Views, Viewpoints, Reviews, and Interviews

I awoke thinking about "Views".   

To view is to look, to watch, to observe, to witness.  View used this way is a verb.

The view is a scene, a landscape, a vista, a sight to behold..  View used this way is a noun.

My view is my perspective, my summarized 'take', my Viewpoint.

To review is to look again, or to summarize, or edit.   A play on words, you can review a view.

To interview is to seek someone else's view, or set of views, or their viewpoint.

This can be somewhere between recursive and convoluted, and still be accurate: "I reviewed the interview of Herman's viewpoint about the view."

The working word here is "Views"    I have spent a lot of time over the years developing and creating views--perspectives might be another word--about many topics.   I've espoused "Pictures" along the way, as in "One picture is worth one thousand words." and we've copyrighted the term "Envisionz" for our company AstroVirtual (see that blog https://www.astrovirtual.com/astrovirtualblog/envisioningdata).

But words can "paint a picture" too.   "Viewpoints" is a column that appears in our weekly county newspaper, the Yamhill County News-Register (https://newsregister.com/about-newsregister).  And I was lucky enough to have that paper select two of my articles for June, that I'll describe below.

This paper traces its roots to 1866, and has been owned and operated for the past 95 years by the same family, the Bladines.  Along the way, they've won numerous accolades, including "Best region's (Oregon) weekly newspaper in 1931 and 1935, and the best nation's weekly in 1939 newspaper."  The honors continue to this day, winning "best non-daily newspaper honors" in Oregon for most of the past twenty years.   

A notable point about the News-Register's history is that Nicholas Kristof's first job, while still in high school, was to be a reporter for the News-Register, and he still returns to town (McMinnville, OR) and presents his latest findings for the locals.  As an example, he gave a standing-room only talk about his new book, Chasing Hope, last summer (https://www.amazon.com/Chasing-Hope-Reporters-Nicholas-Kristof/).  

The paper is noteworthy in my view (there's that word again) for its willingness to tackle partisan issues with a clear passion.   Clearly left-of-center, but open to opinion from all sides, it allows, nay savors, letters to the editor, and Viewpoints, from diverse perspectives.   As many of our blog readers well know, I have strong views about some topics, including 'data-driven decision analysis,' and with the recent unbelievably stupid decisions by Robert Kennedy Jr. about vaccines for Americans, I chose to 'sound off' and share my views from the COVID pandemic experience.    I penned a proposal to the Viewpoints editor, and he forthwith gave me a column on 6 June, 2025 for which he selected the title to draw attention.

Entitled "Stop re-writing history to downplay the pandemic," I waxed eloquent about Yamhill County statistics, and the impact of COVID on a placid rural county far from any news-highlighted hotspot.  Doing the research, I quickly found that our little Yamhill County had the highest per capita death rate of any of Oregon's 36 counties within weeks of the outset. Huh?  Why?

Just to make sure that people understood my "Viewpoint," the first two paragraphs were fairly bold (the 'old Charlie' some of my oldest followers said, somewhat tongue in cheek).  Here are the opening two paragraphs: The lunacy continues. Now the demented head of HHS, clearly beset by his own brain worm, has decided for all of us that we basically should not have free rights to the Covid vaccines unless we are over 65 with other unspecified underlying conditions.

Have we lost sight completely of what America meant only months ago in terms of personal freedom? How Americans can tolerate the ridiculous, dangerous, anti-scientific leadership in Washington, D.C., is stunning to any rational observer.

And here's the article (https://newsregister.com/article?articleTitle=charles-house-stop-rewriting-history-to-downplay-the-pandemic--1749243039--52092--commentary)

I know, I know--this invites ICE to come knocking on the door, or vigilantes to grab their AK-47s and start driving my way.  I don't consider myself an activist, but on topics like this, I do get enthused, even energized.  Jenny sez rabid.  Ah, well, thank God for a newspaper willing to grant a Viewpoints Page.

I'll describe the second Viewpoints article in a subsequent post.   For now, though, keep those words in mind--View, Viewpoint, Review, and Interview.

InnovaScapes Institute vs AstroVirtual Inc.

 Ah, yes, a number of friends have told me --confusing.  Are you still doing InnovaScapes, or is your attention now on AstroVirtual?

And the answer is YES.    But even my AstroVirtual partner seems a bit confused.  So let me try to explain.

