Analysis of survey data in a study published this year shows that most people underestimate energy usage differences between household appliances, modes of transportation and recycling materials. The researchers speculate that the 100 watt light bulb example serves as an anchor point for thinking about energy usage, and that people make insufficient adjustments from this baseline when estimating the energy consumed by other things.

Our estimates don’t scale

This graph from the paper summarizes the household appliance findings, which is where they focus the majority of their attention in the discussion:

Perceived vs. actual energy used and saved by devices and alternatives.

A few of these surprised me. Adjusting a washing machine’s setting (presumably to use only cold water?) can save about the same amount of energy than it takes to run a central air conditioner, which in turn uses about the same amount of energy as a clothes dryer (measured in watt hours). Laptops consume significantly less energy than desktops. A space heater and a room air conditioner use about the same amount of energy, but a dishwasher uses a lot more. Note that the scale is logarithmic, increasing by a factor of ten with each tick.

Lack of incentive

All this got me thinking about what would motivate people to understand appliance power differences better, and adjust their appliance usage or purchasing behaviour accordingly. If you’re interested, like I was, to know more about the energy consumption of household appliances, Michael Bluejay’s site (I keep reading this as “Michael Bluth”) is a great place to start as he provides a good overview as well as a lot of up-to-date links to more specific information. But all this requires a fair bit of effort and just knowing that you may have your estimates wrong is scant incentive to learn how much it’s costing you to run the dishwasher several times a week, or to wash in warm water.

The authors of the paper say that, when asked how they could use less energy, survey respondents are more likely to think of curtailment behaviours (merely cutting back) rather than switching to more energy efficient devices, probably because the latter requires spending money now. It wasn’t clear to me at first why curtailment is considered much less effective than what amounts to buying more stuff, especially at a time when people are lucky just to have a job. One of the researchers explains elsewhere that curtailment is a problem of declining incentive over time: remembering to repeat the cutback activities versus buying appliances that are able to do the cutting back for you.

Rebound effect?

What about the “rebound effect?” I have read or listened to criticisms of efficiency recommendations that claim that if consumers adopt technologies that use less energy they will use those technologies more. As if on cue, one of the items that caught my eye on Bluejay’s site was mentioned in a comparison table: the very small energy consumption of LED night lights (0.5 W) compared with regular ones (5W). Thinking of the incandescent night light we use I checked out LED alternatives on Amazon, and the top reviewer for this popular product liked them so much he got one for every room.

Seems apt. But the reviewer didn’t mention that efficiency was important to him (though other reviewers do). One can think of reasons why this might have nothing to do with a “rebound.” Maybe he was looking for a light for every room and just liked these ones. Or maybe he chose energy-efficient LEDs because he wanted to use so many, rather than the other way around.

So is this effect real? Maybe, but it might not be big enough to worry about. According to Climate Progress, for example, evidence-based answers to this question are hard to find because of the many confounding factors in accounting for rebound behaviour. The aforelinked post describes an analysis of driver behavior in the US over the period 1966–2001, where better fuel economy was correlated with a modest increase in driving. But significantly, the authors report that the magnitude of the effect declines over time, and also with income level. It doesn’t take much to imagine that with the current economy being what it is, another oil price spike like 2008’s will suppress any rebound effect related to driving that compact car you got out of Cash for Clunkers.

Measure it

Since the paper about how people estimate their energy consumption was framed as a problem of individual choices in daily life it makes sense to look at what would motivate people—not just assist them but actually drive them—to make better choices, possibly (or probably) by educating themselves as a means of saving money (i.e. where saving energy is not the focus). In the case of home appliances, if you are “merely” motivated to save energy then measuring your usage is a way to test what works and know for sure if you are using less power/saving money overall (despite whether some of your usage behaviours rebound a little).

By way of anecdote, my Dad’s car estimates for him what his range is based on his driving behaviour. Not only does he like this, he treats it as a game to see how far he can drive on a tank. The numbers go up and down in real time, and it’s easy to associate this feedback with efforts at control such as maintaining a constant speed, lower revs, and fewer hard stops. There is maybe a five second lag after a throttle change and the dashboard displays an updated number. Gasoline prices in Australia are not as high as those in Europe, but they are significantly above the US, and could be seen as glimpse at our future here.

