large margins
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Kawasaki believes there are some lessons one should learn before becoming a venture capitalist or entrepreneur. One thing to avoid is the "Morgan Stanley disease." Investment banking isn't the best way to learn those important lessons -- instead join the sales team of a large company and learn from the bottom up.
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Insurance provides significant risk management to a broad public, and is an essential tool for promoting human welfare. By pooling large numbers of independent or low-correlated risks, insurance providers can minimize overall risk. The risk management is tailored to individual circumstances and reflects centuries of insurance industry experience with real risks and with moral hazard and selection bias issues. Probability theory and statist...more
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One way of understanding Napoleon's life is through attention to his Corsican origins. Although Napoleon himself would later disavow his earlier identification with the island in favor of French identity, many of his actions and attitudes agree with stereotypical notions of Corsican culture. Did Napoleon inaugurate the era of total war? This question, posed in a recent book, is up for debate. On one hand, the violence of the Revolution and...more
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Statistics 110 (Probability), which has been taught at Harvard University by Joe Blitzstein (Professor of the Practice, Harvard Statistics Department) each year since 2006. Lecture videos, review materials, and over 250 practice problems with detailed solutions are provided. This course is an introduction to probability as a language and set of tools for understanding statistics, science, risk, and randomness. The ideas and methods are use...more
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The course covers the system and design issues relevant to high-speed electrical (and optical, if time permits) signaling. We start with the basics of channel properties, modeling, measurements, and communications techniques. Circuit design of main components is covered in detail. The system design issues such as planning and budgeting are presented. A large portion of the class is devoted to case studies that include the multi...more
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Early Modern England: Politics, Religion, and Society under the Tudors and Stuarts (HIST 251)In this lecture Professor Wrightson considers the events leading to the execution of Charles I in 1649, and the republican regimes of 1649-60 (the Commonwealth and the Protectorate), with particular attention to the role of Oliver Cromwell. He begins with the unsuccessful attempts to negotiate a settlement with Charles I after the civil war, the in...more
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Early Modern England: Politics, Religion, and Society under the Tudors and Stuarts (HIST 251)Professor Wrightson surveys the changing economic landscape of early modern England in the early sixteenth century. He notes that, throughout the period, population levels rose and, at the same time, inflation caused a rise in prices, and real wages fell. While many landowners were able to raise rents on their lands and profit from enclosing land, ...more
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Early Modern England: Politics, Religion, and Society under the Tudors and Stuarts (HIST 251)In this lecture, Professor Wrightson discusses witchcraft and magic. He begins with the context of magic beliefs in this period, introducing the 'cunning folk' who had reputations as healers and were often consulted. He then considers the specific problem of witchcraft, the use of magic to do harm, and its identification by the late medieval church...more
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Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner (AMST 246)Professor Wai Chee Dimock demonstrates how four of Fitzgerald's most famous short stories -- "The Rich Boy," "Babylon Revisited," "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," and "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" -- represent "social types," generic identities that Fitzgerald explores as forms of social reality. She reads the dramatic tension in each of those stories as determined by the protagaonist's conformity to or...more
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This lecture continues the analysis of the Capital Asset Pricing Model, building up to two key results. One, the Mutual Fund Theorem proved by Tobin, describes the optimal portfolios for agents in the economy. It turns out that every investor should try to maximize the Sharpe ratio of his portfolio, and this is achieved by a combination of money in the bank and money invested in the "market" basket of all existing assets. The market basket...more
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The sanitary movement was an approach to public health first developed in England in the 1830s and '40s. With increasing industrialization and urbanization, the removal of filth from towns and cities became a major focus in the struggle against infectious diseases. As pioneered by Edwin Chadwick, the sanitary movement also embraced an explicit political objective, according to which urban cleansing took on a figurative as well as a literal...more
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In this lecture, Professor Freeman discusses the Articles of Confederation. Although they seem hopelessly weak in the long view of history, the Articles made perfect sense as a first stab at a national government by a people who deeply distrusted centralized power - a direct product of their recent experience of the British monarchy. Among the many issues that complicated the drafting of the Articles, three central issues included: how war...more
