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Modi’s Hindi is an excessively starched kurta

The cliched but persuasive way in which politicians use language




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Performance of functionalized graphene oxide with organic radical scavengers in proton exchange membranes

Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys., 2024, 26,27817-27828
DOI: 10.1039/D4CP03151B, Paper
Yu Hu, Jiaxing Wang, Shuai Wang, Yuan Feng
A diazonium salt reaction is used to prepare benzoic acid-functionalized graphene oxide as a bi-functional filler for a Nafion membrane, and the corresponding composite membrane has improved chemical durability and proton conductivity.
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Photofragmentation and fragment analysis; Coriolis interactions in excited states of CH3

Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys., 2024, Advance Article
DOI: 10.1039/D4CP03292F, Paper
Meng-Xu Jiang, Ágúst Kvaran
Formation, energetics and fragmentations relevant to the methyl radical, with main emphasis on dramatic effects of Coriolis interaction within its excited states.
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MOTORSPORTS | Young Indian racers excited for Formula 4 Indian championship




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No excursions, please!

How safe are student outings undertaken by institutions?




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Boys in co-ed schools excel in science subjects




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Metal-free photocatalysts with charge-transfer excited states enable visible light-driven atom transfer radical polymerization

Chem. Commun., 2024, Accepted Manuscript
DOI: 10.1039/D4CC04470C, Communication
Yuchen Huang, Yangxin Liu, Yingde Yan, Yanjun Gong, Yifan Zhang, Yanke Che, Jincai Zhao
Photoredox-catalyzed atom transfer radical polymerization (O-ATRP) offers powerful tools for the precise control of polymer synthesis. Metal-free photocatalysts are particularly desirable due to their high level of control in O-ATRP...
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Constructing a core–shell Pt@MnOx/SiO2 catalyst for benzene catalytic combustion with excellent SO2 resistance: new insights into active sites

Environ. Sci.: Nano, 2024, Advance Article
DOI: 10.1039/D4EN00071D, Paper
Dan Yang, Fang Dong, Jie Wang, Zhicheng Tang, Jiyi Zhang
The construction of a core–shell Pt@MnOx/SiO2 protective structure catalyst can protect the active Pt site well from SO2 toxicity.
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Zeolite-like ion-exchanged Cu-attapulgite catalysts for promoted selective oxidation of ammonia

Environ. Sci.: Nano, 2024, Advance Article
DOI: 10.1039/D4EN00157E, Paper
Xuebin Zhang, Tianwei Lan, Qiuying Yi, Yufei Wang, Danhong Cheng, Dengsong Zhang
Zeolite-like ion-exchanged Cu-attapulgite catalysts have been developed for selective catalytic oxidation of ammonia.
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Synthesis and luminescent properties of three excellent yellow emissive Cu(I) complexes based on the diphosphine ligand and the diimine ligand

CrystEngComm, 2024, Advance Article
DOI: 10.1039/D4CE00206G, Paper
Wen-Long Mou, Cheng-Jie Gao, Zi-Xi Li, Si-Jie Fan, Chuan-Bin Hou, Jing-Tong Zhao, Shuai Zhang, Zhong-Feng Li, Hong-Liang Han, Chun-Bo Duan, Guo Wang, Qiong-Hua Jin
High quantum yield (72–88%) yellow-emitting Cu(I) complexes obtained by tuning the nitrogen ligands and anions.
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Indian economy to exceed growth estimates after strong Q2 beat: economists

Indian economy grew 7.6% in Q2FY24




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Retail inflation likely to exceed in Sept’s print of 5.5% in Oct

Government will come out with the detailed inflation data on Tuesday




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6 must-visit places in Mumbai for an exciting weekend

From a brand-new cocktail bar in Bandra to a menu inspired by the Kerala spice trade, we’ve got all your cravings covered





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Exclusive! Mithun Chakraborty Speaks!

'If Mithun Chakraborty can do it, so can anyone else. It is okay for the common man like me to have dreams. They do come true.'




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Not exclusively the activity, but the sweet spot: a dehydrogenase point mutation synergistically boosts activity, substrate tolerance, thermal stability and yield

Org. Biomol. Chem., 2024, 22,3009-3018
DOI: 10.1039/D4OB00211C, Paper
Yu-Ke Cen, Lin Zhang, Yue Jiang, Xiang-Fu Meng, Yuan Li, Chao Xiang, Ya-Ping Xue, Yu-Guo Zheng
A single-point mutation of 7α-HSDH achieved the highest activity and synergistically improved substrate tolerance, thermal stability, cofactor affinity, and conversion rate.
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Photochromism of phenazine-2,3-diol derivatives through excited state intermolecular proton transfer based on keto–enol tautomerization

Org. Biomol. Chem., 2024, Advance Article
DOI: 10.1039/D4OB00387J, Paper
Open Access
  This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence.
Kazuki Ohira, Kumpei Kozuka, Naoki Kaneda, Masahiro Yamamoto, Keiichi Imato, Yousuke Ooyama
It was found that phenazine-2,3-diol derivatives exhibit photochromism through excited state intermolecular proton transfer (ESInterPT) processes based on keto–enol tautomerization.
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Why do planes dump excess fuel in the sky?




