Dan H's Profile

5% of the paper used in books today is recycled

And of all trees harvested for industrial uses, about 40% are used for paper.

average American uses 1500 lb of paper annually. And globally, 71% of the world's paper supply comes from natural forests

Reducing paper use does more than save trees. Pulp and paper mills are also a major source of pollution.

Paper mills also produce large amounts of solid waste and require a lot of water

e-textbooks won out overall for environmental friendlines

physical storage of those books, shipping books, and consumers driving to the bookstore

paper textbook created 4 times the greenhouse gas emissions of an e-book reader and several times more ozone-depleting substances and chemicals associated with acid rain. Conventional books also required more than 3 times more raw materials and 78 times more water consumption than e-books.

energy consumed is from the electricity used while reading.

electricity generation for e-reader use had less of an environmental impact than did paper production for the conventional book system

The paper book's biggest green advantage is that no electricity is needed to read it.

The New York Times alone has more than 1 million weekday print subscribers, and each subscription uses 520 lb of paper per year

But reading a web-based newspaper can use even more energy. Reading online on a desktop computer for 10 minutes produces the same load on the environment as reading an e-book for half an hour, and reading online for 30 minutes has the same overall effect as reading a print newspaper.

reminded me to think about my energy source

using an e-book reader to read newspapers had lower human toxicity impacts than reading a print newspaper

Reading a web-based newspaper for 30 minutes or more created the most potential toxic harm to humans and marine ecosystems, followed by the printed newspaper. For freshwater and terrestrial ecosystems, print newspapers had the most toxic impact.

In response to this challenge, individuals create a personalized subset of the information world that they can use when they are faced with information needs. This subset of the information world is a personal information collection

ersonal information collection is defined as the space we turn to first when we need information to do a task or pursue an interest.

individuals have acquired, cultivated, and organized over time and in response to a range of stimuli

ideal of building a personal information collection is that once we find useful information, it will be organized so that it is readily at hand when a later need for it arises

personal information collection, therefore, includes information sources and channels that an individual has kept.

Keeping

He or she identifies information that is useful and then engages in an act that relates to collecting, representing, indexing, cataloguing, classifying, and storing the information

personal information collection also includes information sources and channels that have been left

concedes that it is in a space or place that can easily be located again

individual makes this decision assuming that he or she will be able to find this information again in the place where it was originally located or encountered

leaving behaviour

keep the information

essential choices remain the same:

leave the information where it is

ignore the information

goal is that once we have found, encountered or acquired useful information, it should never be lost or forgotten and it is readily at hand when a later need for it arises.

Filing takes time and the folders that are created today may prove to be ineffective or even an impediment to access to the information in the future

'out of sight, out of mind' problem that items placed in a folder were sometimes forgotten until well after the period of their usefulness had passed

unctions are clearly reduced as the number of items in the inbox increases

aim of this study was to understand better how people manage information for subsequent re-access and re-use

aim of the keeping study was to understand the diversity of keeping methods (including leaving methods) that people use in their efforts to manage Web information for re-use

Participants were drawn from three professions: researchers, information professionals (including librarians) and managers

A large number of keeping methods was observed

However, no one in this group indicated that sending mail to others was part of a strategy to keep found things found

Managers send this mail with the expectation of getting back information, albeit in processed, reduced form, later on

These ten keeping methods imply one or more companion method for re-finding

Leaving behaviour is, therefore, associated with keeping found things found

leaving methods observed were

several functions appear to influence the choice of method

overall aim of keeping or leaving information is that, later, the individual will be able to access and use the information if it is needed

re-finding study involved two one-hour sessions to set up, and then conduct a delayed cued-recall test of the participant's ability to re-access Websites

descriptions were used to generate cues

For a given cue, participants were first asked if they recalled the Website. They were then asked to return to the cued Website as quickly as possible by whatever means they chose

Objective success was rated by the observer and subjective success by the participant

In 93% of the trials, participants successfully returned to the site using
the first method they selected

Favourites or Bookmarks (18%)

76% of the successful first-attempts at re-finding the Website in the trial, require no explicit keeping method

participants took an average of just under one minute to return to a Website

participants used three or more methods to re-find the cued Website in only 6% of the recall trials

majority of respondents were within the age range of forty to fifty-nine years

most common occupations

researcher

librarian

student

indicate whether they had ever used each of the thirteen methods that were identified in the keeping study (see Figure 1)

The data in Table 4 summarize how frequently participants use a keeping method over a typical week

Creating a Bookmark or entering a URL as a Favourite was reported as the most frequently used keeping method

next most frequently used methods are actually leaving methods

what proportion of the participants in the sample reported using specific methods at least once per week

five most commonly used keeping methods for each occupational group in the sample in rank order were

of the five most commonly used keeping actions for each of the occupational groups represented in the sample; at least two of the methods regularly used require no keeping behaviour

participants in the sample are reasonably confident of their ability to remember information left in situ, and their ability to find that information again

keeping methods most regularly used are

no one method observed in the study presented the user with every function that he or she might need

Generally people have a repertoire of between five and seven keeping methods that they are likely to use as regularly as once a week

he most common, regularly used method for keeping information was to make a Bookmark or Favourite but the second most common method was to do nothing

two of the top five most commonly used methods that participants chose for re-finding Web information actually required no keeping methods

company would be competing unfairly and violating the integrity of a democratic Internet

privacy of Comcast's customers, critics say, because the service provider would need to peek at their customers' transmissions in order to know which ones to slow down

determine whether Comcast was manipulating its network traffic in a "reasonable" manner

addresses privacy concerns by encrypting customer identities, and screens only for conditions it deems to have scientifically sound genetic studies

wants to plant an early stake in a potentially large new market around genetic data.

mission statement, which is organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful

interest in the company seems to be purely financial

they don't have access to our data