Problem analyzing data, know your source - example Consumer Reports Hospital Ranking based on Medicare Billing

We all want to go to the best hospitals.  I read the Consumer Reports ranking on Hospitals.  What I didn't know is the ranking is based on billing information from Medicare.  What does billing information from Medicare have to do with the quality of your hospital?  The ability for a hospital to format the data according to Medicare standards could be what gives a hospital a higher ranking.  Some hospitals weren't ranked because their data did not meet medicare standards.

Hope this gets you thinking about your big data projects.

NBCnews reports on this situation.

Dr. Peter Pronovost, senior vice president for patient safety and quality at Johns Hopkins and one of the leaders in the fight to improve hospital quality, applauds the idea but says the data the report is based on is flawed. “I really applaud the Consumer Report effort to get information to consumers about complications,” he said.

“The overall concept is spot-on,” Pronovost told NBC News. “One of the concerns is they measured these complications using administrative data, which is completely understandable, but we know it’s not completely accurate.”

...

Many of the biggest and most famous hospitals aren’t listed. Consumer Reports used Medicare reporting data for its report and could only include hospitals that reported data in a certain way.

 

The article points out an accuracy of 25% correlation of infections base on billing information filed.

Unfortunately, he said, there’s not much better data out there yet. One of the measures – infections among patients fitted with a catheter – is only right 25 percent of the time when calculated using billing information filed to Medicare, Pronovost says.

5 Golden Rules of Plane Design that could work for Data Centers

BBC has a post on the 5 Golden Rules of Plane Design.

Classic aircraft: Five golden rules for enduring design

ByStephen Dowling

HIDE CAPTION

Best of British
The Supermarine Spitfire was designed to protect Britain from aerial attack; it later served from aircraft carriers and nearly broke the sound barrier. (Copyright: Getty Images)

When I read the 5 rules, 4 rules looked like good ones for data centers.

Rule one: Be adaptable and flexible

Rule two: Be easy to fly (operate and use)

Rule three: Be resilient

Rule four – Be easy to maintain (YES!!!!!)

Rule five – Be easy on the eye

The fifth rule "Be easy on the eye" may seem like it doesn't fit, but some of the best data centers are good looking in the details.  Some of the worse are kind of ugly and causes discomfort looking at.

Winning a DCIM deal with a company like Facebook - sell vs. partner

I wrote a blog post on the Facebook DCIM deal that got away from the DCIM vendors.

So let's hypothetically go through a way that a company could work with Facebook on a DCIM solution.  Part of what I am going to describe as a method is knowing people inside Facebook and other of the big data center operators.

First, make a choice, are you going to try and sell what you have or work with Facebook to develop a solution.  Most would try to sell what they have.  I would try to put a proposal on the table to work with Facebook to create a DCIM solution that works for Facebook.  This is NOT a customization of your solution for Facebook.  It is an opportunity to get insight on what is of real value to Facebook for a DCIM solution.

An example of the concept of insight is Slate's article on Google's Jeff Dean.

The real Jeff Dean admits he isn’t a machine-learning expert but says he’s eager to help out with his skills in building scalable, high-performance systems.

Contrary to what the Jeff Dean facts imply, Dean says simply sitting down to write the perfect program is rarely the best way to tackle a problem. Instead, his process often begins with back-of-the-envelope calculations to find the optimal trade-off between quality and speed for a given process. “In a lot of these areas, from machine translation to search quality, you’re always trying to balance what you can do computationally with each query,” he says. “Maybe you can’t afford the ideal [solution], but if we can approximate it in a certain way, you can get 98 percent of the benefit with 1 percent of the computation.”

Another choice is are you building your solution on a Microsoft stack or on open source.  Most don't know that companies like Facebook have many people who have a preference which favors open source.  Down this path is whether you have built on top of NoSQL.  Why NoSQL as described below - simplicity, scaling and availability are easier with NoSQL and it can be a platform for big data and real-time web applications.

A NoSQL database provides a mechanism for storage and retrieval of data that uses looser consistency models than traditional relational databases. Motivations for this approach include simplicity of design, horizontal scaling and finer control over availability. NoSQL databases are often highly optimized key–value stores intended for simple retrieval and appending operations, with the goal being significant performance benefits in terms oflatency and throughput. NoSQL databases are finding significant and growing industry use in big data and real-time web applications. NoSQL systems are also referred to as "Not only SQL" to emphasize that they do in fact allow SQL-like query languages to be used.

When I run a Google search of "NoSQL DCIM" most of the results I see are pages with one word in an article and advertisements with the other.

By this point it is easy to stand out vs. other DCIM vendors and you can start a dialog with Facebook on what DCIM should do.

I could go on and on, but it gets more esoteric.  You get the basic ideas.  Once you get past the partnership the really hard part comes up to create something that Facebook wants to buy.

