Saccades

Data centers account for approximately 1% of total energy consumption in the US. Many data center operators are struggling with availability and cost of power necessary to operate sprawling racks of IT equipment and are looking for technology solutions that can give them better control over their IT environments. The core issues are related to gross over-provisioning of servers and lack of suitable controls for allocation of computing power and cooling capacity. In response, most large IT vendors are scrambling to create “Green-IT” offerings focused on reducing power consumption and improving equipment utilization. In this video, Scoble interviews Chandrakant Patel of HP Labs’ Sustainable IT Ecosystem Laboratory for a perspective on their approach to a data center of the future.

HP uses rack level monitoring to track power consumption and temperatures across the data center floor and adjust settings on cooling equipment and servers to conserve power. They’re trying to use information from various sensors and system analytics for right-provisioning of infrastructure components based on the current demand and service levels. (This is not a novel approach as many other companies are doing the same thing).

A few practices that can reduce the overall energy footprint of a data center:

• Provide the right amount of power for compute, cooling and storage resources
• Allocate workload based on need
• Take out unnecessary redundancy
• Minimize material use to reduce amount of discarded waste
• Monitor components for intermittent errors

An interesting demonstration of Cisco On-Stage TelePresence Holographic Video Conferencing from the Cisco Day event in Bangalore. Cisco wasn’t the first to use holographic elements in an on-stage presentation, but for those of us that jet around conferences and customer meetings on a regular basis, this may be a true travel upgrade.

 

 Cisco Day in Bangalore 2008 [11:25m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Cisco CEO John Chambers, who was live on the Bangalore stage, ‘beamed up’ Martin De Beer, the Senior Vice President of emerging Technologies, and Chuck Stucki the General Manager of TelePresence, live from San Jose, California. Chambers was then able to have a ‘face to face’ discussion with De Beer and Stucki on the future of Cisco TelePresence, demonstrating first hand the potential capabilities of the system in front of the watching audience.

Made possible by the Musion Eyeliner holographic projection system, fast network connectivity (and an open bar in the lobby of the conference for error correction). The system uses a single high definition camera to capture the image and a single HD projector to project it onto a special foil. According to Musion, “All the images used on a Musion Eyeliner system appear as three-dimensional images, but are projected as two-dimensional images into a 3D stage set. It is the mind of the audience that creates the 3D illusion. This means that production costs are minimal, needing only the single camera lens single camera lens for filming and a single projector for the playback.”

Hans Rosling shares his insights about the developing world statistics (life expectancy, wealth distribution, economic development rates) in a unique and perspective-changing way that highlights less obvious and debunks some of the common preconceptions:

 

 TED, February 2006: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Here’s the follow up presentation in March 2007 @ TED.

Learn more at Gapminder

Originally uploaded by saccades

Do you ever take a familiar road and get to a destination without remembering the individual steps and turns of your route? This brain on auto pilot time is my favorite time to think about a current challenge or a problem I am trying to get through.

Sent from BlackBerry

Christoph Westphal and David Sinclair, backed by Phillip Sharp, team up to to help delay onset and slow progression of aging related diseases (e.g., adult onset diabetes, heart disease, cancer, stroke, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s).

Sirtris and its research got widely noticed in November 2006 when anti-aging properties of resveratrol grabbed media attention.

Resveratrol molecule is produced by certain plants. When it enters the cell it engenders new mitochondria in tissues resulting in a boost to the body’s metabolic rate. The benefits are similar to slow-aging benefits of a calorie-restriction diet - but without calorie restriction regimen. New mitochondira produced this way seem to be more efficient than the originals they replace - they create a fewer free-radicals that could damage DNA and other parts of the cells.Studies indicate low level of blood glucose and insulin, little weight gain during middle age and low body temperature as predictors of longevity.

Sirtris is now clinically testing its first resveratrol-based drug, 501, aimed at keeping diabetic patients’ blood sugar under control.

I found mindmaping very useful in collecting and organizing ideas and managing large amounts of information in a single place. Periodic Table of Visualization Methods created by folks at Visual Literacy organizes many more visualization methods by type of content and the purpose they are intended for: separate tools for visualization of data, information, concepts, strategy …

You can also grab a related paper, “Towards A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods for Management” (pdf file)
(via Seth Godin and Guy Kawasaki)

Wall Street Journal advice on when to buy organic foods:

Buy Organic:

• Apples, peaches, bell peppers, strawberries, imported grapes, spinach, lettuce, potatoes, carrots
• Milk and dairy products
  Free of the growth hormones that are given to conventionally raised cows.
• Meat and poultry (free of growth hormones and antibiotics.
• Baby food (Free of pesticide residues found in vegetables and fruits
• Foods you eat a lot of
  

Conventional will do:

• Broccoli, bananas, frozen sweet peas, frozen corn, asparagus, avocados, onions
• Seafood (No USDA organic certification yet exists for seafood).
• Some processed foods such as breads, chips, pasta, oils
• Foods you eat only occasionally

(Another similar list) 

Ever wanted to relate another nation to a US state by comparing their gross national product?

by Carl Stromer via Creative Think

Highline is a 1.5 mile elevated railway that runs along the West Side of Manhattan, hovering over the streets and passing through buildings. It’s currently closed to the public but there are many plans for it’s rehabilitation - including a park project and a possible expansion of the Whitney Museum. Fred Wilson at AVC points to the upcoming Highline Festival that will be hosted by David Bowie.

iPhone is a pretty good step forward in the mobile phone appearance and user interface functionality. Dave Pouge of New York Times writes about its beautiful design and an innovative touch-interface. It’s also a long awaited iPod upgrade - although still closely tied with the desktop and iTunes. David Kirkpatrick, senior editor at Fortune, thinks that the iTunes dependence is “based on the ideas of the past” and favors the model where users pick from a giant online library and listen to whatever they want wherever they are. Tom Evslin, criticizes the phone’s service provider lock-in and lack of support for software-based VOIP applications like Skype that would allow free calls over WiFi.