I just read a fascinating article in Home Energy Magazine from 1993 on Bob Hubbard’s new-at-the-time, off-the-grid, PV-powered house in Arizona. At the time that he built this house, Hubbard worked in the solar energy industry, so he had a comprehensive understanding of how to build efficiency in, and designed the building to use about a tenth of the energy consumed by a typical American home: about 855 kWh compared to the regional average of 9,300 kWh.^† (It’s big too, at 2,600 ft².)

What became clear as I read the story was just how important it was that Hubbard was able to measure the effect of each of his appliances and systems, both at the planning stages and after he moved in: from assessing the baseload of the house when nothing was being actively used, to knowing which time of day was best to use power tools, and even to determining that the gas oven had a hidden power cost while it was running that was not covered in the manufacturer’s specifications.

Software can help

All of this was possible because of the continuous monitoring and feedback of energy usage that Hubbard designed into his house. At the time it was built the entire residence was completely off-grid, and generated much more electricity than the two occupants used. The article suggests that if the house had instead been connected to the electricity grid his monthly bill from the utility company would have been about $7. Almost twenty years later, this is exactly the area where software could make a mark and help the general public to reduce their living costs.

Here’s an example of how real-time feedback makes a difference based on the writer’s experience with a “moment-of-use” monitor (in this case a PowerCost device):

A few minutes after one of my children started showering, the display unit jumped from its 3–400 watt idle value to over 1.5 kilowatts. […] I realized that was from the hot water heater turning on. When I hear the AC relay flip and the house begins to cool off, I watch the display unit jump to over 3kw. I found this type of monitor to be an effective way to begin understanding the systems in my home and how different behaviors affect how much energy we use.

This is a great example of the immediate usefulness of being able to receive feedback about your energy consumption, though it probably falls into the same camp as curtailment behaviours in that it takes a bout of motivation on behalf of the individual and is not easily sustainable even if you are a geek about it. The most well-known moment-of-use device is the Kill-A-Watt, which is affordable and easy to use, but only allows you to test devices that plug in to a wall socket. Even with the PowerCost which attaches at the breaker box, there is no data logging, so you have to be paying attention to the device to get any useful information out of it.

The web makes it awesome

It’s in web-based monitoring that the real leap forward lies:

Electric utility partnership with Google PowerMeter

Currently this is available almost nowhere. Obviously (well, it seems obvious to me, but I could be wrong) this is awesome, but it won’t take off until it’s something you can order through your utility company, and ideally would allow integration of different energy sources (e.g. electricity, natural gas, user-uploaded data on wood, pellets, propane, etc.). However, the good news is that if you are super motivated you can get started on this right now by purchasing a compatible device, or—if you have mad phreaking skillz—by making your own using open source hardware and software.

Google PowerMeter is a Google.org project, and doesn’t cost anything. (I’m not saying that there is therefore “no cost.” There are privacy implications, though from what I have read the status of this product means that Google is not intending to try to make money out of it, directly at least.) What it does do is makes it trivial to include energy monitoring in your life the same way that you check your bank balance online. And it allows you to represent the data in different ways and compare your usage history with data from the general population.

I suppose this is what people who use the term “smart grid” are talking about, or maybe the idea of combining something like this with appliance-level communication within the home, which—provided it can all be done without using too much power—would make it much easier than it currently is to (a) have a clue, and (b) care about how much energy you consume, in the home and beyond.

Update: a promising development.

† This was in 1993. As of March, 2010 the national average is a rather shocking 11,040 kWh (with regional averages ranging from 6,252 kWh in Maine to 15,624 kWh in Tennessee).

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Since I have my headphones pretty much permanently jammed into my head I am able to do the following thing for you: provide you with a list of favourite podcasts, amongst which you may find something quite interesting.

Start here

Infallible opinions follow… (categories from iTMS)

