Slashdot Mirror
Environmental Costs of Computer Use?
arhines asks: "I'm working on a little research project to figure out what the environmental cost of heavy technological reliance is, and want any suggestions Slashdot has for factors to consider. My school has started requiring students to own and use laptops in all of their classes, under the pretext of saving paper. Having read about the problems with computer recycling on Slashdot, I've become suspicious of the true effect of having several hundred computers thrown out each year. What statistics should I focus on, and are there any definitive studies on the topic you could point me to?"
environmental benefit too, a double edged sword, we just have to make sure we don't always strick with one side.
Saving paper is a pretty bad reason to give college kids laptops. There are good reasons, but saving paper isn't one of them.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Abacus:
* Requires no power.
* Portable.
* Scalable. Just add more beads.
* Ultra-stable.
* Low cost of entry.
* Lasts indefinitely.
* Reboots by shaking!
* Completely royalty free. Open Source.
* Recyclable. Pass it down to your kids!
* Secure. No one can hack your abacus.
* No need to localize to other languages.
* No install package needed.
* One interface to learn (forget Aqua, Luna, KDE, Gnome, etc).
* Friendly to modders (wood, bamboo, aluminum?).
No internet access or Office-like apps though.
Damn straight. If you want to save paper, force all students to use 9 pin dot matrix printers. That way .. the noise and time consumption of printing ANYTHING will make them think twice about frivously printing unnecessary crap. Not like laser printers where it takes only seconds and is silent.
The real question is how much paper needs to be burned to produce the power required to keep your 3Ghz computer on 24/7 to read slashdot.
There are so many hidden costs that the mind boggles at the prospect. An edict like "Use Laptops" handed down from on high is highly suspect.
Consider: laptops have batteries, batteries require charging, charging comes from wall outlets, wall outlets require power generation, most power generation is from coal. (I use a similar argument in my choice to use disposable diapers with my child: cloth diapers require water, solvents, and sewers.)
When I was an undergraduate, we were forbidden from having microwave ovens in our dorm rooms. (I realize I'm showing my age here.) The reason? They used too much electricity. The university would have to raise dorm room prices across the board to accomodate those few people who used microwave ovens.
My coworkers say I'm an amazingly fast typist, but a lot of people can get by with a few scribbles even quicker than I can and still make sense of it. Such a regimentalizing of laptops could well affect students' capability for learning. It's one thing to recommend them, another thing to mandate them.
This reminded me of this story, about photo journalist Jeroen Bouman's exploration of the used computer stuff that gets "recycled" in China.
Thrown out? hey, I'll be GLAD to "recycle" those laptops, feel free to send as many as you want to me. I'll make sure that they are passed on to people and schools that need them.
I would buy myself a laptop just to save all the time, soap, and water I use washing off the side of my left hand after writing with pencil. I need to save those whales, you know.
Rich people are eccentric. Poor people are strange. Me, I'd be happy with odd.
I'm pretty sure most will agree they're a big cost to the environment.
Start with the fact that computers get obsolete pretty quickly when compared to many other things we buy. So maybe every three or four years, we're stuck with a lot of computer hardware that is hard to dispose of or get rid of. It's hard to sell a four year old computer since the technology moves so quickly: their resale value plummets with every faster model.
Next think about how on earth do you recycle a computer? It's not a soda can or paper. What often happens is the parts are sold off and shipped to China, where people in villages are paid to take the computer components apart to get at the trace metals ... in the process leaking all kinds of toxins into the water supply. Great.
Last, I recall a study showing that the paperless office has been exposed to be a myth. While on the surface it would seem having computers everywhere would save paper, the truth of the matter is more paper is consumed. I'm sure you know of people (mostly execs and grandparents) that print out every email since they like reading on paper, not a screen. And how about people printing out their digital photos? If the paperless office were taking hold, we'd be seeing a lot less printer sales, where the opposite is the case: it's expected every computer you buy, comes with a printer.
I actually think as computer technology takes greater hold and becomes more ubiquitous, we will see more waste and more environmental destruction as a result. This has more to do with the fact it's just getting cheaper and cheaper at a faster rate. People toss cell phones in the trash now. I think the only thing that will stop this process is for technology to be made with easy recycling in mind from the start. But I think it will get a lot worse before it gets better.
http://www.goldsmithgroup.com/servfacts.htm
f ew ork/cis/products/icsc/dtasht/_icsc00/icsc0052.htm
Florida Environmental Report states about Computers and Monitors:
"Out of 175 million computers comes a laundry list of toxins including 650 million pounds of lead, 987,000 pounds of cadmium and 231,000 pounds of mercury.
Each CRT (Cathode-Ray Tube) contains four to six pounds of lead. (New York Times, November 23, 2000)
According to University of Florida tests, color monitors contain enough lead to contaminate ground water if deposited in landfills. "Those monitors would fail the legal standards of leaching lead," said Susan Mooney of the EPA, Region 5 (Chicago).
These computers also contain 2 billion pounds of plastic. "
so thats like 1/4 pound of lead per PC on top of the 4 to 6 per monitor. so thats a lot of lead.
http://members.aol.com/Ramola15/funfacts.html
"Americans use 85,000,000 tons of paper a year; about 680 pounds per person."
so lets say you throw your computer out every three years. thats about 18 pounds of lead versus 2000 pounds of paper over three years. imagine throwing your honda civic, made of paper, into the ground. then cover it with something like 1/5 a gallon of molten lead (crappy math, hey i think its within an order of magnitude).
which do you feel worse about? the honda civic sized paper ball or the fifth of lead?
public service announcement: i have a 10th grade math education
http://www.ilo.org/public/english/protection/sa
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
Looking at the site, this isn't college; this is a combined middle school / high school.
Now, my experience with high school students (I work with an 11th grade class that meets in a computer lab) is that, given access to computers, the first things they do are check their email and start loading up websites containing either games or (depending on gender) romance or sports information.
Computers are certainly a great tool - I can't even do my work without internet access anymore, since I'm constantly looking up a research paper or TeX command I need - but at the middle school level, it sees as if you're going to have to devote a lot of time making the students close off the games and get back to work..
Twenties Retirement
Don't count on /. to do your homework for you. In the first instance, it's better to do your work yourself, and in the second instance, you have to remember: "garbage in, garbage out". Maybe you should seek you an environmental scientist or environmental engineering prof. who does research on the long term environmental impact of computers instead.
Since switching to a paperless office we now consume twice as much paper as we did before we moved to paperless
I don't know about you guys, but since I don't have the best hearing, the last thing that I need is the sound of key presses competing with the sound of the teacher's voice. I suppose that they could make quieter key boards, but maybe the college should just mind their own business. After all, I assume that paper will always be a more reliable storage medium compared to electrical powered devices. Anybody able to confirm that?
Will the students be able to charge their laptops for "free" or will they have to pay for it [user fees, or increased tuition, etc.]?
How will they cool the rooms? How much will it cost? I haven't worked much with laptops recently, so I won't know how hot they are these days.
If the college wants to stop polluting, then maybe it should try to find a way to make it easy for students to get to classes without driving.
I'm just thinking out loud.
testing out my trending skills
Don't you need to take into account what percentage of the students already own a laptop as these people would not be adding more waste than they already are. Also, if people are buying laptops instead of desktops, these people would also be included as someone who is not really adding to the waste issue more than current figures.
*duck*
Here's what the massive consumption of electricity is doing.
- Hail to our fearless misleader! Fool speed ahead!
...Now there's a pretty fun thing to do. :)
figure our how to suck out the radioactivity of radioactive wastes.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Children. Don't worry about how much your computer uses, it's nothing compared to the resources a person uses.
Do everyone a favor and stop at one kid.
Someone's going to mark me as a troll here, but what I'm saying is the truth. Not many people want to hear it though.
Get your stinking paws off me you damn dirty ape
Recycling is only efficient from simple sources. Complex electrical devices are, obviously, made of many component resources. Separating these resources for purification would not be practical and will not be implemented in any system with practical limits.
Just another excuse to buy computers. I can understand that.
