I think my research supervisor’s optimism is contagious. Last Tuesday, I returned home to discover my laptop wouldn’t boot. After a couple of hours of trying to coax it back to life, at around 2 am on Wednesday, I realized that the problem was that the hard drive was dead.
|
||||||
|
On Thursday, I attended the Environmental Justice and Sustainability Unconference put on by the Office of Student Life at the University of Toronto. At this “unconference”, individuals could set up shop in various parts of the venue and lead a conversation about different topics. I participated in two discussions: Which are the most energy intensive buildings on campus and why? and on Conservation and consumerism. I thought I would share some highlights from these conversations. The following post is a collection of excerpts from a draft of my Ph.D. depth paper, less citations, which exist in the original document. Few computer systems spend all of their time at full utilization; even in always-on situations such as servers, a properly provisioned system will be spend almost all of its time at less than 50% utilization. Since most personal computers remain idle for extended periods of time1, consumers should be considering a computer’s idle power draw when purchasing a computer. However, performance per watt is often the number that is compared. Continue reading Towards better energy-efficiency labels
One year ago last week, I put the finishing touches on a new computer. I started my game plan for a low-powered device in January 2009, but I was teaching a course at the time so it wasn’t until reading week that I found three (almost) uninterrupted days to bring my plan to fruition. While I’ve seen a number of articles and blog posts about building a low-powered computer, I’ve seen only a few documenting the end result after real-world use. Continue reading Low-powered computer attempt #1 — One year later People keep blogs for many reasons. So why do I blog? I haven’t really figured that out, entirely, yet. All I know is that this blog is here to help with my research… somehow. It’s sometimes helpful just to write thoughts down. Feedback is useful for more mature thoughts. My recent blog posts are all related, if only tangentially, to my depth paper. I’ll start posting excerpts here, soon. Meanwhile, some of my blog posts will magically be transformed into my depth paper. I hope to update this blog on a weekly basis (instead of every other day as I have been for the last few weeks). We’ll see how that works out!
I used to think versatility and choice were always good things. In fact, I wrote something to that effect just over a week ago. Knowing what is out there means not having to reinvent the wheel. It means being able to select the right tool for the right job. When all you’ve got is a hammer, you end up writing messy 50-line snakes and ladders programs in assembly language when you could instead write the same thing in 7 elegant lines of Python. But?
Contrary to initial expectations, we’ve found that a perfectly rational player ought not to defect in a game described in Part I. So what? How does that apply to the real world? Game theory is useful for modeling decision making processes where abstractions reduce the variables to be considered. Examples in real life of situations modeled by a tragedy of the commons dilemma are readily available. In Part III of the Tragedy of the Commons 4-part series, I give my analysis of the game played in class. You should at least read Tragedy of the Commons: Part I — The Setup for a description of the game before reading this section. Continue reading Tragedy of the Commons: Part III — The Debeakered Take In Part II of the Tragedy of the Commons 4-part series, I rehash the professor’s analysis of the game played in class. You should read Tragedy of the Commons: Part I — The Setup for a description of the game before reading this section. Continue reading Tragedy of the Commons: Part II — The Professorial Take Back in 2006, I took the undergraduate course Individual and Organizational Behaviour offered to students in the commerce programme at the University of Toronto. One of the highest quality lectures I have attended was given in this class by a guest speaker, a professor in the Rotman School of Management. During this lecture, students were put into groups and pitted against each other in a friendly competition. We faced off in what seemed to be a tragedy of the commons scenario and our gameplay was analysed by the speaker. However, I argue that what we were playing was not actually a tragedy of the commons scenario and that the analysis given in class was incorrect. Apparently, what I thought was extremely obvious was not. Or perhaps I’m just wrong; I’m no game theoretician. |
||||||
|
Copyright © 2010 debeakered - All Rights Reserved |
||||||
jonathan lung