Germany trades Nuclear for Coal, renewable energy is not a viable alternative

Salon has an article on Germany's increase in Coal power production from 43% to 52% with the retirement of Nuclear Power.

Germany’s clean energy plan backfired

The nation's move away from nuclear power drove it right back to coal

Environmental groups like Greenpeace can make all the noise they want, but the state of renewable energy and its costs are not there yet.

Said a campaigner for Greenpeace, “The Merkel government doesn’t do enough to protect the climate anymore.”

Besides Germany.  Spain tried to push Renewable Energy and met an unsustainable cost with sustainable energy.

Mr Miralda is the victim of a bungled, overambitious renewables programme. Governments everywhere want to turn green and create environmentally friendly jobs. But as Spain shows, good intentions are not enough. If the policies are wrong, the benefits are wasted, the jobs disappear, the costs remain—and business investors bear the brunt.

...

But costs exploded, too. Subsidies to solar energy rose from €190m in 2007 to €3.5 billion in 2012 (an 18-fold increase). Total subsidies to all renewables reached €8.1 billion in 2012, see chart. Since the government was unwilling to pass the full costs on to consumers, the cumulative tariff deficit (the cost of the system minus revenues from consumers) reached €26 billion, having risen by about €5 billion a year.

Expectations are high for renewable energy, and there are plenty of politicians who pushed for renewable energy projects and subsidies.  But, given Germany and Spain's results it looks like wind and solar renewable didn't work this time around.

If you are anti-nuclear, then you may cheer France's EDF withdrawing from Nuclear projects in the US.  But the withdrawal is driven by cheap US natural gas not renewables.

PARIS—French power group Electricité de France SA EDF.FR +7.39% said Tuesday it has signed a deal with U.S. partner Exelon Corp., EXC -0.73% marking the start of the French firm's gradual withdrawal from its multibillion-dollar foray into U.S. nuclear power and illustrating the shale-gas boom's continued wide impact on energy companies' strategies.

Cheap, plentiful U.S. natural gas extracted from shale rock formations is undercutting nuclear power as a form of energy for generating electricity. As a result, building and operating new nuclear power plants now looks even riskier and less attractive, damping enthusiasm for a resurgence in the sector and prompting EDF—the world's largest nuclear power operator—to prepare a strategy to exit its U.S. operations.

The Facebook DCIM whale that got away, Facebook builds its own DCIM solution

Some use the term Whale Hunting to describe going for the big sale, and I would expect that some had used this term going for a DCIM sale at Facebook.

If you don't like the Whale analogy.  Another one is the biggest wins are many times like the "belle of the ball" where companies are the most attractive for a sale.  

Whatever analogy you use the Whale or Belle these companies are smart and know what the market looks like and is used to turning away advances and not taking the bait on a hook.

Then Facebook sends this message out discussing DCIM at DCD SF.

The management tools used today are already a hodgepodge of DIY and third-party solutions. The DCIM solution Furlong hopes will emerge from the current effort will establish a line of communication between management tools on the server side and management tools on the data center side.

Facebook is stuck. With as important as DCIM is, it is not a high enough priority to dedicate the resources to solve.

At the same time, using software-engineer hours to build a solution from the ground up does not make business sense. “Our software developers are better utilized worrying about our infrastructure and worrying about product than they are worrying about data center space.”

You don't hear glowing reviews of DCIM SW from the Whales or Belles in the industry.  Does this mean DCIM is only good enough for the smaller less attractive companies?

Digital Realty has chosen to build its own DCIM which is part of why they'll discuss their solution.

SAN FRANCISCO, May 13, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Digital Realty Trust, Inc. (NYSE: DLR), a leading global provider of data center solutions, announced today that it launched EnVisionSM, a comprehensive data center infrastructure management (DCIM) solution.  EnVision provides increased visibility into data center operations, including the ability to analyze data in a manner that is digestible and actionable; a user interface with displays and reports that are tailored to data center operators; and access to historical data as well as predictive capabilities.

"Up until now, data has been collected, but it has not necessarily been easily accessed or arranged in an intuitive manner that is helpful to a data center operator," said David Schirmacher, senior vice president of portfolio operations at Digital Realty. "The goal in rolling out EnVision across our global portfolio is to give our customers a common database that is structured around the specific needs of data center operators and can therefore manage the millions of data points that are found in today's large-scale facilities."

DataCenterDynamics discusses this is not a threat.

DCIM vendors should not see this trend among hyper-scale operators as a threat, however, Ascierto says. Yes, their physical footprint does represent a sizable chunk of the addressable market, but the market is so immature, and the market penetration rate of DCIM is so low, there are plenty of other operators to go after, she says.

Not getting the big win may not be a threat, but it never feels good to miss the big sale that could be bragged about as the Whale or Belle of the Ball.