Many locales are starting to see activity in respect to recycling. Here in San Diego County, there is are recyclers ready to offer services, i.e. this one . You could also check the local waste management service, which might have a curbside pick-up service (we used to here, but not anymore). With the rise in computer usage, and therefore computer throwage, there is also a rise in recycling opportunities. All you have to do is look for them.
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
I might be dating myself, but I remember when I was back in middle school / highschool, there was a big controversy about allowing us to have scientific calculators. Not that we would be checking email and loading websites on them, but that knowing our times tables and how to add and subtract BY HAND would be "more practical" for us. Needless to say the griping teachers and parents we silenced in the name of inevitable progress.
I also remember taking a typing class and they were all manual typewriters. There was just one electric typewriter, and all us kids would try to get to class early so we could get to sit at it and spare our fingers. Our teacher, totally knew nobody would be using a manual typewriter in a few years but put us through this torture because it would supposedly be better for us. I wonder if she had a cow when computers became ubiquitous.
This kind of question is really a $10 question more suited for Google Answers.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
the only paper computers save is carbon paper.
Where's Robin Hood? We could kinda really use him now.
If we would teach our children at home and further educate them on-the-job through apprenticeship, we could give back all the land wasted on schools, colleges and universities.
Try "Teaching students to use the tools that will be required for any job more fulfilling than 'Burger Flipper' or 'Toilet Scrubber'".
Seriously. Someone entering the workforce without computer skills is useless unless they're doing some sort of manual labor. Sending kids out into the world without computer skills would be like sending them out without knowing how to use a phone or drive a car.
you should never recycle a computer. just put Linux on it. that's what is meant when they say "recycle computer".
"recylcle computer"=="install Linux on it"
You need people like me so you can point your fuckin fingers and say, "That's the bad guy." So what that make you? Good?
You're not in college to learn how to think. You're there to lose all of that wasteful morality and learn how to be a good little consumer in this brave new world.
Just ask Apple Computer's resident environmentalist board member -> Al Gore -> or Albert Arnold Gore, Junior to be precise
Shit... you mean you're supposed to throw out your old computers. But, what if I find a use for all of those old C-64's, and Sun XPC's, and 486 PC's, and...
Well, this is beyond the means for your school, but I think there is a business opportunity for someone here in the offing.
The National Security Agency (NSA) instituted a program some years ago by which they decided to get some money and reuseability out of the obsolete pieces of equipment they were required to destroy (due to classification issues) rather than give to DRMO to be resold to the public.
The NSA has to destroy a lot of circuit boards and electronic devices like hard drives and they have to do so thoroughly. Many of these devices as we all know contain valuable precious and industrial metals like gold, platinum, and so forth. So, they built an industrial plant that could extract as much useful material as possible from the destroyed equipment, and they would resell that to the public for a profit. They also do this with the pulp that comes from the destruction of paper documents and such. What can't be reused is disposed of in accordance with environmental regulations.
This program has turned out to be so successful that the NSA actually turns a significant profit (to the tune of several million dollars a year) and sends this profit back into the Federal Treasury.
I am sure that this could become a viable business in the civilian world for some smart entrepreneurs out there.
I know this because Tyler knows this.
Don't forget to compare manufacturing in this. Printing ciruit boards and chips leads to a lot of nasties as waste, not just the heavy metals actually in the chips (as already mentioned), most of which are never recycled. Furthermore, some of these metals are in short supply and (like oil) aren't really priced at their true cost (in that getting them back from landfill when we run out of natural sources will be very expensive).
Finally, manufacturing paper leads to various chlorine bleaches going into the environment, but if plantation wood or recycled paper is used wasteing paper isn't actually that bad a thing environmentally, dumping paper into landfill removes CO2 from the atmosphere (so long as a sustainable source of wood is used) and that can only be a good thing.
Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
The only environmental benefit of all these computers: Have the kids stay at home. No more burning fossil fuels.
The environmental damage is to thirld world countries anyway, so why bother?
I've been a long time READER of /. but I've only recently (within the past.. day..) become a member.. I'm not claiming to be anything other than very new.. And I've got no idea what the appeal of the "FIRST!" screaming is about. If you're going to make a post, have it be about the topic. If you're not going to be ON-TOPIC, why bother posting in the first place?
My brain hurts, and I think I'm going to go watch MST3k.
I really have no idea what I am talking about.
Suck it, enviroment.
psxndc
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
I have enough of my own to do
Yay me!
Your question begs a discussion of bigger issues than one campus and a few hundred laptops The first thought I had was electricity, how much more juice is being used since the personal computer boom? What about laptop batteries going into landfills? PDA's use a lot of aaa's, cellphones etc etc... Maybe global warming is caused by excess heat from cpus(yes I know this is silly but It will perhaps be an issue in the future) I manage a small lab at an art school and am totally baffled at what and how much students print when a free laser(not really free, they pay lab fees) is available Im tired, thats all i have right now.
well i'm happy in thinking that the worst is past in that most computers that even our grandmothers have are capable of all that most people do on a computer (web email word solitaire) so there's going to be less computers thrown out when upgrades come. plus the shift to laptops and lcds and thinner clients means even the wasted computers of the future will have less crap to them.
and as for schools, the thing we should look forward to the most is not laptops in the classroom but the classroom in the laptop. home based learning will take all the paper away and much of the commuting while moving social interactions into more realistic venues.
as long as we can make it another 30 years without trashing things to the point of extinction of all life i think we'll be at a point of permanently sustainable life. now is definitely the time to be trying extra hard.
If anything, computers make it damn easy to print stuff. I'm writing a big thesis now, but even on a 19" screen it's still better to read on paper. So I print out 150 pages now and then. I sure as hell wouldn't write 150 pages now and then with a pencil...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I always enjoy paying Mrs. Lawrence a visit on my way to the brewery. I AM IN LOVE WITH MATT'S MOM!
propz to all dead homiezz, fozzy/pro, and linux dave.
GRITS
Of course, the human would quickly go extinct at that point (for obvious dating/hygine issues), but I just think of that as Mother Nature getting her turn at bat.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
I'm a tactil learner. So for me the act of writting notes is a learning process in itself (I rarely go back and reread them). typing just doesn't set into stone the same way hand writting does. Also, as someone else mentioned, its very awkward to type calculus
Waiting for the Blackouts... http://www.perkigoth.com/features/music/
the school's website to understand what's at work here.
This isn't about saving paper. It's about making parents feel good about dropping $15,000 a year on high school... after all, the kids use laptops in their classes; our investment in little Johnny will result in opportunities that those poor kids in public school won't have. Don't waste your time thinking about environmental impact. This is marketing.
I went to a private school as well, one of the high-falutin' variety. I loved every minute of it, even if I was a scrubby kid from a lower class neighborhood with a penchant for cynicism, science, and lacrosse. I'm not suggesting your school is good or bad for their decision. If the result of this policy is that more kids with a polished high school education find their way to techie universities instead of the standard small liberal arts colleges most attend now, than I'd consider the policy a good one.
It's not an environmental issue. It's also not a cost issue -- if your parents (or some donor) can afford to send you to a top notch snoot school, than they can afford to buy you a laptop too. It'll come to less than 3% of the overall cost of your high school education. It's a marketing decision, and headmasters, chancellors, and presidents of schools across the country are making the same decisions, based on a poor understanding of IT but a solid understanding of their potential customers.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
</kicks self for typos making lame joke even lamer>
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
And even aside from the teaching, do the classrooms have enough *electricity* for them? You can't depend on a laptop having more than an hour's battery life, in spite of what the ads said when they were brand new (which was usually overoptimistic then, and battery life decreases rapidly as machines get to be a couple of years old, so the _seniors_ are definitely going to need to plug in their machines if they haven't replaced the ones they bought freshman year.) On the other hand, if schools can use them to replace paper copies of textbooks, so the kids who are getting new laptop weight to carry around in their backpacks can leave their books back in their rooms, that may be a win. Works fine for classical literature (anything out of copyright, i.e. pre-Disney), but not so hot for most of the textbook market.
