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
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!
Photo credit Unhindered by Talent
Here is this Friday’s Green Numbers round-up:
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Scant Arctic ice could mean summer double whammy | Reuters
Scant ice over the Arctic Sea this winter could mean a “double whammy” of powerful ice-melt next summer
tags: greennumbers, arctic sea ice, arctic ice, ice melt
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Tibet temperatures hit record high in 2009 | Reuters
Temperatures in Tibet rose last year to the highest level since records began for the remote Himalayan country, which scientists say is particularly vulnerable to global warming, state media reported on Friday.
tags: greennumbers, tibet, himalayas, global warming, temperatures
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10 Animals on the brink of extinction
The 10 animals that are in the most danger of extinction – surprisingly high number are cats
tags: extinction, greennumbers, animals
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Shackleton whisky recovered after 100 years in polar ice
“Five crates of whisky and brandy belonging to polar explorer Ernest Shackleton have been recovered after being buried for more than 100 years under the Antarctic ice, explorers said Friday.
The spirits were excavated from beneath Shackleton’s Antarctic hut which was built in 1908.”
tags: whisky, brandy, greennumbers, antarctic, shackleton
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25 Percent of U.S. Nuclear Power Plants Are Leaking Radioactive Chemicals : TreeHugger
The Associated Press recently reported that at least 27 of 104 nuclear reactors across the United States are leaking potentially dangerous levels of tritium into the groundwater around the plants.
The scope of the problem surfaced after the recent discovery of a leak at the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant. According to the AP, new tests have shown that the levels of tritium in the wells at the Vernon, Vermont site are more than three-and-a-half times the federal safety standard.
tags: nuclear power, tritium, greennumbers, nuclear reactors, groundwater
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China doubles wind power in 1 year – BusinessWeek
China doubled the amount of energy generated from windmills last year, a report from the global wind industry said Wednesday.
The Global Wind Energy Council said the sector grew rapidly last year — with total wind capacity up 31 percent — despite the economic downturn.
The market for new wind turbines was worth $63 billion in 2009, it said.
China became the biggest market for new wind turbines last year, as it doubled power capacity from 12 gigawatts to 25 gigawatts
tags: china, Global Wind Energy Council, greennumbers, wind energy, wind power
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Obama Seeks to Cut $38 Billion Coal & Oil Subsidies Out of Budget : TreeHugger
“We’ve heard this one before; Obama threatening to sever subsidies to the fossil fuel industry. He called for ending the subsidies during his SOTU, and was doing so even before that. Now, he’s proposing that $36 billion worth of those subsidies for oil and $2.3 billion for coal (both get $70 billion a year in total) get stripped from the budget–which would be great. Too bad special interests will almost certainly keep this from happening.
tags: obama, subsidies, coal subsidies, greennumbers, oil subsidies, lobbyists
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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!).