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Ayushman Bharat: All seniors above 70 can avail health coverage except those in Delhi, West Bengal

Senior citizens eligible for PM-JAY regardless of income; Ayushman Vaya Vandana card will help cut out-of-pocket health spends; on Ayurveda Day, PM launches initiatives to validate traditional herbal medicine, promote Indian medical systems




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COVID-19 resulted in nearly half a million excess deaths, WHO’s global TB report states

Thirty high TB burden countries accounted for 87% of the world’s TB cases in 2022 and two-thirds of the global total was in eight countries including India




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EXCLUSIVE! Honey Irani: My Son Farhan Akhtar

'He was an extremely naughty child, always in trouble and creating trouble.''He wanted to fly a kite at night, and sometimes, bunk school.''When I insisted on sending him, we could get a call from school that he had fainted.'




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EXCLUSIVE! The Payal Kapadia Interview

'Hope is about being more accepting of each other, the kind of solidarity and friendship that even our families may not be able to give.'




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Nuclear excitation by electron capture seen at long last

Breakthrough could lead to new type of energy source




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Troia-Wilusa : general background and a guided tour (including the information panels at the site) / prepared by the director of the excavations Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Manfred O. Korfmann, Prof. Dr. Dietrich P. Mannsperger ; English translation by Jean D. Car

[İstanbul] : Ege Yayınları, 2005.




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“Delocalized π-bond” guided pyramidal nanocrystal superstructures for excellent light trapping in SERS

Mater. Chem. Front., 2024, Advance Article
DOI: 10.1039/D4QM00576G, Research Article
Yang Shang, Bo Ren, Xiaotian Wang, Jie Lin
A 2D CuI pyramidal superstructure is self-assembled in a manner similar to a delocalized π-bond, which effectively traps light and exhibits a remarkable SERS performance.
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Correlated excitonic signatures of individual van der Waals NiPS3 antiferromagnet nanoflakes

Nanoscale Horiz., 2024, Advance Article
DOI: 10.1039/D4NH00390J, Communication
Open Access
  This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence.
Vigneshwaran Chandrasekaran, Christopher R. DeLaney, Cong Tai Trinh, David Parobek, Christopher A. Lane, Jian-Xin Zhu, Xiangzhi Li, Huan Zhao, Marshall A. Campbell, Laura Martin, Edward F. Wyckoff, Andrew C. Jones, Matthew M. Schneider, John Watt, Michael T. Pettes, Sergei A. Ivanov, Andrei Piryatinski, David H. Dunlap, Han Htoon
Optical spectroscopy on individual nano-flakes of NiPS3 2D-antiferromagnet reveals correlated excitons arising from entangled charge, spin, orbital, and lattice degrees of freedom, similar to bulk NiPS3 but at a completely different energy range.
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Cricket’s exciting global knock captained by ICC

The spectator friendly 20-over format has grown the game — 89 countries are now ranked in T20 men’s cricket and 74 countries in T20 women’s cricket




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Quantification of technetium-99 in wastewater by means of automated on-line extraction chromatography – anion-exchange chromatography – inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry

J. Anal. At. Spectrom., 2024, 39,2774-2782
DOI: 10.1039/D4JA00270A, Paper
Open Access
  This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence.
Maximilian Horstmann, C. Derrick Quarles, Steffen Happel, Michael Sperling, Andreas Faust, David Clases, Uwe Karst
Ultratrace concentrations of pertechnetate are determined by preconcentration on a dedicated resin and anion exchange chromatography with ICP-MS detection.
The content of this RSS Feed (c) The Royal Society of Chemistry




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A miniaturized microplasma excitation source coupled with photochemically induced volatile species generation as a cost-effective tool for in situ mercury pollution analyses

J. Anal. At. Spectrom., 2024, Advance Article
DOI: 10.1039/D4JA00306C, Technical Note
Open Access
Tymoteusz Klis, Pawel Pohl, Anna Dzimitrowicz, Piotr Jamroz
A portable, miniaturized atmospheric microplasma discharge system coupled with the photochemical vapour generation was developed for the sensitive Hg determination in water samples using OES.
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Novartis, Dr. Reddy’s in exclusive sales pact for select products

