The internet is ruining the environment?

All my music, email, pictures, blog posts, etc. are stored in "the cloud" these days, and before I read the article below, I never really thought much about it. Turns out that "the cloud" is a giant blight on the environment.

Power, Pollution and the Internet

Most data centers [aka the physical homes of "the cloud"], by design, consume vast amounts of energy in an incongruously wasteful manner...Online companies typically run their facilities at maximum capacity around the clock, whatever the demand. As a result, data centers can waste 90 percent or more of the electricity they pull off the grid...To guard against a power failure, they further rely on banks of generators that emit diesel exhaust. The pollution from data centers has increasingly been cited by the authorities for violating clean air regulations, documents show. In Silicon Valley, many data centers appear on the state government’s Toxic Air Contaminant Inventory, a roster of the area’s top stationary diesel polluters. Worldwide, the digital warehouses use about 30 billion watts of electricity, roughly equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants, [and]...data centers in the United States account for one-quarter to one-third of that load, the estimates show.

Energy efficiency varies widely from company to company. But at the request of The Times, the consulting firm McKinsey & Company analyzed energy use by data centers and found that, on average, they were using only 6 percent to 12 percent of the electricity powering their servers to perform computations. The rest was essentially used to keep servers idling and ready in case of a surge in activity that could slow or crash their operations.

Even running electricity at full throttle has not been enough to satisfy the industry. In addition to generators, most large data centers contain banks of huge, spinning flywheels or thousands of lead-acid batteries — many of them similar to automobile batteries — to power the computers in case of a grid failure as brief as a few hundredths of a second, an interruption that could crash the servers. 

So like, the more I blog, the more we all die? That's...not good at all. Sorry about that, folks!

-----

Day 4: complete. It's Friday. Yay.

This is the first thing that's made me want to get off Facebook...and the Internet.

What if someone could point a camera at you and instantly know your name, social security number, and penchant for Farmville? That'd be creepy, right? And invasive? I certainly think so.

But surely, you say, such a thing is the suff of science fiction. Bad news: IT'S NOT. It's the stuff of reality today.  It might be time to panic.

As I discovered in this story (and this one), researchers at Carnegie Mellon have recently combined "an off-the-shelf face recognizer, cloud computing and publicly available information from social network sites — to identify individuals online and offline in the physical world" BY THEIR FACE.  As this article explains, "Since these technologies are also accessible by end-users, the results foreshadow a future when we all may be recognizable on the street — not just by friends or government agencies using sophisticated devices, but by anyone with a smartphone and Internet connection."  All someone has to do is point a camera at your mug and take a picture.

Lest you think this is just an academic exercise, here's a brief description of what the Carnegie Mellon team did with their technology:

In one experiment, Acquisti's team identified individuals on a popular online dating site where members protect their privacy through pseudonyms. In a second experiment, they identified students walking on campus — based on their profile photos on Facebook. In a third experiment, the research team predicted personal interests and, in some cases, even the Social Security numbers of the students, beginning with only a photo of their faces. (Source)

More info here.

I am, to put it mildly, quite disturbed.  We are way closer to a bleak dystopian future than I ever suspected.

***

Fun fact: The Blogger spell checker doesn't recognize the word "dystopian."  It suggests I may have meant "dyspepsia," "Fallopian," "Dionysian" or "Bostonian."  I think I need to get a doom-themed add-on for this thing.

Perhaps this is why I can't remember anything these days. (It's not old age after all!)

Science just published an article entitled "Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips." Apparently (according to this guy (or gal)) because the internet has given us the ability to look anything up, any time, the way we remember things is changing. Or, put another way, what we remember is changing. It seems we are less prone to remembering facts, and more prone to remembering where we can find facts. I'm not sure if this is good or bad, but I sure know that it describes my favored memory retrieval process! The "Google effect," as it is called, is why you probably don't want me on your trivia team. I can't remember facts worth shit, but I sure can remember where I read about relevant content. (Thanks, brain. That's so useful for making me look like a non-idiot.)

As always, I am likely overgeneralizing the results of just one study. Here's the experiments that have led me to my rash conclusion (described here, as I don't currently have access to the full article.  Similar descriptions here):

In one experiment:

A group of dozens more undergrad participants read 40 trivia statements and then typed them into a computer. Half the participants were told that the computer would save their entry, the others were told the entries would be deleted. Participants in the "saved" condition performed worse at a subsequent recall test of the statements, as if they'd relied on the computer as an external memory store. Half the participants in both conditions had been instructed explicitly to try to remember the statements, but this made no difference to their memory performance. "Participants were more impacted by the cue that information would or would not be available to them, regardless of whether they thought they would be tested on it," the researchers said.

In another experiment:

A group of participants read trivia statements and then typed them out, with a message telling them which folder the statement had been saved in. Ten minutes later they wrote out as many of the statements as they could, and then they attempted to recall which folder each statement, identified by a single prompt, had been saved to (e.g. "What folder was the statement about the ostrich saved in?"). The striking finding here is that participants were better at remembering the location of the statements than the statements themselves. What's more, they were more likely to remember the location of statements which they'd failed to recall. It's as if we've become adept at using computers to store knowledge for us, and we're better at remembering where information is stored than the information itself.

Here's what I want to know: What the eff are we going to do when the apocalypse happens, and we can no longer access the internet??

Related:

XKCD

Friday Thoughts

1. Turns out some conspiracy theorists were recently proven right, and the Japansese government did lie about whether Fukushima experienced an actual meltdown.  I do wish reality wouldn't encourage crazy conspiracy theorists, but such is life I suppose.  (Meanwhile, my personal conspiracy-esque theories about the food industry continue to play out as expected.)

2.  THE INTERNET IS OUT TO GET YOU!  Or, you know, tailor what you see on a daily basis based on best guesses about what you like to see.  Related.

3.  Your carpet is killing you!  And stupidifying your children, maybe.

4.  Concerned about a zombie apocalypse?  Don't fret; the CDC has you covered.

5.  Worried the rapture will actually happen on Saturday? You are not alone. (Side note: It is hard for me to believe those numbers are real.)

6.  Ever wonder how long humans can survive without food and/or water?  Wonder no more!

7.  And finally, something fun for your Friday.  Everything you ever wanted to know about horse masturbation (and more, most likely).

Some things to think about this Friday

• One man's opinions on the evils of Facebook. And another's.
  
• An interesting perspective on the "debate" over good (read: organic, non-pesticidey) food. This makes me mad - why is there any kind of "debate" about whether we should be poisoning people or not? Related.
  
• At least half of Americans breathe dangerously polluted air.  Guess who's been living in one of the most polluted areas for the past five years? This girl. I've already talked about air pollution here and here, but if you want to know more awful things about it, click here!
  
• 10 billion people on earth by the end of the century? That can't end well...
  
• Chernobyl is still emitting radiation. But it's not all bad news--biodiversity has increased tremendously in the Chernobyl area ever since they bulldozed everything and moved people out.  Except oh, deformities.
• This cat is as loud as a vacuum cleaner!
• Last but not least, have we passed peak oil? A neat perspective: