{"id":80,"date":"2011-11-12T10:56:00","date_gmt":"2011-11-12T14:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/wing\/?p=80"},"modified":"2011-11-12T11:17:12","modified_gmt":"2011-11-12T15:17:12","slug":"serious-numbers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/wing\/2011\/11\/12\/serious-numbers\/","title":{"rendered":"Serious numbers"},"content":{"rendered":"

When times are mysterious \/ Serious numbers \/ Will always be heard<\/p>\n

– Paul Simon<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’ve been reading “Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air”<\/a> It’s by David MacKay — yes, the same\u00a0David MacKay that wrote the terrific book “Information Theory,\u00a0Inference, and Learning Algorithms”. \u00a0 I\u00a0got started on the topic after reading and thinking about “Networking in\u00a0the Long Emergency” (which I previously posted about<\/a>). \u00a0 \u00a0Once you start\u00a0poking around in the related literature, all signs point to MacKay’s\u00a0book.<\/p>\n

The first half of the book consists of a fascinating assessment of\u00a0energy consumption and production, broken down into categories like\u00a0cars, planes, heating, light, etc. \u00a0 The power of the book is that it\u00a0makes clear where the big problems are, and which issues are just\u00a0distractions.<\/p>\n

On the right is a graphic from the book that shows the breakdown of average energy\u00a0consumption per person in Britain.\"ConsumptionStackMacKay\"<\/p>\n

What jumps out from this chart is “Jet flights.” \u00a0 Surely this “average\u00a0person” is jet-setting around the world, no? \u00a0 Actually, no. \u00a0This bar\u00a0corresponds to exactly one<\/em> intercontinental trip per year.<\/em> That’s it.<\/p>\n

Well, this must be because air travel is so inefficient, no? \u00a0 Again,\u00a0no. \u00a0 The book does a wonderful job of explaining the physics of\u00a0transport and where the energy actually goes. \u00a0 To boil it down: the\u00a0problem is not that it’s air travel. \u00a0 The problem is simply how\u00a0far<\/em> you travel when you go to another continent.<\/p>\n

Of course, this makes sense. \u00a0 \u00a0My commute is about\u00a040 miles per working day. \u00a0At 250 working days per year, that’s 10,000\u00a0miles in a year. \u00a0 For comparison, next month I’ll attend CoNEXT in Tokyo. \u00a0 The\u00a0round trip is 14.290 miles, for a five day trip.<\/p>\n

So what does all this have to do with networking? \u00a0 \u00a0Nowadays, there is a\u00a0growing research effort on “green networking”<\/a> and “greening\u00a0the Internet.”\u00a0My take is that to really make a difference in favor of responsible\u00a0energy use, we should be beefing up<\/em> the Internet. \u00a0 \u00a0I take anywhere\u00a0between 4 and 8 trips per year, often traveling overseas 3 or 4 times in\u00a0a year. \u00a0 That kind of travel absolutely dwarfs all my other energy consumption combined<\/em>. \u00a0 \u00a0What if I could eliminate\u00a0one or two of those trips through the use of telepresence? \u00a0 That would\u00a0actually make a significant impact on my carbon footprint.<\/p>\n

What do we need to make the routine use of telepresence commonplace? \u00a0The social \/ human factors answer is that we need telepresence to\u00a0provide an acceptable substitute for the personal experience of being in\u00a0a room with a group of people. \u00a0 \u00a0And we need to carefully identify the\u00a0meetings where being together with a group of people socially is an\u00a0essential component, and distinguish those from meetings where the\u00a0social component is an afterthought. \u00a0 \u00a0For example, I think that some\u00a0conferences fall in the first category, and some meetings fall in the second.<\/p>\n

The engineering answer is that we need a quantitative improvement in the\u00a0Internet, and a qualitative improvement in HCI. \u00a0 \u00a0At present, the Internet is not\u00a0quite up to multiway-telepresence as a reliable service on a global\u00a0basis. \u00a0 But the current rate of network buildout, if it\u00a0continues, will take care of that. \u00a0 \u00a0The real issue is the HCI\u00a0component: how we think about our displays. \u00a0 For telepresence to be\u00a0routine, we need to stop thinking about displays as tools that sit on\u00a0our desk and allow us to manipulate computers. \u00a0 We need to think about\u00a0displays as part of building infrastructure — something that is\u00a0designed into every office space and has standard properties that can be relied upon to make the telepresence experience consistent. \u00a0 \u00a0We know\u00a0what to expect in terms of social and nonverbal cues when we are in a\u00a0room with someone. \u00a0 We need to figure out how to make that consistently\u00a0available over the Internet.<\/p>\n

So, the bottom line for me is that while “greening the Internet” is important,\u00a0“Internetting people” will make a bigger difference in the long run…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When times are mysterious \/ Serious numbers \/ Will always be heard – Paul Simon I’ve been reading “Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air” It’s by David MacKay — yes, the same\u00a0David MacKay that wrote the terrific book “Information Theory,\u00a0Inference, and Learning Algorithms”. \u00a0 I\u00a0got started on the topic after reading and thinking about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2086,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/wing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/wing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/wing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/wing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2086"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/wing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/wing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":87,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/wing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80\/revisions\/87"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/wing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/wing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/wing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}