Name & cover	Reason for awesome	Archives
Savage Love	Dan Savage. Everything you ever wanted to know about sex and preferred that someone else asked. Funny as hell. Brought to us by the Tech-Savvy At-Risk Youth. Dan’s voice, also pretty marvelous. (Category: Sexuality.)	iTMS, website (2006–)
Democracy Now!	Amy Goodman. A daily digest of the news that matters with fascinating interviews and debate. People in their own words. Every show a driven, inspiring and unflinching look at national and global events. (Category: News & Politics.)	website (1996–)
Background Briefing	ABC journalists. Consistently the most relevant, well-researched and informative investigative journalism on the radio. Looks at emerging social, economic and political topics. Props to Dan for the recommendation. (Category: News & Politics.) See also…	website (1995–)
This American Life	Ira Glass. Wonderful collections of stories organized by theme. American culture served with humour, pathos, insight and a dash of longing. Occasional collaborations with other journalists. (Category: Society & Culture.) See also…	website (1995–)
The Conversation	Dan Benjamin. Thoughtful interviews with movers and shakers in web and software development with forays into design, production, and online culture. Candid talk that’s low on jargon; well-produced. Dan Benjamin is doing great things. (Category: Tech News.)	iTMS, website (2010–)
All in the Mind	Natasha Mitchell. Fascinating interviews with experts in the areas of psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience and the occasional bit of philosophy. The conversations with Thomas Szasz are fantastic. (Category: Science & Medicine.)	website (2002–)
The Bugle (paywall)	John Oliver and Andy Zaltzman. Gut-clenching satirical take on the week’s news. Think hilariously accented, ginger mopped, ancient history major and the guy from The Daily Show. (Category: Comedy.) See also…	iTMS since 2009 (2007–)
Point of Inquiry	Chris Mooney, Robert Price and Karen Stollznow. Formerly D.J. Grothe. Consistently challenging interview program promoting skepticism and science in the public interest. (Category: Social Sciences.)	iTMS, website (2005–)
The Moth	Shorts from performances at The Moth in New York City and on tour. Straight out fantastic live storytelling. Introduced each week by Dan Kennedy, whose own Moth story is particularly good. (Category: Performing Arts.)	website (2008–)
Astronomy Cast	Fraser Cain and Pamela Gay. Program by astronomy experts that’s pitched at a general audience. Though they cover some, um… hard physics stuff. Try wrapping your head around the theory of inflation. Good times. (Category: Natural Sciences.) See also…	iTMS, website (2006–)

Honorable mentions

Coming soon…

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An excerpt on global web usage from the (newly redesigned) World Wide Web Foundation site, whence I also co-opted the graphic above:

Only 25% of the world’s population uses the Web, despite the fact that more than 70% (and growing) have access to mobile or fixed communications.

Useful to remember next time the “ubiquity of the web” argument rolls around. The WWW Foundation has a lot of good projects on the boil, of which the program to “teach youth in the most economically-challenged neighborhoods of major cities to develop Web applications” is especially cool.

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• 32 people were asked for their top three news sources
• 95 total news sources were indicated
• 51 of them are web (all free, as far as I know)
• 17 are tv
• 16 are radio
• 5 are conversation-based, and
• 9 are print, of which:
  • three are free (YDN, Middletown Press, UK Metro)
  • six cost money (Les Echos, “various magazines,” Courier Mail, Hartford Courant, Boston Globe and New Yorker)

Of the six paid news sources, three of them are someone’s primary source (Les Echos, various mags, and the Courant). One of those is a French newspaper, and another the available magazines in my friend’s break room. This means that one of my friends (out of 31 who responded) pays for their primary source of news, and only five people out of 32 pay for any of their top three news sources, none of which have a revenue stream that is Internet-based.

What does this mean? Among my friends news is important, but paying for it directly—in the sense of buying bread and milk—is not. (Of course, people in the group I asked might be paying for something, such as a monthly cable bill or donations to a radio station.) The dominant medium for news is the Internet and its ascendent form is the web, as opposed to e-mail, newsgroups or RSS. And people tend to get their news from a variety of media. The variety aspect is probably not new, and I suspect newspapers would have dominated in a poll like this twenty years ago the way that the web does now. But these days my friends aren’t spending much time turning pages.

One of my friends works for a newspaper and seems to think his current job is not long for this world. It’s hard to watch what is happening to newspapers as they decline, and much harder still to be a part of it. This is all anecdotal, but some things are now obvious: technological change has rendered the businesses built on the previous system obsolete. Clay Shirky’s magnificent essay has become the canonical statement.

Good luck with the micropayments, Rupert.

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The problem here is the myth of regular readership. When I started newspaper sites, I had publishers on my rear because they expected people to read them every day, just as (they thought) people read newspapers. But just because the thing plops on the front porch every day, that doesn’t mean everybody reads everything—or sees every ad. That was the myth that fueled overpriced ad rates and overinflated editorial egos. Online, we get to see what people really read – and what it’s really worth to them—and that’s a lot less than we ever thought.

Dr. Evil is purported to have said, in relation to all this, that “the current days of the Internet will soon be over.”