400 Novartis employees to lose jobs due to resulting role redundancies 




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Dewan Housing Finance Corporation Ltd. - Outcome Of The Meeting Of The Special Committee For Resolution Plan Held On Tuesday, 6Th August, 2019 And Disclosures Under Regulation 30 Of Securities And Exchange Board Of India (Listing Obligations And Disclosur




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Dewan Housing Finance Corpn Ltd, - Outcome Of The Meeting Of The Special Committee For Resolution Plan Held On Tuesday, 6Th August, 2019 And Disclosures Under Regulation 30 Of Securities And Exchange Board Of India (Listing Obligations And Disclosure Requ




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Enhanced oxygen exchange kinetics and long-term stability of Ruddlesden-Popper phase Pr4Ni3O10+δ cathode for solid oxide fuel cells

J. Mater. Chem. A, 2024, Accepted Manuscript
DOI: 10.1039/D4TA01845A, Paper
Saim Saher, Affaq Qamar, Chou Yong Tan, Singh Ramesh, Walied Alfraidi
This research explores the intricacies of oxygen exchange kinetics in Pr4Ni3O10+δ (PNO), aiming to assess its potential as a viable cathode material for solid oxide fuel cell applications. Utilizing a...
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Tata Teleservices to surrender excess spectrum




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Sachin Tendulkar met Dalai Lama, inaugurated Centre of Excellence in HPCA Dharamshala

The Bharat Ratan, Cricketer Sachin Tendulkar today met 82 years old Tibetan spiritual leader the 14th Dalai Lama at his residence in north Indian hill town Dharmashala. After meeting the Dalai Lama Sachin said, “It’s excellent… very good meeting and always wanted to be here and take the blessings. Just wanted to spend some time […]




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Parental behaviour closely associated with adolescents’ excessive Internet use, finds NIMHANS study

The study showed that decreased care and increased control from the mother, high autonomy from father and increased rejection from both parents as risk factors associated with adolescent internet excessive use




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Boney M, Akon and an exclusive Japan arena — Here’s why you should head to Shillong Cherry Blossom Music Festival

In its fourth edition, Shillong Cherry Blossom Music Festival brings icons like Boney M. and Akon on stage and ropes in Japan as its partner country




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Influence of a diketopyrrolopyrrole spacer on the ultrafast nonlinear optical properties and excited state dynamics of dimeric zinc porphyrin molecules

J. Mater. Chem. C, 2024, Advance Article
DOI: 10.1039/D4TC03281K, Paper
Rahul Murali, Chinmoy Biswas, Sudhanshu Kumar Nayak, Hanping Wu, Xiaobin Peng, Vipin Kumar, Prabhakar Chetti, Venugopal Rao Soma, Sai Santosh Kumar Raavi
This work highlights the significance of adding a DPP unit to the zinc-porphyrin core with ethynylene bridges to enhance third-order NLO properties under femtosecond laser excitation.
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Unveiling the mechanism behind shell thickness-dependent X-ray excited optical and persistent luminescence in lanthanide-doped core/shell nanoparticles

J. Mater. Chem. C, 2024, Advance Article
DOI: 10.1039/D4TC04256E, Paper
Zezhen Liu, Jingtao Zhao, Danyang Shen, Lei Lei, Shiqing Xu
We reveal an optimal shell thickness of approximately 3 nm for both XEOL and XEPL of homogeneous NaYF4:Tb@NaYF4 and heterogeneous NaYF4:Tb@NaLuF4 core/shell NPs.
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A novel deep-blue fluorescent emitter employed as an identical exciplex acceptor for solution-processed multi-color OLEDs

J. Mater. Chem. C, 2024, Accepted Manuscript
DOI: 10.1039/D4TC04073B, Paper
Jie Pan, Shiyue Zhang, Zhongxin Zhou, Yongtao Zhao, Shujing Jin, Yanju Luo, Weiguo Zhu, Yu Liu
Currently, exciplex-type thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) materials are emerging as a promising strategy for optimizing organic light-emitting devices (OLEDs). However, achieving highly efficient multi-color OLEDs based on exciplexes remains...
The content of this RSS Feed (c) The Royal Society of Chemistry




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Enhanced energy storage performance with excellent thermal stability of BNT-based ceramics via the multiphase engineering strategy for pulsed power capacitor

J. Mater. Chem. C, 2024, Accepted Manuscript
DOI: 10.1039/D4TC04170D, Paper
Maqbool Ur Rehman, Aiwen Xie, Attaur Rahman, Yi Zhang, Ao Tian, Xuewen Jiang, Xinchun Xie, Cong Zhou, Tianyu Li, Liqiang Liu, Xin Gao, Xiaokuo Er, Ruzhong Zuo
High-temperature resistance and ultra-fast discharging of materials is one of the hot topics in the development of pulsed power systems. It is still a great challenge for dielectric materials to...
The content of this RSS Feed (c) The Royal Society of Chemistry