They're not going to save any natural resources by having you use computers instead of paper. Nor will they save money. Sure, the paper you use in a year will probably outweigh the computer, but you'll spend more than $100/year on computers, while you won't conceivably use that much paper writing by hand
The real environmental costs have to include the disposal costs of the equipment. Laptop LCD screens are much smaller and lighter than CRTs, and other people have talked about the leaded glass and phosphor problems with CRTs. LCDs are semiconductor-based, which means there's a certain amount of toxic waste involved in the production; I don't know if it's more or less than monitors. Fortunately, Nickel Cadmium batteries are a thing of the past, but how toxic are the current battery technologies?
And how long do these things last, and how upgradable are they? Laptops are usually slower than desktops made at the same time, with smaller disks and RAM for the money. How many years will they last before being obsolete? My experience carrying a laptop around as a business traveller and train commuter was that they're not super-durable, especially the ones that are light enough that you're willing to carry them around all that time. How will they survive students?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
My local solid waste authority has regular drop-off dates for computers (monitors too!) along with other household toxic waste (paint, solvents, etc.).
When one comes around that I'm prepared for, I pull the seats out of the Sienna and ride around filling it up with old monochrome monitors and crappy laser printers. Sure beats paying to have the monitors recycled...
Let's see, huge micro-fabrication factories where the machines used within are created in yet another pollution creating factory. I don't think shaving a few trees to make paper compares to the environmental injustice that making computers will cause. Think about it, getting down to .90 nm technology will require some serious energy to get them wafers produced. Not to mention the recycling that you so mentioned of the pieces of junk 286 computers of the world and soon to be pieces of junk pentium 4's etc (muhaha). Whatever teacher , administrator, or gov't official proposed that dumb idea about laptops instead of paper should be
;p
beaten severely. Laptops in the classroom seem effective, however, just not for the reasons cited. It's almost like those stupid hippies that smoke pot and wear those fucking stupid "save the rain forests!" t-shirts while a huge cloud of smoke and haze surrounds them, a bunch of hypocrites that just need to get beaten!
And why do you think San Diego was voted as one of the smoggiest cities in america? Is it the paper factories, or is it the fucking multitudes of chip factories that sd is known for? Maybe you can say cars add to it from all the commuters, but hell, those cars were probably bought by money made from selling intel pentium chips. Full circle of evil!
People are stupid, sometimes I just want to line all the stupid people up across the world and stick out my bloody right hand and run past them at full speed, hand extended -- ppp pppp ppp pppsshtt ppp ppppsh ppshtt !!!
blue monday monday
Seems like a good way to make sure you only keep middle class rich kids going to your school to me.
-- Free software on every PC on every desk
I work at a computer lab at my school doing basic things like helping people save (seriously) and sorting what people print so that they don't have to separate it from the hundreds of other pages that other users have printed.
;) Posting on slashdot is significantly more stimulating than sorting printouts, believe it or not.
;)
This is not hyperbole. The printer we have here is an hp laserjet 9000, and it prints about 50 pages a minute. At peak usage here (there are 60 total computers in the lab) it will print for 2 straight hours, stopping only when it jams. Many of these print outs are annoyingly wasteful - powerpoint presentations printed out 1 slide to a page, with 72 pt font, instead of 6 to a page or an outline view, or huge volumes of online textbooks that you just KNOW this person isn't going to read. My record is 1000 pages, counted by the number of times I've had to put new paper in, for one user. Ironically enough, I'm at this job right now, watching people get angry as the stack of paper on top of the printer gets bigger with no lab assistant to distribute it
So, I got a little off track, but what I'm trying to show is that people with computers are perfectly capable of wasting paper.
Furthermore, how often do you really WASTE a piece of hand-written paper? All of the paper I actually write on (who, me, pencil?) is used for notes and scribbling diagrams or algorithms, which I do on paper even though I have a computer. It takes effort to waste writing, so I don't do much of it. But all it takes is the click of a button to print a webpage or someone else's class notes
I would imagine that the school thought of this when some teacher or professor said "hey, I've handed out like 500 xeroxes this week alone, let's just make the students get computers so I can email it to them instead." THAT is where the wastage probably came in, not with student's papers and such. I don't have any insight on that, particularly, but it seems like the validity of the argument would really depend on how much paper they distribute.
And so, the point!
When you're doing your study, make sure to find out the school's current paper distrobution rate.
Take it from me. If you find the real truth. Or set out using the scientific method, then you will most likely dissapoint your teacher.
Also, to get to the real truth will cost you too much time and money.
Just go ahead with the flow, turn in some report that basically says high technoloy is bad for the environment, and that we need to go back to a time when we worked with out hands, etc. etc.
You can easily create some spin that Capitalism is at fault.
we just use ink, paper, and vodka.
We tried population control, but for some reason the people that believe in it and pass it on as a value to their child are becoming fewer and fewer, while those who believe in having large families and preach that as a virtue continue to increase. :)
There is no population explosion anyway--just population shifts. We eradicated smallpox and malaria in the 3rd world, and surprise, surprise, people reproduce like gangbusters. Sooner or later, they'll reach a point where they want to send their kids to college. Then, nobody will have to tell them that 10 kids isn't such a bright idea. The population will shift to a new equilibrium. The real challenge is figuring out what to do when a prosperity spike backfires like it did in Japan. A big part of their economic problem is an aging population with insuficient replacement. In the US, we remedy the problem with immigration, but Japan is more xenophobic. They'll either have to give up their dislike for immigration, or they'll have to spend all their time caring for old people and settling for fewer consumer comforts (you can't make Hondas while you're tending the elderly at a nursing home).
So it would be nice if people stopped panicking and found something better to do... like procreating.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The one big hope on the cost side...once all students have electronic readers, there will the possibility of schools switching from printed books to eBooks. This would save a ton of money (especially in language and literature classes that can use public domain materials).
Who knows, an OSS iniative to create open source textbooks could wipe out one of the biggest expenses of students. The OSS texts would probably be better quality and more current than the current texts used by schools.
I have found that often the cheapest long term solution is also the best for the environment. Now I'm going to get bombarded with examples conflicting with this thought but think it through. More often than not, if a product is not protected in some way ie has a government influence that shields it (think oil or other industries that get serious subsidies and EPA exemptions) the cheaper long term solution will be the best for the environment. Yes, there are many examples of how this doesn't work but it is a good starting point especially in complex situations like this.
Can you prepare yourself for the job market without a personal laptop? How much extra work would it require? How much better prepared would you be with a personal laptop? How do you work/play/communicate using a personal laptop and not using one. What is the total cost of your education (don't just think tuition)? Find the answers to these questions and you'll be closer to your answer than if you start with how much paper you save. That argument was a BS excuse to get some committee to sign off on this policy.
I don't know how far you want to take your thesis regarding the impact of technological reliance and the environment, but I would look at labor statistics for as far back as you can find. Basically look at what percentage of the populous is working in given industries. As our focus as become more and more technologically oriented, I think you will find a dramatic shift in the number of those who work in agriculture to those who work in technology. Now check legislative records relating to land use and agricultural issues. Again I think you will find a correlation between the demographic shift of workers with the areas of greater legislation. Now check your pollution levels and see how they are correllated to the above two. I would submit that you will find that as we have become further removed from our agrarian roots, that pollution has increased and that legislation has been enacted to make use of our natural resources in more liberal ways. The further from the land we have moved, the more we are willing to allow the land to suffer because we do not see the impact.
What will surprise you, I think, is that the factor for this is not a technological one as high tech, per se, but one of industry. It is the advent of the assembly line and small consumer products that has lead to our environmental doom, and if we look to how things were done before then, we might better find solutions to what we need to do now.
Best of luck!
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
There will be free laptops for the taking.
I went to a rich boy's high school and after school got out some of us poor kids checked out the "empty" lockers. We found portable teevees, video games, stuff like that.
I haven't lived in a dorm, but I'm sure people will leave behind laptops at the end of the semester.
riding round the world on an old motorcycle
Paper grows on tree. Literally. Not figuratively or metaphorically, but literally.
Now consider how we get silicon, copper, aluminum and plastic, which go into the production of laptop computers. Also consider the sources of electricity used to power that computer.
I don't mean to imply that paper manufacturing is perfect. But the trees used to make paper are grown on farms. Maybe we should start making laptops out of wood too. But then they wouldn't weigh only four pounds, which would put a severe crimp in the lifestyles of environmentalists.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Paul Allen and Bill Gates - for what it's worth. Bill Gates: Before Microsoft
This should be from the Yet-Another-Sign-How-Stupid Higher-Education-Is Dept.
