanded not only in the United States, but to Canada and the United Kingdom.
Black Lives Matter’s Mission as an organization is to «eradicate white supremacy» and intervene through local power «in the violence inflicted on black communities by the state and vigilantes.»
The project created by Garza, Khan-Cullors and Opal Tometi – who describe themselves as radical black leaders – has increased its visibility in recent years, but had a new moment of visibility in May 2020 after the death of George Floyd at the hands of a white cop in Minneapolis, who for almost 9 minutes pressed his knee on Floyd’s neck. The responsible officer, Derek Chauvin, was fired and faces charges of involuntary manslaughter and manslaughter.
The movement «helped spark the conversation around police and state violence» against black people, says its website, adding that the movement’s commitment is to «fight together and imagine and create a world free of anti-blackness, where every black person has the social, economic and political power to prosper »
And Floyd’s death sparked mass protests not only in Minneapolis, but in various cities across the United States and around the world calling for more and more to join the initial call: that the lives of black people matter.

Photo by Josh Hild on Pexels.com

Inspiring people: Kalpana Chawla

Chawla was born in Karnal, India in 1961 the third of four children, and died in the tragedy of the Columbia space shuttle as it was destroyed when entering orbit on February 1, 2003 over the southern United States 16 minutes before the landing. Kalpana Chawla had a certified flight instructor license for single-engine, multi-engine, gliders, seaplanes, and even for instrument control on airplanes.

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Inspiring people: Sandra Cisneros

Sandra Cisneros is one of the most successful contemporary Hispanic-Mexican writers in the world. Her first book, the novel House on Mango Street, received rave reviews, sold more than six million copies, was translated into more than twenty languages, and is read in elementary, high school, and colleges across the United States. In later works he used a child narrative voice. Following the publication of House on Mango Street, she directed a writing program at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio, Texas.

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Inspiring people: Raffi Freedman

Raffi Freedman-Gurspan is an American transgender rights activist and the first openly transgender person to serve as a member of the White House under the presidency of Barack Obama. She was also the first openly transgender legislative employee to serve in the Massachusetts House of Representatives. She previously served as a policy advisor for the National Center for Transgender Equality, a racial and economic justice initiative in Washington and is a public policy specialist in support of the LGBTQIA + community. We can recognize that this community is one of those that carries the most social weight, unfortunately some people who are not part of this community and who do not understand their rights believe themselves with the power to vote and decide on them, their future and how they develop in community. We are all unique, no one on this planet is the same, we must not allow a difference to be the cause of discrimination because we all have something different from others.

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Inspiring people: Arturo Schomburg

One of the most influential forces behind the creation of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library is the man whose name the building is named, Arturo Alfonso Schomburg. Born in Puerto Rico in 1874 to a black mother and father of German descent, young Arturo often wondered about the lack of African history taught in his school classrooms. This interest formed the cornerstone of Schomburg’s eventual work which consisted of research and preservation, a work that led him to become one of the leading collectors of Black literature, slave narratives, works of art, and diaspora materials. African of the world.

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Inspiring people: Mae Jemison

Did you get to see the movie Hidden Figures? This tells the story of how Mae Jemison and multiple engineers saved a launch of a space mission at NASA, you wonder why this is different from the different discoveries or contributions of some other engineer at NASA? Well, I tell you that Jemison was the first black female engineer and astronaut to be accepted into NASA and to travel to space. This was between 1987 and 1992, a time that defined the path for women of color in the engineering field. When we are born with an «advantage» or a «privilege» we do not recognize how difficult life was for some people, the level of discrimination that existed at NASA was exponential considering that they had bathrooms not only separated by gender but by color of skin, this was a defining moment in history.

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