AstroVirtual is a 'for profit' company, although to date it has operated in a non-yet-profitable mode.  AVI has designed a number of 'multi-screen environments' that are suitable for displaying many virtual large-screens, each of which is inter-active within itself.  The set of multiple screens are simultaneously shown.  AVI designs, produces, and delivers these environments for clients who want to feature a series of simultaneous displays for their customers.   Imagine that you 'sell' access to all of the March Madness basketball games simultaneously, or all of the nation's NCAA football games on any October Saturday.  

AVI's environments give you ways to show all of these.  You could simulate a Las Vegas betting room, or a Fox Sports Multi-Channel.  Instead of switching your TV from channel to channel to see different games, you watch all of them simultaneously on an AVI diorama.    

AVI licenses the environment to you, along with a modest annual maintenance contract.   Your task is to select the content you want to display, and either load it yourself (AVI will teach you how to do this), or hire a content team to do it for you (AVI also will contract to do this for you, but it is not our main business).  And then, your task is to advertise your offering, and deliver this montage of pictures and interactive screens to your customers.   You might use these environments to build a business 'war-room' or a Situation Center, or altenatively, you might build a local Health Observatory for your community, or a Historical Hall of Fame for your Service Club or local organization.

InnovaScapes Institute is a specialized research organization, which on occasion may be either a content provider for customers, or a content producer for either client or public consumption.   Projects have been quite varied over the years, including COPD and COVID studies, innovation drivers and enhancement tools, in-depth topical interviews such as historical figures in computer science, and creation and initial operation of institutional recognition programs.

I am the founder and CEO for InnovaScapes, operational since 1991.   I am also a co-founder and managing director for AstroVirtual, since 2023.   

The confusion, aside from the fact that I am involved in both orgaiznations, is that we have illustrated  some InnovaScapes research content on AstroVirtual prototypes, to stimulate potential clients to imagine how their own material might be used.

To the extent that a potential AVI client, or interested newcomer, might see some of these prototypes, it is not hard to see why a potential client might conclude that AVI is, say, a COVID research team, and miss the notion that AVI is content agnostic, and in fact doesn't offer any content for sale.

We can illustrate this with pictures, and maybe that would be a good idea for the next post.

Where has the time gone?

 The last InnovaScapes post was in October last year?   Whew!  What, what?

And the last two posts in October included passages about the impending Trump election, raising concerns that I would certain support fully at this point.   But, this blog is not really intended nor appropriate for political discourse, so we'll move past that one.

The October 5, 2024 post did however include a one-sentence news item about Hurricane Helene -- "spreading widespread destruction to areas with little warning, killing hundreds and leaving countless thousands with out food, water, or shelter.  Tragic."

What I did not yet know was that I would be one of those affected by Hurricane Helene, and it was not a very pleasant discovery.   Unbeknownst to me for a few days, "Hurricane Helene led to a significant shortage of intravenous (IV) fluids, including saline solutions, in the United States. The hurricane damaged a major IV fluid manufacturing plant in North Carolina, which produces a large portion of the nation's supply. This disruption has caused hospitals to ration IV fluids and explore alternative methods for patient care." (Wikipedia).      

In mid-September, I was scheduled for hip replacement surgery in early November (I'd had one years earlier for the other hip), but just after I wrote the blog post, my surgeon called to say that this outage of the Baxter Labs facility in North Carolina was severe, and my surgery (since it was elective) would be postponed until April 2025.   What?

Well, it turns out that this one lab produced something like 60% of America's saline solutions, and "Blam, sorry Ma'am" the country is out of luck.   I did muse about how could one company get a virtual lock on such business, sounds pretty monopolistic to me.   I did not pursue this line of reasoning further.

I finally got the surgery on April 2, 2025, and also finally, on May 13, 2025, Baxter Labs said, "Hey, we're back in business, hooray"     https://www.baxter.com/baxter-newsroom/hurricane-helene-updates

Meanwhile, lasst autumn, my hip got worse and worse.  I went from a cane in October and November (actually, a shillelath, not a cane.  Shillelaths ward off evil spirits, canes are for cripples), to a four-wheeled walker of sorts in December.  By January, all the way to April, I was virtually house-bound, with adequate pain levels to justify pounding Aleve at higher rates than recommended.

And, voilà, today the surgery has healed, and I am able to walk again without mechanical aids, provided I don't do anything silly, like try to walk on uneven ground, or more than one hundred yards at a time.  In effect, I got so out of shape from no exercise, that I am unsteady, and using Physical Therapy folk to recover is taking more time than I had expected.

