Tag Archives: energy

A tiny bit about energy policy

My new research project with Pete Pirolli will be based on the following hypothesis: Diversity of people and information in social networks will lead users to be better at information discovery and sensemaking tasks. This is proving to be quite tricky to set up properly. But we have decided that our “tasks” will be in [...]

environmental impact of the internet

Second Life has a non-negligible environmental impact! This article from Treehugger reports that the average Second Life avatar consumes as much electricity as the average Brazilian! Daily energy requirements for Second Life’s 4000 servers, hosting ~12,500 avatars at any one time, total 60,000 kilowatt-hours, or 4.8kWh per avatar. Annualized, avatars consume 1,752 kWh, which is [...]