In my opinion, iPhone does very little to challenge the status quo, change the mobile phone service business model or meaningfully extend functionality to enable users to do something new and useful. Apple spent a lot of time making incremental improvements and creating a sexier package for a pretty standard set of features: phone with a music player and a web browser.

I think that the device that aims to “revolutionize” needs to do much more. It’s got the looks, now let’s add some brains too. Here’s my wish list:

1. Work anywhere / everywhere without dropping a call
   Recognize, auto-configure and securely utilize whatever network exists transparently - across technologies and service providers. It should allow the user to pick between the most economic coverage and the best performance but not require any technical knowledge. (Apple could also “virtualize” charges across providers based on usage to make this economically viable).
2. Change the way we meet and interact while on the go
   A lot of integration related to location based services and social networks could be done here - e.g., check out a map to see who from your LinkedIn circle of interest (not the whole network!) is close-by and ping them to meet.
3. Change the way we collaborate and manage work / life activities
   Build smarts that emulate a good executive assistant that knows who to let through and who to route elsewhere based on what you’re doing, where you are and what are your priorities. Calendar, contact info, project notes, tasks, priorities, GPS, and a lot of other things are already there - what’s missing is the context and some common sense to connect the dots …
4. Keep us informed and entertained anywhere
   Cache multimedia content subscriptions without need to “plug-in” or manually synchronize everything (newspapers, lectures, eBooks, magazines, movies, music, rss feeds, podcasts, …) What I use on the web should just be on my phone too.
5. Synchronize all data with an online vault in real time
   The phone should not live in bubble - it should know about and use the data where it lives without having to get its own copy of everything. Master copy of any user files, PIM data and pretty much anything else should be updated at its main location without the user having to do a thing. (Master location is what’s versioned, backed-up, archived, indexed …)
6. Integrate all existing communication channels into one - with no mods required
   
7. Keep data safe and under your control regardless of who’s got the phone
   Integrate security features that allow users to disable, locate and/or permanently erase the phone by accessing an online portal. Staying up all night trying to remember exactly what personal & business data was exposed on a lost PalmPilot is not the experience I’d like to repeat.

Admittedly, some of this this stuff could be accomplished in software on top of the iPhone hardware (lack of 3G speed notwithstanding). As of right now, there’s no iPhone dev kit and no 3rd party apps can be loaded onto the device. While all this may sound like a huge mashup of opensource code and existing APIs, it should probably be managed and done by a company with Apple or Google sense of control and attention to detail in oder to ward off bugs & reboots that would make the whole thing just a pile of metal and plastic (Treos loaded with 3rd-party hacks is far from reliable).

If you still want the pretty new iPhone, try waiting a bit longer after the initial introduction: there’s a lot of room for price incentives. AP quoted an iSuppli estimate that Apple built in a 50% gross margin into the device MSRP. According to the report, the 4-gigabyte version of the iPhone, with a retail price of $499, will cost Apple $245.83 to make. The 8-gigabyte version, priced at $599, will cost Apple $280.83.

I’ll wait for the gPhone and keep my trusted BlackBerry & iPod for now.

Bakeries that will ship their specialty breads to your door:

• Zingerman’s
• Dorothy Lane Market
• Crooked Tree Bread Works
• Bread Alone.com
• Amy’s Bread
  
• Poilane

NYC’s ban on trans-fats in restaurants, set to start in July, is intended to force food establishments to serve healthier food. On the other hand, greater scale replacement of large amounts of bad oils with equivalent supplies of healthier alternatives may result in stiffer competition for farm space with the alternative fuel industry. Farmers will have to choose how to allocate their farm acreage between growing corn, which is used in production of ethanol, and growing soybean, a crop used in production of healthier oils.

James Dyson, industrial designer and the inventor of Dyson vacuum cleaner, shares his tips on product design with Fortune Magazine:

• Focus on your frustrations
• View complacent competitors as an opportunity
• Find inspiration in your office
• Communicate directly
• Get high on failure

Look for things that don’t work properly, things that could be done better, things that are disappointing in performance or are very difficult to use. Don’t be afraid to go against big and powerful competitors if they’re slow and meeting the needs of customers. Liven up you office / cubicle space to inspire creativity. Skip e-mail and phone and spend time with people face to face. An engineer’s life is 99% failure. You don’t learn from success and your successes are few and far between. Fail often and learn from the mistakes.

(via Fortune Digital Edition - Jan 22 issue)

Fortune launched a neat new digital edition of their bi-weekly magazine. You can access it here with any web browser with a standard flash plugin (no special software downloads needed). The whole issue can be saved in your browser cache for offline viewing too. And the best part: you don’t need an account or a subscription to view the entire magazine online (for now anyway).

Digital edition is powered by OliveSoftware and they have some sample content available on their web site