Developing Creativity for a Knowledge Economy, play more, obsess less

Being Asian I am used to the concept of Tiger Mom.  WSJ wrote an article on why Chinese Mothers are superior.  Many of you may think these are the type of people you want to have on your team, obsessed over achievers.

By AMY CHUA

A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids. They wonder what these parents do to produce so many math whizzes and music prodigies, what it's like inside the family, and whether they could do it too. Well, I can tell them, because I've done it. Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do:

Enlarge Image

Erin Patrice O'Brien for The Wall Street Journal

Amy Chua with her daughters, Louisa and Sophia, at their home in New Haven, Conn.

• attend a sleepover

• have a playdate

• be in a school play

• complain about not being in a school play

• watch TV or play computer games

• choose their own extracurricular activities

• get any grade less than an A

• not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama

• play any instrument other than the piano or violin

• not play the piano or violin.

Luckily, my mom was not a tiger mom.  She let us play which was way more fun and creative.

Guess what one of the most successful economies in the world Singapore with a large chinese influence has the Prime Minister challenging the role of the tiger mom.  The Economist covers this topic.

ONCE upon a time most of the tiny island-state of Singapore was a jungle. That is nearly all gone now, but the country is still heavily populated by tigers. These strict, unyielding felines, celebrated by Amy Chua in her book on the superiority of Chinese parenting, “The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother”, load their cubs down with extra homework and tuition to make them excel at school. Western parents are usually horrified at the pressure the tiger mums exert on their children to get better grades or become concert violinists, preferably before puberty. But in Singapore this style of parenting, especially among the ethnic Chinese majority, is rarely questioned.

The controversial part is

Imagine, then, the surprise when the prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, launched an attack on tiger mothers in a speech in late August to mark Singapore’s national day. Most of his remarks celebrated Singapore’s success, as usual. But then he berated parents for coaching their three- or four-year-old children to give them that extra edge over the five-year-old competition. And he added: “Please let your children have their childhood…Instead of growing up balanced and happy, he grows up narrow and neurotic. No homework is not a bad thing. It’s good for young children to play, and to learn through play.”

...

But the anxiety behind the comments is that hard-studying Singaporeans lack creativity and an ability to think laterally. This is now seen as a competitive disadvantage in what are often called “knowledge economies”, where innovation and inventiveness are at a premium. Are the tiger mothers, Mr Lee seems to be wondering, now putting Singapore’s future prosperity at risk?

The Knowledge Economy is the future built on top of the data centers being built now.  Would you rather have a room of anti-social over achievers or a out of the box creative innovators analyzing your data?  

Can the innovative services of the future be created by the kids who were raised by tiger mom's?  It looks like the Singapore Prime Minister has figured this out.

Mike Manos tells the rest of story - NYTimes DC cont.

Mike has posted the rest of the story on what happened in Quincy, WA in response to the NYTimes' 2nd story on Microsoft's efforts.

Insider Redux: Data Barn in a Farm Town

September 24, 2012 by mmanos

I thought I would start my first post by addressing the second New York Times article first. Why? Because it specifically mentions activities and messages sourced from me at the time when I was responsible for running the Microsoft Data Center program. I will try to track the timeline mentioned in the article with my specific recollections of the events. As Paul Harvey used to say, so then you could know the ‘REST of the STORY’.

One of the main points of the NYTimes is the air pollution.  Mike tells the rest of the story.

The article then goes on to talk about the permitting for the Diesel generators. Through the admission of the Department of Ecology’s own statement, “At the time, we were in scramble mode to permit our first one of these data centers.” Additionally it also states that:

Although emissions containing diesel particulates are an environmental threat, they were was not yet classified as toxic pollutants in Washington. The original permit did not impose stringent limits, allowing Microsoft to operate its generators for a combined total of more than 6,000 hours a year for “emergency backup electrical power” or unspecified “maintenance purposes.”

Goldman Sachs gains the Green Data Center Capability of the elite from IO, Data Center Capacity deployed annually

What is fundamentally wrong with data centers of the past is it was an exercise in consensus decision making to gain enough votes of confidence to move forward with a major capital investment.  The Real Estate and IT group would go around to all the different business units and other parts of the company to collect the requirements, and alternatives would be presented.  Here is how much it will cost to meet the needs of the business for the next 15 years.

This method was fine when Data Centers were a fraction of the IT costs.  Now with the web and surge of data, it is reasonable for the top financials to have 50k - 100k of servers.  Some of these servers need to meet regulatory requirements from dozens of gov't agencies.  Some of these servers have minimal regulatory issues and can be spread around in low cost data centers.  Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft are building some of the lowest cost data centers that are tuned to their high server counts with geo-redundant homogenous architectures.  Google has 5 data centers support a major geographic region for ad services where 24x7x365 services are requirement.  In contrast the gov't  financial regulators will require an A + B data center and disaster recovery site strategy within a specific distance of Manhattan.  These requirements push the costs of data centers to be one of the highest costing in the industry as Active-Active fail over with full capability to run services if the other goes down.

