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Uncertainty Wednesday: Entropy (Cont’d)
Albert Wenger – Jun 7, 2017
Last week in Uncertainty Wednesday, I introduced Shannon entropy as a measure of uncertainty that is based solely on the structure of the probability distribution. As a quick reminder, the formula is H = - K ∑ pi log pi [...] Read more
The Biggest Danger of the Trump Presidency: Abandoning Science and Rationality
Albert Wenger – Jun 6, 2017
I recently read “Seveneves” by Neal Stephenson and just last night finished “The Dark Forest” which is the second book in the “Three Body Problem” trilogy by Cixin Liu. What these books have in common is that they look at [...] Read more
Uncertainty Wednesday: Entropy
Albert Wenger – May 31, 2017
Today in Uncertainty Wednesday I want to start on the idea that just the shape of the probability distribution alone contains some measure of uncertainty. Let’s think about the simplest case again with just two states A and B and [...] Read more
Basic Income: The Potential of Cryptocurrency
Albert Wenger – May 30, 2017
In my book World After Capital, I have a chapter on Universal Basic Income, which I see as essential to getting from the Industrial Age into the Knowledge Age. Basic income gives people economic freedom, which is essential if we [...] Read more
Some Lessons I Learned from the Dotcom Bubble for the Coming Crypto Bubble
Albert Wenger – May 26, 2017
I spent a bunch of time at Consensus and Token Summit this week. If it wasn’t clear before, we are headed into a crypto currency bubble. Now a bubble isn’t in and of itself a bad thing. In fact almost [...] Read more
Uncertainty Wednesday: Probability Distribution
Albert Wenger – May 24, 2017
So far in Uncertainty Wednesday we have limited ourselves to looking at examples with only two states of the world and two possible signal values. When I introduced this I explained that these combine to form four elementary events and [...] Read more
Blockstack Browser and Token
Albert Wenger – May 23, 2017
Today Muneeb and Ryan from Blockstack delivered the morning keynote at the Consensus 2017 conference here in New York. They made two important announcements: first the availability of the developer edition of the Blockstack Browser and second the news that there will be a Blockstack Token. To understand the importance of both of these announcements, it useful to look at some of the history of the Internet. Read more
Who Controls our Attention? Separating Aggregation/Discovery from Publishing
Albert Wenger – May 22, 2017
This weekend brought us both a big New York Times piece titled “The Internet is Broken: @ev Is Trying to Salvage It” and a Guardian article about Facebook’s guidelines for content moderators. Both speak to the question of who controls [...] Read more
Vocational Schools and Getting to the Knowledge Age: Finding a Calling
Albert Wenger – May 19, 2017
I recently listened to a talk by David Autor about employment and technology. He praised the high school movement as being incredibly forward looking for addressing the rapid decline in farm employment. When asked about what the equivalent would be [...] Read more