One key point: trees grow again, whereas the metals, plastics, and the materials to make those metals and plastics, do not. They're not a renewable resource.
They don't generally get recycled, either - they go to the dump, where they rust and leak toxins into the environment. Paper, on the other hand, will biodegrade in a couple hundred years in a landfill environment.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Also, semiconductor manufacturing uses lots of quite nasty chemicals and while the organics can be incinerated, the heavy metals are difficult to dispose of safely for the long term and there is always the inevitable discharge of toxic pollutants into the air or water surrounding the factory.
Finally, both manufacturing and operating computers use lots of electricity, which is usually generated by plants that produce lots of greenhouse gases.
Besides worrying about recycling, you also want to worry about all these environmental costs.
Is it even reasonable to expect to calculate the 'environmental' cost of a laptop?
Just calculating the environmental cost of a piece of paper appears insurmountable. Just how accurately (read, credibly) can this be done? What exactly is the environmental cost of a lumberjack taking a dump after hours? Since having paper requires a certain percentage of us be lumberjacks, we must consider the entire cost of having them. A truck used in hauling lumber has environmental effects across the entire planet; from fossil fuels to iron ore. Never mind that it probably has several computers on board and the whole calculation goes recursive (trucks making computers to make trucks...)
Now consider a laptop. Plastics, solder, various exotic bits like tantalum, manufacturing resources on multiple continents using a huge variety of techniques, transportation costs for all of the above... Here's a cost to consider; the environmental impact of supporting the guy who wrote the BIOS for the laptop, for that short period of his life that he did the work, and the time during which he was educated to do it. He most likely used a computer for that and once again we go recursive (computers making computers...) Just how far do you think you can take this?
Slashdot posted a story about the true cost of making a memory chip. Many posters were quick to point out that the water used in the process was recycled on the spot multiple times. The original story left the impression that the water was entirely consumed, but actually left the matter entirely ambiguous by not being clear about what the water figure actually meant. Naturally the suspicion is that the author intended to be ambiguous because it has more impact to say 'umpteen gallons per chip.' In the end the story assigned some dollar figure to the results and condemned modern technology as another great western destroyer of the environment.
How are environmental costs calculated? If I go strip mine an acre, presumably something somewhere much have incurred a cost. That spot of land? It's still there. Nothing is growing on it now, but it's still there. Eventually something will grow on it again. So are we to attempt to prorate a cost to that period of time between the moment the acre was last 'pristine' until the moment it once again represents something environmentally sound? Is there a price sheet somewhere we're working from?
At the very least admit the extreme ambiguity of any such endeavor. If you are concerned that acknowledging this would ruin some presupposed result, you really need to reconsider your motives. Too much of the research coming from the environmental movement reeks of junk science and is dismissed out of hand. You risk creating something that has the appearance of a result created to drum up outrage. If you want to influence my skeptical mind you need to be absolutely scrupulous in avoiding that. Just calculate. Don't even mention the word 'western.' Avoid ambiguity. Acknowledge this real limits of what can be known.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
don't despair. just throw it out and buy a new one.
"Smoking helps you lose weight - one lung at a time" -- A. E. Neumann
Our company Disposes of Technology for Companys.The Cost is a set price per unit. And depending on the contract that is agreed on.maybe a portion of the remarket value.any unit that doesn't pass or meet specs. meet the shredder where the shredded units are sold.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large numbers.
Assuming that all the students go paperless and all data from the (chalk, white, black) boards is digitally enterered into the computer. Then the school enviromental impact will be a little less witout papers in the halls and less garbage cans full of papers. Without the need for Pens and Pencles there would be less graffiti on the walls and the stalls, desks and chairs. And because I am a packrat I can honestly say that an average student uses an average 2 cubic feet of paper per year. So If a student uses a laptop over 4 years completly paperless then they will be saving fair amount of landfill space. I think the energy use of the laptop is more hazerous with polutants from power companies. Then paper would be per year. So I think globally it would be the same for the environment but for the schools environment it would probably be cleaner if everything is done right which will probably not happen.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
If I remember correctly, electronics use (including computers) has low environmental impact compared to things like driving an SUV or living in a big house. This is from the book:
o nI D=308
6 09 80281X/104-4760810-4413531?vi=glance
"The Consumer's Guide to Effective Environmental Choices: Practical Advice from the Union of Concerned Scientists"
You can get it here:
http://www.ucsusa.org/publication.cfm?publicati
and read some reviews here:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0
I program, admin, and plot out incredibly complicated schemes to waste my time while maintaining the careful semblance of productivity. Since it's not feasible to carry around a 10mx3m messy white-board, I prefer using legal pads. If they came with wings, it would be a bonus. I fill them. I file them, I throw them (without wings they just go nuts!) and when things are really fun I jump up and down on them in a cathartic rage while shaking the walls with formless screams of primal fury. Face it, aside from dealing with the dioxin problems caused by the processing (and one wicked smell!) paper has an incredibly high return value.
-Go ahead, fold your laptop into a dart or a glider. Hey, just throw it. Please?
-Crayons, ink, watercolor, pencil, tempra, chalk all work well on paper, try it with a laptop, but don't insult us by calling it a "case mod". It would be interesting to hear a tape of the support call though. Be sure to put it on a M$ personal webserver directly on said laptop and link it to an "Ask slashdot" article. Thank you.
-One word....Origami!!
-Another victim....cursive/calligraphy. We will all write like doctors, dammit!
-Write and solve complex "anything" on a computer while you deny yourself the rich medium that lets you doodle, scribble, jot, or work on your limerics in the margins while still giving you the kind of dynamic outline capabilities of paper. My guess is that you'll suffer a kind of claustrophobia. I know I do. I can't even stand computer day-planners. They're a complete waste of time to everyone except the rigidly controlled. There's just too much chaos in my day-to-day, hour-to-hour world.
And comming soon..."Digital Ink"! It's short for "Another costly M$ Monopoly we will impale you on PC user--pay up and quit whining thieves!". Could you imagine having to purchase site licenses for a floor of tablet-pc's and then suffer the indignity of having to purchase "Refills"?!! (more primal screaming and breaking things)
There's also the cluelessness of computer use in the classroom. K12 Schools that want to present themsevles as being forward and progressive are actually just making the fat-cats fatter. What about all the infrastructure costs? You don't network for free with laptops...or anything. K12 should be about something other than the bored smart kids helping the bored kids fix their laptops or use M$ products...because after some buttmunch tweaks the registry you'd probably be lucky to have a character mapper or even notepad accessible on one of those things.
What about licensing fees for software?! Does "Ichman Highschool" suddenly transform into "The DELL-Ichman-Microsoft Campus" Screw the whole "highschool" thing, they're not _just_ a provider of k12 education.
"Students...Parents...Please take the scalpel provided and while holding your forearm over the bloodletting tray, gently press and slice with the tip, just enough to get a good stream of blood started..."
On the upside, it's certainly easier to catalog and archive every deviant word, every unpleasant thought, computer doodles and website deviltry and sell access to it to the highest bidder, like PINKERTON, or to a Corporate Human Enslavement department. I'm sure everyone here would just love to know that their employer would be reading about a crush they had, or what they did some weekend tweleve years ago when they foolishly submitted some journal assignment. Of course the alternative is to have really savvy kids with such an entrenched reflexive mendacity that they would never write anything personal. I've already seen this kind of behavior in colleges where nobody ever really writes what they're thinking except for the former home-coming queens and class valedictorians who truly want whirrled peas and work with children.
"Do k12 students really need access to computers at all for anything other than entertainment?" The answer is a resounding "No." Even NASA would prefer that they just "write up" experiments and then scan in just the illustratio
Every new form of media has it's own Requirimento
One thing you may want to look at is the source of energy used to power those laptops and how much of that resource is going to powering those laptops and how much pollution that resource makes.
I have been asked in lectures "Why are you taking notes" as I furiously scribble down whats on the powerpoint presentation overhead. "It'll be available on the subject homepage" they say. I just seem to take it in better if I'm writing it down, rather than reading it later. Working full-time, Uni part time, I dont put enough time aside to reread the lectureres slides all over again anyway. ^_-
It could just mean that paying attention and focusing on the lecture is better for me than chatting to the people next to me...
