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Uncertainty Wednesday: A Random Variable without Expected Value
Albert Wenger – Oct 18, 2017
I ended the previous Uncertainty Wednesday post asking whether an expected value always exists. Going back to the definition, the expected value is the “probability weighted average of a random variable.” So let’s construct an example of a random variable [...] Read more
Blog Panic (Backing Up Cloud Services)
Albert Wenger – Oct 16, 2017
I woke up this past Friday (the 13th) to a DM on Twitter saying that Continuations was down. I immediately tried to open the site on my phone and was greeted by an ominous: At first I figured that maybe [...] Read more
Uncertainty Wednesday: Sample Mean (Part 3)
Albert Wenger – Oct 11, 2017
Last Uncertainty Wednesday we dug deeper into understanding the distribution of sample means. I ended with asking why the chart for 100,000 samples of size 10 looked smoother than then one for samples of size 100 (just as a refresher, [...] Read more
Support idyll – Interactive Narratives
Albert Wenger – Oct 9, 2017
I am excited about a new open source project called idyll. Here is how Matthew Conlen, the lead author, describes idyll The project seems like an important step in the direction of an interactive learning environment that seamlessly combines text, [...] Read more
Uncertainty Wednesday: Sample Mean (Cont’d)
Albert Wenger – Oct 4, 2017
Last Uncertainty Wednesday, we started to look at the behavior of the mean of a sample by repeatedly drawing samples. We used a sample of 10 rolls of a fair die. We know that the expected value of the probability [...] Read more
Las Vegas Mass Shooting and Life’s Fundamental Asymmetry
Albert Wenger – Oct 2, 2017
I was going to write a post today about how liquidity in financial markets goes down as concentration of holdings goes up but then I woke up to the news of the mass shooting in Las Vegas last night. I [...] Read more
The Estate Tax and Universal Basic Income: Who Deserves What?
Albert Wenger – Sep 29, 2017
I just spent a couple of days in Vienna, Austria at a conference. The upcoming Austrian elections were the talk of the town. One of the major parties is campaigning in part on the promise of introducing an estate tax [...] Read more
Uncertainty Wednesday: Sample Mean
Albert Wenger – Sep 28, 2017
Last Uncertainty Wednesday I introduced a definition of climate as the probability distribution over weather states. That post ended with a question about how historically observed statistics relate to this distribution. I am in Vienna Austria for a conference and [...] Read more
Machine Learning Build vs Buy: The In-House Temptation
Albert Wenger – Sep 25, 2017
By now most CEOs of startups understand that they urgently need to figure out what role machine learning will play in their business. Large established companies too are actively engaged in this process. This is not an easy task in [...] Read more