In the previous year (until October 2007) my electricity consumption was 3,062 kwH. Since then I replaced all lamps with the low energy variant, and pull the plug on any electrical device I don't use. The projected consumption for this year (since October 2007) is currently at 1,928 kwH. About 33% less!
Saving a lot of energy appears rather simple: pull the plug. In my case: microwave, digital television, radio, computer (the network card keeps on running while the computer is turned off), and cable modem. All these devices consume energy also when "turned off".
Pulling the plug: it really is that simple!
Yesterday, I gave a talk on educational data mining at the University of Amsterdam (my previous employer). The talk was about how I approach the very difficult issue of trying to understand what learners are doing in learning environments. During the inevitable drinks afterwards, someone exclaimed that's not machine learning. He was right, I actually tried the standard data mining techniques and they don't seem to produce any useful results. The key, I think, is in understanding what you want to discover, and not whether you are using the "correct" algorithms. Educational data mining, and data mining in general, is these days biased by the "Microsoft/Google" of data mining packages (it is called WEKA and I refuse to provide a link). Researchers compress there data such that WEKA can handle it, and then presto one of the algorithms produces some results.
Today, I gave a course to third year psychology students on educational data mining. Explaining what the issues are, and showing the results produced by the new methods we have developed. The students were very responsive, asking good questions, and aligned with the idea that in educational data mining the purpose is to understand the behaviour of the learner which the standard data mining techniques hardly provide an opportunity for.
Last week, Lilia and I had a discussion about a chapter of her thesis. Lilia's little toddler Alexander (1 year and 3 months) was present. He liked emptying my trash bin, putting the trash into the bin again, emptying it and so forth indefinitely. Perhaps, researchers, once they have reached a certain level of maturity, become toddlers again.
A little food for thought. Let us suppose you are a scientist and have written a conference paper. Two conferences would possibly accept the paper. They take place around the same time, one at an exotic location you always wanted to visit and one in a dull location you've unfortunately visited many times before. To which conference do you submit the paper? For those not familiar with scientific practice, it is not done to send the same paper to two conferences at the same time and publishing papers is core business for scientists.
After about a year in my new job on educational data mining I invited all collaborating colleagues (5) to write a paper on what we had discovered so far. They all took up the challenge and only after the paper was finished two asked: what is the conference location? Oh well, it is within cycling distance. I checked that before inviting them.