Yay me!
"My school has started requiring students to own and use laptops in all of their classes, under the pretext of saving paper."
/parents must pay for a laptop to be used in the classroom, they can limit the amount of paper materials that teachers are required to distribute. Teachers can then distribute most of their classroom materials and handouts electronically and eliminate a lot printing and copying. Copying costs and printing cost are a huge expense for the schools, and if this cost can be reduced by moving to electronic documents, then it would make financial sense for the school to do so.
I think everyone is assuming that the schools is doing this based on environmental factors (and maybe that is how it is being presented,) but I doubt that is actually the case. More likely they are looking at this from a cost savings standpoint for the school. If they can create a requirement in which the students
My experience has been that even if a paper is submitted to a teacher or professor (I played this game five years ago in high school), the teacher immediately prints it and pulls out a red pen rather than grading it electronically.
.
It's especially cute that the department at my college that seems the least inclined to grade and return my papers electronically rather than printing them out is the environmental studies department. The most inclined is the Math dept., where some professors won't even accept hardcopies anymore.
Plus, using electronic sources leads to paper wastage, too. A textbook is used over and over. If you hand students an electronic source, many of them will print it out, then throw it away. And again next year. And again. And again. And again.
And then there's all of the cute pictures people find on the 'net and print out. .
I'm going to make a very un-PC like statement and come out and say if I had a choice between a notebook and a notebook laptop, I'm taking the hardware each and every time. I mean... it's a friggin' laptop! C'mon! I would have killed for one when I was in school.
But, they don't belong in the classroom any more than computers do.
...ing. Global Warming is therefore caused by Pron.
Does anyone? Is there a single scrap of evidence that computers are more useful to teachers than chalk? As far as I can see, we spend billions on computers in our schools without a shred of evidence that they help teachers teach.
I remember when I was a college freshman in 1998. I noticed several classmates of mine who typed out all their notes on laptops in our computer engineering classes. By the time I graduated, noone used laptops for notetaking and those who used to jumped ship to political science or some art.
Laptops for classtaking are retarded. True geniuses use video cameras with a good zoom.
.smell my feet.
That's the wonderful thing about paper, it grows back! Even if it ends up in a land fill, plant some trees on it, they will absorb the nutrients from the old paper, and make new paper!
Ahh, the wonderful renewable world of wood.
The Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition storehouses a lot of this information, though you have to wade through a lot of fluff. You might start here.
http://www.mapcruzin.com/svtc_maps/
and here is a list of the 179 superfund sites and sites that don't quite make the superfund list in the valley, the company names and addresses are scary....
http://www.mapcruzin.com/svtc_maps/list.htm
I teach computer science/computer technology at a small college, and this has been my experience with the power point as well. I had to threaten that if I saw anything but the "six slides to a page" I would stop making the powerpoint available at all.
As for homework, I started requiring all homework be submitted electronically years ago. First on 3.5" diskettes, then on CD-R and now most is Email. For example, this past semester I taught a course in advanced C++. All assigments were emailed to me, I would compile the source code, test it, and then email it back with comments and the grade. Saves all sorts of paper and has a quicker turn around time for the students as well. In addition, I can make assignments due at a time when neither I nor the students would normally be at the school, such as midnight on a Sunday night.
There was an article written in Forbes about 4 years ago by a fellow named Mark Mills. He broke down the numbers that concluded that every time a megabyte is moved accross the internet, 1 chunk of coal is burned somewhere. Search their archives.
Computer use is a substanicial and growing percentage of household electricity use. Since most of our electricity comes from coal & nukes, this is a blow to our health and ecosystems. To balance this though is the lesser amount of driving we do as we purchase more and work from home more online.
TripInvite.com: Group Travel Made Simple Evit
Using up paper is one enviro cost, but life cycle is what makes technology nasty. While there has been a good deal of focus on recycling, manufacturing has been neglected. Really ugly chemicals are used to process semiconductors and to make PCBs.
Life, by it's very nature, by it's very definition, requires consumption. Everything every living creature does involves consumption.
Everything that goes into owning a computer (from the mining of metals, creation of plastics and glasses, manufacturing, transportation, packaging, the byproducts of the people involved in all those steps, the cost of electricity, the cost of the glasses you now need to see because of focusing on such a close target, the microwave radiation from your 802.11b network connection, a rah-rah and etc, and so-on so-on so-on) added together will not cause all the trees on the planet to die, the o-zone layer to deplete, the oceans to stop emitting carbon-dioxide, the rain to have a pH so low as to eat through your skin, one one salmon or spotted owl to die. The planet is huge, and chock full of resources, and not only that, but those resources are constantly replenished via life's ability to fill any niche available to it. It's a complex system which constantly adjusts to feedback.
On the other hand, owning that computer will give jobs to many who wouldn't have them, will give you access to the largest repository of knowledge ever assembled by humanity, will put you in direct (virtual) contact with millions (billions?) of people, enhance your ability to take the ideas of your mind and realize them in reality.
So I ask, to what end is your inquiry directed?
Cost....The school wants every student to purchase a laptop ($800-1000 new, but possibly reused old laptops from mom & dad)to save the school how much paper? Costing how much money? That brings up questions of class and having to buy access to a public education.
As far as I know, paper mills use electricity, and some chemical by-products to manufacture their product, but I think hundreds of laptops would create much more pollution/environmental impact than saving some paper. How environmentally damaging is a landfill full of wasted paper anyway? When I throw out a piece of paper, its not like I'm throwing out a couple of AA batteries (I recycle those).
People might even use more paper. There has to be some mechanism to track the school's paper usage. There also has to be a mechanism to figure out whether kids are learning more/better. That's the school's reason to be there in the first place.
Look at why the school might want to do this. Maybe the school has to pay for their paper directly, but IT purchases come from a state budget. Maybe this bold initiative is being pushed by an outside vendor that would love to fill your school with WAPs
The recycling issue isn't really about IT, though. There are plenty of ways to get old equipment recycled. The owners are responsible for getting rid of it appropriately.
In the end, I'm afraid you'll end up with something like: xyz school district wants to spend (insert 5-figure number) and students to collectively spend (insert 6-figure number) so we can cut our paper usage by $2000 per year. If this is the way to go for the sake of your education, great. But look at the big picture. It doesen't look like you're getting a "bang for the buck" in any sense
Sorry to be cynical...but I wonder if you can buy "school-authorized" laptops, for a generally reasonable price. Or even worse, if laptop MUST be "school-authorized"? Me thinks me smells a scam :)
Comparing the recycling of paper to the recycling of computer is really missing the entire point.
Don't forget to calculate in the gained efficiencies and waste reductions throughout the entire resource gathering, design, and manufacturing process caused by a "reliance" on high technology.
I'm certain that any ecological damage you'll find from the waste of end user computers will be several orders of magnitude less than the waste reductions and efficiencies (read: astronomical benefits) from our use of high technology in industry.
As you may know, Open Source has always lagged far behind in many 'consumer' type of features. Among the most prominent are 'power saving' modes featured on many of the newer PCs. The subsystems, of hardware, BIOS, and operating systems, reduce the amount of power consumed by the computer when it is not in use, and thus save energy and the environment. However, it is clear that by eschewing these features as being for 'lame desktop windoze lusers', the open source community firmly establishes itself as standard American energy sucking social reprobates, unconcerned about the fate of the rest of the planet, and not caring one whit if the entire nation collapses just like California did last year. In this article I show just how much energy would be wasted if people did, in fact, switch to linux or BSD.
.083 * 120 = 9 watts. Thats pulling all the time. Day and night. 24/7. Now, lets say I have this thing plugged in all year. Thats 8760 hours. The power company measure this stuff in 'kilowatt-hours', so how many of those am I using? 9 watts * 8760 hours = 78,840 watt-hours, or 78 kilowatt hours. At 14 cents a kilowatt hour in my district, I have payed 11 dollars to the power company this year for my computer system to do absolutely nothing at all. Not even be turned on.
