Everyone lies, do you support the fork to honest or dishonest actions?

WSJ has a post by Dan Ariely who has a new book.

The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone---Especially Ourselves [Hardcover]

Dan Ariely (Author)

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I've pre-ordered the book. Why? I have read and watched Dan Ariely's works and he is on to some good issues that need to be addressed.  The human factor of lying is something few think about, but it is human nature to lie. 

Check out the WSJ article.

What we have found, in a nutshell: Everybody has the capacity to be dishonest, and almost everybody cheats—just by a little. Except for a few outliers at the top and bottom, the behavior of almost everyone is driven by two opposing motivations. On the one hand, we want to benefit from cheating and get as much money and glory as possible; on the other hand, we want to view ourselves as honest, honorable people. Sadly, it is this kind of small-scale mass cheating, not the high-profile cases, that is most corrosive to society.

Morales can help people take the path to honesty vs. dishonesty.

...my colleagues and I ran an experiment at the University of California, Los Angeles. We took a group of 450 participants, split them into two groups and set them loose on our usual matrix task. We asked half of them to recall the Ten Commandments and the other half to recall 10 books that they had read in high school. Among the group who recalled the 10 books, we saw the typical widespread but moderate cheating. But in the group that was asked to recall the Ten Commandments, we observed no cheating whatsoever. We reran the experiment, reminding students of their schools' honor codes instead of the Ten Commandments, and we got the same result. We even reran the experiment on a group of self-declared atheists, asking them to swear on a Bible, and got the same no-cheating results yet again.

Heading to GigaOm Structure, some of the Data Center Related topics

I went to GigaOm Structure for the first time last year as a blogger.  I am attending again this year as a GigaOm Pro Analyst.

Here are a few of the companies that look interesting from a data center perspective.

• Atlantis Computing goes beyond the VDI market and makes it possible to leverage commodity servers for storage-intensive virtualized applications in cloud environments. 
• Cluttr focuses on helping companies manage their data centers more efficiently and responsibly, with a smaller environmental footprint.
• ComputeNext is a transparent marketplace for consumers and providers of cloud services that empowers choice and enables the search, purchase, and utilization of compute resources.     
• Garantia Data is a fully automated cloud service for reliable memcached and infinitely-scalable redis, requiring zero management and guaranteeing absolutely no data loss.            
• Keen provides analytics infrastructure as a service for mobile applications.
• MLstate is the provider of Opa, a new open source cloud development language designed to accelerate time-to-market for high-performance, massively scalable, exceptionally secure services and applications on any connected device.        
• OneOps enables organizations to design cloud-based applications that align software requirements with business goals, automating the transition to agile operations.    
• Tempo is the data layer for the measured world, purpose-built to store and analyze massive streams of time-series data generated by sensors and connected devices.

I'll be there for both days. I know DatacenterKnowledge's Rich Miller attends and DatacenterDynamics's Yevgeniy usually attend.  It's a great event to learn something new.

More Pictures inside Google Data Center - Networking Room

We've all been in plenty of data centers, but many haven't and they will get excited seeing these pictures inside google.

You can see these pictures at this url http://www.google.com/green/storyofsend/desktop/#/clear-instructions/overlay/inside-networking

Google's servers are here. http://www.google.com/green/storyofsend/desktop/#/hard-working-machines/overlay/our-servers

Climate-change skeptic makes PR mistakes, loses funding

The #1 rule of any environmental group, even if it is anti-climate change is you will need to keep the money coming in.

The Economist reports on The Heartland Institute making some bad moves.

THE Heartland Institute, the world’s most prominent think-tank promoting scepticism about man-made climate change, is getting a lot of heat. In recent weeks it has lost an estimated $825,000 in expected donations, a couple of directors and almost its entire branch in Washington, DC. At its annual shindig in Chicago this week, the institute’s president, Joseph Bast, said Heartland had “discovered who our real friends are.” The 100-odd guests who failed to show up for the “7th Climate Conference” were not among them.

The Heartland made a bad move.

Worse ensued early this month after the institute put up a digital billboard in Chicago that linked belief in global warming to madness and terrorism. It depicted the “Unabomber”, a mass-murderer called Ted Kaczynski, with the slogan, “I still believe in Global Warming. Do you?” The offending sign lasted only for a day. But PepsiCo, BB&T bank and Eli Lilly, a pharma company, are among donors that announced the end of their support.

Keep in mind whenever you see an environmental group take action, they are doing the things that keeps the money coming in.  If they don't, they'll be in a defensive position like The Heartland.

Demonstration of what could be done with information sharing, a path to lower costs and less waste

Data Centers almost never share information on its operations.  This is what hospitals used to be like.  But, more and more hospitals are sharing information so they gain insight into best practices.

Seattletimes has an AP article that discusses a discovery on better procedures for knee surgery.

The hospital is part of a national collaborative that's analyzing a range of high-volume, high-cost medical procedures and conditions to see which approaches result in the best outcomes and the lowest costs. Its findings on knee replacements were published last week, but several of the health systems already have made changes based on the results.

For example, Dartmouth-Hitchcock is considering having a dedicated team of anesthesiologists, nurses and technicians assigned to knee replacements after seeing that another hospital with such a team had the shortest average operating time, which is associated with fewer complications.

Wouldn't it be great if data centers could share its procedures and results.  Why is it so secret to discuss maintenance operations on power and cooling equipment?