Are multi-taskers the high tech version of Emperor New Clothes? PBS show digital_nation: life on the virtual frontier

PBS Frontline has a show “Digital Nation: Life in the Virtual Frontier”, showing Feb 2, 2010

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Going through the synopsis I found this interesting discussing bright students and multitasking.

"I teach the most brilliant students in the world," says MIT professor and clinical psychologist Sherry Turkle, who describes the challenges of teaching students who are surfing the Internet and texting during class. "But they have done themselves a disservice by drinking the Kool-Aid and believing that a multitasking learning environment will serve their best purposes. There are just some things that are not amenable to being thought about in conjunction with 15 other things."

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A multitasker herself, Dretzin travels to California to the Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media (CHIMe) Lab, where Stanford professor Clifford Nass has been studying the effectiveness of self-proclaimed multitaskers. After taking one of Nass' tests, Dretzin is shocked by her poor results. "It turns out multitaskers are terrible at every aspect of multitasking. They get distracted constantly. Their memory is very disorganized. Recent work we've done suggests they're worse at analytic reasoning," Nass tells Dretzin. "We worry that it may be creating people who are unable to think well and clearly."

Which brought up an interesting observation of multi-taskers.  We all know people who are proud how of how many things they can do at the same time.

But, are they living in an illusion, like The Emperor’s New Clothes

An Emperor who cares for nothing but his wardrobe hires two weavers who promise him the finest suit of clothes from a fabric invisible to anyone who is unfit for his position or "just hopelessly stupid". The Emperor cannot see the cloth himself, but pretends that he can for fear of appearing unfit for his position or stupid; his ministers do the same. When the swindlers report that the suit is finished, they dress him in mime and the Emperor then marches in procession before his subjects. A child in the crowd calls out that the Emperor is wearing nothing at all and the cry is taken up by others. The Emperor cringes, suspecting the assertion is true, but holds himself up proudly and continues the procession.

Douglas Rushkoff makes the point of fooling ourselves.

So what does it mean if we multitaskers are actually fooling ourselves into believing we're competent when we're not? "If multitasking is hurting their ability to do these fundamental tasks," Nass explained matter-of-factly, "life becomes difficult. Some of studies show they are worse at analytic reasoning. We are mostly shocked. They think they are great at it." We're not just stupid and vulnerable online—we simultaneously think we're invincible. And that attitude, new brain research shows, has massive carryover into real life.

If you believe this, then the next step is to think what is a better way than being an obsessive multitasker.  One place to look is Matthieu Ricard a famous Tibetan monk.

Matthieu writes on dealing with stress and anxiety, and interesting enough he quotes the same Stanford research.

Tip #2: One thing at a time
If you have many things to do, do them one at a time. You will work faster and better this way. Recent studies conducted at Stanford University revealed that multitasking actually reduce people’s ability to concentrate and even slows down the capacity to switch between several tasks. Multitaskers perform worse and non-multitaskers in all attention tasks that have been studied. In other words, multitasking takes us more time to achieve worse results.

The other two tips are:

Tip #1: Do away with your worries
If there’s a solution, then there’s no need to worry. If no solution exists, there is no point to worry.
…
Tip #3: A bit of meditation
If you are gripped by anxiety, pause for a moment and simply try to be aware of this anxiety. As you «examine» your anxiety with the eye of mindfulness, it will loose its potency. Why? Because the part of you mind that is aware of the anxiety is not itself anxious. It is simply aware. As mindfulness expands, the anxiety that upset you will gradually fade and make way for renewed inner peace.

Are you going to spend more time muiltasking or meditating?

Confession: I”ve been mediating since I was fourteen.  So, I am biased on this subject. :-)

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Mike Manos is Nokia’s New VP of Service Operations, competes against GOOG, AAPL, RIMM, and MSFT

I wrote a post asking “is Mike Manos Crazy?”, knowing full well he has a plan.

Is Mike Manos Crazy? Makes a job change in less than 9 months leaving Digital Realty Trust for where?

Mike Manos just announced he was leaving Digital Realty Trust.

A Digital Adieu

January 29, 2010 by mmanos

Those who follow the news from Digital Realty Trust closely may have recently read that I have decided to leave the company to focus a bit more on some personal work/life balance issues.  With this move comes a new role that I will talk more of in the coming days and weeks.

Mike Manos just announced his new job at Nokia as VP of Operation Services worldwide.

