The hidden challenges of using cloud backup to replace tape

October 15, 2013

It's no secret: IT pros absolutely love to hate tape. I've remarked on that fact in this column several times over the past few years, and it's no less true now than it was any of the other times I've mentioned it. But that's all changing! What local disk backup couldn't solve on its own, cloud storage providers with their hyperredundant and constantly maintained fleets of disk can certainly fix! Finally, we can put a stake in the heart of tape and it will simply become a ghost story that the old timers tell IT newbs. Right?

Maybe, but not so fast. Although the cloud absolutely can replace some of the use cases for tape, it can't satisfy them for everyone all the time. The very same reasons why tape was still alive and kicking when I wrote about it nearly four years ago are still largely true today.

However, you need not fret if you're itching to get rid of tape and make backup someone else's problem by moving it to the cloud. Things are definitely looking up -- especially if you're working with relatively small amounts of data, can deal with long restoration times, or have ridiculous amounts of bandwidth to spare.

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Source: http://podcasts.infoworld.com/d/data-explosion/the-hidden-challenges-of-using-cloud-backup-replace-tape-228690?source=rss_infoworld_top_stories_
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T-Mobile Is Killing Grandfathered Plans (Updated)

Following several rumors, Engadget has confirmed that T-Mobile is doing away with old data plans and forcing customers to choose from one of its current Simple Choice plans. According to a statement from the company a "vast majority" of customers will get "similar or better features at a comparable price."

Read more...

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/O7WJut355eg/t-mobile-is-killing-grandfathered-plans-1445558366
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Do Elephants Weep as an Emotional Response? (Op-Ed)

Marc Bekoff, emeritus professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, is one of the world's pioneering cognitive ethologists, a Guggenheim Fellow, and co-founder with Jane Goodall of Ethologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. This essay is adapted from one that appeared in Bekoff's column Animal Emotions in Psychology Today. He contributed this article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

A recent newspaper article called "Elephant tears: Newborn weeps after being parted from mother who tried to kill him" reports about a newborn male elephant who "cried for five hours without stopping after he was rejected by his mother."

This story immediately made me think of the book When Elephants Weep (Delta, 1996), which helped to open the door to people taking the emotional lives of animals more seriously than they previously had.

I've been studying various aspects of animal behavior and animal emotions for more than four decades, and have published numerous books and essays about these areas of inquiry, so the story about the weeping elephant resulted in my receiving a number of emails and also in doing an interview with Discovery News.

My approach to, and take on, this story, is fairly straightforward. I did a Google search for topics including "Do/can elephants weep?", "Do/can elephants cry?", "Do/can animals weep?", and "Do/can animals cry?" and found some very interesting answers that ranged all over the place from "Sure they do" to "Probably they do", to "No, they don't" I also looked for various positions on whether or not crying/weeping were associated with various emotions as they are in human animals.

In a nutshell, available information supports the view that other animals do cry and weep and that they can be closely associated with various emotions, including, perhaps most likely, sadness and grief that are associated with loss. Of course, crying or weeping may be more hard-wired, in the recent case with the infant elephant responding to a loss of much-needed touch or what is also called "contact comfort" offered by his mother.

One worker quoted in the above article noted, "The calf was very upset and he was crying for five hours before he could be consoled." Humans did try to calm him down but their touch is not the same as another elephant's, and of course there could also be visual and olfactory components associated with the potpourri of contact comfort.

So, while scientists are not 100-percent certain, solid scientific research supports the view that elephants and other nonhuman animals weep as part of an emotional response. Rather than dismissing this possibility as merely storytelling, we need to study it in more detail. After all, "the plural of anecdote is data" and stories and citizen science can and should motivate rigorous scientific research. And, let's not forget that many "surprises" have been discovered in the emotional lives of animals, including laughing rats and dogs and empathic chickens, mice and rats — all published in outstanding peer-reviewed professional journals.

At one website called "Do elephants cry?" I found the following quote: "However, we do not know what emotions elephants feel, if any, in the same manner that we do not necessarily know for sure what emotions other people feel. This is simply because we cannot measure emotions, we can only experience them. As a result, science cannot say whether elephants experience emotions, whether other people experience emotions, or what these emotions are like. This is because science requires that we be able to measure something in order to draw any conclusions about it."

I couldn't find the date this answer was posted but it surely does not reflect current or even recent ideas about the study of human and nonhuman emotions. For example, you can read excellent examples of recent work in such books as "Gifts of the Crow: How Perception, Emotion, and Thought Allow Smart Birds to Behave Like Humans" (Atria Books, 2013) and "Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures" (Crown, 2013)

As with many other aspects of the cognitive and emotional lives of animals, it turns out that we are not alone, and that human exceptionalism is more a myth than a fact. So, I offer that we are not the only animals who cry or weep as an emotional response, though I look forward to more research on this topic.