The way to calculate power consumption of a computer is relatively simple and will cost about 50 bucks. First you need to get a multimeter that can measure AC current up to a few amperes. The next step is to get a 3 prong power cord. After that get some connector thingies and a wire stripper/crimper. Then take the hot wire of the power cable and split it and make it so you can plug the multimeter into it, in series w the circuit to measure. In this case, a computer.
Next, power is measured in watts. A good familiar yardstick is lightbulbs, with 60 watt being pretty normal to see in ceilings in people's houses. Volts * amps = watts, and since the voltage will be roughly 110-120 volts, (measure w a voltage meter if u wanna be exact), you can multiply the number on the ammeter by 120 to find out how many watts the computer system is using up.
Now, surprisingly, in 'off' mode, power supplies and monitors and so forth draw current. 83 milliamps in my case.
Now let's say I turn it on! My system draws roughly 0.66 Amps with windows running. When I start an open gl game its 0.68A. If i decide to unplug the fan that saves me 0.02A. basically, though, its roughly 0.66 Amps.
If I left my computer on full blast all the time, hard disk going, monitor on, etc, this is what it costs me to be up 24/7. 0.66Amp * 120v = 79.2 Watts. 8760 hours in a year at 79.2 watts makes roughly 693,000 watt-hours, or 693 kilowatt hours. Again at 14 cents per, thats about 97 USDollars worth of electricity a year for the computer to be on.
But the nice folks at Microsoft, being tree hugging hippies and all, have implemented easy to use, reliable, and safe 'power saving' mode. This mode will make your hard disk stop spinning, and on suitable monitors will turn them off as well. Now, how much power does this actually save? Well, you can measure it. Just wait a few minutes for the comptuer to go into power saving mode.
In my case, when the monitor goes into sleepy mode, (the orange sleepy light instead of the green power light on the monitor case) consumption plummets from 0.66 Amps to 0.27 Amps. All because of an operating system software feature interacting properly with the a simple monitor hardware feature that has been around at least 5 years. Now when the hard disk shuts off, it goes down even more to about 0.23 Amps. Now, with the hard disk not spinning and heating in my machine, I could theoretically shut the case fan off and save another 0.02 amps... but my box doesn't do that. Anyways, there is even a 'more power saving mode', its called 'suspend' mode I believe, and that drops me down to a low low 0.20Amps. I guess it shuts down some circuits on the motherboard as well as the HD and monitor. I don't know.
and you call yourself cynical? hah! it's for sure an environmental issue: the question is when the issue manifests and which poor slob (or generation) has to deal with it. it's for sure a cost issue: the rich pay each other to mess their minds enough so that they lose track of their impact on the poor.
there, i hope i have demonstrated how to be "contemptuously distrustful of human nature and motives" (webster's definition of cynical). what you tried to pass off on slashdot was being "savvy", but you'll have to polish that a little more. have a nice day.
It has been proven time and time again that computers actually generate more paper work. God knows I prefer to print out a tute rather than try to read the damn thing on the screen.
Also I have to say this but it's a high school for god's sake. What the hell is wrong with pen and paper. There is really no concievable reason why students would need laptops unless you've started offering first year uni courses on top of the regular curiculum.
We can save paper with laptops. Right. Two big issues. I did two semesters of college on laptops.
-Homework was still paper (and this in a 4th year computer science curriculum, they should know email) The best were the profs who wanted both electronic and paper submissions.
-"open notes" exams... do you think they let you fire up the Thinkpad (especially with the 802.11 card dangling out the back)
Further, exams in general are difficult to do other than pencil and paper and retain cheatproofing.
It's just like a fascist dictatorship, without the punctual rail service!
I think this has to do with the fact that paper is easier to look at. If you have to read 100 papers, sitting at the computer reading is a lot harder on your eyes than looking at paper. Not to mention, you can sit back in a chair and read papers, while typically you have to sit at a desk to use the computer (or at least with a laptop sitting in your lap - which gives off heat, feels heavy after a while, etc).
Until there's a better way to read data electronically (and theres some promising ideas), hitting that shiny print button is still easier.
Speak before you think
Check out ComputerCorps. They focus on recycling and refurbishing computers.
http://www.computercorps.org/
~jf
remind me never to complain about /. ed's posting dupes again..
Speak before you think
For a damn good reason. Do you realize how hard it is to correct a paper digitally? Even the best digital pen systems out there are no match for a good old ball point pen.
Also, the way the human eye scans documents when reading them off of a computer screen (scrolling et all) encourages far more mistakes and necessitates multiple readings to catch the same number of mistakes as one read through of a hard copy.
notes scribbled on paper also have automatic "version / draft" management. Just select the word that you like best from all those jotted down. . .
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
I'm serious too. I'm working on a home automation project. I have a means to control up to 8 devices using the LPT port (yeah yeah, I could do more w/ the serial port, but I'm too lazy to learn it :), and using old 486s running Win95 over a network (yeah, insert MS bash here), I plan to set up various nodes that control 8 devices... just a motherboard, minimal HD (for loading the OS and code), ~32 MB RAM apiece and just have it listen to the network.
:) (sorry, I had to say it)
That, or beowulf them
Interested in dumping the equipment, email me: torfoff at yahoo.com. Ya know... I really should just register one of these days...
Using laptops or any other computer could reduce the amount of gasoline used to haul the student around.
With a computer you can do research that would only be possible by physically going to a library. The costs of transportation to places where you do research should be factored into the equation when determining the effect of computer use in a classroom.
Computers can allow a person who is disorganized to become more organized. The fact is that barring malfunction computers do not forget what you put into them. People do forget things. Forgetting stuff is very wastefull as it causes extra trips to be made burning up even more gasoline.
Games on computers can save gasoline also. The games will keep the students away from Malls and their arcades. Why burn gasoline to drive to the mall when you can first person shooter on your laptop. There are lots of older games that are still loads of fun that can be played on many older laptops.
Saving time by using a computer is also something to consider. Time is one thing that you can never get back. Any saving of time could be considered very important.
Most importantly of all, male geeks need more female geeks. Forcing Buffy to use a computer might get her interested in Greg the Geek rather than Fred the football player.
I am sure with a little effort you can come up with even more ways you are saving the environment by using a computer.
dzimmerm
Jumping to correct solutions slowly is better than jumping to incorrect solutions quickly.
THAT is just an excuse for your own lazy ass. You can be just as messy and disorganized on a computer as you can in real life.
My own computer would be an excellent example. I cannot even find my pr0n anymore. I always become really afraid when someone comes over to "check their email..." gives me the willies!
I heard the robotic Al Gore replaced an older obsolete robot on Apple's computer assembly line.
Of course you realise that many donators will be in direct violation of the EULA between themselves and the BORG !!!! :-)
Unless of course you wipe the HD and put Linux on them... them it would be OK
FragHARD
FragHARD or don't frag at all
I remember reading a study put out by back in '99 by Germany's Wupperthal (sp?) Institute that had calculated that 20 tonnes of raw materials go into your average laptop. Sorry -- don't have a link to it, but here's a useful link to an article on some of problems that are being shipped overseas, instead.
Also, farmer/poet/essayist Wendell Berry wrote a short, widely ridiculed essay years back entitled "Why I am not Going to Buy a Computer". It contains interesting criteria for accepting new technological innovations. Google reveals an online version of the essay here. Its short and worth reading. You should really buy the whole excellent book: What Are People For?
20 some years ago I was working at one of the "office automation' companies in tech sales. As low man, I got fwd a phone call from some poor schmuck at a big paper company - mgmt had charged her to find out what the impact of this "paperless office" would have on their busineess. I told her they should plant more trees and prepare for a big boom in use of paper.
How many times do *you* print the same PDF file?
I've been researching environmental effects of electronics in general, I have some information about the topic. For example, "computers discarded over the next 5 years [2000 to 2005] will place more than 1 billion pounds of lead into the waste stream" (European Union 2000). If you want my references (bibliography), email me xenotrout@arabia.com
since you mentioned technology ... something you might want to consider is that use of cellphones has been found to contributing to the extinction of gorillas in africa ... there's your globalization for you.
http://www.cellular-news.com/coltan/
and ... i remember reading that a person using a cellphone while driving is MORE dangerous than one who is drunk out of his/her skull.
