Diversifying the Tech Boom

I'm very fascinated by learning from, like, the legendary start-up companies.
Like, why did Pinterest become Pinterest? And why did the other ten companies fail?
A unicorn company is a public or private company that has been valued at over a billion dollars by
investors.
I came up with this term unicorn as part of an analysis that I was doing to learn about these billiondollar companies because there's, like, 1001 stories in the city about people and their ideas and their
startups and yet, very few will wind up becoming super successful over time and also standing the
test of time. So what's going on here?
When we did the first unicorn analysis, there were very few I think maybe no female CEO's on the
list. That's something that I'm very passionate about changing.
Cowboy Ventures is a seed-stage fund; we invest in technology startups. We also happen to back a
much higher percentage of female founders than [a] venture capitalist traditionally does.
More diverse teams come up with better results. They're better at problem solving. They're better at
generating a positive company culture and greater employee loyalty, and they deliver better financial
results.
There are about double the number of unicorn's in our analysis from 2015 versus 2013, which is
pretty astounding. The whole world of technology has shifted considerably in the past five years,
which makes room for new solutions and new technology companies. And that will help us,
hopefully, place more diverse candidates into leadership teams and into companies and onto
boards.
Source: nytimes

Understanding Zika
The Zika virus was first detected in Brazil in May of 2015. The virus has long circulated in Africa and
parts of Asia, but it is new to the western hemisphere. Since then, as many as 1.5 million people
have thought to have been infected in Brazil and the virus has spread throughout Latin American
and the Caribbean.
Symptoms of Zika are usually mild. Just one in five people develop signs like fever and joint pain
and they usually go away within a week. But experts suspect that if a pregnant woman was infected,
the virus can cause brain damage in her unborn child. Scientists think that as many as several
thousand babies in Brazil could have microcephaly, a condition where infants are born with
abnormally small heads and often deformed brains. They suspect that Zika is the main cause, but it's
too early to know for sure.
Brazilian doctors have also linked the Zika virus to a rare condition: Guillain-Barr which can cause
temporary paralysis in patients of all ages. But causation has not been proven. Zika is transmitted by
the same mosquitos that carry diseases like Yellow Fever, Chikungunya, and Dengue.
That type of mosquito is also present in the United States, but mosquito control in the U.S. tends to
be better than in Latin American countries. For now, the U.S. is advising pregnant women not to
travel to areas where the virus is prevalent. There's also growing evidence that Zika can spread
through sexual contact. A person who contracted the virus in Venezuela gave it to a sexual partner in
Dallas. Men having sex after traveling to areas where the disease is prevalent should consider
wearing condoms, federal health officials have said.
El Salvador has gone as far as to recommend that women in that country wait until 2018 to become
pregnant.

The World Health Organization has declared a global health emergency. Still, a lot remains
unknown. Is Zika what's actually causing the spike in microcephaly in newborns? And if the virus
continues to spread, how fast will it spread?
Source: nytimes

Queens The Next Tourist Destination

Queens is, to me, the heart of New York City. It has so much to offer. It's a hidden little gem that's
now been uncovered.
Lovely Planet named Queens the No.1 destination of 2015 in the United States.
What? I don't believe that. Wow. So it's picking up. What's wrong with the world?
From day one I really believed in the area and I came and I went all in and invested there a lot of
money in the dream that people outside Manhattan should have, like, affordable hotel but very
unique design with top notch services. I think way better than Brooklyn. And I do have properties in
Brooklyn as well, so
Yeah, we get loads of tourists. Strangely, tourists love to come and taste beers. You don't think that
people are going to come to Long Island City to Queens to like, check it out but, it's happening.
People come through here all the time.
We are finding that all of the sudden we are getting some international travelers that are emailing
ahead to find out what our hours are, when we're open
The Queens tourism wave predates the Lonely Planet's designation of the city. Between 2012 and
2013, visits to Queens increased by 12 percent. In the same period, around 1000 jobs supported by
tourism were created.
Umm, I feel that Lonely Planet was important for us because there's kind of a psychological barrier
about Queens. The Queens of old, of my youth, is nothing like the Queens of today. The one issue
that might hurt us is the fact that there are only a few public transportation lines.
What I like about Queens is the ambience, the people, the culture. There's a lot of culture, a lot of
diversity. It has everything Manhattan has, and even better.
Go to the Queens farm! A lot of fun! They have, like, Indian powwow's, and other stuffs as well as
[] but don't over crowd it because then I'm going to get pushed out.
Source: nytimes

Monkey Manners
Everyone knows that monkeys copy other monkeys and do what they do but which monkeys do they
watch? The answer is mom, at least for some Vervet monkeys in South Africa.
Scientists call this kind of copying Social Learning. Its pretty common among primates. Chimpanzees,
for example, learn how other chimpanzees fish for termites and different groups have different traditions.
The researchers who were studying the Vervets wanted to gather some solid data on just how these
traditions are passed on.
So they set up an experiment that would work with wild, free-living monkeys. They set out some delicious
grapes but first they dirtied them up with some sand. Then they sat back and watched what happened.

Some of the monkeys used their hands to brush off the sand. Others rubbed the grape against something
else, and some split the grape with their mouth, ate just the inside and threw away the peel.
Young monkeys did not copy dominant males or some other unrelated monkeys. They watched and
imitated their mothers and sometimes their brothers and sisters. That makes sense. Vervet families are
led by females and grape cleaning is a family tradition.
Source: nytimes

Is it All in Your Gut?

