Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) posted at 4:12 pm on Thu, Oct 31, 2024:
Tomorrow, the UN General Assembly will vote on a resolution to study the human and environmental cost of nuclear war.
The UK is planning to oppose it.
I have written to the Foreign Secretary, urging the government to reconsider.
https://t.co/Wkg3X62f4W
https://x.com/jeremycorbyn/status/1852020760765685929?t=Z_ZCZzuWuCPm62ft1_8svw&s=03
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What is the carbon footprint of normal online activity? Composite: Guardian Design; Getty Images
Vast datacentres are being built worldwide, amid growing concerns about the environmental costs. So should we all be considering a data diet – if not complete digital sobriety?
Chris Stokel-WalkerThu 31 Oct 2024 13.30 CET
So the Guardianset me a challenge: to try to give a sense of how much data an average person uses in a day, and what the carbon footprint of normal online activity might be. To do that, I tried to tot up the sorts of things I and millions of others do every day, and how that tracks back through the melange of messaging services, social networks, applications and tools, to the datacentres that keep our digital lives going.
My own carbon tally gets off to a bad start, and it is not even my fault. The email from my editor asking me to try to quantify quite how much data a single person uses in a day is itself contributing to my footprint. If the editor took 10 minutes to write the email – likely, given it was quite detailed – and it took me three minutes to read, and if it was sent from a laptop and received on one, then we have generated 17g of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions already, according to estimates by Mike Berners-Lee, a professor at Lancaster University’s Environment Centre, and the author of How Bad are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint of Everything.
My frantic emails to people asking to speak to them for this story pump out more carbon at a prodigious rate. And though 17g of CO2 is insignificant compared with the 384.2m tonnes of net emissions the UK as a whole is responsible for each year, it all adds up.
All those emails and videos and games don’t just appear on our screens by magic. Everything we do digitally involves the vast transfer of data through the internet from one place to another, brokered through datacentres. Datacentres are vast premises full of computer servers that store data. The idea behind them is to reduce what the data industry calls “latency”, the time between you typing in a web address or clicking on an app button, and the content you are requesting being delivered to you. Everything on the internet, every link you click, every video you watch, is physically stored in a datacentre somewhere.
Digital sprawl … datacentres and industrial complexes in Medemblik, the Netherlands. Photograph: Merten Snijders/Getty Images
Datacentres are big business, and vast numbers of them are being built around the world. In the UK, Amazon has just announced plans to invest £8bn over the next five years building new datacentres and maintaining those it already has, “supporting 14,000 jobs annually”. That comes on top of £3bn already spent in the UK by Amazon’s cloud computing arm since 2020. Google is spending $1bn on a new centre at a 133,500 sq metre (33-acre) site in Hertfordshire, and at the end of last year Microsoft committed to £2.5bn of investment in the next three years, more than doubling its datacentre footprint in this country.
The reason for this is simple: demand is increasing at alarming rates. Americans used 100tn megabytes of wireless data in 2023, a record-breaking increase of 36% on the previous year – that’s enough to download Candy Crush Saga 265bn times.
It is a lot of data, and a lot of energy is required to serve that data to us, plus a lot of water to keep all those servers cool. In fact, Ireland, the Netherlands and Singapore are so worried about the energy impact of datacentres that they have imposed moratoria on new developments. When Google announced its environmental impact earlier this year, it revealed its own greenhouse gas emissions had risen 48% in the last five years, and 13% in the last 12 months, largely driven by increased datacentre demand to service its AI needs. Now big tech companies have come up with another solution to try to solve the looming energy crisis: their own nuclear power plants. Microsoft has struck a deal to recommission the Three Mile Island site in Pennsylvania, Google recently announced plans to build six or seven new small reactors to meet its anticipated energy needs. There’s no way round it: a steady stream of environmental harm is coming from our everyday actions – activities that we often don’t think about in relation to the target of limiting global heating to below 1.5C.
“You will run into this pretty much anywhere during the day,” says Alex de Vries, who researches the carbon footprint of our day-to-day lives at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands. “Digital applications are so deeply embedded in our lives nowadays, it’s really hard to avoid. The thing is, when you’re using them, it’s not like you have something popping up in the screen telling you, like: ‘Hey, be aware, this activity has this carbon footprint.’”
