21
Mar 14
LifeHacker – The Ways Your Brain Tricks You Into Doing Things You Shouldn’t Do
We often discuss how your brain can trick you and, by proxy, how you can hack your brain, but there are a few things our minds are very good at tricking us into that we should be aware of. This video from the folks at DNews is a crash course in three of them: Sunk cost, optimism bias, and confirmation bias.
The video’s about three minutes long, but it serves as a great crash course for some of the nastier things our brains are hard-wired to do, even if we think we have the willpower to do something differently. For example, the sunk cost fallacy is that thing that makes us prioritize what we’ve lost over what we could possibly gain—leading us to keep eating when we’re full, justify poor buying decisions, or make us keep watching a TV show that we say we hate. The video also tackles the topic of optimism bias, or our natural tendency to believe that bad things just won’t happen to us, even if we’re the ones engaging in behaviors that are bad for us. Of course, optimism bias is a good and a bad thing, and helps us strive to better, greater things.
20
Mar 14
Arthur Cole – The Multi-Layered Cloud Revolution
Evolution is supposed to be slow-moving and steady, giving those affected plenty of time to react. Revolution, on the other hand, is rapid and disruptive and usually leaves casualties in its wake. Nevertheless, revolution is still a process, which means it unfolds in stages, and it isn’t always easy (in fact, it rarely is) to see how one stage will affect another or how it will all come out in the end.
In that regard, the cloud is a typical revolution. What’s surprising, though, is that each stage so far has been a mini-revolution in itself, and it doesn’t look like we’re even close to finishing.
NASA CTO Chris Kemp spelled all this out plainly enough at the recent OpenStack Enterprise Forum, where he noted that demand for the cloud is quickly propelling the demand for hyperscale infrastructure, both within the traditional enterprise and in the hosted service provider market.
19
Mar 14
BetaBeat – Forget Productivity Apps: What Time Do You Wake Up?
Joel is one of the most productive people I know and he has a secret that all of us can use to become more productive.
Like most of us, Joel has a lot on his plate. He’s the father of two kindergarten-aged children. Both he and his wife work full-time demanding jobs. That’s more than enough for most people but not for him. On the side he’s a budding author and a voracious reader. He also plays in a garage band and always makes time for his friends.
Within five minutes of meeting him for the first time and discovering all that he fits into the same 24 hours we all have, people inevitably ask “How do you fit it all in? What’s your secret?”
“There is no secret,” he tells them. “I just get up earlier than everyone else.”
Say what?
Most of us are at our peak in the mornings. Not only do we think better in the wee hours of the morning but, because everyone else is still sleeping, we’re able to focus on what we want to do rather than what we have to do. We’re more creative and more productive.
18
Mar 14
Baseline – IT Leaders: Game-Changers for Governance, Security
A key frustration of CIOs and IT managers is the inability to articulate risk to the organization’s senior managers and corporate decision-makers who may not have the technical background to fully appreciate the scope and breadth of weaknesses in their own data environments. Often, company decision-makers rely on IT leaders to set budgets, recommend operational solutions and generally “keep the lights on” without fully understanding the complexities surrounding any given project.
When a project is critical to the business, however, these IT leaders face tremendous pressure to deliver results to management.
Even more challenging is when a crisis occurs, and questions surface about what happened and how it occurred. In these situations, IT leaders often find themselves explaining complex problems to an unsympathetic audience.
The ability to uncover and correct weaknesses in a data environment may be less about what resources are available to the IT department and more about the willingness of the business to truly embrace good data governance. The fact is, poor data governance is generally not the result of some single breakdown attributable only to the IT department. Rather, it is often a failure of the business to support specific risk-mitigation measures and initiatives—both inside and outside of IT—that create an environment in which positive data governance can flourish.
17
Mar 14
CIOInsight – Inviting the App Store Into Your Enterprise
App stores are the mobile equivalent of desktop Web browsers in many ways. They are the predominant mechanism for delivering content and functionality in the mobile world. They provide much more control than traditional browsers and the direct ability for developers and administrators to deploy, monitor, manage and monetize apps and the content that passes through them. This, along with being end user-facing, has made them the cornerstone of the outside-in view for users and developers. Within the enterprise, they will soon be the final manifestation of application management and device management capabilities for end users and IT administrators, and become as ubiquitous as the intranet.
