How many Data Center Experts are confident, but wrong?

I missed Daniel Kahneman speaking in Seattle by a day, so I am going back and looking at videos and articles.  The Seattletimes has an article on his talk.

Exploring how we truly think

I had a feeling Daniel Kahneman was going to be interesting. My gut was right, but it isn't always, and that was the point of his talk. A lot of our thinking is messed up, but we don't know it unless we slow down and examine what our brains are doing. That's not easy to do. Kahneman is a Princeton psychologist (emeritus), who won the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics for pioneering work showing that people don't always make rational financial decisions.

Jerry Large

Seattle Times staff columnist

I had a feeling Daniel Kahneman was going to be interesting.

My gut was right, but it isn't always, and that was the point of his talk. A lot of our thinking is messed up, but we don't know it unless we slow down and examine what our brains are doing.

That's not easy to do.

Kahneman is a Princeton psychologist (emeritus), who won the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics for pioneering work showing that people don't always make rational financial decisions.

Economists thought we did, that we weighed the facts and acted in our own best interests, but people are more complicated than that.

How familiar does this sound to a potential problem that gets swept under the rug?

When he was a young psychologist, Kahneman was put in charge of evaluating officer candidates in the Israeli Defense Force. He and his team put candidates through an exercise and saw immediately who was a leader, who was lazy, who was a team player and so on.

Much later, they got data from the soldiers' actual performance, and it turned out his team's predictions were all wrong. The experts were absolutely confident, but wrong.

Even experts take a bit of information and believe it can predict more about a person than is possible.

System 1, he said, "is a machine for jumping to conclusions." System 2 is supposed to monitor System 1 and make corrections, but System 2 is lazy.

We think we are actively evaluating then acting, but most of the time we act on unexamined input from System 1.

What is an example, think about the assumptions made on hardware purchases and how often do people go back and evaluate the true performance of the hardware after deployment?

 

 

ISO 50001 and Data Centers

ZDNET Asia has a post on Singapore, Data Centers, and Green IT.

Pro-biz, green incentives give S'pore datacenter edge

By  , ZDNet Asia on November 3, 2011 (8 hours ago)
...

The Infocomm Authority Development of Singapore (IDA) also regard green datacenter standards as one of its priorities for attracting potential datacenter customers into the island. An agency spokesperson said the IDA had partnered other local government agencies to come up with theSingapore Standard SS564:2010 Green Data Centres (energy and environmental management systems), which was published in January this year.

The Singapore Green Data Centre Standard is here with part of the standard built on ISO 50001.

The Green DC Standard helps organisations establish systems and processes necessary to improve the energy efficiency of their DCs. It provides them with a recognised framework as well as a logical and consistent methodology to achieve continuous improvement in their DC facilities. This standard is modelled after the ISO 50001 standard on energy management (currently under development by ISO) but is specifically tailored to meet the needs of DCs in Singapore. The standard adopts the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) methodology, an iterative, four step problem-solving process used for continuous process improvement. The PDCA cycle forms the basis for many established management standards, which have successfully stimulated substantial, continual efficiency improvements within organisations around the world.

Here is a press announcement on a Taiwan data center being ISO 50001 certified.

TSMC Leads in ISO 50001 Certification for Data Center


Hsinchu, Taiwan, R.O.C. – November 3, 2011 –TSMC today announced that its Fab 12 Phase 4 data center in the Hsinchu Science Park has completed the ISO 50001 Energy Management System certification, becoming Taiwan’s first company to earn this certification for a high density computing data center.

The ISO 50001 Energy Management System was established by the International Standards Organization (ISO) Energy Management Committee (ISO/PC242), and was announced in the second quarter of this year. The Fab 12 Phase 4 data center which completed certification provides data and control systems for factory automation, and supports both manufacturing and R&D. Adoption of the ISO 50001 Energy Management System is expected to reduce the data center’s power consumption by 8%, conserving 2.21 million kilowatt-hours of electricity and eliminating 1,350 tons of carbon emissions per year. In addition to upgrading existing data centers, TSMC also plans to apply ISO 50001 standards to future data centers and implement the most up-to-date energy-saving designs. TSMC estimates that the company can conserve 59.62 million kilowatt-hours of electricity and eliminate 36,490 tons of carbon emissions per year.

