Zika may soon be coming to a home near you. The virus spreads through mosquito bites, blood, and sex. In the womb it laces rapidly through early brain cells of infants, destroying enough of them to create small heads, or microcephaly. In adults the virus can provoke Guillain-Barre disease, a horrible neurological condition where the white […]
Learning From The Next Ebola (10/20/14)
When the Past Is Prologue Humans don’t see threats until they’re kicking at the door. But that does not mean you can’t put a crisis to good use. Chance rules the world. As Nassim Taleb showed in “The Black Swan” and other books, low probability events can create high impacts. But the threat to the […]
Losing Everything (7/15/13)
Standing Out Maybe you knew him. He didn’t stand out in a crowd. A hardworking guy, in his mid-fifties, he long worked a steady job. Proudly he raised a family. Then the bust came. He got downsized. The losses came like dominos. First the job. Unemployment insurance went on for a while, but there was […]