Come to Oregon. The environmentalists will yell at scream at you, because those dams are supposedly killing the fish. Nevermind we let the indians fish as much of the protected salmon they want. Reminds me of the whale in washington. They let the indians go on a whale hunt, because it was a sacred ceremony...
they don't put them on CDRWs :) So we can at least re-use them. Like when they used to be on floppies... And what gives with the stupid packaging? I really liked the plastic DVD-like cases they used to come in...
GW = Golden Words - Canada's other national newspaper
I was just discussing & thinking out loud.
testing out my trending skills
/*sarcasam*/Great analogy/*sarcasam*/
Guns are tools of dealing destructive force
Computers are tools for managing digital information
I see your point on guns... how again does an information tool not belong in a center for education ?
I don't ask you to be me. I only ask you not expect me to be you.
> If anything, computers can lead to MORE paper use.
Oh yes. I've been trying to convince faculty to make their PPTs more general and NOT required to print out to get a good grade. My comments have fallen mostly on deaf ears, but I think some people are thinking about this.
The real issue is that PPT is a poor-mans text book. Okay, so Jane Professor has had her book rejected eighteen times. So she pushes an abridged version of her rejected book in PPT format. Everyone prints it out and take notes on it. Score: Professor's ego 1, envinronment 0. It wouldn't be so bad if we didn't have to buy another book, usually VERY underutilized, for the class because of department requirements. Worse, these types of teachers always have it in for the required book. Really now, your half-assed PPTs are no substitute for a decent book on the subject, a book with an index, and clearly labeled chapters.
Some professors do use PPT properly: as outlines to lectures and not as quasi-books. These outlines rarely need to be printed out as the notes you take in your notebook work just as well.
There are some serious usability issues with PPT becoming the new micro-publishing. It wouldnt be so bad if we all had tablet laptops that we could take notes right on with a stylus, but that ain't gonna happen anytime soon, if ever.
this brings up an interesting side point: Digital Photography is very good for the environment. Photoprocessing involves a lot of nasty chemicals, which digital photography cuts out. Yes, people printing those photos uses more rescources, but there is still a net gain for the environment.
omnia tua castra sunt nobis
"Neither Spamhaus nor any of the Defendants named had ever heard of EMarketersAmerica prior to this SLAPP suit being filed. The Plaintiff EMarketersAmerica could not have suffered any damages whatsoever."
Isn't this a bit of nonsense? Just because Spamhaus had not heard of Emarketers doesn't logically mean that Emarketers couldn't suffer damages from their actions. Of course I agree that any lawsuit over an RBL is a load of hogwash, but I really don't understand the logical of Spamhaus here, either.
You might want to consider RSI problems. School furniture is usually not suited for working with laptops. In the Netherlands, regulations forbid employees from using a laptop more than two hours a day (that means that the employer is obliged to provide a docking station or PC). Recently, the Inspection has concluded that (college) student computer equipment should meet the same standards as personnel equipment. In short, if there are regulations about laptop use for employees, why shouldn't they apply to pupils? (And if that doesn't work, you can still frighten the parents.)
I find it very interesting how everyone discusses things we can't quite evaluate and ignore what we can know and do something about.
For example, do the school has a program to eliminate paper? It is not necessarily a buzzword, especially if there isn't a printer nearby or if its use is costly.
And which notebooks? A PowerPC notebook (like an Apple) would use much less energy, and cost much less to manufacture, than an equivalent Intel, since die and battery sizes are bigger for the same given process and performance.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
This reminds me of an idiot standing in front of a speeding massive something or other saying stop when they know damn good and well it won't. If there was a qustion of whether or not computers environmental impact might eventually casue us to stop using them I would grant some relevence to the decision to use laptops over paper but since I simply don't belive that short of a catastrophic event throwing us out of this age of technology completely computers are going anywhere its a moot point. The educational system has to embrace computers as a primary educational tool sooner or later in an increasingly computerized world.
Computers have a place in the educational process becasue they area fundamental reality of functioning in the 'real world'. Currently the realm of education and the 'real world' are becomeing more and more estranged from one another. The longer this remains true the worse of a decline we will see in education. The education system ( speaking primarily of US education as its all I know about ) is fast loosing its relevence in modern society. More and more each day it seems the relevence of what you learn in school is less and less pertinate to what you will do/need to know in the 'real world'.
Of course many would say the real world us leading to the brink of technology dependent illiteracy but to me that depends on what you declare is illiteracy.
Why is manual computation ignorace such a bad thing if you can correctly perform the equations with the aide of a calculator/computer ? Why is the inability to write in a clear and legible handwriting bad if you can type ? The reason we remain so attached to writing and its paper use is that is the primary means with which most of us to date were taught to manipulate our thoughts outside of our heads. IE you are first taught to write with a pencil and paper instead of to type. Why ? Everyone will agree that a typewritten page is far far far more legible than a handwritten one. In fact one you get on up in the process of education handwritten pages are no longer acceptable to many professors/teachers. Why not teach children primarily to type instead of handwritting ?
Most would have an obvious knee jerk response to that suggestion but if you will go beyond that just a bit and trully examine it what would be so bad about that ? Teach rudimentary manual notation for the areas in which typing simply isn't very feasible but don't spend years practicing pretty print and cursive scripting for which the modern world has so little use. Seriously... how many people still primarily convey the written word through handwritting vrs typing ? I know I shifted somwhere my last couple of years of highschool and about the only use I had for handwritting was taking notes in college courses becasue I couldn't afford a laptop. The universal nature of computers is slowly but surely creeping down the ranks of the education system and sooner or later typing will replace handwritting at the most basic levels. Its simply a matter of time and sufficient penetration of the technology.
For every horror story about a kid that can't perform simple math without a calculator I ask you how many kids out there that can perform simple math equations that can't use a spreadsheet ? How many kids that won spelling bee's that can't use a word processing program ( and by that I mean more than typing in one.. replace, foot noting, formatting page numbers etc )? The key needs of education necesarry for survival in the modern world has shifted and manual processes of data manipuation are becoming antiquated rapidly. Students would often be far better served if time now devoted to learning the finer points of increasingly archaic notational skills were shifted to mastering those skills as they are actually employed in an increasingly computerized world. And I garountee you if you teach a kid to type and think on a computer screen FIRST they will bitch and moan about having to handwrite something the way most of us bitched about having to type a paper for the first time.... especially as screen quality/portability continues to increase.
I don't ask you to be me. I only ask you not expect me to be you.
My experience has been that even if a paper is submitted to a teacher or professor (I played this game five years ago in high school), the teacher immediately prints it and pulls out a red pen rather than grading it electronically.
Well, speaking from experience I can honestly say that grading a paper electronically is a right pain in the arse. It's almost downright impossible if it's mathematically heavy (as in lots of equations, something computers and word processors especiall are still not very good at).
When I grade/mark a paper I tend to make a lot of comments, not just read it and put a mark on it. I could do that electronically but I've always felt that unless I'm giving something a perfect mark I owe it to the student to give them helpful comments. Whether they take any notice of them of course, is another matter!
"Because it's there." - George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt Everest, March 18, 1923 (New York Times)
Ok, being an engineer this is a tough one. I graduated from University of Waterloo. A place where computers are in excess. This means everywhere there is a computer. I am not saying it is a bad thing. The professors knew this and as result adapted. They had us do all equations theoretically using letters and equations. Rarely did we actually have add two numbers. For these scenarios the computer did not help one bit. These days the first year courses could be solved by MathCad and the likes.
So in first year I would ban computers just so that people get the jist of things. But after that the computers do not help you because you need to think about the equations and structure...
Computers do impede the child's ability to learn. Because the child can get easy answers to solutions. You have to learn to walk before you can run. Granted once you can walk, you should not have to spend your life walking.
BTW an example of where this has happened, not directly is video games. As an old fogy when I was a child we had video games and traditional toys. I opted for the traditional toys because I had more fun with it. But these days most are opting for video games. Result? Kids have better reflexes, but much lower levels of creativity. That is not a good thing....
