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Individual Courage and Lasting Change in Tech
Albert Wenger – Jul 7, 2017
The women who have come forward in tech in the last few weeks, including Susan Fowler, Niniane Wang and Sarah Kunst have shown great courage. Their courage will be the catalyst for lasting change, provided all of us turn this [...] Read more
Uncertainty Wednesday: Variance
Albert Wenger – Jul 5, 2017
In last week’s Uncertainty Wednesday, I introduced the expected value EV of a random variable X. We saw that EV(X) is not a measure of uncertainty. The hypothetical investments I had described all had the same expected value of 0. [...] Read more
Happy 4th of July: Celebrating Truths
Albert Wenger – Jul 4, 2017
I am spending this 4th of July in Germany, having visited my parents and friends from growing-up near Nuremberg for the last few days. It is late here now and I am seeing all the Happy 4th wishes from the [...] Read more
ChangeX: Impact As A Service
Albert Wenger – Jun 30, 2017
Susan and I have been longtime supporters of the wonderful ChangeX platform: ChangeX helps spread social innovation across communities. This week ChangeX introduced a new model for donors, which they are calling Impact as a Service (IaaS). This is a [...] Read more
Uncertainty Wednesday: Expected Value
Albert Wenger – Jun 28, 2017
In today’s Uncertainty Wednesday we start to explore the properties of random variables. The first one we will look at is the so-called “expected value” or EV for short. The EV is simply the probability weighted average of a random [...] Read more
Scifi Book Recommendations: Seveneves and Three Body Problem Trilogy
Albert Wenger – Jun 26, 2017
I love reading science fiction for two reasons: first, because of what I learn about the possible future and second, because of what it says about the present. For instance, I read a lot of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling [...] Read more
Health Insurance and the R Word (Redistribution)
Albert Wenger – Jun 24, 2017
There are a lot of outright lies (at worst) / profound misunderstandings (at best) on all sides circulating around health insurance at the moment. Today’s post is about the most fundamental one: the relationship between health insurance and redistribution and [...] Read more
Uncertainty Wednesday: Random Variables
Albert Wenger – Jun 21, 2017
Just a quick reminder on where we currently are in Uncertainty Wednesdays: I had introduced the idea of measuring uncertainty, then we defined what a probability distribution is and learned about entropy, which is a measure of uncertainty that is [...] Read more
MongoDB Stitch: A Fresh Take on Backend As A Service
Albert Wenger – Jun 20, 2017
Nearly 10 years ago, I wrote a post titled “I Want a New Platform” which led to our investment in MongoDB. At the time the company was called 10gen and had developed a Platform as a Service: a Javascript application [...] Read more