Month: July 2018

A couple of years ago, Massimo Ferrari and I created the most extensive and thorough financial evaluation of OpenStack, which we called Elephant in the Room. We talked about it a lot, met a lot of customers doing amazing things, and received a lot of nice press coverage. Pulling together this type of research is a lot of work, and the hope was it would do more than help a few customers. The hope was it would help change the conversation we, as an industry, are having around cloud. That’s ambitious, I know, but I’m an optimist and was convinced we needed more understanding of financial implications of our technology choices.

Using some quick R¹ for statistical testing on the results of search phrase “cloud tco” on Google Trends, there is a sustained 42% increase in that search phrase following our blog post. I don’t know whether our blog post and talks around the world caused it, but the stats are significant (p << 0.01), and it sure is a heck of a coincidence.

¹ Code and data here: https://github.com/emorisse/ARIMAelephant

Despite the guest, Dr. Iain McGilchrist, explicitly rejecting the metaphor that the brain is like a computer, I can’t help but think about the process of building and incorporating machine learning models.

Psychiatrist and author Iain McGilchrist talks about his book, The Master and His Emissary, with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. McGilchrist argues we have misunderstand the purpose and effect of the divided brain. The left side is focused, concrete, and confident while the right side is about integration of ourselves with the complexity of the world around us. McGilchrist uses this distinction to analyze the history of western civilization. This is a wide-ranging conversation that includes discussions of poetry, philosophy, and economics.