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
being eco-friendly only costs more because being wasteful is subsidized.
the reason capitalism is (at least partly) at fault is because it seeks to privatize benefits while socializing costs.
think about it - why is power from coal or oil so cheap? because it is (usually) extracted from public lands (all of us) and given to a private entity (exxon, BP, peabody, et al) at a bargain basement price. then it is processed and burned (either in a car or at a power plant) and used individually (in the case of the car) or sold at profit (in the case of a power plant). The benefits in either case are that the individual can get to where he/she wants to go or the company will make a monetary profit. the costs? despoiled public lands (i've never hiked through an oil field (although i have seen pictures), but i have hiked through a clearcut. it ain't pretty), air and water pollution, etc. if the costs of those externalities are included, you'll see that the eco-friendly alternatives will begin to appear a lot more affordable.
and yes, i know that there are benefits to technology, i'm not a total luddite (i am using a computer, right?), and even to capitalism (although i would argue that whatever benefits there are to capitalism are not inherent to capitalism, but rather a nice side effect). i just don't want to keep typing forever here...
...That a self-proclaimed geek website is generally so against the idea of students using laptops at school.
If I had a laptop when I went to school, I would have gotten much better grades. For the life of me, I could not keep my notebook organized and I still to this day have absolutely awful handwriting.
If YOU don't want to use laptop, fine. But for some students, if it makes an improvement in their grades and they don't use it just for playing quake, let them have laptops.
Students engage in competition for most interesting filenames...
[flashing light. ringing bell]
WE HAVE A WINNER!!!
F. Foobar is printing today's most interesting article named...
Imagine the possibilities...
---
"A theory that seems to explain everything really explains nothing."
-- Karl Popper
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I teach math. It completely amazes me that anyone would accept a math homework in electronic form and then make the corrections electronically. None of the word processors I've seen produce anything close to readable equation output. Equations set with MS Word make my eyes bleed.
Most mathematicians still use LaTeX for anything involving equations (departmental documents which are, unfortunately, most likely standardized on Word are another matter). For electronic grading, I'd either have to correct a student's LaTeX or (worse) fiddle around with the tedious Word equation editor. I'm sure this would double or triple the time I spend grading.
I sometimes have students wondering if I can put stuff up on the Web via WebCT. This would be a lot of work. This is something people don't think about, but at least for math all the electronic alternatives are a pain in ass.
WHere i work, they have their ASSISTANTS print out their e-mail, the then write their response on the printout, and the assistant types it in. THe only time some of these guys turn on the $2500 laptop on their desk is when theres a photo-op, and they want to look tech savvy.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
I am amazed at how lazy people are. I have long ago stopped being upset at people not turning off their computers when they're not using them overnight or such. I understand it can be a lengthy process to "get back to where you were" when you turned it off....especially if you're a devleper like me.
But what about your stupid monitor? There it is, sucking away 200+ Watts of energy and generating heat in air conditioned offices in the summer. The effect of people regularly turning off their monitors overnight in this country would probably give us back about enough electricity to like a city of 500,000 people.
You figure the fuel not used and the wars not fought.
See, here is your problem though.
/BSD Unix or other OS's to suddenly find their way onto the hard drives of these machines, replacing the Windows that is stuck on the hard drive now?
As a middle schooler at Lady's Island Middle School in Beaufort, SC, we were given the opportunity in 1996 to become part of a pilot program introducing the use of laptops in the classroom. It went very well, until...
High School in 1999. While most of the students from the middle school still used the laptops that they had been leasing or purchased, the technology was seriously dated on the machines. Not even the early wireless would work on these machines. So it's not necessarily a private school matter. It's more of a test to see what students will actually do with the laptops they receive. What did I do?
Collectively over the 7 years I had the laptop (I just recently gave it to a friend who now uses it for word processing. I have to find the modem) I must have had at LEAST 20-30 different games on there at any given time. I think the one that stuck with the hard drive until it was given to my parents to use 2 years ago was Duke Nukem 3D. I remember playing the game religiously in class. I was all about those strippers.
So the other question is this: Will the laptops lead to the downfall of morales at the shcool because the kids will stick all sorts of games on there. And if they are using new laptops (with wireless, etc) what is to stop them from conducting in IMing, File Swapping/Sharing, and WLAN Games of Quake III during Geometry?
Another question: because everyone at the school suddenly has a laptop, will it be easier for Linux
"Now there's a look in your eyes, like black holes in the sky"-Pink Floyd
A couple years ago the Cassandras were claiming computer servers and computers were using as much a 15% of the US power supply. The IT bubble in the late 90s accounted for most of the increase in US electricity demand.
Other people claim the percentage usage is more like 5%. I wonder who is correct.
Imagine taking Organic chemistry, and trying to copy down a chemical structure!
And getting the proffesor's lecture notes is no substitute - the point of note-taking is to jot down the things YOU think are relevant. It's one of the skills you're supposed to be learning in school.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
Ummm ... if you melt down a Billion dollars worth of computers and get back $13M you are not really turning a profit.
Want to see a dramatic profit? How about simply skip this year's computer purchases, milk the ones you have for one more year, then replace them next year. Use Win2000Pro for another year instead of upgrading to XP. Extend the use cycle on hardware for one more year per system and you can decrease your spending on hardware by about 30%. Add 512M of RAM to each system for $40 apiece and be amazed at how much faster they run - doesn't take a new system to do that.
What the NSA is doing is equiv to donating $100,000 to your local church in order to get a $20,000 break on your taxes. You didn't save $20,000, you pissed away $80,000.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
.... that does not understand exponential growgth.
Depressing.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I hear (I haven't tried it myself) that OpenOffice.org has a good equation editor (better than MS Word). Also, there's GNU TeXmacs.
OLPC Australia
whats wrong with you people?
I've yet to throw a computer out, even if it doesn't work.
I've still got my original 286 desktop, and an old & busted 286 laptop, sitting around.
Most people seem to be focusing on the "paper" or energy use aspect (often in conjunction with paper/recycling), but are ignoring the chemical factor of computers. Every computer takes hundreds of different types of deadly chemicals and chemical products to produce, most of which goes strait into the environment. Those who don't, go inot the computer components that are quickly finding their way back into landfills, causeing just as much polution. Also, unlike naturally produced things like paper, computer components cannot be easily or cost effectivly recycled (some components, often the most dangerous ones cannot be recycled at all). This is causing very serious environmental damage. for more info, Google, or:
Cleaning Up Computer Trash - TechTV
Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition Web site
Virtual Ecology: A Brief Environmental History of Silicon Valley
Computers in a Sustainable Society
The next revolution in computers: Think Green
Yes. And that idiot assumes that everything is exponential.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
So AI is on the right track after all?
HI, MY NAME IS ISAAC.
Have your students ever claimed that their e-mail service was down, or have your e-mail service ever gone down when assignments were due?
I am interested because it seems to me that e-mail is less reliable than showing up to class or office with a hardcopy. Has that been a case in your experience? What do suggest to your students as a way to avoid such problems beyond the obvious suggestion of having the HW ready a day before it's due?
An ecosystem is destroyed.
Of course Email does go down on occasion, but these days most students have alternate ways to send. For example, the college where I teach has an elaborate campus email system, which is fairly robust, but most of my students have personal email accounts as well, and most of them have yahoo/hotmail, etc too. This past semester we had one outage of campus email, and every single student in my Advanced C++ class managed to find an alternate way to email the assignment to me. The beginning programming class wasn't as good at it, but I tend to cut them more slack anyhow.
I even do this with my Intro to Computers classes. One of the skills they are supposed to master is attaching files to email, so when they take their tests, there is always a "hands on" portion where they create a file of some kind, (depending on the unit) and email it to me during the exam.
Nothing is perfect, but I have had less problems with email than I ever had with diskettes, and it's so much easier to grade programs when I can compile them, make some changes, etc. than back when I used to have to look at hard copy.
well fuck you you fucking loser new member fag. you dont deserve mystery science theat. 3000 you fucking tird. you little bitch.
newbie fag.
How naive can someone be?
Paper is two-dimensional. Much like a cave wall, which is where this dolt learned all he supposedly knows about homework. Being a student does not automatically qualify you as being an expert at editing. Go to your room, kid.
oh, and thanks for the nice picture on the school's website ;)
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
THen put them into a beowulf cluster
Tragek