I was recently having a conversation with a mutual friend of Rafe’s and mine.  Like the two of us, he’s quite smart, well educated, and socially aware.  I respect his thinking a lot. However, during the course of this conversation, it became clear to me that he holds what I think of as an...

I typed “social entrepreneurship tax credit” into Google and the top result was this page on BarackObama.com.  There are some good ideas there, and I hope they get implemented once he takes office.  But I’d like to see even more. ...

This is a response to Kevin’s post responding to my post. Rafe makes an analogy to cells within a multicellular organism. How does this support the assertion that there will only be one superorganism and that we will need to subjugate our needs to its own?  Obviously, there are many multicellular...

Google Labs has a new service called “In Quotes” which might be tweakable to do a truth market of sorts.  Here’s the suggestion I just emailed them on this topic: I would love to use Google “In Quotes” to crowdsource measures of truth. For instance, I just saw this: “In a...

One of the more inspiring talks at Pop!Tech this year was Paul Polak’s talk about serving the “other 90%” with life-saving and transformative products using a for-profit micro-franchise model that scales.  Paul’s vision and track-record speaks for itself, check it...

One of the talks at Pop!Tech this year sparked intense emotions regardless of whether people agreed with the premise or not: Juan Enriquez (2008) Pop!Tech Pop!Cast from PopTech on Vimeo. To address these intense feelings and the demand for public discussion, a wiki was created, in which you are invited to...

I am a fan of prediction markets.   They have typically done much better than polls at predicting the outcome of elections.  Why?  Here’s a thought experiment.  Consider who you think is going to win the election (not who you want to win).  Now consider that I was going to bet you $10,000 of your...

I apologize for the posting lull. I actually spotted an issue than I wanted to address a few weeks ago, but I’ve been pondering how to approach it.  It’s pretty complicated and subtle.  I even ran a couple of drafts by Rafe to refine my thinking.  So please bear with me. As I’ve...

A few months ago a friend of mine engaged me in a discussion about the controversy surrounding global warming.  If you are surprised to hear that there is still controversy, read on; I was equally surprised. ...

A new prediction market site with a twist: your profits in the market get donated to the charity of your choice. I was concerned that it may look noble but that they might be profiting from the bid/ask spread, so I wrote and asked them.  Here is their response: No fees, except the 5% on top of any funds put...