Joel Achenbach at the Washington Post has posted today a must-read article about pseudo science and journalism. The final two paragraphs echo the findings in my recent post titled “Separating Fact From Fiction”: There’s nothing at stake here except the survival of credible journalism. For those who are
Read moreI was interviewed for the WNYC radio show New Tech City last week, and the story appeared today. It’s a fun piece, and worth listening to. My one quibble is that the report explicitly creates false balance, because it contrasted my data and analysis-based view of how much
Read moreThis article is an abridged, re-edited, and amended version of an article that recently appeared as Koomey, Jonathan. 2014. “Separating Fact From Fiction: A Challenge For The Media.” In IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine. January. pp. 9-11. “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into
Read moreLast week I moderated a panel at the Open Compute Summit V in San Jose that focused on bringing integrated design, mass production and learning by doing to the data center industry. The great irony is that information technology (IT) has had amazing success at transforming other industries, reducing costs
Read moreThe chemical spill that fouled West Virginia’s water supply provides yet another example (as if any more were needed) showing why unregulated markets will underinvest in environmental protection. The Wall Street Journal has a summary here (subscription required) Freedom Industries Inc., the company connected to a chemical spill that
Read moreThe National Journal (among others) is reporting that The $1 trillion federal spending bill that lawmakers unveiled Monday night would soften an Obama administration climate-change policy that greatly restricts U.S. support for coal-plant construction in developing nations… The bill also targets a policy to phase out inefficient
Read moreMy invited perspective article, “Moving beyond benefit-cost analysis of climate change”, was just posted by the open access on-line journal Environmental Research Letters. Here’s the abstract and the introduction. Abstract The conventional benefit–cost approach to understanding the climate problem has serious limitations. Fortunately, an alternative way
Read moreCold Cash, Cool Climate: Science-based Advice for Ecological Entrepreneurs was recently honored as a finalist in the Science: General category of the 2013 USA Best Book Awards. To see the list of 2013 winners, go here. In May of this year, the book was awarded an honorable mention in
Read moreThe Annual Review of Environment and Resources has just released their Volume 38, which contains our latest article, titled “Smart Everything: Will Intelligent Systems Reduce Resource Use? (CLICK ON THE TITLE LINK TO DOWNLOAD A FREE COPY!)”. The article provides a broad look at the progress of distributed mobile computing
Read moreIn a white paper I wrote for Samsung last fall (Koomey 2012), I analyze the economics of purchasing green DRAM for servers. Assessing the economics of efficiency improvements in IT equipment requires knowledge not just of energy prices and energy savings, but also of the avoided infrastructure costs associated with
Read moreI and two former students of mine, Nicole Schuetz and Anna Kovaleva, just completed a wonderful case study of eBay’s transition to more efficient data center operations. As readers of this blog know, the barriers to achieving higher efficiency data centers are not primarily technical. Instead, they are mainly
Read moreKen and Margot Brill, with Ken reading to one of our sons, on May 8, 2011. Photo credit: Jonathan Koomey. My dear friend Ken Brill passed away on July 30th, and a few of his colleagues and I gathered with Ken’s family in Maine on August 17th of this
Read moreWhat makes a great man? Jonathan Koomey St. Albans Episcopal Church Cape Elizabeth, Maine August 17, 2013 We’re here to honor the life of a good friend and a great man: Ken Brill. In preparing for this event, I contacted many of Ken’s friends and colleagues, all of
Read moreEulogy for Ken Brill Martin McCarthy St. Albans Episcopal Church Cape Elizabeth, Maine August 17, 2013 I loved Ken Brill. It took me 50 years of my life to get ready to meet this man, but I loved him. And in the last 5 years he’s been such an
Read moreIn honor of Ken Brill John Thornell St. Albans Episcopal Church Cape Elizabeth, Maine August 17, 2013 As the father of the data center industry, Ken has many accomplishments to his name. These accomplishments are the product of an insatiable curiosity, and an unrelenting passion, focus and drive. Sometimes this
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