Let’s take a look at the outside-in view and the key characteristics of app stores so we can evaluate them for the enterprise.
User and Device Identity. One of the most important characteristics of app stores that differentiate them from regular Web browsers is the fact that app stores have identifiable users with strong identities. App stores play an integral role in the mobile ecosystem of devices, developers, publishers and end users by identifying the users they provide services to, blocking usage when required and ensuring security. In an enterprise, user identity elements span not just employees, but also partners, vendors and resellers so having the right level of access and functionality for each stakeholder is critical to its success.
14
Mar 14
Arthur Cole – Is the Cloud Cheaper than IT? Not Always
The cloud is cheaper than standard IT infrastructure. This has been a given for so long that hardly anyone questions its veracity. And after all, who would argue the cost advantages of leasing resources from an outside provider vs. building and maintaining complex internal infrastructure?
Well, some very bright minds in the IT industry are starting to do just that.
Rob Enderle, writing for CIO.com, for one, notes that speed and flexibility, while important, do not necessarily translate into lower costs. The hard truth, of course, is that spending on IT is dropping while spending on cloud services is increasing, but this has more to do with timing and availability rather than simple economics. Indeed, recent analyses show that once internal infrastructure begins deploying cloud services of its own, it can meet enterprise needs for about $100 per user while Amazon and other providers come in at around $200 per user when purchased individually or in small groups, as is the practice with many business units. And a proprietary platform like Oracle can run as much as $500 per user.
13
Mar 14
Data Center Knowledge – State of the Data Center Puts IT in the Spotlight
One in every nine people on earth is an active Facebook user, and mankind created 1.9 trillion GB of data in 2013. The growth of social sites and the proliferation of information are two trends that Emerson Network Power captures in its “State of the Data Center 2013” infographic. These trends have a huge impact on the communications network, IT department and, most importantly, data centers.
In 2011, Emerson Network Power introduced our “State of the Data Center” infographic, a scan of major trends that affect data centers. We also researched the number of outages and the cost of downtime. This infographic provided a baseline for comparing future trends.
We recently completed “State of the Data Center 2013,” which we developed as an infographic that illustrates the facts of the year. To sum up the results in a few words, the global dependence on everything digital is pushing IT to the forefront of the organization. Data centers increasingly are relied upon in areas that were traditionally offline pursuits, and consumers have high expectations of speed and performance. I’ll share trends that support these findings, and I’ll also discuss a significant consequence of IT being in the spotlight.
12
Mar 14
FightingAge.org – Theorizing That Some Change in the Aging Brain is Optimization, Not Degeneration
The nature of neural networks is perhaps better understood by more people nowadays than used to the be the case. Forms of neural network are used for a range of computational purposes, where they have proved useful as a way to economically discover solutions to difficult problems in pattern recognition, optimization, and other fields. How a particular solution works isn’t always clear, especially when using larger networks, but if it can be proven to work well then why worry?
We ourselves are neural networks: the complex adaptive phenomena that we choose to call the self arises from comparatively simple exchanges between many, many neurons. The machine is the connections and the state of its neurons, constantly altering itself in response to circumstances and its own operation.
10
Mar 14
HBR – Strategy in a World of Constant Change
Am I the only person to be getting a bit weary of hearing it repeatedly asserted that we’re living in a world of constant, accelerating change? That competitive advantages are becoming ever more transient and that the secret to survival will be to the ability to transform on a dime? Otherwise, what happened to Tom Tom will happen to you. Please!
Let me share a fun clip with you, sent to me the other day my former colleague Jonathan Rotenberg, founder of the Boston Computer Society. It chronicles Steve Jobs’ first public introduction of the brand new Macintosh, which happened in January 1984 at Jonathan’s Society in Boston. The whole event was was a cool trip down memory lane.
The moment I loved most was during the Q&A when an older gentleman asked Jobs a challenging question about the mouse as user interface technology: did it really compare favorably to the traditional keystroke approach? It was fun to watch a younger, mellower Jobs give a patient, reassuring response and not insinuate that the questioner was a moron. Jobs turned out to be quite right in his answer, which was that once people gave the mouse a try, they would see that it was far superior to keystrokes.
