Data Centers Support the Cloud—But Waste 90 Percent of Their Energy in the Process | 80beats. Once I’ve typed in a message, shared a video, or uploaded a photo to a social media website like Facebook or Twitter, I tend to forget about it. I assume that if I check back days or even weeks later, the status update or tweet will still be there, safely stored…somewhere. That “somewhere” is in one of tens of thousands of data centers, each filled with many, many servers that physically preserve the vast quantity of information flowing over the internet every day. But while it’s easy to forget about data centers, they are having a huge impact on our energy grid—and our environment. The New York Times has kicked off a series of articles about the physical constructions on which “the cloud” is built with a piece by James Glanz.
As Glanz writes, data centers not only consume a huge amount of energy, they also waste about 90 percent of what they use by running the facilities on full throttle at all times. Image courtesy of Route79 / flickr. Harper Reed, Obama’s Data Guru, Gets Voters to Engage—and Provide Their Info Along the Way | 80beats. What do custom-designed T-shirts and presidential campaigns have in common? Harper Reed, chief technology officer for the Obama campaign, rose to prominence because he knew the answer: They both can benefit from websites that engage users and encourage community participation—and, in the process, gather valuable data. In a profile at Mother Jones, Tim Murphy describes how such potentially powerful and jealously guarded tech strategies—Obama’s go by codenames like “Narwhal” and “Dreamcatcher”—work. Reed got his start at Threadless, a website that sells quirky T-shirts to hipsters. But as Murphy details, the site didn’t just make shirts and expect people to buy them; it was a social forum that asked for their input every step of the way: Threadless wasn’t the first company to market arty apparel to the Wicker Park set, but its genius lay in its model.
Now chief technology officer of the Obama campaign, Reed has now created a grassroots organizing website called Dashboard. Centre to study technology risks to humans. Researchers at the University of Cambridge have proposed a new centre that will study the risks of technology to humans. The researchers - which include a philosopher, a scientist, and a software engineer - have come together to propose the new centre at Cambridge. The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) would address developments in human technologies that might pose “extinction-level” risks to the human species, looking at developments in bio and nanotechnology, to extreme climate change and even artificial intelligence. “At some point, this century or next, we may well be facing one of the major shifts in human history – perhaps even cosmic history – when intelligence escapes the constraints of biology,” said Huw Price, the Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy and one of CSER’s three founders.
Price was speaking about the possible impact of Irving John ‘Jack’ Good’s ultra-intelligent machine, or artificial general intelligence (AGI) as it is called today. Pub7203. Hay (well, straw) could fuel future airplanes. Synthetic biology: building in barriers.