I mean, Mr. Murdoch.

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After:

Better.

Update: ReadWriteWeb reviews whitehouse.gov from the beginning using the Internet Archive.

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This desire to get in, get it over with and get out spills over into other forms of reading. Maybe you can just barely endure a quick flip through one section of a newspaper, but could you even read a book of short stories? I ‘read’ 200 books annually, yet even I barely manage to begin five fiction books a year; of those, I might finish one. I manage the other 200 books solely because the books can be skimmed over or simply flipped through, as though they were a fashion magazine.

He has a point, and I don’t think it’s just the medium (hypertext) that is causing this. For me graduate school had a similar effect on my ability to read novels—because of the demand to read so much (and I’m a slow reader) my reading habits changed so that it became common to read only fragments of a text. Even when I did, technically, read an entire book it wasn’t by starting at the first chapter and proceeding systematically to the last.

The fact that there is so much writing produced about very specialised topics is part of the problem. This is more about the political economy of higher education and status attainment than about the technology of reading. Information culture pervades daily life because utterable, sourced information has become the principle currency of various status economies that thrive in conditions of plenty.

But, and this is Clark’s point, the Internet facilitates this effect unlike any other mass medium. The web has transformed reading practice faster, and for more people, than film, radio or television and in world history it is at least as ubiquitous as any of those things, and potentially more so. The most provocative part of Clark’s argument then, is the claim that our collective behaviour may be destroying a cultural competency that many of us value.

Like I said, I think he has a point.

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Serious Business leverages the core competencies of our world renowned team to create revolutionary new synergies which tap in to blue ocean markets in the social platform mashup internets. Serious Business will forever redefine the way we use the web—even the way we see life itself. The first decade of the internet was fun. This decade is going to be Serious.

Also: awesome homepage design.

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The survey should take only about 20 [10 –Ed.] minutes or so to complete. It’s anonymous, but we do ask you register, both to help us maintain the integrity of the result, and just as importantly, to enable us to give away cool stuff to those who participate, including passes to future Web Directions events of your choice, including Web Directions North in Denver. Of course, we’ll only use any email addresses for the purposes of communicating about the survey, and won’t share them with anyone.

More data, better web, trip to Denver?

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The first thing was to see if I can get the Watch Instantly feature to work, and the second whether it would produce an acceptable result on the TV. Part 1 was successful (after ridiculous problems occasioned by bringing an 18-month dormant PC online), and that small victory has got me wondering about Part 2. I don’t have a connecting cable on hand just yet. The standard LCD display I tested on has a resolution of 1280 x 1024 pixels. Our TV is 1366 x 768 natively, so I’m assuming it will be comparable when the Netflix player is in full screen mode.

I’ve tried two movies so far, Dan in Real Life and Cashback. For these two movies, at full screen, the picture is not sharp. But as far as streaming video goes the playback is rock solid, and the audio quality on my powered desktop speakers seems decent. According to Netflix the overall picture quality is variable by design with four main encoding levels; the player uses your network connection speed to determine the delivered quality:

Our first-gen PC streaming player uses 1-4 bars to represent the delivered quality, representing 500, 1000, 1600, and 2200 kbps. The 3400kbps encodes are represented as 4 bars. The player measures bandwidth once at the start of the title, and chooses a bitrate for delivery that has at least 40% headroom from the measured speed.

The amount of headroom (it seems like a lot?) might account for why I didn’t notice any stuttering during playback. Also, starting, pausing and scrubbing the timeline were all very responsive operations. It felt as though the response was instantaneous, or nearly so. My PC is connected to the Internet by wireless and the signal strength is currently a bit weak because of its physical proximity to the base station. I was getting three bars (out of four), according to the Netflix site, when I initialised the movie. I’m planning to test the service again when I can connect it to the TV, and hopefully that will mean a faster network speed as well.

While I’m at it, I’m also planning to try out Criterion Collection’s Online Cinematheque, which requires an Intel Mac or a PC, in this case using Flash Player 10. I wonder how that will hold up over a full length movie. Allynn tells me that Flash video typically has audio/video track syncing problems for movies longer than about 30 minutes. They must have addressed it, so, curious…

Update: InstantWatcher is a third-party web site that makes it easier to search and browse the Netflix streaming video library.

† My testing setup included Windows XP (SP3), Internet Explorer 6 and Windows Media Player 11 on an otherwise bare bones Athlon 1.8 GHz PC with 736 MB RAM.

