0 Comments March of the Metaphorical Footprints…

Recently, I posted about the carbon footprint of Spam and it seems Carbon as a currency is gaining currency! What exactly is Carbon Footprint? Here’s how the UK Carbon Trust defines it:

the total set of GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions caused directly and indirectly by an individual, organization, event or product

Image Courtesy: British Recycled Products

You can calculate your own Carbon Footprint here. It requires some guesswork about your consumption habits but it will give you a general idea about where you stand vis-à-vis the rest of the planet.

Carbon is not the only metaphorical footprint that has become popular in recent years. In fact, its not even the first. I think the metamorphic footprints started in a big way with the Ecological Footprint  – a measure of human demand on the Earth's ecosystems. Then there’s the Water Footprint  – the total volume of freshwater that is used to produce the goods and services consumed by the individual or community or produced by the business. You can also find references to Social Footprint, usually in the context of Corporate Social Responsibility.

Anyway, coming back to the Carbon Footprint. I recent read about a new washing machine that claims to have a Carbon Footprint 40% lower than the most efficient alternative. How so? Well, it uses 90% less water and (therefore) significantly less electricity for drying the laundry. This “green gadget” from Xerox uses thousands of tiny nylon beads that have the characteristic of attracting and retaining dirt particles (now you know why nylon clothes get dirty very easily!) in conjunction with detergent and a little water. Read more here.

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0 Comments The Carbon Footprint of Spam…

We all know how irritating Spam can be. No matter what filters you use, there will always be some new spammer who find its way into your inbox. Have you ever wondered how much time and resources the world spends on creating and sending Spam and on preventing Spam from entering our mailboxes?

Image Courtesy: ICF/McAfee

According to the estimates of a recent report (PDF: 2.33 MB) by ICF International (commissioned by McAfee Inc.), approximately 62 trillion spam emails were sent out in 2008. The report estimates the global carbon footprint of these spam emails as well as the estimated savings by the use of spam filters.

Here are some key findings:

• Annual energy use on Spam – 33 Terawatt Hours (TWh) or 33 Billion KWh – equivalent to the energy consumption of 2.4 Million US homes.
• If this energy is assumed to be produced from coal-based power plants, the Green House Gases (GHG) emitted would equal the GHG emission of 3.1 Million passenger cars using 2 Billion US gallons of gasoline.
• The same gasoline could be used to drive around the planet 1.6 Million times.
• Spam filters annually save the planet 135 TWh of electricity – the impact equivalent to taking 13 million cars off the roads.
• For a typical medium-sized business (presumably, in the US), the annual energy consumption on emails is roughly 50,000 KWh – 20 percent of which can be attributed to Spam.

The Economist ran an article on the report (link requires subscription) and some of the reader comments are really interesting.

• What incentives do spammers have to send messages that can be easily filtered? One of the readers points out that even if 1 in 12.5 million messages leads to a real sale (of pills, for example), sending spam is worth the effort. Spammers not only make money from selling the pill but often much more by getting access to your financial information (credit card number) and its misuse. The fact that the marginal cost of generating and delivering spam to every additional person is so low (economies of scale?) makes it worthwhile.
• Another reader is very apologetic about his own comment when he quips, “I apologise for the CO₂ produced in my typing, and hence readers reading, this comment.”

Now, coming from McAfee Inc., these results are not very surprising. That Spam Filters save GHG emissions equivalent to removing more than 3 million cars is excellent news indeed – but to what effect? Spam is a “created paper tiger” that McAfee et al. shoot down and in the process make huge profits. Obviously, they are not doing this to “save the planet”. But then again, as Michael Douglas says in Wall Street, “Anything worth doing, is worth doing for money”.

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0 Comments The Unfriendly Greeting...

Are you an Indian (or South Asian, or for that matter, ANY Asian) living outside Asia? If yes, then I am sure you will connect with the post below.

Although this blog comes from CricInfo - a website about cricket, the post has got nothing to do with cricket. The author is a cricket journalist, currently in South Africa covering a popular cricket tournament. He is disturbed by the fact that he is greeted by "strangers" everywhere and is having a tough time reconciling with this custom. I absolutely enjoyed reading it and I hope you will too.

Read the full article here: Enough with the Friendliness

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0 Comments CouchSurfing: Seeing the World through the Eyes of Locals…

Cross-posted from NonSense – a PhD-To-PhD Newsletter

Image Courtesy: PaperMag.com

Have you ever wanted to have a local travel guide everywhere in the world? CouchSurfing is something I ran into a couple of years ago and have fallen in love with ever since: it’s an online community of travel-lovers.

Officially, “CouchSurfing is a worldwide network for making connections between travellers and the local communities they visit“. Unofficially, it’s more like a belief-system, a way of life and a passion that has overcome more than a million people in 230 countries!