ISO 50001 standard has a video.

ISO 50001 — What is it ?ISO 50001:2011, Energy management systems – Requirements with guidance for use, is a voluntary International Standard developed by ISO (International Organization for Standardization).ISO 50001 gives organizations the requirements for energy management systems (EnMS).ISO 50001 provides benefits for organizations large and small, in both public and private sectors, in manufacturing and services, in all regions of the world.ISO 50001 will establish a framework for industrial plants ; commercial, institutional, and governmental facilities ; and entire organizations to manage energy. Targeting broad applicability across national economic sectors, it is estimated that the standard could influence up to 60 % of the world’s energy use.*

Telling Data Center Stories, think about the memories vs. the experience

I was talking to a data center executive yesterday about a project and he asked me do I think the project is really interesting.  We then discussed the issue of telling a good story to get people interested.

Check out this video to get some ideas on how memories and experiences are not the same.

The following text starts at 3:51.

Now, the remembering self is a storyteller. And that really starts with a basic response of our memories -- it starts immediately. We don't only tell stories when we set out to tell stories. Our memory tells us stories, that is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story.And let me begin with one example. This is an old study. Those are actual patients undergoing a painful procedure. I won't go into detail. It's no longer painful these days, but it was painful when this study was run in the 1990s. They were asked to report on their pain every 60 seconds. And here are two patients. Those are their recordings. And you are asked, "Who of them suffered more?" And it's a very easy question. Clearly, Patient B suffered more. His colonoscopy was longer,and every minute of pain that Patient A had Patient B had and more.

But now there is another question: "How much did these patients think they suffered?" And here is a surprise: And the surprise is that Patient A had a much worse memory of the colonoscopy than Patient B. The stories of the colonoscopies were different and because a very critical part of the story is how it ends --and neither of these stories is very inspiring or great --but one of them is this distinct ... (Laughter) but one of them is distinctly worse than the other. And the one that is worse was the one where pain was at its peak at the very end. It's a bad story. How do we know that?Because we asked these people after their colonoscopy, and much later, too, "How bad was the whole thing, in total?" and it was much worse for A than for B in memory.

Data shows 4x revenue for location ads with real time bidding

GigaOm has a post that supports one of the points I have been making on the where changes will be occurring.  Real-time ad bidding combined with contextual information.

Mobile advertisers paying 4x more for location-based impressions

By  Nov. 2, 2011, 9:23am PT No Comments

Location, location, location: it’s not just for real estate. Mobile advertisers are increasingly prizing location-based ads,according to real-time bidding exchange Nexage, which said that mobile publishers and developers are getting 3.8 times more for eCPMs, or ad impressions, that include location data in the last three months.

Demand for location-based ads are also going up, jumping by 170 percent over the same period. More and more, advertisers are pursuing mobile ads that include location data because they can find users where they are, target specific areas and can drive consumers to take actions locally.

As Google expands around the world, they are in a position to support real-time ad bidding and location.  Location may have privacy issues, but it is valuable information and provides a huge context.  Are you at home, at work, at a mall, or on the road? You should get different ads.

“We don’t see any end in sight for demand. As people see the value especially for offer-based advertising and publishers manage their privacy issues, we think it will continue to grow. If publishers do the things we talk about today, it’s not really theory anymore. It’s fact; you will see an uplift in revenue,” Cormier said.

Jonathan Ive provides his perspective on working with Steve jobs

Check out this video to get an idea of Steve Jobs from one of his most trusted advisors, Jonathan Ive.

Top Comments

  • Jony should be apples new spokesman, not Tim Cook at upcoming Keynotes. Jony talks with such passion and conviction. He is the natural successor to Steve on stage.

    stibbers 1 week ago 88 

  • Who'd have thought Jony was such a brilliant public speaker. Fantastic tribute from a great man to another.

    Anthrazit87 1 week ago 43