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Happy Blue Beanie Day!

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The Australian Government wants to censor the Internet and the push seems to have gained ground because of concerns about child safety. The proposal calls for mandatory ISP filtering of Internet traffic that is supposed to prevent access to “illegal material” (content featuring child sexual abuse) and child-inappropriate material (pornography).

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy is at the centre of a growing debate about the true scope and feasibility of the plan. He has equated it with similar systems in countries like the UK, Sweden, Canada and New Zealand, but there are fundamental differences. Australians won’t be able to opt out. According to network engineer Mark Newton, in a recent opinion piece for ABC News:

In actual fact, none of the countries Senator Conroy cited have anything like what he’s proposing for Australia. [...] The only countries which feature government-imposed internet censorship are nations which place more emphasis on opinion suppression than internet access, such as China, Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Newton points out that Conroy has used the term “illegal” in the Senate to refer to a government blacklist of material designated as “prohibited” (deemed unsuitable for children). Former Senator Andrew Bartlett recently echoed criticism about where such a censorship plan would end. Not to mention whatever they mean by material that is “inappropriate:”

The catch-all nature of the term “inappropriate” gives me concern. I have little faith that the current government will prove much better than governments everywhere, and be unable to resist the urge to continually increase the scope of what they try to control.

Beyond this, it seems highly unlikely that the plan can be implemented as intended. ISPs hate it claiming that filtering will be extremely costly to implement, easy to circumvent and would likely yield a lot of false positives (hundreds of thousands?). The Angry Aussie says it best in a recent rant:

If you put some filter between the big wide Internet and the poor little defenseless Australian users it would strangle our already shit Internet access, let a bunch of stuff through anyway, be trivially easy to get around, and would block sites that shouldn’t be blocked. In other words, there is not a single thing an honest person can recommend about this approach.

Way to go Labor. I bet this will haunt the Rudd government if it goes much further. Why not spend the $189 million on building media literacy instead?

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Derek Powazek’s talk on group-generated intel^† was a standout, particularly his discussion of James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds and how it relates to designing web applications. I bought the book on my way home, and just a few pages in the enjoyment factor is high. I also really liked Paul Boag’s presentation on how to work with clients, a healthy mix of energy, sarcasm and Pommy hubris.

Chris Lea, Joe Stump, Ryan Sims, Daniel Burka and Liz Danzico.

Liz Danzico led a panel discussion at the end of the day on how designers and developers communicate with each other. This was rowdy and good. One thing came through loud and clear over the banter: communication works best when issues are framed in terms of problems to be solved, rather than as requests for a given solution.

† Crowdsourcing, ew.

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For example if, using Safari, you make Shortwave the first bookmark in your Bookmarks Bar, it is assigned the keyboard shortcut ⌘ + 1 (i.e. Apple key + 1). I defined a Shortwave commands file to include a search of Zero to One-Eighty (which you can query using “http://ztoe.net/?s=”), mapped to “z”. To search my site using Safari, I type “⌘ + 1,” then “z [search term]” then Return. Suh-weet. In Opera, ⌘ + 1 can be set to invoke the bookmarklet if you use Speed Dial, and in Camino, if you save the bookmarklet in the first folder in the Bookmark Bar and designate the folder as a Tab Group. (I don’t know if you can reassign ⌘ + [numeral] in Firefox.)

When you use a custom commands file, the dingus sends the search query plus the URL for your commands file to http://shortwaveapp.com, and then sends you to the destination address. For example:

http://shortwaveapp.com/?go&c=z%20elena&s=http://ztoe.net/misc/shortwave.txt

for the (custom) query “z elena.” It also sets a cookie whose content is the URL of your commands file.

Anyway, if you like using keyboard commands, this is a nice way to save keystrokes and mouse gestures, and (by providing your own bookmarklet) even give your visitors a customised way to search your site, if they are fanatical enough to tweak their browser for you.

Update: Firefox does not provide a way to customise it’s default keyboard shortcuts (for example to re-map ⌘ + 1 to invoke the bookmarklet instead of the first tab), but you can assign keywords to the bookmark by editing its Properties. For example, “sw” for Shortwave means I can invoke Shortwave using “⌘ + L,” then “sw + Return.” Not as nice as ⌘ + 1, but it’s a start.

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The best teams didn’t have a methodology or dogma they followed. The best teams all focused on increasing the techniques and tricks for each team member.