Bekoff's most recent Op-Ed was "'The Smile of a Dolphin,' Banned in Texas." This article was adapted from "Do Elephants Weep as an Emotional Response?" in Psychology Today. More of the author's essays are available in "Why Dogs Hump and Bees Get Depressed." The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on LiveScience.

Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/elephants-weep-emotional-response-op-ed-163936675.html
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Arkansas AD Long chosen selection committee chair

Arkansas athletic director Jeff Long will be the first chairman of the College Football Playoff selection committee, and the rest of the 13-member panel that will decide which teams play for the 2014 national championship will be officially revealed Wednesday.

The announcement of Long to lead the committee and act as a spokesman was made Monday.

A news conference will be held Wednesday at the College Football Playoff's new offices in Irving, Texas, with Long and executive director Bill Hancock unveiling the rest of the members.

The names of the other members expected to be on the committee, however, already have been reported by The Associated Press and other media outlets.

Long is among five current athletic directors, along with West Virginia's Oliver Luck, Wisconsin's Barry Alvarez, Clemson's Dan Radakovich and Southern California's Pat Haden.

Also expected on the committee are: Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; retired Lt. Gen Michael Gould; former Big East Commissioner Mike Tranghese; former Nebraska coach Tom Osborne; former Notre Dame, Stanford and Washington coach Tyrone Willingham; former NFL and Mississippi quarterback Archie Manning; former NCAA vice president Tom Jernstedt; and former college sports writer Steve Wieberg.

The committee will pick the four teams to play in the national semifinals in the new postseason system that will replace the Bowl Championship Series after this season. The winners will play about a week later for the national championship.

Long has led the athletic department at Arkansas since 2008 after holding the same position at Pittsburgh. He played football and baseball at Ohio Wesleyan and worked on the football staffs at Rice, North Carolina State, Duke and Michigan.

"I'm very humbled and honored to serve as the first chairman of the College Football Playoff Selection Committee," Long said in a statement. "There is no doubt our task will be challenging. However, I am confident in the committee members' ability to determine the four best teams in college football. I look forward to getting to work."

Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/347875155d53465d95cec892aeb06419/Article_2013-10-14-Playoff%20Committee/id-65cbaf726b974854bbb7788de8acdf7d
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How Do We Know What We Know? Three Nobel-Winning Approaches

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announces the winners of the 2013 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in Stockholm Monday. The prize went to U.S. professors Eugene Fama, Lars Peter Hansen and Robert Shiller.

Claudio Bresciani/AP

Eugene Fama, Lars Peter Hansen, and Robert Shiller were awarded the Nobel Prize in economics today for their efforts to answer to a key question: How do the prices of assets like stocks and real estate behave over time?

They came to rather different answers to that question. The markets are rational and efficient, Fama has argued; not so much, has been Shiller's reply. This difference has been widely discussed today.

But it's also worth pointing out how differently these three economists study the world, which points to a much bigger question: How do we know what we know in economics, or indeed in any social science? The three winners of today's Nobel Prize in economics differ not only in their conclusions, but also in their ways of knowing.

Fama is an empiricist, and studies the world of asset prices from his computer screen. For nearly 50 years he has been examining price movements, minute by minute year by year. Perusing the 105 research papers on Fama's CV makes clear his way of knowing: Millions of "observations" that is, price data points — examined with exactitude. From these millions of data points – consistently observed — Fama has discerned what is. In this way of knowing, one need not venture out. The beauty of staying inside is the consistency of the weather: it is possible, in empirical testing, to control for much of the messiness outside. A "clean" empirical test a good one.

Shiller, on the other hand, is nothing if not out. Though his early methods were similar to Fama's, Shiller's recent work begins with the premise that the world cannot be understood through data points alone. His work pioneered the use of psychology in understanding market behavior, inviting the messiness of the human mind into the conversation. While Fama watched price behavior, Shiller watched human behavior, and then developed ideas about the mechanisms by which one influenced the other.

Hansen is a scientist's scientist, the quantitative heavyweight of the three. Unlike Fama or Shiller, he has no position to defend. Instead he has made his mark designing ways to statistically ask and answer questions about how prices behave. His contribution is in accurate and creative measurement. Advances in measurement advance our ability to incorporate the messiness of the world into clean empirical tests, in fact, to bring Shiller and Fama into one another's orbit.

How do we know what we know? We examine data, we study people, and then we measure everything as best we can. We need all three.

Pietra Rivoli is Professor at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University.