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Excess pregnancy weight gain may make your child obese




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Understanding deNOx mechanisms in transition metal exchanged zeolites

Chem. Soc. Rev., 2024, Advance Article
DOI: 10.1039/D3CS00468F, Review Article
Open Access
  This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence.
Jamal Abdul Nasir, Andrew M. Beale, C. Richard A. Catlow
Transition metal-containing zeolites have received considerable attention, owing to their application in the selective catalytic reduction of NOx. To understand their chemistry, both structural and mechanistic aspects at the atomic level are needed.
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Sustainable Web Design, An Excerpt

In the 1950s, many in the elite running community had begun to believe it wasn’t possible to run a mile in less than four minutes. Runners had been attempting it since the late 19th century and were beginning to draw the conclusion that the human body simply wasn’t built for the task. 

But on May 6, 1956, Roger Bannister took everyone by surprise. It was a cold, wet day in Oxford, England—conditions no one expected to lend themselves to record-setting—and yet Bannister did just that, running a mile in 3:59.4 and becoming the first person in the record books to run a mile in under four minutes. 

This shift in the benchmark had profound effects; the world now knew that the four-minute mile was possible. Bannister’s record lasted only forty-six days, when it was snatched away by Australian runner John Landy. Then a year later, three runners all beat the four-minute barrier together in the same race. Since then, over 1,400 runners have officially run a mile in under four minutes; the current record is 3:43.13, held by Moroccan athlete Hicham El Guerrouj.

We achieve far more when we believe that something is possible, and we will believe it’s possible only when we see someone else has already done it—and as with human running speed, so it is with what we believe are the hard limits for how a website needs to perform.

Establishing standards for a sustainable web

In most major industries, the key metrics of environmental performance are fairly well established, such as miles per gallon for cars or energy per square meter for homes. The tools and methods for calculating those metrics are standardized as well, which keeps everyone on the same page when doing environmental assessments. In the world of websites and apps, however, we aren’t held to any particular environmental standards, and only recently have gained the tools and methods we need to even make an environmental assessment.

The primary goal in sustainable web design is to reduce carbon emissions. However, it’s almost impossible to actually measure the amount of CO2 produced by a web product. We can’t measure the fumes coming out of the exhaust pipes on our laptops. The emissions of our websites are far away, out of sight and out of mind, coming out of power stations burning coal and gas. We have no way to trace the electrons from a website or app back to the power station where the electricity is being generated and actually know the exact amount of greenhouse gas produced. So what do we do? 

If we can’t measure the actual carbon emissions, then we need to find what we can measure. The primary factors that could be used as indicators of carbon emissions are:

  1. Data transfer 
  2. Carbon intensity of electricity

Let’s take a look at how we can use these metrics to quantify the energy consumption, and in turn the carbon footprint, of the websites and web apps we create.

Data transfer

Most researchers use kilowatt-hours per gigabyte (kWh/GB) as a metric of energy efficiency when measuring the amount of data transferred over the internet when a website or application is used. This provides a great reference point for energy consumption and carbon emissions. As a rule of thumb, the more data transferred, the more energy used in the data center, telecoms networks, and end user devices.

For web pages, data transfer for a single visit can be most easily estimated by measuring the page weight, meaning the transfer size of the page in kilobytes the first time someone visits the page. It’s fairly easy to measure using the developer tools in any modern web browser. Often your web hosting account will include statistics for the total data transfer of any web application (Fig 2.1).

Fig 2.1: The Kinsta hosting dashboard displays data transfer alongside traffic volumes. If you divide data transfer by visits, you get the average data per visit, which can be used as a metric of efficiency.

The nice thing about page weight as a metric is that it allows us to compare the efficiency of web pages on a level playing field without confusing the issue with constantly changing traffic volumes. 

Reducing page weight requires a large scope. By early 2020, the median page weight was 1.97 MB for setups the HTTP Archive classifies as “desktop” and 1.77 MB for “mobile,” with desktop increasing 36 percent since January 2016 and mobile page weights nearly doubling in the same period (Fig 2.2). Roughly half of this data transfer is image files, making images the single biggest source of carbon emissions on the average website. 

History clearly shows us that our web pages can be smaller, if only we set our minds to it. While most technologies become ever more energy efficient, including the underlying technology of the web such as data centers and transmission networks, websites themselves are a technology that becomes less efficient as time goes on.

Fig 2.2: The historical page weight data from HTTP Archive can teach us a lot about what is possible in the future.