So, yes, I could have been writing blog posts, but it has been hard to even sit at the computer.  This idea of getting older with slower recovery times is not a perfect plan, but compared to the alternative, here we are.   Meanwhile, time moves on, and our company AstroVirtual has made progress that I can report on a bit in the next post.   I will also note that I did use the computer time that I could tolerate to begin an AstroVirtual blog, which you can find via the AstroVirtual website (https://www.astrovirtual.com/astrovirtualblog)

So, for now, InnovaScapes Institute is up and running, and posts might again be moderately regular.

Cheers,

Chuck

Orwell might be winning--YouTube is BIG BROTHER

The final throes of the 2024 US Presidential election are upon us, and the fact that it is purportedly evenly divided in the American electorate speaks volumes to Winston Churchill's opine that "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others."

I try to stay away from political statements in general, but of late, the exhortations of Trump about 'revenge' and getting rid of his enemies 'within' are really bothering me.   Why?  Well, because I just had a Big Brother intrusion on my own work, that both maddens and scares me.   And this is from my 'good friends' at Google (you do remember that "do no evil" is [or was] their corporate motto).

First, as many of you know, I have been diligently working on the COVID stories for nearly five years, along with COPD issues for fifty years.   I have been a strong believer in Data-Driven Decision Making ever since early days at Caltech imbued me with a "cause-and-effect" perspective towards all sorts of events and happenings.  

And I published a short set of slides to a PRIVATE YouTube posting last week that showed correlation factors for COVID cases and deaths over a six-month period (July 1 through December 31, 2021) which is the first full six-month period after vaccines were widely available.

This is BIG DATA representation--choropleths of multiple state cases and deaths along with their average vaccine rates.  Using Johns Hopkins data (correlated with USA Facts data, as we've done for 4 years), I show below the per capita death rates for three clusters of neighboring states -- the Upper Rocky Mtn West, the Upper Great Lakes, and New England, including New York.  I also show the set of aggregated data for absolute and per capita Cases alongside Deaths.   The striking thing is that all three groups have roughly the same Infection Rate, while differing dramatically in Death Rate.  Probably no dispute here, even for the censors who bleap swearing on television.

And then, I found the 'average' vaccine rate per state, and did the calculations, as shown here:

So anyone can run the numbers, and the results won't vary greatly.  But, they cannot run the numbers is they cannot see the numbers, and YouTube CENSORED this.  A phone call revealed that it is but one of many POLITICAL STATEMENTS that they do not endorse, and ThEY SCREEN EVERY YouTUBE, even if it is PRIVATE.   Pleading made no difference.  We cannot publish this.

Holy shit.  

I worked with Hector Molina-Garcia and Terry Winograd and Jim Gray on the original NSF Digital Library Project, for which Sergey Brin and Larry Page did the first Google prototype with Stanford professor Rajeev Motwani.   I recall vividly the day that Hector showed me the BackRub prototype operating.   Motwani and Winograd co-published the first academic paper with Brin and Page.

And later, Susan Wojcicki would lead YouTube for Google, for more than a decade.  She was on the Computer History Museum Board with me.  Her mother, Esther, was a MedaiX@Stanford visiting scholar for years with me.   And Eric Schmidt is an old Sun Microsystems guy, for whom I gave a lecture at Sun circa 1990.   So I know these people, and I've counted them more-or-less as friends as well as colleagues for decades.

But then I saw the San Jose Mercury News front page story today, one of many in a series reporting that Silicon Valley residents are now fearing "high-tech".  And you know what, I'm with them.  THIS IS BULLSHIT, not only worse than X or TWITTER or whatever that asinine thing is that the bouncing idiot proclaims, this is HIDDEN and SECRET and BIG BROTHER.   We don't need to wait for Trump's proclaimed machinations--we've done it to ourselves.

The BIG news drowns out the Big News

 Last week (September 24-30, 2024)  is a great example

Let's start with the BIG news.

First, the Presidential Election--especially Trumpian trumpeting--consumed most of the news cycle, a pattern that we've seen all too well for nearly a decade, proving both the validity of Orwell and Huxley predictions.  And predictably, even though newscasters 'know the impact' keep reporting it breathlessly.

Second, the Hezbollah bombing, and killing of leader Hassan Nasrallah commanded headlines and stories at length, understandably.

Third, Hurricane Helene, spreading widespread destruction to areas with little warning, killing hundreds and leaving countless thousands without food, water, or shelter.   Tragic. 

***********.  

Then, what I would ordinarily consider Big News, from the San Jose Mercury-News, still my go-to online newspaper even though we moved from the Bay area more than a decade ago, carried these stories which I thought significant.   But none of them even went 'national'    Admittedly, the first two went 'local' in Oregon, for a very specific reason.

