Good or Original

"My congratulations to you, sir.  Your manuscript is both good and original.  But the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good."

attributed to Samuel Johnson



I received this quote in my weekly email from the Bookshelf of Guelph, a spectacular bookstore and community centre in Guelph Ontario.  Too good not to pass along.

Highway Driving in America

Michael Adams' 2004 book Fire and Ice explored the values of Canadians and Americans - how they were similar or different and whether they were converging or diverging.  Fire and Ice showed the values gap widening between Canadians and Americans.  This conclusion, based on Adams' decade of research, was quite surprising back in 2004.  Today Canadians look south in dismay at a country in denial that their taxes are too low to support enormous military and social spending, a country where politicians spat childishly at the edge of a fiscal cliff, a country where carrying a gun is an inalienable right, but healthcare is a privilege.  I wonder if our values have drifted even further apart.

So, while many around the world assume that Canada and the US are interchangeable, a Canadian traveling in the US is truly travelling in a foreign country.  And this is obvious even while barreling along the highways, where American culture is on display.  My earlier post about Highway Driving in India pointed to some observations about Indian culture too, and is one of the most popular posts on this blog.  So what struck me over the many days I've spent on American highways over the last few months?

The first thing is the prevalence of religion.  There are so many churches, especially in the south.  Most of the southern churches seemed to be Baptist, but with more variations of Baptists than I had thought possible.  And then there were the many churches of religions I'd never heard of.  

Where these isn't a church, there are religious bumper stickers, billboard advertisements for churches, and exhortations to repent such as the one to the right.

The billboards advertising health care facilities hammers home the point that this is a country without a public healthcare system.  (Not that competition is entirely bad; in fact the Canadian system is trying to insert such competition in a public system.)  It also features interesting disruptive innovations in healthcare like the Minute  Clinic kiosks in pharmacies where nurse practitioners provide convenient, quick treatments for a small list of conditions.

And then there is the gun culture - ads for a Gun and Knife Show, billboards advertising guns and ammunition, restaurant signs prohibiting guns inside, and intellectually challenged commentators on Fox claiming fewer people would die if everyone carried guns (and why is it that so many public places in restaurants and hotels have a TV running and it's always tuned to Fox?).  

Ironically, the other observation is the tendency for Americans to adhere to speed limits.  Canadians are the ones with a society built on respect for law and order as opposed to the raw individualism of the US, yet it's Canadians who regularly drive 20-30 kms over the speed limit.  It makes for slower travel in the US - to say nothing of the fact that those miles click away much more slowly than kilometers!

Technology allows one to bring a little bit of Canada along on the road, by downloading and listening to CBC podcasts like The Current, As It Happens, Ideas, Quirks and Quarks and the ever-droll Stuart McLean and the Vinyl Cafe.  How parochial of me!

Searching - for Power: the Internet and electricity consumption

Googleplex, Douglas County Georgia with banks of servers

Some years ago, I prepared a report for World Wildlife Fund on the ways that Information and Communications Technologies can help reduce carbon imprint.  Telecommuting, smart systems to regulate heating and traffic, teleconferencing and many other technology-enabled applications are helping.

But there is a dark side to technology and energy: big data centres consume about 2% of all electrical energy in the US in order to deliver us the instant response and vast storage we consider part of our Internet entitlement[1].  Google alone uses the equivalent of one quarter of the output of a nuclear power plant in its data centres around the world. [2]  Most of that goes not to powering the computers but cooling the environment they run in.

This makes electric power - and its cost - a strategic consideration for these companies.   For instance, Google locates its data centres largely based on the adequacy, reliability and cost of electricity.  Iceland and the Canadian North are making pitches as locations for such data centres, so as to use 'natural cooling'.   Not surprisingly, Google  has invested $1B in green sector ventures.

