What is the Internet? Nice intro / reminder

Nice advert by BT, giving us a sense of what the Internet is. We use it in training sessions sometimes.

Now you need never wonder what that little groove called under your nose in called…

How many people in your organisation / community could do with understand what the Internet is? Tailored, experiential training sessions available.

In Recovery - Affluenza

Troubled?

Read Affluenza.

Watch/listen to Lily… she’s growing up. Maybe we all can.

“I’m a weapon of massive consumption. But it’s not my fault, it’s how I’m programmed to function.”

Spread the antidotes, not the virus.

You are a Neuron — Slides

Here are the slides from my talk this evening at Twitter Dev Nest.  It was great fun writing and delivering this talk, and thanks for the great feedback in person and over Twitter.

Speaking at Twitter Developer Nest London

24 March, 2009
6:00 pm	to	10:00 pm

I’m giving a talk at the first Twitter Developer Nest in London next Tuesday, with a talk titled You are a Neuron, on something that has been floating around in the back of the old mind for a bit.   It is less of a technical ‘how to make this’ or ‘how I made this’ developer talk, and more of a call-to-arms or provocation to developers.

I’m going to step back from Twitter and look at the whole of it.  And draw some parallels with other things in the world, like your brain.

It ought to be a bit of fun and provoke some new thinking.  I’m thinking we need to go a bit deeper with these social utilities and really think about why something like Twitter is attactive and interesting.   I’m quite sure it is not just about my friends and I having a chat.

Anyway, I’ll post slides and stuff as they come together.

(How) can Web 2.0 help save the human race?

Via YouTube, via Twitter, via WordPress… to you.

Participation culture, creativity & social change - by Prof David Gauntlett (Age: 37), Professor of Media and Communications, at University of Westminster, UK.

Reduce carbon emissions by 90% by 2030 (or sooner)? How are we going to do that!!? David Gauntlett says, through encouraging more creativity in education and everyday life.

By moving from a “sit back and be told culture” (ie. school) to a “making and doing / connection” culture (assisted by web 2.0 participation and mass creativity).

Ivan Illich is yet again quoted (why do I so love defrocked catholic priests) and our friends at School of Everything will already know David I’m sure.

Richard Sennett’s wonderful book The Craftsman is also referenced.

I’m with them all the way…

But will we have the guts to offer our Bea (8) the South Down’s Learning Centre rather than mainstream factory-style high school, or maybe the local high is not as bad as it might seem…

Ahh - the personal and the political. But back to packing… we’ve got some carbon to burn (sigh). Train next time…

More from David Gauntlett here and here.

Alan Watts v South Park - Meaning of Life

Love Alan Watts. Interesting that the South Park guys wanted to team up to do this.

And on that note, we’re off on holiday for a week’s food, love and snow in Bardonecchia, Italian Alps.

Many thanks to Bea’s outstanding school Down’s Junior for approving of the extra holiday. No doubt it will be highly educational, in the deepest, funnest (is that a word?) sense of things.

Many thanks also to the 16 Guidelines to Happiness / Essential Education folk for sharing the video. More good clips and resources on their website.

Communities of Practice: Conversations To Collaboration

Lots in this fine presentation, but well worth flicking through and pondering.

Communities of Practice came up when I began an MA in Person Centred Education. I believe they have profound implications for lifelong learning.

Google pushes for open Energy data, launches PowerMeter

Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Google, has today announced Google PowerMeter, a tool that will take energy consumption data from smart household energy meters and make the data available and easy to understand.

This will be very useful to bring social energy measurement alive, where you and I can compare our energy use and work out how to reduce it.  It helps that Google.org are also pushing for free and open access to energy data for consumers.  This from their December submission to Californian energy regulators:

Accordingly, Google urges the Commission to include the following principles in its smart grid policy, discussed in greater detail below:

• Consumers should have direct access to real-time electricity usage information.
• Electricity usage information should be freely available to consumers.
• Electricity usage data should be made available in a standardized, open format, freely available to third-parties with permission from the consumer.

Freely available, standardised, open access to real-time energy data.  Once consumers have that, they can close the loop and easily reduce consumption.

The Google PowerMeter looks like access to smart meter billing information placed into some energy visualizations tools, and what also looks like some detection of the signature of particular appliances energy use.

Here’s an introductory video:

That all looks very cool.

The part that really interests me is that this gives a big push forward for open access to energy data, which then allow a whole ecosystem of tools and applications to develop to aid people in reducing their energy consumption, CO2 emissions, and money spent on energy.

Once we can make these energy measurements available, we can make them social, compare with each other, learn and save energy.

For a long time the big energy industries haven’t been too interested in opening up and giving us information, especially real-time information.

Let’s hope PowerMeter comes out of testing soon, and we get to see it operating here in the UK.  And let’s get these open standards up and running ASAP.  We’ve got a lot of measuring to do and changes to make to bring our energy consumption down.

Is that 7g or 0.2g CO2 per Google search?