You might be familiar with the concept of performance budgeting as a way of focusing a project team on creating faster user experiences. For example, we might specify that the website must load in a maximum of one second on a broadband connection and three seconds on a 3G connection. Much like speed limits while driving, performance budgets are upper limits rather than vague suggestions, so the goal should always be to come in under budget.

Designing for fast performance does often lead to reduced data transfer and emissions, but it isn’t always the case. Web performance is often more about the subjective perception of load times than it is about the true efficiency of the underlying system, whereas page weight and transfer size are more objective measures and more reliable benchmarks for sustainable web design. 

We can set a page weight budget in reference to a benchmark of industry averages, using data from sources like HTTP Archive. We can also benchmark page weight against competitors or the old version of the website we’re replacing. For example, we might set a maximum page weight budget as equal to our most efficient competitor, or we could set the benchmark lower to guarantee we are best in class. 

If we want to take it to the next level, then we could also start looking at the transfer size of our web pages for repeat visitors. Although page weight for the first time someone visits is the easiest thing to measure, and easy to compare on a like-for-like basis, we can learn even more if we start looking at transfer size in other scenarios too. For example, visitors who load the same page multiple times will likely have a high percentage of the files cached in their browser, meaning they don’t need to transfer all of the files on subsequent visits. Likewise, a visitor who navigates to new pages on the same website will likely not need to load the full page each time, as some global assets from areas like the header and footer may already be cached in their browser. Measuring transfer size at this next level of detail can help us learn even more about how we can optimize efficiency for users who regularly visit our pages, and enable us to set page weight budgets for additional scenarios beyond the first visit.

Page weight budgets are easy to track throughout a design and development process. Although they don’t actually tell us carbon emission and energy consumption analytics directly, they give us a clear indication of efficiency relative to other websites. And as transfer size is an effective analog for energy consumption, we can actually use it to estimate energy consumption too.

In summary, reduced data transfer translates to energy efficiency, a key factor to reducing carbon emissions of web products. The more efficient our products, the less electricity they use, and the less fossil fuels need to be burned to produce the electricity to power them. But as we’ll see next, since all web products demand some power, it’s important to consider the source of that electricity, too.

Carbon intensity of electricity

Regardless of energy efficiency, the level of pollution caused by digital products depends on the carbon intensity of the energy being used to power them. Carbon intensity is a term used to define the grams of CO2 produced for every kilowatt-hour of electricity (gCO2/kWh). This varies widely, with renewable energy sources and nuclear having an extremely low carbon intensity of less than 10 gCO2/kWh (even when factoring in their construction); whereas fossil fuels have very high carbon intensity of approximately 200–400 gCO2/kWh. 

Most electricity comes from national or state grids, where energy from a variety of different sources is mixed together with varying levels of carbon intensity. The distributed nature of the internet means that a single user of a website or app might be using energy from multiple different grids simultaneously; a website user in Paris uses electricity from the French national grid to power their home internet and devices, but the website’s data center could be in Dallas, USA, pulling electricity from the Texas grid, while the telecoms networks use energy from everywhere between Dallas and Paris.

We don’t have control over the full energy supply of web services, but we do have some control over where we host our projects. With a data center using a significant proportion of the energy of any website, locating the data center in an area with low carbon energy will tangibly reduce its carbon emissions. Danish startup Tomorrow reports and maps this user-contributed data, and a glance at their map shows how, for example, choosing a data center in France will have significantly lower carbon emissions than a data center in the Netherlands (Fig 2.3).

Fig 2.3: Tomorrow’s electricityMap shows live data for the carbon intensity of electricity by country.

That said, we don’t want to locate our servers too far away from our users; it takes energy to transmit data through the telecom’s networks, and the further the data travels, the more energy is consumed. Just like food miles, we can think of the distance from the data center to the website’s core user base as “megabyte miles”—and we want it to be as small as possible.

Using the distance itself as a benchmark, we can use website analytics to identify the country, state, or even city where our core user group is located and measure the distance from that location to the data center used by our hosting company. This will be a somewhat fuzzy metric as we don’t know the precise center of mass of our users or the exact location of a data center, but we can at least get a rough idea. 

For example, if a website is hosted in London but the primary user base is on the West Coast of the USA, then we could look up the distance from London to San Francisco, which is 5,300 miles. That’s a long way! We can see that hosting it somewhere in North America, ideally on the West Coast, would significantly reduce the distance and thus the energy used to transmit the data. In addition, locating our servers closer to our visitors helps reduce latency and delivers better user experience, so it’s a win-win.

Converting it back to carbon emissions

If we combine carbon intensity with a calculation for energy consumption, we can calculate the carbon emissions of our websites and apps. A tool my team created does this by measuring the data transfer over the wire when loading a web page, calculating the amount of electricity associated, and then converting that into a figure for CO2 (Fig 2.4). It also factors in whether or not the web hosting is powered by renewable energy.