You may wonder why I am suddenly writing about this topic now, especially after an astonishingly long silence on this blog.  Well, a friend forwarded me some photos taken in various Google data centres, or Googleplexes as they're known.  The pictures show incredibly well organized technology, but they look like abstract art and they are just too beautiful not to share.

The back of servers in Oklahoma, where hundreds of fans (re)circulate cooled air

Server racks in Oklahoma with their cables, tidily coloured

Back-up tape library in South Carolina

Water is so critical to the cooling effort that a lot of effort is devoted to it, as you can see in these final pictures.

Water tanks in South Carolina hold up to 900,000 litres 

And my favourite pic of all:

Colourful water pipes in Georgia

Having started out in the business in 1970, I can remember big data centres, holding a laughable amount of data and computing power compared to today.  My personal back-up system can hold as much data those old huge farms of disk drivers.  And none of them were painted pretty colours either!


[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/technology/data-centers-waste-vast-amounts-of-energy-belying-industry-image.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
[2]  Again from New York Times:  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/technology/google-details-and-defends-its-use-of-electricity.html

Adapt - or else!

It's a privilege and honour to have a guest post today from my friend Donna McPhail.  Donna and I met by chance at the Fortune Innovation Forum in New York a number of years ago and developed a friendship based on our shared passion for ideas.  We breakfast together from time to time and my husband is always amazed that a breakfast can take that looong.  But we always leave with a bunch of topics we wanted to discuss and never got around to.  I never come away without learning from these meetings.  And now I'm happy to share some of her wisdom here.

At our last breakfast, Donna was excited about a book she'd recently read, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure, by Tim Harford.  Or as so eloquently put by Sonny in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, "Everything will be all right in the end; if it's not all right, then it's not yet the end".

I thought others would enjoy Donna's review of this book:

 

In Adapt, Tim Harford argues that complex or complicated problems are best solved through a process akin to evolutionary development.  Survival of the fittest doesn't mean survival of the strongest, but rather of those with the ability (accidental, usually) to adapt to the environment in a positive or influential way.

He outlines a fairly simple 'algorithm' for finding solutions - although these solutions can never be permanent since the environment itself is always changing.  The steps of the algorithm were developed by the early  20th Century economist Palchinsky.  They are paraphrased as follows.

Try new things in the expectation that some will fail.  This liberates you to try some very unexpected ideas, things that are quite wide-ranging.

Make the failures survivable because failure will be common.  This implies you should focus on small tests, rather than giant leaps of innovation, because small experiments are more survivable if they fail.  Look for buffers to protect you from failure.

Take the things that work and start all over again.  Try variations on the successes as well as new ideas.  Make sure you know what is working and what has failed.  When you discard the failures, make sure you understand why they have failed.  Then, if there's a simple 'fix', you can add that to the ideas you're testing again.

This instruction set is based on trial and error, not ideology or theory.  In fact, Harford seems convinced that theory can rarely solve complex problems, except perhaps in science, although even in science there can be fundamental paradigm shifts which overturn theory. 

Why did this book impress me so much?  Perhaps because it reinforced my slowly dawning rejection of ideology and theory as solutions to the world's problems -  apparent most obviously in the stalemate of US politics and in the pre-2007 rigid belief that markets are 'perfect', self-correcting, and amenable to mathematical modeling.  Theory simplifies complex situations too much.  It encourages a rigid attitude and an all-or-nothing approach to solutions.

In contrast, studies of successful people and companies would indicate that trial and error are the norm, that luck plays an important part in achievement, and that cross pollination of ideas is more likely to contribute to invention and innovation than sheer genius or theory.

While we often recognize these 'success factors', we don't always translate them to adoption of pragmatic testing of hypotheses.  Instead, we try to codify what did work into a new theory after observing one example of success.  Hence, for example, there is a new trend to micro-managing because Steve Jobs micro-managed everything.

An ideal summation comes from the father of economics, Friedrich von Hayek, as quoted in the beginning chapter of the book.  "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design."

Donna is an independent marketing and communications consultant in Toronto.