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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
Getting Past the Dominance of the Nation State
Albert Wenger – Jun 17, 2017
One of the important topics that I have not yet addressed in World After Capital is the role of the Nation State. So I am gathering up some of my thoughts in a post first. I believe it is critical [...] Read more
Uncertainty Wednesday: Entropy and Communication
Albert Wenger – Jun 14, 2017
The last two Uncertainty Wednesdays we have looked at entropy as a measure of uncertainty. Today I want to tie that back to the original communications context in which Shannon introduced it. We can use our really simple model of [...] Read more