Ethernet and power cables plugged into the back of a computer server machine at a datacentre. Photograph: Ellen Isaacs/Alamy
In the absence of reliable figures from the companies themselves, educated guesses are often all we can rely on. Case in point: estimates of the proportion of world energy use that the internet makes up range from 3.7% to 10%, depending on who is counting. One estimate by Zero Waste Scotland suggests all our online activity generates an average of 8.62kg of CO2 a week (about 448kg a year), or about 30 miles in an average-sized petrol car. But a German estimate (which also includes the emissions created by the production digital devices themselves) says we expend around twice that, roughly 850kg a year.
People struggle with two key problems when trying to wrap their heads around their data usage and resultant carbon impact, says De Vries. One: everything is digital, and therefore not tangible. “If you’re holding a pen and a piece of paper, you can get some idea of what might be necessary to make this product,” he says. “But if you’re using a digital application, what’s really going into that to make all of that happen? A lot of people simply will have no clue what that looks like.”
The other issue is that the tech companies are really good at making things work. “You probably don’t even know what is in [an application],” says De Vries. You press the button, and the Netflix series starts.
Companies such as Netflix are disarmingly honest about their data usage: if you keep your video quality on “low”, you use a paltry 300MB an hour of data on a streaming service such as Netflix. If you want to watch things in HD, though, you ramp up to 3GB an hour when looking at the most detailed scenes. If you are a movie connoisseur, your 4K streaming uses up to 7GB an hour.
But while few would argue we should spend less time in front of streaming services, the environmental impact of all that binge-watching appears to be comparatively low. A 2020 analysis by the International Energy Agency (IEA) found that watching an hour of Netflix was equivalent to boiling a kettle once: about 36g of CO2.
There are other variables to take into account, though: the energy consumption of the device you are watching on, for example (Netflix says 70% of its viewers use televisions, which are more energy-hungry than mobile phones); or how the electricity you are using is generated (nuclear or wind is less carbon-emitting than coal or gas).
If you want to gossip about the latest episode with your friends, that also comes with an environmental toll. The average WhatsApp group chat uses 2.35kg of CO2 a week, Zero Waste Scotland calculated. (To blunt the impact slightly, rely more on emojis – which are stored locally on your device – than reaction gifs, which have to be downloaded afresh from datacentres.) Listening to music online also comes at an environmental cost, although it is estimated that you can stream music for five hours before you will emit more CO2 – 288g – than is involved in making a CD in a case. Like many tech companies, Spotify has committed to reaching net zero emissions, in its case, by 2030.
Construction work is continuing in Slough, Berkshire, on two huge datacentres for the Yondr Group, a developer, owner and operator of datacentres. Photograph: Maureen McLean/Alamy
Big tech companies buy carbon credits and offsets to try to mitigate the impact of their activity, but it’s often seen as a poor attempt at atonement for the environmental impact they cause. There are also questions about the extent to which firms’ reported datacentre emissions are capturing the whole picture. A recent Guardian analysis found that real emissions between 2020 and 2022 from datacentres owned by the four big tech companies, Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple, were likely to be 662% higher than officially reported.
The tech industry’s warm embrace of generative AI has complicated things even further. It is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid. Type certain searches into Google and you will be given an “AI overview”, as Google calls them, which summarises key information from the results the search engine finds and presents it in a simple set of bullet points, alongside associated links. And you can’t turn it off. “AI Overviews are a core Google Search feature,” the company says.
“Generative AI hasn’t necessarily added very many new use cases,” says Sasha Luccioni, AI and climate lead at AI company Hugging Face. “It’s adding more compute and more environmental impacts to existing use cases.” The problem is that we don’t fully know how much. “None of the corporates, and none of the proprietary models, have published any numbers,” she says. De Vries’s research suggests that AI-powered search results use 10 times the power that non-AI searches do.
All this is before you get into the conscious use of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude chatbot – where you are going to their websites or opening their apps, and taking part. Here, we are also in the dark about how much data, and therefore how much energy and water, generative AI uses. The best information we have is from informed third-party estimates: training GPT-3, a precursor to the current model, used an estimated 5.4m litres of water, according to one academic study, and produced as much CO2 as would be generated by flying between New York and San Francisco 550 times.