When you sign up, you define ways in which you would be willing to help travellers to your city – offering your couch to sleep on (or extra bed, floor space); meeting for a cup of coffee or a drink or simply suggesting places to visit in your city. You may join local CS groups of different places to interact with other CS’ers, attend regular meetings etc. After you “host” or “surf” with someone, you leave a reference about your experience for the benefit of other CouchSurfers.

Image Courtesy: CouchSurfing.org

Even though Delft is not particularly high on the tourist-agenda, over the past two years, I have hosted 10-12 people from different countries – USA, Mexico, India, Slovenia, Germany, Spain – and have met numerous other wonderful people through CS meetings. I surfed a couch in Ahmedabad, India when this guy I met at a local CS Meeting let me crash at his place after knowing me for less than a couple of hours! Overall, a wonderful experience…so, the next time you’re planning a trip, give CouchSurfing a thought… it’s definitely worth it. And if you do, don’t forget to let me know how it went. Read more about CouchSurfing:

• CS Home Page – About CouchSurfing
• The Phoenix Story – How CS crashed and was recovered solely by volunteers
• My CS profile – Links to my CS friends and references

Are you a CouchSurfer? Are you thinking about signing up? Any travel plans in the near future? Let me know your experiences and about your travels…

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0 Comments The Petabyte Age: Making science obsolete...??

1 Terabyte = 1,000 Gigabytes; 1 Petabyte = 1000 Terabytes

Did you know that Google's servers process 1 Petabyte of data every 72 minutes?

A recent issue of WIRED magazine carries a series of articles on how the Petabyte Age is changing the world. While all of them make a good read, one in particular seems rather bold, to say the least...and has created a controversy of some sort...

The End of Theory: All models are wrong, science is obsolete!

Click on the link to read the full article and judge for yourself. The author suggests that today we have so much data and data processing (computing) power at our disposal that we don't need models (simplistic representations of reality) and theories (generalizations that broadly explain the logic behind the data and the models). Rather far-fetched, I would think.

Every scientist, researcher and statistician understands that mere correlation between data means nothing for explaining causation. Petabytes of data on how many times this article was read, by whom, from where and for how long will say nothing about the quality of the article or agreement / disagreement among the readers. Sure, it might provide some hints, but data is JUST data...and will always remain that.

Interpreting data and converting it into information requires wisdom, which comes from knowledge, which comes from all the theories and science that constantly keep evolving. Garbage In, Garbage Out... and the more garbage you put in, the more of it will come out UNLESS it is processed scientifically.

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0 Comments Privately Smart, Publicly Dumb?

Recently read an interview of V. Raghunathan about his book "Games Indians Play". I was planning on reading the book since the title sounded interesting... but after reading the interview (available at Knowledge@Wharton website; Requires 'free' user registration), I must say I'm put-off.

I think the author (unfortunately, bragging his ex-IIMA fame, and IMHO, brining bad name to it) has taken a very narrow and unconvincing view on Indian psyche. It is absolutely naive to say, for example, that the tendency to defect in a Prisoners Dilemma (PD) situation is greater in India than elsewhere. Or, that Indians cannot work well in teams.

All the examples cited in the interview seem carefully handpicked from a "Bible of Inferiority Complex", wherein he is in awe of anything non-Indian and almost ashamed of anything Indian. I'm sure another person can cite ten times more examples and say exactly the opposite (although that might sound equally unconvincing, but that’s another issue). The funniest thing, at the end, he finds hope for resolving the Indian PD situation in the Bhagwad Gita!! Well, if that was the answer, at least some of 1.1 billion people might have learnt something from thousands of years of reading and chanting.

Anyway, don’t take my word for it, judge for yourself... The only positive example quoted in the interview is the case of TVS Group, which insisted on selling diesel engines at normal mark-ups even during World War II when supply was disrupted and TVS had the import license. The author says TVS refused to "defect" whereas I think this was not a PD situation at all!! If there was any defection, TVS "defected" from industry and market norms by not letting the price being determined naturally by demand-supply factors and arbitrarily (benevolently?) pegged the prices. The author further claims, superficially, that other traders that had profited during the war "went out of business one after another" while TVS survived. How was the profiteering linked to them going out of business is not clear.

I have seen Chinese cab drivers stopping before a red light at 2:00 a.m. -- no Indian taxi driver would ever do that. The number of medals they win during the Olympics shows that they have systems that work very well.

Again, it is hard to imagine how stopping at red lights at 2 AM has got anything to do with winning Olympic medals. Is traffic behaviour a good indicator of number of medals? Oh, maybe the author means "discipline" and "adherence to formal systems". But hasn't anyone heard, "there's a method in madness"? The author's view of India seems to be that of a distant outsider that does not recognise the intricate informal systems that underlie the apparent chaos.

No wonder, in the end, the author admits that the book is an "expression of his frustrations" (read: don’t expect any logical arguments). Quite right, but I, for one, don’t share his frustrations (thank god!) and don’t find them very convincing. I think his arguments smell of cheap marketing gimmicks. Pity!

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