Come to Video Hackday (New York, May 7)
Susan, Oliver and the team at Ziggeo are organizing the second annual Video Hackday. You will learn the latest about video APIs from companies including Twilio, JW Player and of course Ziggeo. The first video hackday was a blast. I [...] Read more
Climate Change and Flooding on the East Coast
Living in Manhattan and having experienced the storm tide during Hurricane Sandy, I have been reading up on the what climate change is doing to the sea level. Sea levels in the 20th century rose faster than in the 27 [...] Read more
My Book: World After Capital (Rough Draft)
After frequently mentioning in person and here on Continuations that I am working on a book, I am excited to announce that a first rough draft version is now ready! You can head over to World After Capital to read [...] Read more
Against Technological Determinism: Blockchains and Encryption
When the web first emerged I remember vividly the excitement that I and many others felt about the potential for decentralized and permissionless publishing. Want to put some content out there? Register a domain, run a web server and publish. [...] Read more
Startups and Persistence: Soundcloud Launches Premium
At startups events I am often asked about important qualities in the character of founders. Persistence strikes me as crucial. Startups have many setbacks along the way and possibly even near death experiences. Only someone with persistence will be able [...] Read more
Blockchain Technology and Progress in Science
Having recently started to read “Willpower” by Roy Baumeister, I am fascinated with the controversy over the reproducibility of his experiments on ego depletion. This is just the latest example in a longstanding historic problem with reproducibility that impacts the [...] Read more
Insurance Fundamentals (Cont’d): Adverse Selection
In an earlier post in my mini series on insurance fundamentals I explained the concept of moral hazard, which refers to an information asymmetry as having insurance changes unobserved behavior which increases the risk or severity of loss. There is [...] Read more
Insurance Fundamentals (Cont’d): Reinsurance Exercise Explained
So in one of my earlier posts on insurance fundamentals, I included an “exercise for the reader.” The question was to figure out how much money it would cost for the hypothetical insurance scheme in the example to buy re-insurance [...] Read more
Insurance Fundamentals (Cont’d): Moral Hazard
In the previous post in my mini-series on insurance fundamentals I provided a numerical example that has a 1 in 100 probability of a loss of $50. I explained how the fair rate to insure this would be 50 cents, [...] Read more