I recently published a book on AI and as part of that, I have been touring and giving talks about AI’s impact on our world. In my favourite set of slides that I present there is a party trick. To highlight concerns around copyright in generative AI, I ask ChatGPT’s image generator, Dall-E, to produce a depiction of whichever place I’m in, in the style of Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night.
The gimmick always gets a laugh and serves its purpose: it shows how often the AI system has seen that painting by the ability to mimic its brushstrokes. But I always feel guilty. Because each time I do that, whether in Chipping Campden or Vilnius, I’m using data. About halfway through my book tour, I started adding a couple of slides immediately afterwards on the environmental impact of AI.
So besides stopping generating bootleg Van Goghs, what should those of us conscious about our environmental footprint do? Luccioni advocates for “digital sobriety”: being mindful about how we use AI. “You don’t need to be using these new AI tools for everything,” she says. “There are applications that are useful, but there’s a lot of cases where you really don’t need them.” The same approach holds true for everything digital: think twice, text once.
High scoring? Playing video games at home. Photograph: matrixnis/Getty Images
Estimating how much data your daily activities use is an art not a science, but here are best estimates of how much you are gobbling up online.
Erskine Childers (@erskinechilders) posted at 1:55 pm on Tue, Oct 29, 2024:
The only photo of Erskine’s hearse leaving Beggars Bush gate on the way to Hardwicke Hall.
Robert Barton and Senator Robinson walked behind it. Barton had to identify the remains. Robinson remembered the crowd at the Barracks, most in tears and weeping.
My grandfather Michael Comyn KC represented Erskine Childers. It caused him much sadness when he was executed while his case was on appeal. Michael Comyn was one of the last people to meet with Erskine Childers.
https://t.co/FfzgMbnlcz
https://x.com/erskinechilders/status/1851261672394051634?t=PMPy9gJuZG1FrJTkv6r8dw&s=03
10-30-2024TECH
Experts advise using caution when sharing sensitive information to train tech platforms.
[Images: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images, Tryfonov/Adobe Stock]
BY Jessica Bursztynsky 1 minute read
Billionaire and X owner Elon Musk put out a call on his social media platform Tuesday for people to submit their medical scans to Grok, his AI chatbot. But experts are advising people to use caution when sharing sensitive information to train tech platforms.
Musk asked users to “try submitting x-ray, PET, MRI or other medical images” to the artificial intelligence platform for analysis. “This is still early stage, but it is already quite accurate and will become extremely good. Let us know where Grok gets it right or needs work,” he added on X.
Musk’s call to share medical data certainly raises some privacy-related questions. Experts widely agree against sharing sensitive data with publicly available AI systems. Even xAI’s own privacy policy discourages users from including personal information in prompts. “Please do not share any personal information (including any sensitive information) in your questions to Grok,” the website states.
Ryan Tarzy, CEO of health tech startup Avandra Imaging, says in an email that Musk is trying to speed up Grok’s development by bypassing direct-sourcing the data rather than obtaining the data from a secure network where patient data has been de-identified.
“This approach has myriad risks, including the accidental sharing of patient identities,” Tarzy adds. “Personal health information is ‘burned in’ too many images, such as CT scans, and would inevitably be released in this plan. The data gathering will also not be systematic, and therefore, the dataset will be full of bias and not representative of the population.”
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jessica Bursztynsky is a staff writer on Fast Company’s technology desk. She primarily focuses on the gig economy and other consumer internet companies, including gig workers working in extreme heat, Tinder’s plans to refresh the legacy app, and Uber and Lyft’s worker benefits More
Beijing, China Edited By: PrishaUpdated: Oct 30, 2024, 06:10 PM IST
Representative image of a pregnant woman. Photograph:(Others)
According to the officials, the national grass-roots campaign aimed at creating pregnancy incentives has led to resentment and worry among people.
The 35-year-old working mother said that the worker went to the extent of asking her when she had her last period and gave her a reminder about now being “the right time” to conceive another baby.
“I laughed so hard when I told my husband about it. The surveyor must be from the previous generation, who did not realise that she was talking to a whole different generation that values privacy, quality of life and choices much more,” said Huang.