With todays current financial climate, it is time for a change.

And one of the first financials to make the change is Goldman Sachs.  Don Duet is quoted in the press release.

"Their innovative technology and services will allow Goldman Sachs to scale its data center operations more efficiently, and further advance the firm's broader commitment to environmental stewardship and reduced carbon footprint."

The three points that GS focuses on are part of a green data center strategy.

1) Efficient operations

2) Commitment to environmental stewardship

3) Reduced Carbon footprint

The money savings isn't mentioned by Don in the quote, but it is highlighted as a feature of a data center 2.0 strategy

 In addition to greater operating and capital expense savings

Add all these things up and one way to look at GS's strategy is to gain the capabilities that Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft have to design data centers that meet their business needs in a way that data centers capacity can be deployed yearly vs. the past where data centers were built every 3-5 years.

The WSJ highlighted the GS announcement as part of a post here.

Data- and technology-driven organizations like Goldman Sachs are particularly vulnerable to the pace of technological change, because the huge investments they make today could cripple them tomorrow. Whatever competitive advantage they may have earned today can be swept away in the next tide of change, particularly if their hardware investments prevent them from reacting in an agile manner. That’s why Don Duet, the global co-chief operating officer of Goldman’s technology division, is building modular data centers that depend more on software than hardware, so that his team can react to “the pace of technological change,” he said during a phone conversation Monday.

WSJ also reported on Allianz Global Investors questioning its data center strategy.

The economic crisis in Europe is forcing Allianz Global Investors of America to reconsider its data center consolidation strategy. Daniel Stroot, CIO of Allianz, says the company considered opening two data centers in Europe and two in Asia, in addition to the two it maintains in the U.S., but is now planning to add just one more. “We had planned to have two in each region but now we’re thinking maybe we only need three globally,” Stroot told CIO Journal in an interview. “The crisis in Europe has continued to force us to look at being more efficient.”

At this point, the company no longer owns its own data centers, having in 2011 consolidated five data centers down to two private clouds operated by data center service provider IO. The original reasons for consolidation were as much circumstantial as a reaction to other changes in technology, namely software-as-a-service. The company was moving two of its offices into new buildings in New York and San Francisco that either wouldn’t support a data center, or where running a data center represented too great a cost from a power and cooling perspective. The new offices were “the trigger event to rethink what we’re doing and get out of the business” of maintaining data centers in-house, Stroot said.

The Future of NYTimes Data Centers 10 steps to a Lean Power Diet, No Diesel Generators, No Batteries and PUD best friends

Jim Glanz is becoming infamous in the data center industry with his two posts on 

THE CLOUD FACTORIES

Power, Pollution and the Internet

&

Data Barns in a Farm Town, Gobbling Power and Flexing Muscle

I was talking to one of the smart data center guys, and we joked that the series will continue and maybe the possible conclusion is the NYTimes showing us all how they can be different than the rest in how they host the NYTimes in a data center.  How?  Here are 10 steps that would follow Jim Glanz's suggestions.

1) The NYTimes commits to run its server at 50% utilization or more. Comatose servers are decommissioned  Consolidating all their IT resources into a 200kW space or less. 

2) The NYTimes eliminates the pollution from diesel generators and environmental impact of UPS battery back-up by connecting straight to the Utility.

3) This constant predictable load of 200kW causes no problem for the Public Utility Department, so all is happy.  We all know the PUD like nice steady loads.

4) Peak traffic usages that push beyond server capacity are redirected to those power hungry polluting news organizations - CNN, Foxnews, NBC, ABC, Huffington Post you will be the polluters of the world not the NYTimes.

5) Power hungry hard drives will be replaced with tape drives.  As long as the NYTimes can stream content faster than people can read it is OK.

6) Images will be phased out for words to reduce information required to deliver news. Embedded links will point to Instagram and Google Images.

7) Redundancy is wasteful and polluting. Single point of failures are standard practice.

8) When the power goes off, we'll turn off too.

9) The NYTimes will make the ultimate commitment to a zero carbon impact commitment by going out of business.

10) Data Centers are causing the destruction of the USA, polluting the air we breath.  There are so few people employed by the data center industry, send the data centers outside the USA.  Decomission those server farms and let's go back to an agricultural society where methane is the pollution.

The secret plan for word domination.

11) in this new (retro) agrarian society, we will be the only ones to know how make ink from berries and hand press our newsprints (as we will have bought up all ancient printing presses with the money we save).  Then, and only then, we will truly fulfill our mission of "all the news that is fit to print"

NYTimes article lands on NBCNEWS Homepage

You may be thinking the NYTimes article on Polluting Data Centers will fizzle out.  But, guess what, NBCnews.com puts the 2nd article focusing on Microsoft on its home page.

When NBCnews.com was MSNBC.com there would have been the disclosure that MSNBC is a Microsoft & NBC collaboration, but that has ended.  And, now NBCnews is just NBC.  

DatacenterKnowledge collected a roundup of reactions to the 1st post.

And, Mike Manos has posted his response to the 2nd post.