Rolling Clouds - My Move into the Mobile Cloud
As many of you saw in my last note, I have officially left Digital Realty Trust to address some personal things.   While I get those things in order I am not sitting idling by.   I am extremely happy to announce that I have taken a role at Nokia as their VP of Service Operations.  In this role I will have global responsibility for the strategy, operation and run of infrastructure aspects for Nokia’s new cloud and mobile service platforms.

I have a friend who is an ex-Nokia employee working in Finland and London. He talks highly of the company culture which got me thinking about Nokia’s latest move to ship free navigation SW.  Going back there is a point made by Nokia’s CEO

Nokia Chief Executive Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo aims to build the world’s biggest mobile Internet services platform to protect market share and create new revenue streams. The company is trying different payment models including bundling with consumer handsets and pay-per-download. Google also has a diversified services business model, with most of its revenue coming from advertising.

So, why would Mike Manos make the move to Nokia?  Because he gets to be the man who builds the future of Nokia's mobile cloud services.  Would Google, Apple, RIM, or Microsoft offered him that job?  And, were they organized to include the data center, applications, and operations for mobile under one VP?  Most likely not.  My bet is on Mike transforming what we think of mobile data centers. We'll see if these companies regret not being able to throw their names out there to recruit Mike to change mobile data center services. 

I am very excited by the fact that there are some fierce competitors in this space as well. Once again I will be donning my armor and doing battle with my friends at Google. Their Droid platform is definitely interesting and it will be interesting to see how that develops. I have a great amount of respect for Urs Hoelze and their cloud platform is something I am fairly familiar with . I will also be doing battle with the folks from Apple (and interestingly my good friend Olivier Sanche). Apple definitely has the high end market here in the US, but its experience in Cloud platforms and operations is not very sophisticated just yet. On some levels I guess I am even competing against the infrastructure and facilities I built out at Microsoft at least as it relates to the mobile world. Those are some meaty competitors and as you have seen before, I love a good fight.

So, Mike isn’t so crazy after all.  But sees something most of us don’t as most of us have discounted Nokia as mobile competitor as Google, Apple and RIM slug it out in the US. 

Personally, some of my best stock market investments have been in the emerging market category.  So, I get Mike’s statement of growth and penetration.

In my opinion, Nokia has some very interesting characteristics that position it extremely well if not atop the fray in this space. First there is no arguing about Nokia penetration of hand-held devices across the world. Especially in markets like India, China, South America, and other emerging Internet using populations. Additionally these emerging economies are skipping past ground-based wired technologies to wireless connectivity. As a result of that Nokia has an incredible presence already in those markets.

Taking the leap thinking about mobile data centers reminds me of a fun discussion with ARM and what could be done with small low power data centers colocated with cell towers to change the delivery of mobile data.

Isn’t the highest growing market mobile devices and the services for those devices?

Ahh, so Mike switched from building colocation data centers for others who are living in the present to a future scenario where data centers look different to support a worldwide market for mobile device data services.  Who wouldn’t make the switch?

Now I can see the reasoning behind the change and maybe it isn’t so crazy after all.  But a leap to be innovative in a company who knows they have to innovate to be successful.

GigaOM made this point comparing Google’s map services vs. Nokia.

In comparison, Google Maps Navigation has to download maps constantly over a network connection.  It doesn’t matter if your don’t have a 3G connection or have lost data connectivity, the basic functionality of Ovi Maps will work, Nokia claims. This low data consumption model is something carriers are going to love, Ojanperä said. Why? Because it will save them money on network costs, as explained by this image.

Another reason why carriers are going to love Ovi Maps: It will help them sell data upgrades to voice-centric customers, even in emerging markets such as India and China where standalone GPS devices have yet to become commonplace, unlike in the U.S. and Europe. To me, this is Nokia’s big opportunity.

Watching Nokia, Apple, Google, RIM, and Microsoft compete in the mobile data center space should be an interesting competition that is the future for each of these companies.  Losing the mobile battle is expensive.

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Is Mike Manos Crazy? Makes a job change in less than 9 months leaving Digital Realty Trust for where?

Feb 1, 2010 – new blog post on Mike’s Move to Nokia.

Mike Manos just announced he was leaving Digital Realty Trust.

A Digital Adieu

January 29, 2010 by mmanos

Those who follow the news from Digital Realty Trust closely may have recently read that I have decided to leave the company to focus a bit more on some personal work/life balance issues.  With this move comes a new role that I will talk more of in the coming days and weeks.

The official press release is here.

