Googling vs. boiling

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Interesting ‘revelation’ in Times Online.

Performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea, according to new research.

While millions of people tap into Google without considering the environment, a typical search generates about 7g of CO2 Boiling a kettle generates about 15g. “Google operates huge data centres around the world that consume a great deal of power,” said Alex Wissner-Gross, a Harvard University physicist whose research on the environmental impact of computing is due out soon. “A Google search has a definite environmental impact.”

Google is secretive about its energy consumption and carbon footprint. It also refuses to divulge the locations of its data centres. However, with more than 200m internet searches estimated globally daily, the electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions caused by computers and the internet is provoking concern. A recent report by Gartner, the industry analysts, said the global IT industry generated as much greenhouse gas as the world’s airlines – about 2% of global CO2 emissions. “Data centres are among the most energy-intensive facilities imaginable,” said Evan Mills, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. Banks of servers storing billions of web pages require power.

Hmmm… This Wissner-Gross seems to be a bright lad. He’s a Fellow at the Harvard environment Center where his bio says that in 2003 he “became the last person in MIT history to receive a triple major, with bachelors in Physics, Electrical Engineering, and Mathematics, while simultaneously graduating first in his class from the MIT School of Engineering as the Henry Ford II Scholar.” According to his home page he has seven granted or pending patents, and fourteen published papers in addition to his PhD. And he was a boy soprano for the New York City Opera. He’s also set up CO2stats, a site that claims that it “makes your site carbon neutral and shows visitors you’re environmentally friendly”.

I’m not convinced by the search vs. kettle calculation, but I am sure that the environmental impact of computing is one of the Next Big Stories.

Thanks to Darren Waters for the original link.

Inane email disclaimers

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This morning’s Observer column about inane email disclaimers.

A friend sends you an email saying "How about lunch?" and it comes with this implicit threat that if you so much as breathe a word of it to any living being the massed litigators of Messrs Sue, Grabbit and Runne will descend upon you. The practice is now so widespread that most of us have become inured to it. We treat it as a penance to be borne – like muzak in lifts and the "we really value your call, please hold" mantra of customer "help" lines.

The funny thing is that the practice is, at best, legally dubious…

I’m collecting examples of this idiotic legalese. Here’s one that came in this morning:

This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential, and may be subject to legal privilege, and are intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed. If you have received this email in error or think you may have done so, you may not peruse, use, disseminate, distribute or copy this message. Please notify the sender immediately and delete the original e-mail from your system. The contents, comments and views contained or expressed within this correspondence do not necessarily reflect those of [sending organisation] and are not intended to create legal relations with the recipient.

LATER: A comment on cearte.ie says:

But don’t forget that, in Hedley Byrne & Co Ltd v Heller & Partners Ltd [1964] AC 465, [1963] UKHL 4 (28 May 1963), the case that established liability in principle for negligent misrepresentation, a disclaimer was effective!

Songsmith: the backstory

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When I mentioned Songsmith the other day, my colleague Tony Hirst reminded me wryly that he had sent me a link about it months ago. And of course he was right. Here it is.

The program works by identifying the 12 standard musical notes in a sung melody, and then feeding those notes into an algorithm that has been trained by listening to 300 songs in varying genres and learning how to identify chords and melody fragments that work well together. The result is a series of musical accompaniments that users can adjust via sliders for "happy factor" and "jazz factor."

"I suspect musicians will argue that this is another step towards homogenized elevator music for all," Peter Bentley, a computer scientist at University College London, told New Scientist. "But I see a big market for this, whether it's liked by musicians or not." We agree, and we think the web is the perfect place to find that market.

Error tracking

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Here’s something you don’t see every day — from Jack Shafer in Slate.

Track my errors: This hand-built RSS feed will ring every time Slate runs a "Press Box" correction. For e-mail notification of errors in this specific column, type the word decline in the subject head of an e-mail message, and send it to slate.pressbox@gmail.com.

The future of newspapers

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Interesting quotes in a Guardian piece about Clay Shirky.

The great misfortune of newspapers in this era is that they were such a good idea for such a long time that people felt the newspaper business model was part of a deep truth about the world, rather than just the way things happened to be. It's like the fall of communism, where a lot of the eastern European satellite states had an easier time because there were still people alive who remembered life before the Soviet Union – nobody in Russia remembered it. Newspaper people are like Russians, in a way.

Jeff Jarvis said it beautifully: "If you can't imagine anyone linking to what you're about to write, don't write it." The things that the Huffington Post or the Daily Beast have are good storytelling and low costs. Newspapers are going to get more elitist and less elitist. The elitist argument is: "Be the Economist or New Yorker, a small, niche publication that says: 'We're only opening our mouths when what we say is demonstrably superior to anything else on the subject.'" The populist model is: "We're going to take all the news pieces we get and have an enormous amount of commentary. It's whatever readers want to talk about." Finding the working business model between them in that expanded range is the new challenge.

