Screen saver

Photo credit Tom Raftery

I’m an IT guy. I love my (Mac) computer. Most other IT people I know love their computers too, be they Mac, Windows or *nix based. Of course you would when you are typically working on them 8+ hours per day.

We take pride in our computers – how fast they are, the latest software/widget we installed, etc.

One boast I hear people come out with regularly, is how long it has been since their last computer re-start. This can be a measure of just how stable the operating system is – if it hasn’t crashed or needed a re-start in weeks/months then it must be really stable! This is an way-of-thinking which needs to change, quickly.

The problem with this, of course, is that it means people are not shutting down their computers and are therefore needlessly consuming electricity (using more energy and emitting more CO2).

Power strip with switch

Power strip with switch


Modern browsers remember all the windows/tabs you have open when you quit them so there can be no reason for not shutting down your computer every evening.

Shutting down, mind you, not simply putting it to sleep.

And not just the computer either, the monitor (if you have an external one), the printer, external drive, etc. – all the peripherals.

Having all your devices plugged into a power strip with a switch allows the power to be cut to all of them in one easy go.

The badge of pride now should be how long it has been since you left the computer on overnight – obviously longer = better!

by-nc-sa

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Green numbers

Photo credit Unhindered by Talent

Here is this Friday’s Green Numbers round-up:

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

by-nc-sa

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IBM EcoJam Themes tag cloud
Photo credit Tom Raftery

I participated in last week’s IBM Global Eco Jam.

As you can see from above, the event generated 2080 posts from a total of 3987 logins.

I mentioned previously that the quality of the participants in the jam was really impressive, but what were attendees most interested in talking about during the jam?

The screenshot above is a tag cloud of the themes discussed during the jam. And while it gives some idea of the relative importance of topics explored during the jam, I decided to see if I could dig a little deeper into the numbers.

Doing a View Source of this page tells me the pixel size of each of the terms – see below:

12px – air
12px – business_case
12px – city
12px – collaboration_tools
12px – cooling
12px – electricity
12px – energy_savings
12px – improve_energy efficient efficiency
12px – public_transportation
12px – reporting
12px – software
18px – business_processes
18px – carbon_footprint
18px – climate_change
18px – efficient
18px – energy_management
18px – energy_usage
18px – goals
18px – incentives
18px – mobility
18px – smart_grid
18px – solar
18px – working_home
22px – buildings
22px – cities
22px – data_centers
22px – energy_consumption
22px – energy_efficiency
22px – green
22px – power
22px – reduce_energy
22px – supply_chain
22px – sustainability
22px – water
22px – workplace

Unfortunately they only seem to fall into three sizes – 12px, 18px and 22px – so not hugely granular, still it is something.

Clicking on the tags to see the posts doesn’t give an immediate indication of why some are larger than others unfortunately. All of the 22px tags contain 10 posts but so do the 18px and the 12px! Nor does it appear to refer to the number of replies to posts.

It is equally unclear how the tags were arrived at in the first place, apart from this explanation on the site – “A special text-mining tool has identified themes across all of the discussions in Global Eco-efficiency Jam. The theme cloud below illustrates major concepts based on frequency of word use”.

When creating a new post, or replying to previous posts there was no option to tag your responses.

35 posts were identified as being “Hot Ideas” – no idea how or why they were identified as such. It appears to have been a manual process. The hot ideas which generated the most responses (those with >30 replies) were, in decreasing order:

Getting Around – Mobility Services? – 79 replies
Cultural barriers to online collaboration – 58 replies
Greening Your Business Processes for Innovation – 47 replies
Green IT & Cloud Computing – 39 replies
Citizen engagement – 33 replies
Real world customer examples – 32 replies
IT’s Central Role In Managing Energy & Carbon – 32 replies
Integration to improve energy and eco-efficiency – 31 replies

Some of the Hot Ideas had as few as two responses, so the Hot Ideas designation doesn’t appear to come from response number!

Still, despite the lack of transparency around the process, it was an incredibly worthwhile event. I ended up contributing 45 posts (2% of the posts!) which received 46 responses. I learned loads and would definitely participate if IBM decide to hold another (hint, hint!).

by-nc-sa

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Interesting energy storage solutions?

February 3, 2010 storage

Photo credit Tom Raftery
I published this post on the IBM Global Eco Jam last week and it generated some interesting feedback so I thought I’d re-publish it here too to solicit your thoughts –
I was at the NewNet CleanTech Investors Summit in London last November.
At this event a poll was taken asking which [...]

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NightWatchman saving energy

February 2, 2010 energy efficiency

Photo credit officer2975
Following on from my earlier post about the importance of turning things off, we had a briefing the other day from a company called 1E.
1E entered the power management space about 10 years ago when they wrote NightWatchman. NightWatchman is a PC power management application which aims to reduce the energy wasted [...]

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Forget mobile phone chargers – they are not the problem!

February 2, 2010 energy efficiency

I participated in the recent IBM Global Eco Jam and there were some fantastic discussions there.
One of the discussions surprised me though – people were still talking about unplugging mobile phone chargers as if that was a significant problem. It is not. On the contrary, it is a dangerous distraction.
Watch the video above. Seriously, do. [...]

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Friday Morning Green Numbers round-up 01/29/2010

January 29, 2010 GreenNumbers

Photo credit Unhindered by Talent
Here is this Friday’s Green Numbers round-up:

U.S. pledges 17 percent emissions reduction by 2020 – washingtonpost.com
The United States pledged Thursday to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent by 2020 from 2005 levels under an international climate agreement, though it made its commitment contingent on passing legislation at home. [...]

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IBM Global Eco-Efficiency Jam Day 2

January 29, 2010 IBM

Today is the final day of IBM’s Global Eco-efficiency Jam (it finishes at 6pm CET today) and it has been awesome.
There have been hundreds of discussions on all manner of Eco-related topics – everything from LEED certification, to Green software engineering, to Energy Efficiency certificates to Smart cities and collaboration.
People have been asking questions like:
If [...]

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Can Apple make Home Energy Management sexy?

January 28, 2010 energy efficiency

Will Apple move into home energy management, and if they do, can they make it sexy and front-of-mind for everyone?
I made this point in a reply to a post earlier on the IBM Global Eco Jam and I thought it could well do with being fleshed out to a full post here to see what [...]

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