If you want to take it to the next level and tailor the data more accurately to the unique aspects of your project, the Energy and Emissions Worksheet accompanying this book shows you how.

Fig 2.4: The Website Carbon Calculator shows how the Riverford Organic website embodies their commitment to sustainability, being both low carbon and hosted in a data center using renewable energy.

With the ability to calculate carbon emissions for our projects, we could actually take a page weight budget one step further and set carbon budgets as well. CO2 is not a metric commonly used in web projects; we’re more familiar with kilobytes and megabytes, and can fairly easily look at design options and files to assess how big they are. Translating that into carbon adds a layer of abstraction that isn’t as intuitive—but carbon budgets do focus our minds on the primary thing we’re trying to reduce, and support the core objective of sustainable web design: reducing carbon emissions.

Browser Energy

Data transfer might be the simplest and most complete analog for energy consumption in our digital projects, but by giving us one number to represent the energy used in the data center, the telecoms networks, and the end user’s devices, it can’t offer us insights into the efficiency in any specific part of the system.

One part of the system we can look at in more detail is the energy used by end users’ devices. As front-end web technologies become more advanced, the computational load is increasingly moving from the data center to users’ devices, whether they be phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, or even smart TVs. Modern web browsers allow us to implement more complex styling and animation on the fly using CSS and JavaScript. Furthermore, JavaScript libraries such as Angular and React allow us to create applications where the “thinking” work is done partly or entirely in the browser. 

All of these advances are exciting and open up new possibilities for what the web can do to serve society and create positive experiences. However, more computation in the user’s web browser means more energy used by their devices. This has implications not just environmentally, but also for user experience and inclusivity. Applications that put a heavy processing load on the user’s device can inadvertently exclude users with older, slower devices and cause batteries on phones and laptops to drain faster. Furthermore, if we build web applications that require the user to have up-to-date, powerful devices, people throw away old devices much more frequently. This isn’t just bad for the environment, but it puts a disproportionate financial burden on the poorest in society.

In part because the tools are limited, and partly because there are so many different models of devices, it’s difficult to measure website energy consumption on end users’ devices. One tool we do currently have is the Energy Impact monitor inside the developer console of the Safari browser (Fig 2.5).

Fig 2.5: The Energy Impact meter in Safari (on the right) shows how a website consumes CPU energy.

You know when you load a website and your computer’s cooling fans start spinning so frantically you think it might actually take off? That’s essentially what this tool is measuring. 

It shows us the percentage of CPU used and the duration of CPU usage when loading the web page, and uses these figures to generate an energy impact rating. It doesn’t give us precise data for the amount of electricity used in kilowatts, but the information it does provide can be used to benchmark how efficiently your websites use energy and set targets for improvement.




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Design for Safety, An Excerpt

Antiracist economist Kim Crayton says that “intention without strategy is chaos.” We’ve discussed how our biases, assumptions, and inattention toward marginalized and vulnerable groups lead to dangerous and unethical tech—but what, specifically, do we need to do to fix it? The intention to make our tech safer is not enough; we need a strategy.

This chapter will equip you with that plan of action. It covers how to integrate safety principles into your design work in order to create tech that’s safe, how to convince your stakeholders that this work is necessary, and how to respond to the critique that what we actually need is more diversity. (Spoiler: we do, but diversity alone is not the antidote to fixing unethical, unsafe tech.)

The process for inclusive safety

When you are designing for safety, your goals are to:

  • identify ways your product can be used for abuse,
  • design ways to prevent the abuse, and
  • provide support for vulnerable users to reclaim power and control.

The Process for Inclusive Safety is a tool to help you reach those goals (Fig 5.1). It’s a methodology I created in 2018 to capture the various techniques I was using when designing products with safety in mind. Whether you are creating an entirely new product or adding to an existing feature, the Process can help you make your product safe and inclusive. The Process includes five general areas of action:

  • Conducting research
  • Creating archetypes
  • Brainstorming problems
  • Designing solutions
  • Testing for safety
Fig 5.1: Each aspect of the Process for Inclusive Safety can be incorporated into your design process where it makes the most sense for you. The times given are estimates to help you incorporate the stages into your design plan.

The Process is meant to be flexible—it won’t make sense for teams to implement every step in some situations. Use the parts that are relevant to your unique work and context; this is meant to be something you can insert into your existing design practice.

And once you use it, if you have an idea for making it better or simply want to provide context of how it helped your team, please get in touch with me. It’s a living document that I hope will continue to be a useful and realistic tool that technologists can use in their day-to-day work.