We've had a new appreciation of a facet of our biology that we call the gut microbiota. This complex
community of microbes that lives in our intestines, they're connected to our metabolism, our immune
function there's emerging evidence that these microbes may dictate aspects of moods and
behavior but if we don't take care of this community or if something goes awry, the whole
ecosystem can turn against us and actually contribute to health problems.
Investigators decided to use germ-free mice to study the way that the gut microbiota contributes to
disease.So the investigators took two groups of mice. They gave one group an obese microbiota
and another group of mice a healthy microbiota and then they just gave them the same diet and
asked whether the mice receiving the obese microbiota gained weight more rapidly. And indeed,
they did.
Microbes eat all of the nutrients that we haven't absorbed in our digestive tract. And that is primarily
dietary fiber. What's been really startling, if you look at the trend in dietary fiber consumption is that
it's plummeting.What's happening, over time, is that we're losing microbial species in our gut, likely
because we're not feeding them properly and this corresponds with all of these rising health
problems.
There's a bit of chicken and egg problem of causality and so, there needs to be very careful
investigation to see whether the depleted microbiota is then leading to problems in our health. But I
think a lot of arrows are pointing in that direction.
Source: nytimes

Birke Baehr: What's wrong with our food system

00:12Hello. My name is Birke Baehr, and I'm 11 years old. I came here today to talk about what's
wrong with our food system. First of all, I would like to say that I'm really amazed at how easily kids
are led to believeall the marketing and advertising on TV, at public schools and pretty much
everywhere else you look. It seems to me like corporations are always trying to get kids, like me, to
get their parents to buy stuf that really isn't good for us or the planet. Little kids, especially, are
attracted by colorful packaging and plastic toys. I must admit, I used to be one of them. I also used to
think that all of our food came from these happy, little farms where pigs rolled in mud and cows
grazed on grass all day.

00:54What I discovered was this is not true. I began to look into this stuf on the Internet, in books
and in documentary films, in my travels with my family. I discovered the dark side of the industrialized
food system. First, there's genetically engineered seeds and organisms. That is when a seed is
manipulated in a laboratory to do something not intended by nature -- like taking the DNA of a
fish and putting it into the DNA of a tomato. Yuck. Don't get me wrong, I like fish and tomatoes, but
this is just creepy. (Laughter)The seeds are then planted, then grown. The food they produce have
been proven to cause cancer and other problems in lab animals, and people have been eating food
produced this way since the 1990s.And most folks don't even know they exist. Did you know rats that
ate genetically engineered corn had developed signs of liver and kidney toxicity? These include
kidney inflammation and lesions and increased kidney weight. Yet almost all the corn we eat has
been altered genetically in some way. And let me tell you, corn is in everything. And don't even get
me started on the Confined Animal Feeding Operations called CAFOS.
02:01(Laughter)
02:03Conventional farmers use chemical fertilizers made from fossil fuels that they mix with the dirt
to make plants grow. They do this because they've stripped the soil from all nutrients from growing
the same crop over and over again. Next, more harmful chemicals are sprayed on fruits and
vegetables, like pesticides and herbicides, to kill weeds and bugs. When it rains, these chemicals
seep into the ground, or run of into our waterways, poisoning our water too. Then they irradiate our
food, trying to make it last longer, so it can travel thousands of miles from where it's grown to the
supermarkets.
02:37So I ask myself, how can I change? How can I change these things? This is what I found out. I
discovered that there's a movement for a better way. Now a while back, I wanted to be an NFL
football player. I decided that I'd rather be an organic farmer instead. (Applause) Thank you. And that
way I can have a greater impact on the world. This man, Joel Salatin, they call him a lunatic
farmer because he grows against the system. Since I'm home-schooled, I went to go hear him speak
one day. This man, this "lunatic farmer," doesn't use any pesticides, herbicides, or genetically
modified seeds. And so for that, he's called crazy by the system.
03:26I want you to know that we can all make a diference by making diferent choices, by buying our
food directly from local farmers, or our neighbors who we know in real life. Some people say organic
or local food is more expensive, but is it really? With all these things I've been learning about the
food system, it seems to me that we can either pay the farmer, or we can pay the
hospital. (Applause) Now I know definitely which one I would choose. I want you to know that there
are farms out there -- like Bill Keener in Sequatchie Cove Farm in Tennessee -- whose cows do eat
grass and whose pigs do roll in the mud, just like I thought. Sometimes I go to Bill's farm and
volunteer, so I can see up close and personal where the meat I eat comes from. I want you to know
that I believe kids will eat fresh vegetables and good foodif they know more about it and where it
really comes from. I want you to know that there are farmers' markets in every community popping

up. I want you to know that me, my brother and sister actually like eating baked kale chips. I try to
share this everywhere I go.
04:29Not too long ago, my uncle said that he ofered my six-year-old cousin cereal. He asked him if
he wanted organic Toasted O's or the sugarcoated flakes -- you know, the one with the big striped
cartoon character on the front. My little cousin told his dad that he would rather have the organic
Toasted O's cereal because Birke said he shouldn't eat sparkly cereal. And that, my friends, is how
we can make a diference one kid at a time.
04:54So next time you're at the grocery store, think local, choose organic, know your farmer and
know your food. Thank you.
05:01(Applause)