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/10/14/234234987/how-do-we-know-what-we-know-three-nobel-winning-approaches?ft=1&f=
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Shutdown's Reach Extends To South Pole

Research season was just getting started when the government shutdown put McMurdo Station into "caretaker" mode, halting data collection. Host Scott Simon speaks to Gretchen Hofmann, a professor at University of California, Santa Barbara, about the government shutdown's impact on research in Antarctica.

Source: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=232622003&ft=1&f=1007
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Classic Cars: The Best 'Alternative Investment' of All - Yahoo Finance

This week hundreds of thousands of car enthusiasts will descend on Hershey Park in Pennsylvania for the annual classic car show and auction. The value of classic cars has jumped 39% this year, according to the Historic Automobile Group Index (HAGI), which tracks the financial performance of 50 rare and exotic classic cars. These cars have outperformed collectibles such as gold, wine, art, stamps and coins over the last 10 years. And more investors turned to cars after the global stock selloff in 2008.

Related: Jim Grant’s Top 3 “Undervalued” Assets

Ferraris, Alfa Romeos, Bugattis, Bentleys, Aston Martins and Duesenbergs often sell for millions of dollars every year at the world famous Concours D'Elegance Pebble Beach and Amelia Island auctions, but classic cars have never been the exclusive toys of the rich and famous. Last month on the boardwalk in Wildwood, NJ, owners of Corvettes, Fords, Chevys, Pontiacs and Plymouths were proudly showing off their cars to judges and the public, hoping to win a “best in show” prize. Inside the Wildwood Convention Hall, more than 100 muscle and antique cars were up for auction, at prices the average car fan could afford.

David Gooding, president and founder of auction house Gooding & Co., has sold thousands of classic cars over the years. He says the beauty, mystique and history of these cars are what make them so valuable and coveted by collectors from around the globe. The auction house had a 91% sale rate at the two-day Pebble Beach auction in California, with an average price per lot of $965,675. Thirty of the 127 cars Gooding offered at Pebble Beach sold for more than a $1 million a piece, including the $8.745 million sale of a 1937 Bugatti Type 57SC Atalante, a new world record for a Bugatti sold at auction. Gooding says 75% of classic car buyers are based in the U.S. but there has been growing interest from new collectors in Asia, the Middle East and South America.

Related: Ferrari 250 GTO sells for $52 million in latest world record

“Automobiles are recognized as an art form,” he tells The Daily Ticker. “People are realizing they are exciting to collect. You can drive them and take them around the world. A car can be a passport to adventure.”

The classic car that has seen the greatest price appreciation is the Ferrari. A 1963 Ferrari 250 GTO racer was acquired this summer in a private sale for more than $52 million, making it the world’s most expensive car. It beat the previous all-time record of $27.5 million for a 1967 Ferrari 275 Spyder that was sold in Monterey, Calif. in August. The HAGI Ferrari Index has gained 44% since January but Dietrich Hatlapa, founder of the Historic Auto Group Index, worries that the recent explosion in the classic car market may be due for a correction.

“Classic cars have been a very good performer in terms of value appreciation and the financial crisis helped classic cars and collectible markets,” says Hatlapa in a phone interview from Europe. “But some of the growth rates we’ve seen are not sustainable in the long term. The art and wine markets have already corrected. You really have to know what you’re doing.”

Don Williams, a classic car dealer and collector, rejects the idea that the classic car market could be a bubble.

“A bubble is when people are speculating with borrowed money,” he explains. “I think [classic cars] are the most solid form of investing in the world. Where gold keeps getting dug up, stocks keep getting printed, the cars are very, very limited. We’re in an infancy level compared to any other form of investing. The hobby has expanded so internationally that we have 10, 20, maybe 30 times as many potential buyers than cars.”

Related: Jim Rogers: Gold Could Fall to $900 in Next 1-2 Years

Williams, president of the internationally known Blackhawk Museum in California and owner of The Auto Collections in Las Vegas, has been described “as the man who buys and sells more million dollar cars than anyone in the business.” His personal collection of 100 cars includes a $7 million Bugatti and a 1966 Chevy Impala convertible. In his 40 years of collecting, Williams has owned between 8,000 to 10,000 cars: "I'm addicted," he admits. Even with rising prices, Williams encourages individuals who have always wanted a classic car to take the plunge.

“Not everybody is equipped financially to just start collecting at the high-end level,” Williams notes. “Buy one that you can personally afford, one that will bring enjoyment to your life, not a financial burden. Cars have brought a lot of friends into my life. It cuts through all language barriers.”

Tell Us What You Think!

Do you own a classic car? Have you attended the major car auctions? Send an email to: thedailyticker@yahoo.com.

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