If you’re working on a product specifically for a vulnerable group or survivors of some form of trauma, such as an app for survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, or drug addiction, be sure to read Chapter 7, which covers that situation explicitly and should be handled a bit differently. The guidelines here are for prioritizing safety when designing a more general product that will have a wide user base (which, we already know from statistics, will include certain groups that should be protected from harm). Chapter 7 is focused on products that are specifically for vulnerable groups and people who have experienced trauma.

Step 1: Conduct research

Design research should include a broad analysis of how your tech might be weaponized for abuse as well as specific insights into the experiences of survivors and perpetrators of that type of abuse. At this stage, you and your team will investigate issues of interpersonal harm and abuse, and explore any other safety, security, or inclusivity issues that might be a concern for your product or service, like data security, racist algorithms, and harassment.

Broad research

Your project should begin with broad, general research into similar products and issues around safety and ethical concerns that have already been reported. For example, a team building a smart home device would do well to understand the multitude of ways that existing smart home devices have been used as tools of abuse. If your product will involve AI, seek to understand the potentials for racism and other issues that have been reported in existing AI products. Nearly all types of technology have some kind of potential or actual harm that’s been reported on in the news or written about by academics. Google Scholar is a useful tool for finding these studies.

Specific research: Survivors

When possible and appropriate, include direct research (surveys and interviews) with people who are experts in the forms of harm you have uncovered. Ideally, you’ll want to interview advocates working in the space of your research first so that you have a more solid understanding of the topic and are better equipped to not retraumatize survivors. If you’ve uncovered possible domestic violence issues, for example, the experts you’ll want to speak with are survivors themselves, as well as workers at domestic violence hotlines, shelters, other related nonprofits, and lawyers.

Especially when interviewing survivors of any kind of trauma, it is important to pay people for their knowledge and lived experiences. Don’t ask survivors to share their trauma for free, as this is exploitative. While some survivors may not want to be paid, you should always make the offer in the initial ask. An alternative to payment is to donate to an organization working against the type of violence that the interviewee experienced. We’ll talk more about how to appropriately interview survivors in Chapter 6.

Specific research: Abusers

It’s unlikely that teams aiming to design for safety will be able to interview self-proclaimed abusers or people who have broken laws around things like hacking. Don’t make this a goal; rather, try to get at this angle in your general research. Aim to understand how abusers or bad actors weaponize technology to use against others, how they cover their tracks, and how they explain or rationalize the abuse.

Step 2: Create archetypes

Once you’ve finished conducting your research, use your insights to create abuser and survivor archetypes. Archetypes are not personas, as they’re not based on real people that you interviewed and surveyed. Instead, they’re based on your research into likely safety issues, much like when we design for accessibility: we don’t need to have found a group of blind or low-vision users in our interview pool to create a design that’s inclusive of them. Instead, we base those designs on existing research into what this group needs. Personas typically represent real users and include many details, while archetypes are broader and can be more generalized.

The abuser archetype is someone who will look at the product as a tool to perform harm (Fig 5.2). They may be trying to harm someone they don’t know through surveillance or anonymous harassment, or they may be trying to control, monitor, abuse, or torment someone they know personally.

Fig 5.2: Harry Oleson, an abuser archetype for a fitness product, is looking for ways to stalk his ex-girlfriend through the fitness apps she uses.

The survivor archetype is someone who is being abused with the product. There are various situations to consider in terms of the archetype’s understanding of the abuse and how to put an end to it: Do they need proof of abuse they already suspect is happening, or are they unaware they’ve been targeted in the first place and need to be alerted (Fig 5.3)?

Fig 5.3: The survivor archetype Lisa Zwaan suspects her husband is weaponizing their home’s IoT devices against her, but in the face of his insistence that she simply doesn’t understand how to use the products, she’s unsure. She needs some kind of proof of the abuse.

You may want to make multiple survivor archetypes to capture a range of different experiences. They may know that the abuse is happening but not be able to stop it, like when an abuser locks them out of IoT devices; or they know it’s happening but don’t know how, such as when a stalker keeps figuring out their location (Fig 5.4). Include as many of these scenarios as you need to in your survivor archetype. You’ll use these later on when you design solutions to help your survivor archetypes achieve their goals of preventing and ending abuse.

Fig 5.4: The survivor archetype Eric Mitchell knows he’s being stalked by his ex-boyfriend Rob but can’t figure out how Rob is learning his location information.

It may be useful for you to create persona-like artifacts for your archetypes, such as the three examples shown. Instead of focusing on the demographic information we often see in personas, focus on their goals. The goals of the abuser will be to carry out the specific abuse you’ve identified, while the goals of the survivor will be to prevent abuse, understand that abuse is happening, make ongoing abuse stop, or regain control over the technology that’s being used for abuse. Later, you’ll brainstorm how to prevent the abuser’s goals and assist the survivor’s goals.