History’s curious way of repeating itself

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This is the illustration on a lovely post by Nick Bilton discussing the way what John Seely Brown called ‘endism’ keeps cropping up in discussions of media ecology.

Bilton ends by saying:

Accusations of people “never leaving their house again” or books and the written word “ceasing to exist” didn’t start with the telephone or the phonograph. These assumptions come with each new invention or technology. Printing presses, telephones, telegraphs, phonographs, radios, moving images–are all born into a world where their antiquated predecessors are soon-to-be deceased forms of information delivery. They are the new, and the old will have no place in this novel world. That is, until the next thing comes along.

The way we tell stories and consume content inevitably changes with the birth of these new technologies. The voice of the predecessor doesn’t instantly die when a new form of communication arrives, it begins to morph and adapt to the changing climate, or as the current pundits aptly predict, it won’t survive. But take a 10,000 foot view–we’re just in the infancy of this wonderful melded form of journalism and media, where each form of broadcast borrows from the other as a method of storytelling. We’re not going to wake up tomorrow to find out that newspapers no longer exist. Yes, in the long run, a large contingent won’t survive, and the ones that do will tell stories very differently than they do today, carving out a new, ever-changing narrative. But this evolutionary process is going to take time. History tells us so.

He also includes a link to a splendid piece in Slate.

Yes Wii Can!

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Nintendo had to be tickled to learn that the new White House will include a Wii. President-elect Obama told the New York Times that his girls got one of the consoles for Christmas and that he himself was putting in some time at the virtual bowling alley, with considerably more success than he had at the real-world lanes.

But Obama’s flirtation with the Wii is nothing compared to his deep devotion to his BlackBerry, which his advisors want him to stop using because of legal and security concerns. “I’m still clinging to my BlackBerry,” Obama said Wednesday in an interview. “They’re going to pry it out of my hands.” What’s an endorsement like that worth if Research in Motion had to pay for it on the celebrity market? At least $25 million, maybe twice that, said agents asked by the New York Times. “You always want the celebrity to be a good fit with your brand, and is anybody considered a better communicator right now than Barack Obama, or a better networker?” said Fran Kelly, chief executive of the Arnold Worldwide ad agency. “It couldn’t have a better spokesperson.” This, of course, could all change if Obama can’t find the reset button for the economy.

Link.

OLPC downsizes

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ArsTechnica reports that

In an announcement posted to the OLPC wiki, Negroponte reveals that the organization will have to significantly scale back and cut costs in order to continue operating. The new budget constraints have necessitated major layoffs and pay cuts.

"Like many other nonprofits that are facing tough economic times, One Laptop per Child must downsize in order to keep costs in line with fewer financial resources. Today we are reducing our team by approximately 50% and there will be salary reductions for the remaining 32 people," he wrote. "While we are saddened by this development, we remain firmly committed to our mission of getting laptops to children in developing countries."

Another victim of OLPC budget cuts is the Sugar project, a Linux-based education software platform that OLPC developed for its laptops. This cut is unsurprising, because OLPC has gradually been moving away from Sugar and has increasingly sought to support Windows. It is still unclear whether OLPC will continue to encourage its large buyers to adopt Sugar, but Negroponte says unambiguously that the organization will be working on transitioning Sugar development entirely to the community.

The report goes on to describe the OLPC project’s “extreme dependence on economy of scale” as its Achilles heel.

The organization was not able to secure the large bulk orders that it had originally anticipated and fell short of meeting its target $100 per unit price. The worldwide economic slowdown has made it even more difficult for OLPC to find developing countries that have cash to spare on education technology. The latest restructuring effort could help OLPC regain its focus, but the failure of its past attempts to do so don’t really provide much confidence.

Hmmm… I’m sorry that they’ve hit trouble, but my sympathy is tempered by irritation at the way the project seems to be re-focussing on running Windows.

Microsoft offers Vista replacement. Servers fall over.

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From Good Morning Silicon Valley.

Microsoft surely anticipated a crowd when it announced this week that 2.5 million current users of Windows Vista SP1 would be allowed to download a free beta of the upcoming Windows 7 starting at noon Pacific today (see “Microsoft offers Vista users something beta“), but it apparently wasn’t ready for the Wal-Mart-on-Black-Friday kind of mob that gathered outside its virtual doors and collectively clicked its servers into whimpering submission. With the Web site faltering under the load, Microsoft called a timeout and said it needed to add “some additional infrastructure support to the Microsoft.com properties before we post the public beta.” No ETA was given, and prospective downloaders have been left to mill about aimlessly, checking their favorite tech news sites for a new go signal and talking among themselves about the benefits of BitTorrent.

There’s nothing wrong with Vista, of course. Nothing at all.