Like many others, the august institution that I work for has set itself the goal to score better in the international university rankings.

There are brownie points in rankings these days when it comes to sustainability. You just wish that university management and those who do the ranking actually understood sustainability.

So at a lot of universities, they have discovered (or at least think that they have) that exams on paper are bad, and that going online is environmentally friendly. That's because that paper requires a lot of trees to make (ignoring for a moment that many modern papers contain large amount of recycled paper).

On the Internet, we learn that making 1 metric ton of paper causes about 1 ton of CO2 emissions. Wow that's a lot. Now the exam scripts for my students are usually under 20 pages A4. An A4 page weighs about 5 grams. So my entire exam is 100 g or less in CO2 emissions from paper. Add another 20 g CO from printing.

Now my experience is that if you let students sit online exams, around half of the class will cheat. These days, you do that with ChatGPT. Now let's assume there are 10 questions in the exam, and each takes two queries to ChatGPT to get right. I've asked ChatGPT how much CO2 a query to it produces, and it says between 5 and 20 grams. So we'll get between 100 and 400 g of CO2 here. Say 250 g on average. That's around 125 g per student, slightly more than producing a printed exam produced. Add to that the power used by student devices, and the paper exam looks positively environmentally friendly again.  

On 28/11/2024 11:39 pm, David Fernández via Starlink wrote:
Hi Hesham,

You may check this report, in case you missed it, for ideas on how to reduce energy consumption and carbon footprint, in general for the audiovisual sector, but satellite distribution of video may be considered there:
https://en.arcep.fr/news/press-releases/view/n/environment-071024.html

You may be interested in following this IETF group, too:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/group/green/about

This workshop already happened, but you may get something from there too, about the development of energy neutral devices:
https://6g-conference.dnac.org/2024/en-iot-2024

Considering that most of the CO2 is emitted during a device fabrication (e.g. 79% for laptops, according to Atos), making them last long and being modular and repairable may be the best way to reduce the carbon footprint (and the increasing amount of e-waste).

Regards,

David

Date: Sat, 23 Nov 2024 11:16:11 -0800
From: Hesham ElBakoury <helbakoury@gmail.com>
To: Dave Taht via Starlink <starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net>
Subject: [Starlink] Reducing Eenergy Consumption and Carbon Foot Print
        of      Satellites Network
Message-ID:
        <CAFvDQ9p6R9wdGFri3YPdU5=25FjyD6iN5yT+oW7XkgCZk77bow@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

I appreciate your input and pointers to publications regarding how to
reduce energy consumption and carbon footprint of satellites network.

Thanks
Hesham

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Dr. Ulrich Speidel

School of Computer Science

Room 303S.594 (City Campus)

The University of Auckland
u.speidel@auckland.ac.nz 
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ulrich/
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