Also Read: ‘China’s traditional way being challenged’: 60% Chinese above 60 are empty nesters
Like Huang, China’s government is pursuing thousands of women to plan a child and soon get pregnant.
The government is also trying to understand why so many women are not willing to have more children and come up with a new policy in the wake of a declining birth rate which is resulting in a demographic crisis.
China’s Population and Development Research Centre recently announced that a nationwide survey will be conducted to “obtain new data on views on marriage and fertility and key influencing factors”.
The National Bureau of Statistics has approved the Sample Survey on Population and Family Development in China which is targeting women of child-bearing age.
According to the centre, the survey will focus on understanding “the actual difficulties and needs of families in birth and parenting”, as well as the reasons for “not wanting or not daring to have children”, for providing a scientific basis to improve incentives and fertility support policies.
Watch: China Pays The Price For ‘One Child’ Policy?
The government worker’s call in Huang’s case was cut short when she clarified that she had no plans for a second child. “When she asked why, I told her I have no money, no time and no energy for a second baby,” she said.
A lot of people who have been contacted have vented “strong grievances” regarding the one-child policy and expressed worries regarding employment and the economy.
A lot of people who were fined by the government for breach of the birth control rule have demanded a refund of the penalties in the wake of the government’s encouragement for more children.
“They said that is the best way for the government to show sincerity if it wants to promote births,” Lin said.
Meanwhile, there has been a sharp decline in the number of kindergartens by more than 5 per cent because of the declining birth rate in China.
(With inputs from agencies)
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The transition from childhood to adulthood during adolescence is a complex process. Bullying — manifesting as social exclusion, verbal abuse, and physical violence —adds another layer of stress for young people at this stage. The largest pan-European study to date, involving 2,049 victims, reveals that bullying — which affects one in three students worldwide — also impacts brain development. The study, published in the journal bioRxiv, indicates that at least 49 brain regions responsible for memory, learning, and motor control may be affected.
Michael Connaughton, a researcher at Trinity College, and colleagues from the PRADO research group analyzed responses to a five-item questionnaire and MRI scans of adolescents aged 14, 19, and 22 from Germany, Ireland, the U.K., and France. While previous studies have established that bullying leads to detrimental mental health consequences that often persist into adulthood, this research suggests that bullying may influence overall brain development. The study also identified differences in how boys and girls respond to bullying.
The co-author of the study, Darren Brody, from the Department of Psychiatry at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, posits that these differences may stem from the types of aggression typically experienced by each gender. MRI images showed greater activation in specific areas of the brain for girls, including the left nucleus accumbens, linked to psychological reward systems and motivation, and the right amygdala, which plays a role in managing the nervous system.
“Girls are generally more likely to experience emotional manipulation, such as ostracism by their peers,” he explains. Conversely, boys exhibited responses related to physical coordination in motor and sensory regions like the right precentral gyrus, likely reflecting their experiences of physical bullying. Brody notes: “In boys’ brain responses, it was not as obvious that emotional centers were enlarging.”
During adolescence, the brain is in a phase of development that makes it especially vulnerable to stressors. Much like a gardener pruning weeds in a park, this stage involves synaptic pruning or readjustment of neurons and their connections, which leads to profound neurophysiological changes. Alessandro Massaro, a PhD in Clinical and Health Psychology, says that during this period, adolescents exhibit heightened sensitivity to both negative emotions (fear, anxiety, or shame) and positive emotions (joy, love, and happiness).
“There is a shift in reference figures from parents to peers, and when young people struggle to belong to a group, this situation can be extremely difficult for them to cope with,” explains Massaro, who was not involved in the study. The findings indicate that bullying victimization is associated with a decrease in total gray matter volume in both sexes, suggesting a widespread impact on brain development in response to chronic stress. Concurrently, the stress response leads to hyperactivation of the limbic system, which mediates emotions and memory. According to the authors, this hyperactivation may result in an increased response volume in these regions as the brain attempts to regain control.
Experts acknowledge that while causality cannot be definitively proven — meaning it remains unclear whether the observed brain changes are due to inherent characteristics of bullying victims — they argue that in the three age groups analyzed, bullying was consistently linked to alterations in brain growth curves. Professor Ignacio Morgado from the Institute of Neuroscience at the Autonomous University of Barcelona concurs, noting that although the sample size is substantial, the conclusions are preliminary and will aid further investigation into the long-term consequences of bullying.