Digital Realty Trust Announces Organizational Changes

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan 29, 2010 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Digital Realty Trust, Inc. (NYSE: DLR), the world's largest wholesale datacenter provider, announced today that Mike Manos has resigned from the company as Senior Vice President of Technical Services, effective January 29, 2010. Mr. Manos joined the Company in 2009.

"Mike has made a tremendous contribution to Digital Realty Trust and we greatly appreciate his efforts," commented Michael F. Foust, CEO of Digital Realty Trust. "We understand that this was a difficult, personal decision for him and we wish him the very best in his future endeavors."

DataCenterKnowledge covers the news as well.

Manos has been one of the data center industry’s most visible executives, and been a regular speaker at major industry conferences and events.  

The first thought that came to mind “is Mike Manos crazy?”  He just left Microsoft in Apr 2009 to Digital Realty and in Jan 2010 announces he is leaving Digital Realty Trust.

Here is Mike’s post saying goodbye to Microsoft.

Farmers, so long

April 13, 2009 by mmanos

Bean1Level8x10

This post represents a bittersweet moment in my career. As you have no doubt heard I am moving on from Microsoft to take on an exciting senior role at Digital Realty Trust. I will save the specifics on my new role and its mission for a future post on my personal Loosebolts blog. But for now, I want to reflect a bit on my work here at Microsoft, our team, and a little bit on what it means to be a farmer.

The demand for data center expertise is high, but what got Mike to leave so soon.

This reminds me of the movie “The Gods must be Crazy” trying to figure out what motivates Mike.

If you have never seen The Gods Must be Crazy here is the first 15 minutes of the movie

After having a laugh, I thought “well Mike must have some logic to his actions and I can’t see it.”  The movie uses this technique well to show how an outsiders view of what you do can be funny.

I am sure we’ll hear soon what MIke’s plans are.

And, maybe in the same way that the Coke bottle from “The Gods Must be Crazy” didn’t quite fit in the culture of the tribe.

Xi and his band of San/Bushmen relatives are living well off the land in the Kalahari Desert. They are happy because the gods have provided plenty of everything, and no one in the tribe has unfulfilled wants. One day, a glass Coke bottle is thrown out of an aeroplane and falls to earth unbroken. Initially, this strange artifact seems to be another boon from the gods—-Xi's people find many uses for it. But unlike anything that they have had before, there is only one bottle to go around. This exposes the tribe to a hitherto unknown phenomenon, property, and they soon find themselves experiencing things they never had before: jealousy, envy, anger, hatred, even violence.

Since it has caused the band unhappiness on two occasions, Xi decides that the bottle is an evil thing and must be thrown off of the edge of the world. He sets out alone on his quest and encounters Western civilization for the first time. The film presents an interesting interpretation of civilization as viewed through Xi's perceptions.

Maybe Mike was just too good of a thing that there was only one of.  It is quite interesting how organizations behave when there is a resource that drives disruptive changes like Mike.  Look at how much he has done on Digital Realty Trust’s home page.

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Personally, I’ve gone through quite a few circumstances where being innovative is something that doesn’t fit.

Was Mike too innovative at Digital Realty Trust?

Or maybe someone said “Mike let’s let you be really innovative over here?”

My bet is MIke has something very cool he is up to.  It may seem crazy now, but after we learn more, it will most likely make sense.

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Bill Gates 2010 Annual Letter’s Environment Position is Similar to Google.org’s RE<C

Bill Gates posted his 2010 annual letter which discusses his primary focus on health and education today.  On the last/conclusion page Bill discusses his own personal interest in the environment.

Visiting an Eko financial services shop in the suburb of Uttam Nagar with my dad (Delhi, India, 2008).

Visiting an Eko financial services shop in the suburb of
Uttam Nagar with my dad (Delhi, India, 2008).

There are a lot of important topics I didn’t get around to in this letter. One area that I have been spending a lot of personal time on is energy and its effect on climate. The most important innovation required to avoid climate change will be a way of producing electricity that is cheaper than coal and that emits no greenhouse gases. There will be a huge market for this, and governments should supply large amounts of funding for basic R&D. Because the foundation invests in areas where there is not a big market, I have not yet seen a way that we can play a unique role here, but I am investing in several ideas outside the foundation. I am surprised that the climate debate hasn’t focused more on encouraging R&D since it is critical to getting to zero emissions. Still, I think it is likely that out of the many possible approaches, at least one scalable innovation will emerge in the next 20 years and be installed widely in the 20 years after that.