First, two Fortune 50 companies had alarming (or joyous) news, depending on your point of view, and since they are Oregon's two biggest employers, it caused a local stir::         A.  John Donahoe, CEO of Nike, was relieved of his duties.   The Wall Street Journal had a small squib, and Bloomberg Business had urged this action earlier in the same week.   Seems he didn't earn much employee goodwill (averred my granddaughter!), and revenues and profits were suffering as well.           B. Intel, it was reported, is the take-over target for (a) Qualcomm, or (b) ARM.   And beleaguered CEO Pat Gelsinger even was quoted as saying he thought the company could be saved, especially if the Feds lean in.    Now, how the hell can Intel be in such sorry shape?   This was the behemoth of silicon not many moons ago; proud and aloof even.   And Nike, with little upstart Adidas 'next-door' in Portland--what gives?

Second, another Fortune 50 company, Cisco, announced it was moving its headquarters from its huge presence on Tasman Drive in San Jose to Santa Clara's Santana Row, essentially an upscale mall--beacuse they have better restaurants for lunch for employees.   What BS.   What they announced was that Buildings 8, 9, 10 and 11--the core of Cisco's vast property estate in San Jose--was being abandoned.  WHAT?   This is as shocking, and perhaps as dunb, as when Boeing's idiot beanies decided to move Boeing headquarters from Seattle to Chicago.  How'd that one work out?   And how long before Boeing is a 'break-up' target for the vulture hedge funds?

And then, OpenAI and its charismatic leader, Sam Altman, said something to the effect of "now we;ll have to start charging for ChatGPT."  This at the end of a week featuring a two-day session at the United Nations General Assembly re AI, and an hour special TV show hosted by Oprah Winfrey re AI (with Sam Altman as the first speaker), and a special UNGA Digital Health Symposium with two days of breakout sessions re AI and ML.

Third, a small obituary appeared, for Bob Maxfield, the M of ROLM, where a raft of ex-Sylvania and HP folk started one of the first of the Silicon Valley start-ups.   I turned to the Computer History Museum oral history for Maxfield, and played nostalgia for a day, while wondering why CHM never interviewed R or O or L.   Oshman, the O, was CEO from the beginning, and he indeed did several Si Valley oral histories, though none for CHM.   Gene Richeson (the R), and Walt Loewenstern (the L) have none.  I was in a small Venture group for years with Walt.   A shame that these stories haven't been captured.  Ah, well.

************. 

My thoughts today--AI will prove far more impactful on the world than Hezbollah, and certainly more than any single hurricane--probably as much as summarized world climate change, if not more.  And the life-cycles of Fortune 50 companies and their products, including unintended consequence products, will have way more impact than the news headlines suggest.   But that means changing the perceptions of journalists and readers from today's on-the-spot news into more reflective approaches.  Won't happen.

 Getting ready for the UNGA movie, I found myself in places reverting to 'old stories' -- stories that I love, stories that I know backwards and forwards, stories that I think tell WHY, not just HOW, we're working, and what inspires us.

My colleagues at AstroVirtual have, mostly, been indulgent of this propensity, but for this movie, they urged FOCUS, FOCUS, FOCUS.  Ever heard that from your team?

So, late one night, after a wonderful dinner with my wife, a daughter, and her daughter, I had this set of troublesome thoughts, and I got up and penned the following.  On reflection, maybe it is worth thinking about.  So, with no more lead-in than that, here it is.

UNGA79

 Well, we did it.   We put together a 9 minute, 58 second (have to stay under 10 minutes, right?) movie about the Virtual 3D Global Health Observatory for the 4th annual Digital Health Symposium at the United Nations 79th annual meeting.  See it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV-7NSYLd7c

Fair warning.   I am awaiting imminent surgery to aid a mobility issue, so I elected to send a movie rather than attend.   Martin Curley, the host (and director of the Maynooth University Innovation Values Institute (IVI), elected to showcase the movie in two different break-out sessions, which resulted in some great exposure for the 84 presenters over three days.   

We anticipate follow-up in three directions.

1. InnovaScapes Institute will donate our 1,024 day COVID database for 3,141 US counties and 196 countries to the Innovation Values Institute for the first fully operational Observatory that they support.

2. AstroVirtual will provide a 5 session seminar workshop for medical researchers on the use of these tools, with a follow-on 5 session advanced seminar depending upon interest.

3. IVI is sponsoring a pan-European Digital Health initiative, with the Observatory as one ingredient.

These kinds of projeccts don't happen overnight, but when they get some traction, the results can be truly inspirational.   We are proud to be part of the developing program.