Link Collection — November 6, 2011

• A final thought from The Wisdom of Clouds | The Wisdom of Clouds – CNET News

  I completely agree with James. Echoes why I retired from the Top 3 Stories Podcast, and ground to a halt on Elemental Cloud Computing:

  “For one, cloud computing itself is no longer an innovative new field, but a growing marketplace of hundreds or even thousands of technology and service options. Covering cloud overall has become a journalist’s job, and I see myself more as an analyst and essayist.”

  tags: cloud computing

• Kaggle Solves Big Data Problems With Contests — And Now Has Big Funders and $11M on Board – Liz Gannes – News – AllThingsD

  “What if the Netflix Prize model of solving hard problems about big data sets using contests could be applied to all sorts of other things? In fact, a remarkable start-up called Kaggle is doing exactly that — and already seems to be making it work.

  Kaggle has facilitated breakthroughs in NASA’s analysis of dark matter, improved Allstate’s actuarial methods, predicted many of the top finishers of the Eurovision Song Contest, and is currently hosting a $3 million prize to device ways to reduce unnecessary hospitalizations.”

  tags: bigdata kaggle

• Systems thinking conference highlights practical applications in healthcare, education, product development – MIT News Office

  “A system is a set of interrelated entities that perform a function,” said Crawley, the Ford Professor of Engineering in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. The function that emerges, he said, is greater than what could come from any single entity — and the overall system’s “emergent properties” are what produce value.

  Crawley then explained that systems thinking is a way of looking at problems in context, in order to more successfully predict what will emerge to ensure value. “This is the real art and the real goal of systems thinking — training yourself in the domain in which you work to look at an unprecedented system, predict outcomes and add value,” Crawley said. In essence, using systems thinking helps make complex challenges less complicated.”

  tags: systems thinking mit

• Introducing the 5-watt server that runs on cell phone chips — Cloud Computing News

  “Can ARM wrestle its way into the server market? Calxeda and Hewlett-Packard think so. On Tuesday Calxeda launched its EnergyCore ARM server-on-a-chip (SoC), which it says consumes as little as 1.5 watts (and idles at half a watt). And HP, the world’s largest server maker, committed to building EnergyCore-based servers that will consume as little as 5 watts when running all out. Compare that to the lowest-power x86 server chips from Intel, which consume about 20 watts but deliver higher performance.

  Calxeda, backed in part by ARM Holdings, is banking that the success that ARM chips found in smartphones and mobile devices will carry over into data centers serving large, scale-out workloads. In that arena, it is facing off squarely against chip giant Intel and its x86-based architecture, which dominates the market for chips running in commodity servers.”

  tags: cloud computing chips

• Giving the F.B.I. What It Wants – NYTimes.com

  “Hasan M. Elahi is an associate professor and an interdisciplinary artist at the University of Maryland. This article is adapted from a forthcoming TED Talk.”

  “In an era in which everything is archived and tracked, the best way to maintain privacy may be to give it up. Information agencies operate in an industry that values data. Restricted access to information is what makes it valuable. If I cut out the middleman and flood the market with my information, the intelligence the F.B.I. has on me will be of no value. Making my private information public devalues the currency of the information the intelligence gatherers have collected.

  My activities may be more symbolic than not, but if 300 million people started sending private information to federal agents, the government would need to hire as many as another 300 million people, possibly more, to keep up with the information and we’d have to redesign our entire intelligence system.”

  tags: privacy

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.