Note the “electricity that is cheaper than coal and that emits no greenhouse gases.”

Doesn’t this sound like Google’s RE<C project?

RE<C will work to develop electricity from renewable energy sources that is cheaper than electricity produced from coal with a goal of producing one gigawatt of renewable energy capacity – enough to power a city the size of San Francisco – in years, not decades. As part of this effort, Google.org is making strategic investments and grants, advancing key public policies, and using Google products to unlock critical information.
Renewable energy is clean, abundant, and inexhaustible. However, electricity from renewables today is generally more expensive than electricity from coal. RE<C is focused on making renewable energy cheaper than coal-fired power which today is the predominant source of electricity worldwide and a large contributor to global warming pollution.  

Google founders are behind the idea.

The decision to pursue this initiative reflects the strong commitment of Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin to help realize the promise of renewable energy.

Can you imagine the marketing people trying to get a Renewable Energy event where Bill Gates, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin are all in the same room?

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Bill Gates goes Green Finally, podcast and investment in Khosla Ventures

For past 3 years I’ve talked with a variety of people at Microsoft and the Gates Foundation about Bill’s interest in the environment and Green.  The resounding past answers has been “the environment is not on Bill’s priority list.

I was skeptical when Bill launched his podcasts on Energy and Climate Change.  Listening to them I didn’t hear anything really mind blowing.

What’s been on my mind lately

Podcast Series: Energy and Climate Change

Posted 01/20/2010
Finding carbon-free energy sources that will provide affordable power for people around the globe is a complex and difficult issue. Bill shares his thoughts on the challenges of developing alternatives to fossil fuels.

In this series of podcasts, Bill talks about why we need to develop new sources of energy that provide power without generating CO2. Among the topics he covers are the challenges with potential solutions such as carbon capture and sequestration, nuclear, wind, and solar; and why he believes the U.S. government should increase its funding for basic research in energy.
To download the podcast as a .wma file for Windows Media Player, click below.
1. Alternative energy Part 1
2. Alternative energy Part 2
3. Government’s role
4. Learning about energy

Click below to download this podcast series as an mp3.
1. Alternative energy Part 1
2. Alternative energy Part 2
3. Government’s role
4. Learning about energy

But, today cnet news reports an Bill’s investment in Vinod Khosla green-tech firm.  Now that Bill has put his money in and he is hanging out with Vinod, I tihnk we can expect some big changes coming from Bill and the Gates Foundation.

Bill Gates investing in Vinod Khosla green-tech fund

by Martin LaMonica

Bill Gates, whose philanthropy is aimed at improving the lives of people in poor countries, is also taking a interest in clean energy, both intellectually and financially.

In an interview published Sunday, Gates said he has invested in Vinod Khosla's green-technology fund, which is aimed at incubating breakthrough technologies.

"He is backing some great entrepreneurs. I get some exposure to them as part of that. Innovation is called for in a big way," Gates said.


If you are not familiar with Khosla Ventures here is their site. I found Xsigo and Seamicro through his site.

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Khosla Ventures has an interesting philosophy on what they can care about.

the things we care about

Making a difference is a core value of khosla ventures and we have pledged some of any investment proceeds to achieving this difference. In particular, Vinod will donate 100% of his general partner profit from khosla ventures to these and other similar causes. Some of our "social impact" interests also make for great businesses, such as alternative energy, or can at least be viable businesses ("no loss" self sustaining businesses that don't need continued outside support, they are impact maximizers instead of being profit maximizers) even if profit is not the primary goal, such as microfinance and affordable housing.

Some of the organizations we support are below. Some of these are traditional non-profit efforts. Others are "for profit" organizations. When we "invest" in ventures with these partners, we will put the equity in a non-profit trust to achieve social impact

  • Microfinance - SKS, SHARE, ASA, CFTS, Jamii Bora Grameen USA, Unitus - with a goal to provide credit to over 25 million "below poverty line" borrowers. See also An Anti-Poverty Success Story; Video
  • Environment - GE Ecomagination Advisory Council, Chairman of India Advisory Board of the Cleantech Network
  • Education - Indian School of Business - a world class school of business, DonorsChoose.org - teachers ask for private funding on thousands of projects
  • Health - Public Health Institutes of India, UNICEF
  • ...others including eBay Giving Works - a marketplace for compassionate commerce supporting 9,000 charities

Also, just found this list of Green Papers from Kholsa Ventures.  More for my reading list.  :-)

green
White Papers

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