“As it is a correlational study, we cannot say 100% that it is the cause of these changes in the brain. The loss of neurons is already well documented in cases of stress,” says Morgado, who was not part of the research. In 2018, researchers at King’s College London discovered physical structural differences in the brains of adolescents who are regularly bullied, though the study involved only 682 participants. Additionally, a more recent analysis from the University of Tokyo, published in February 2024, revealed that the brains of bullying victims exhibit chemical changes linked to psychosis.
“Not all cases are the same, and we would like to study in depth the more subtle forms of harassment, such as those experienced by women,” adds Brody.
Bullying emerges and develops within a complex network of interpersonal relationships, often leaving teenagers feeling compelled to remain silent about their experiences. Rosario Ortega, a professor of Developmental and Educational Psychology at the University of Córdoba in Spain, emphasizes that bullying is not a pathological phenomenon. “Cruelty is not a disease; it is an immoral behavior that can cause significant harm to someone. The victim needs support when they are affected,” she explains.
To effectively tackle this issue, Ortega stresses the importance of open communication between parents and guardians of teenagers. Javier Miglino, director of the NGO Bullying Without Borders and a proponent of World Day Against School Bullying, believes that addressing bullying requires a diligent, grassroots approach implemented in schools one at a time. “It’s a good idea to investigate the root causes to stop it from occurring,” he adds.
Experts agree that early interventions can help mitigate the devastating psychological consequences of bullying in young people. Cognitive-behavioral therapy, in particular, can empower victims who have endured repeated attacks to “adopt a more resilient mindset,” as highlighted in the study.
Additionally, fostering transparency in how schools address bullying can enhance the overall climate of coexistence. “When someone is abusive, it is important for the school administration to intervene to ensure that no victims are overlooked,” says Ortega.
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Yanis Varoufakis (@yanisvaroufakis) posted at 8:42 am on Thu, Oct 24, 2024:
When I called out Israel’s chemical attack on UN peacekeepers as the war crime of the 21st century, Israel’s supporters shamelessly inundated me with claims that those attacks used legal weapons (against the UN!).
https://t.co/xrfyMYMRMk
https://x.com/yanisvaroufakis/status/1849355819420176676?s=03
10-29-2024 IMPACT
What if you could create housing without starting from scratch?
[Photo: courtesy SEHP]
BY MaryLou Costa and Reasons to be Cheerful5 minute read
An abandoned fisherman’s cottage on a remote Scottish island that had no running water, electricity, or windows—and sheep living in it. That was all ex-soldier and businessman Robert Tai could afford after a long and difficult divorce left him close to broke.
He had become enchanted by the historic stone buildings that stand empty all across the windswept, rainy Isle of Lewis back when he was visiting yearly with his then-wife in the 2000s, so it seemed a natural place to seek refuge after their marriage broke down.
Tai was intent on purchasing and renovating a dilapidated property he’d initially spotted in 2004. In 2021, he managed to track down and negotiate a sale with the owners, who had been planning to demolish the four-bedroom building and replace it with a new structure. So began the next chapter of his life.
“I really wanted to set myself up again, and this was the only way I could get back on my feet,” says Tai.
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Through the Scottish Empty Homes Partnership (SEHP)—a collaboration between the Scottish Government and U.K. housing and homelessness charity Shelter—Tai was able to qualify for a tax reimbursement on the materials he purchased to restore the cottage to a livable state. He claimed back 12,000 pounds (about $15,900) of the 75,000 pounds he’d spent completely overhauling the property.
Tai had never done professional building work before, but he reinstated electricity and water, replaced the beams, ripped out carpets encrusted with sheep droppings, removed a damaged chimney, repaired the roof, knocked down walls to expand the kitchen and bathroom, and updated the decor.
Professionals helped install new windows, and Tai took advice from a local builder friend. On the 17 acres of surrounding farmland, where Tai has replaced fences and gates, he has planted 7,000 trees and plans to plant another 3,000. He has also built a polytunnel for growing vegetables.
