Not being a big television watcher I'm always amazed at TV's power to influence public opinion. Channel 4's the Great Global Warming Swindle seemed to convince plenty of educated people that we'd all got the wrong end of the stick over global warming, and now Panorama seem to have sent people into a panic over wireless networking.
I didn't see either programme (just picked up the gist on the web), but I can guess what it was like (I did see Panorama's 'expose' into football bungs - can't believe the actually aired it given how poor the programme was!).
But anyway, despite my misgivings (contempt!) for sensationalist pseudo-science TV, is there any truth it the claims?
The statement from the World Health Organisation is as follows:
¨Considering the very low exposure levels and research results collected to date, there is no convincing scientific evidence that the weak RF signals from base stations and wireless networks cause adverse health effects.¨
(http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs304/en/index.html)
So should we carry on deploying WiFi? Personally I think the answer is yes - to me the science seems to say that there isn't a problem (and I'm an organic vegetable growing, car hating, vegetarian tree hugging type ...). I'm interested in other people's opinion though.
Seems like I'm just writing about events all the time at the moment - must be that time off year...
Anyway, bookings are now open for the annual IT and Library Colloquium held in Gregynog. Details of the programme etc are available here:
http://gregynog.sihe.ac.uk/
The event is open to IT and Libray staff (and any others that are interested) working in Welsh HE institutions - I'll be talking about MyCommunity and SMS services.
A quick report from UCISA's one day manager's forum on Green IT. It's interesting that the general vibe (from the delegates in particular) seem to one of scepticism about environmental problems, with the main focus being on saving money. Still, the end result is the same, even if the motivating is different. The two themes were:
- Cutting power consumption (as power is expensive!)
- Dealing with disposals (legal problems etc).
A quick summary of some of the main points from the speakers.
Simon Tindall from Sun kicked off. Simon appears to be genuinely concerned about environmental issues, and gave some interesting facts, eg:
- A PC requires 200 times its final weight in raw materials to produced, compared to a fridge that requires on 2 times!
- One institutions had measured that 65% of it's electricity use came from IT equipment!
He also made the point that soon (perhaps around 2010/20215) the energy costs to power IT equipment will exceed its capital cost.
Simon talked about Sun's own Green initiatives including lower power (in energy terms) servers, thing clients, aggressive recycling targets and flexible working. I'll come back to the thin clients in a minute.
Chris Cartledge from Sheffield was next, with an excellent session 'Using less electricity'. Chris went through how to estimate power usage of IT equipment, and implored us all to take the issue seriously. As Chris said, the issue is that in most institutions IT aren't responsible for paying the electricity bills, and therefore have little pressure to reduce power consumptions (and therefore, in turn, are putting little pressure on manufactures, who therefore charge a premium for 'green' products).
Chris's figures (for estimate purposes) were to use 10p per unit (or 15p if air conditioned). Some of Chris's figures:
PC on all the time: ₤100pa
8 Core Server: ₤400pa
Standard phone: ₤1pa
IP Phone: ₤8pa
Chris's point about making your own calculations rather than taking manufactures at face value is critical. For his example, I did some 'on the back of an envelopment' calculations about Sun's 8 Watt thin client - I won't post them here as they aren't accurate, but by the time you add in the server element (Sun estimate 4 watts, but this is for 100 users per server, which is a maximum, and I don't think includes air con costs), then factor in that the Sun clients and servers are on 24/7 rather than just say, 40 hours per week for a PC, the cost increases quite about (though still doesn't get close to the 100W PC).
Lisa Nelson, from Liverpool, gave a session entitled ' Power Saving for ₤0'. She explained that from their experience, Windows power saving options don't really work in a networked environment for two reason:
- It caused problems with DHCP (I don't think we'd have that problem as our leases are longer.
- It caused problems with applications like Word.
Because of this they adopted an approach of automatically shutting down PCs if they weren't used for a while (although people could opt out). Sounds like a good, common sense approach, and I can't see any reason why we shouldn't do it here. Full details are available here: http://pcwww.liv.ac.uk/powerdown/
Peter Tinson gave a session 'Managing Disposal, an institution's view', explaining a process similar to ours where IT have central responsibility for disposals, offsetting disposal costs with any money made from sales. The only major difference was the Peter's example institution considered it too risky to resale directly, so they used a company to do it.
Final session was from Dell, outlining there understanding of the WEEE directive. WEEE stands for Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment. I won't go into detail about the directive here, you can read about it on the DTI site if you want to know more. The thing I was interested in was how Dell were going to act when it becomes their responsibility in law to dispose of equipment. They still haven't finalised details, but here's my understanding of the basics:
- Equipment will be be disposed of free of charge on a like for like basis. ie if you buy 20 PCs Dell will dispose of 20 PCs, but not laptops, printers etc.
- The disposal service will be a 'bare bones' service - no asset tracking, disk wiping etc. These things will remain a chargeable extra.
It therefore looks like we'll still have to pay for a useful disposal service then.
All in all, I useful day, although I'd like to see a change in mindset from 'Let's save power/dispose of things appropriately etc so we save money/don't get sued et ' to: 'Lets act in enviromentallly responsible way because it's the right thing to do'