Vintage Photo Effect

Vintage Photo Effect: "

This is a good advice ;-)

---

Advertise with Design You Trust! - DYT on Twitter - Facebook"

Income and Federal Tax Shares

Income and Federal Tax Shares: "

Click on grapic to enlarge. Source: Scott Hodge from Tax Policy Center estimates.

"

Top 10 Creative Ways to Store Your Stuff [Lifehacker Top 10]

Top 10 Creative Ways to Store Your Stuff [Lifehacker Top 10]: "

Figuring out the smartest places to store your stuff is time well spent—mostly because it results in time you don't spend cleaning. Here are 10 smart storage solutions for your excess cords, shoes, spices, and all kinds of computer stuff. More »







Lifehacker - Shopping - Hardware - Twitter - Facebook

"

What's the carbon footprint of a mobile phone?

What's the carbon footprint of a mobile phone?: "

Mobile phones don't consume much power – but the networks they rely on do.

• More carbon footprints: nuclear war, a pint of beer, more
• Understand more about carbon footprints

The carbon footprint of using a mobile phone:
47kg CO2e: a year's typical usage of just under 2 minutes per day
1250kg CO2e: a year's usage at 1 hour per day
125 million tonnes CO2e: global mobile usage per year

A minute's mobile-to-mobile chatter comes in at 57g, about the same as an apple, most of a banana or a very large gulp of beer. Three minutes has a similar impact to sending a small letter (written on recycled paper) by second-class post.

Mobile phones cause a fairly tiny slice of global emissions, but if you are a chatterbox using your mobile for an hour each day, the total adds up to more than 1 tonne CO2e per year – the equivalent of flying from London to New York, one way, in economy class.

Indeed, the footprint of your mobile phone use is overwhelmingly determined by the simple question of how often you use it. One estimate for the emissions caused by manufacturing the phone itself is just 16kg CO2e, equivalent to nearly 1kg of beef. If you include the power it consumes over two typical years (that's about how long the average phone remains in use, even though most could probably last for 10 years) that figure rises to 22kg.

But the footprint of the energy required to transmit your calls across the network is about three times all of this put together, taking us to a best estimate of 94kg CO2e over the life of the phone, or 47kg per year. This breaks down as follows:

Base station 23.1kg
Administration 7.1kg
Manufacture 6.3kg
Switchboard 5.6kg
Phone energy 3.2kg
Transport before sale 1.6kg

In 2009 there were 2.7 billion mobiles in use: nearly half the world population has got one. On this basis, mobile calls account for about 125 million tonnes CO2e, which is just over one-quarter of a per cent of global emissions.

If you want to reduce the footprint of your communication habits, texting is a much lower-carbon option. Landlines offer carbon savings, too, because it takes about one-third of the power to transmit a call over a fixed landline network than it does when both callers are on a mobile.

It took a lot of digging to get data for these calculations. In the end I was pleasantly surprised that there is some reasonably sensible looking analysis out there. Nevertheless, now feels like a good time for a reminder that all footprint estimates contain considerable uncertainty – and some more than others.

• See more carbon footprints.

• This article is drawn from How Bad Are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint of Everything by Mike Berners-Lee

• Carbon footprints
• Climate change
• Mobile phones
• Ethical and green living

Mike Berners-Lee

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

"

Caffeine: Google Finally Brews Its New Pot Of Web Results — 50% Fresher

Caffeine: Google Finally Brews Its New Pot Of Web Results — 50% Fresher: "

In August of last year, we wrote about Caffeine, the codename for Google’s latest iteration of its search product. The idea behind it was simple yet encompassing: to “push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.” Back in December, it looked just about ready, but never came. Today, it’s finally ready to roll.

In a post on the Google Blog, the company is saying that the new web indexing system is complete. Significantly, it provides “50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it’s the largest collection of web content we’ve offered.” Basically, you’ll now be able to find more current links faster than ever before.

Google says that while the old index consisted of several layers (some of which were updated faster than others), the new Caffeine index will “analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally.”

Some big stats they throw out about Caffeine:

• every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel -if this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second


• Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day


• You would need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information; if these were stacked end-to-end they would go for more than 40 miles

CrunchBase Information

Google

Google Search

Information provided by CrunchBase

"