You may recall news stories last month claiming that a google search results in 7g of CO2 emissions.   This story resulted in a storm of comment and reporting, a clarification from google (0.2g per search), and somewhat of a clarification from the original study’s author.  But all the resulting hoo har goes to show:

• The original claim was woefully unclear as reported
• Releasing research headlines without the research is troublesome and results in misunderstandings
• We’ll need to get a lot better at identifying what we are actually measuring when talking energy and CO2

I want to break this story down and inject some facts in, and hopefully we’ll learn something in the process.

So, starting at the beginning:

The Sunday Times reported on January 11 that a Google search produced about 7g of CO2.  In their words:

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.

Now, you’d hope the rest of the article would go on to clarify this a bit.  That 7g per search.  What does that include? Where are the boundaries drawn around what a search is?  Not explained.  So, that get left to indivudual interpretation and that’s where this sort of measurement and claim gets messy and there is a resulting storm of voices claiming This and That.

Google quickly posted a blog post and said that the energy required by Google’s servers to handle one search is 0.2g CO2.

Supposedly measuring the same thing, but we have over an order of magnitude difference?   This comes down to what is actually being measured, as later clarifications revealed.

The original 7g of CO2 per search was actually made up from several searches and a few minutes of time sitting at a PC, and it included the energy of the PC used to start the search, not just Google’s servers.  Here’s the Jan 16 clarification by The Times:

A report about online energy consumption (Google and you’ll damage the planet, Jan 11) said that “performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle” or about 7g of CO2 per search. We are happy to make clear that this does not refer to a one-hit Google search taking less than a second, which Google says produces about 0.2g of CO2, a figure we accept. In the article, we were referring to a Google search that may involve several attempts to find the object being sought and that may last for several minutes. Various experts put forward carbon emission estimates for such a search of 1g-10g depending on the time involved and the equipment used

Bingo. That’s the detail we originally needed.  It ain’t about Google’s servers or the search itself, but about you sitting down in front of a foot-warming PC with a big, bright screen and tapping away for a bit trying to find something out.  And we now have a range of 1g to 10g depending on circumstances.

So, the mention of Google at all in the story is pretty spurious,  they claim 0.2g for their part of the search, the rest is elsewhere.   A more correct statement could to be something like… “Using a PC and the Internet produces CO2 at the rate of between 1 and 10g CO2 per few minutes depending on your computer setup and what you are doing” (or something like that, please don’t quote this statement).

Basically, the Sunday Times got it wrong.  They did the classic lazy blame-somebody-else story, blaming the CO2 on Google, when it is really much more about a home PC and how it is used, and the rest of the Internet equipment used to move all that data around.

One more quote, from a followup article from TechNewsWorld put it basically to rest:

One problem: the study’s author, Harvard University physicist Alex Wissner-Gross, says he never mentions Google in the study. “For some reason, in their story on the study, the Times had an ax to grind with Google,” Wissner-Gross told TechNewsWorld. “Our work has nothing to do with Google. Our focus was exclusively on the Web overall, and we found that it takes on average about 20 milligrams of CO2 per second to visit a Web site.”

And the example involving tea kettles? “They did that. I have no idea where they got those statistics,” Wissner-Gross said.

An average 0.02g of CO2 per second.  That’s 1.2g per minute, or 72g CO2 per hour.

Contrast that to driving your car, which likely produces 200g CO2 per km or more.  Drive 1km, or browse the net for nearly three hours?

The Science & Art of (Ethical?) Persuasion

We are all enjoying reading “YES! 50 Secrets from the Science of Persuasion” by leading academics Goldstein and Cialdini with Martin making it pacy and very readable. Even Bea (8) snaffled it to swot up, priding herself on the ability to convince her parents of just about anything.

What I’m liking about the book, other than the credibility of its empirically based contents, is its ethics.

Reviews say “earnest and honest… Jedi-like… perfectly pitched for smart business people…charmingly practical.”

I’ll be quoting from it often.

“Constructive tools that help build authentic [there's that word again] relationships with others, highlight the genuine strengths of one’s message, initiative or product, and ultimately create outcomes that are in the best interests of all parties.

“When these tools are instead used unethically as weapons, however - for example, by dishonestly or artificially importing the principles of social influence into situations in which they don’t naturally exist - the short-term gains will almost invariably be followed by long-term losses… the long-term reputational consequences are dire when such dishonesty is eventually discovered.”

In a post-Cluetrain world where the blogosphere and online consumer ’sharing’ can bring down the biggest or the smallest bullshit artistes, the time has never been more ripe for telling it straight - and well.

The Science of Persuasion is a great read to help you do so. I am not surprised it made it into Britain’s most prestigious award for science writing from the Royal Society.

Let’s hope Bea wields her new-found knowledge with kindness and wisdom! Let’s hope we all do… with carrots not sticks.

COMPETITION FOR NODESTONE READERS

Examples please people… let’s start adding up the real-life situations of positive persuasion, and the costs of unethical propaganda… A copy of Naked Conversations by Scoble and Israel or Yes! for the best entries (with links to case studies ideally) in the comments section.

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