“I started this project at age 63 and this was my first property renovation. I’m now 66 and think this is a good example of what can be achieved,” says Tai, who’s cottage was one of 688 sitting empty across Scotland’s remote Western Isles (amid some 46,217 empty properties across all of Scotland).
But the SEHP is working to change that: It has brought 1,875 empty properties back into use across the country over the past year, and a total of 10,889 since the initiative began in 2010.
Twenty-nine of Scotland’s 32 local authorities now have an Empty Homes program, through which officers try to track down the owners of properties they’ve identified that could be restored, or that the public has reported. Empty Homes officers help property owners apply for grants and rebates, share materials and services discounts, and staff an advice line.
The SEHP’s support for property owners looking to complete—and even start—renovations, is crucial, considering that the majority of Scotland’s empty homes got that way because of owners intending, but failing, to renovate, according to SEHP’s latest impact report. Other reasons include owners being hospitalized, dying or moving away, or homes becoming repossessed.
While the Scottish government has set out to create 110,000 affordable new homes by 2032, the SEHP’s national manager, Tahmina Nizam, is confident that the program’s work can help ease some of the pressure, as restoring an empty property can be cheaper and faster than building new. Its next phase, she says, is to help local authorities be more proactive and strategic about identifying and rehoming empty properties.
“Using empty homes won’t be the sole response (to Scotland’s housing shortage), but it could be a key response that means there’s less pressure on just relying on new buildings, especially at a time when local authorities and the Scottish government are facing financial difficulty and are having to make challenging decisions,” says Nizam.
Having an Empty Homes strategy and service in place can help local authorities plan more long term, Nizam adds. It can help them understand why properties remain empty for extended periods and what they can do about it.
Applications for social housing in Scotland increased by 5% from 2022 to 2023, while nearly 130,000 people are on social housing waiting lists. Encouragingly, around 19% of the empty homes brought back into use over the past year have been converted to affordable housing, either through a local authority or housing association management scheme or privately.
SEHP is now working directly with organizations like South of Scotland Community Housing to convert empty homes and buildings into affordable housing. It has also set up a project to help tackle the shortage of affordable accommodation for health and social care workers who need to relocate for their jobs.
Like Tai’s home on the Isle of Lewis, around 29% of abandoned properties that come through the SEHP become owner-occupied—something Nizam still counts as a win as it counteracts the negative impact empty homes have on their surrounding communities. For example, empty homes can become a hub for vandalism and even drug use.
“Someone living in a property is what we want. It means you’ve got someone who’s contributing to the local economy, and becoming part of the fabric of that community. In rural areas, the impact even one empty property can have on a small village is not to be understated,” says Nazim.
Also on the Isle of Lewis, the SEHP helped Karis and David Beattie secure a 38,000 pound grant (roughly $49,000) to renovate the traditional farmhouse they’d bought in 2022. Built in 1914, it had been empty since the 1940s. They’ve since turned it into their dream home—and have sparked a trend, attracting seven new residents to the village.
“The thing that everybody says is that they just can’t wait to see a light back on in that house. People are excited and commenting on the changes that they are seeing day to day. If you have a vision and a passion for this kind of project then see it through, it’s really rewarding to see these buildings brought back into use,” Karis Beattie told the SEHP.
Meanwhile, Tai believes his renovation is “95% finished.” He officially moved into the cottage with his new partner a year ago but is still “doing bits and pieces.” After the exhaustion of working around the clock for a whole year, and being set back by a storm that flooded the house, Tai is now in a good place.
“It’s the most beautiful spot by the sea—just really rugged beauty. The property is very remote. The nearest neighbors are about a mile away—I can’t even see their house,” he says. “It’s really calming and relaxing. You either like it or you don’t. And I love it.”
—By MaryLou Costa, Reasons to Be Cheerful
This story was originally published by Reasons to Be Cheerful.
African Hub (@AfricanHub_) posted at 7:47 pm on Thu, Oct 24, 2024:
France Gold bars = Malian gold
French furniture = Congo wood
World Cup for France = Africa’s Talent
France fuel = Gabon oil
Electricity France = Niger Uranium
French phone = Congo cobalt
French chocolate = Ivory Coast cocoa
French cars = Mauritania iron
Your thoughts on this https://t.co/jl2kg7pXpJ
https://x.com/AfricanHub_/status/1849523058651836849?s=03