And while the “abuser/survivor” model fits most cases, it doesn’t fit all, so modify it as you need to. For example, if you uncovered an issue with security, such as the ability for someone to hack into a home camera system and talk to children, the malicious hacker would get the abuser archetype and the child’s parents would get survivor archetype.

Step 3: Brainstorm problems

After creating archetypes, brainstorm novel abuse cases and safety issues. “Novel” means things not found in your research; you’re trying to identify completely new safety issues that are unique to your product or service. The goal with this step is to exhaust every effort of identifying harms your product could cause. You aren’t worrying about how to prevent the harm yet—that comes in the next step.

How could your product be used for any kind of abuse, outside of what you’ve already identified in your research? I recommend setting aside at least a few hours with your team for this process.

If you’re looking for somewhere to start, try doing a Black Mirror brainstorm. This exercise is based on the show Black Mirror, which features stories about the dark possibilities of technology. Try to figure out how your product would be used in an episode of the show—the most wild, awful, out-of-control ways it could be used for harm. When I’ve led Black Mirror brainstorms, participants usually end up having a good deal of fun (which I think is great—it’s okay to have fun when designing for safety!). I recommend time-boxing a Black Mirror brainstorm to half an hour, and then dialing it back and using the rest of the time thinking of more realistic forms of harm.

After you’ve identified as many opportunities for abuse as possible, you may still not feel confident that you’ve uncovered every potential form of harm. A healthy amount of anxiety is normal when you’re doing this kind of work. It’s common for teams designing for safety to worry, “Have we really identified every possible harm? What if we’ve missed something?” If you’ve spent at least four hours coming up with ways your product could be used for harm and have run out of ideas, go to the next step.

It’s impossible to guarantee you’ve thought of everything; instead of aiming for 100 percent assurance, recognize that you’ve taken this time and have done the best you can, and commit to continuing to prioritize safety in the future. Once your product is released, your users may identify new issues that you missed; aim to receive that feedback graciously and course-correct quickly.

Step 4: Design solutions

At this point, you should have a list of ways your product can be used for harm as well as survivor and abuser archetypes describing opposing user goals. The next step is to identify ways to design against the identified abuser’s goals and to support the survivor’s goals. This step is a good one to insert alongside existing parts of your design process where you’re proposing solutions for the various problems your research uncovered.

Some questions to ask yourself to help prevent harm and support your archetypes include:

  • Can you design your product in such a way that the identified harm cannot happen in the first place? If not, what roadblocks can you put up to prevent the harm from happening?
  • How can you make the victim aware that abuse is happening through your product?
  • How can you help the victim understand what they need to do to make the problem stop?
  • Can you identify any types of user activity that would indicate some form of harm or abuse? Could your product help the user access support?

In some products, it’s possible to proactively recognize that harm is happening. For example, a pregnancy app might be modified to allow the user to report that they were the victim of an assault, which could trigger an offer to receive resources for local and national organizations. This sort of proactiveness is not always possible, but it’s worth taking a half hour to discuss if any type of user activity would indicate some form of harm or abuse, and how your product could assist the user in receiving help in a safe manner.

That said, use caution: you don’t want to do anything that could put a user in harm’s way if their devices are being monitored. If you do offer some kind of proactive help, always make it voluntary, and think through other safety issues, such as the need to keep the user in-app in case an abuser is checking their search history. We’ll walk through a good example of this in the next chapter.

Step 5: Test for safety

The final step is to test your prototypes from the point of view of your archetypes: the person who wants to weaponize the product for harm and the victim of the harm who needs to regain control over the technology. Just like any other kind of product testing, at this point you’ll aim to rigorously test out your safety solutions so that you can identify gaps and correct them, validate that your designs will help keep your users safe, and feel more confident releasing your product into the world.

Ideally, safety testing happens along with usability testing. If you’re at a company that doesn’t do usability testing, you might be able to use safety testing to cleverly perform both; a user who goes through your design attempting to weaponize the product against someone else can also be encouraged to point out interactions or other elements of the design that don’t make sense to them.

You’ll want to conduct safety testing on either your final prototype or the actual product if it’s already been released. There’s nothing wrong with testing an existing product that wasn’t designed with safety goals in mind from the onset—“retrofitting” it for safety is a good thing to do.

Remember that testing for safety involves testing from the perspective of both an abuser and a survivor, though it may not make sense for you to do both. Alternatively, if you made multiple survivor archetypes to capture multiple scenarios, you’ll want to test from the perspective of each one.

As with other sorts of usability testing, you as the designer are most likely too close to the product and its design by this point to be a valuable tester; you know the product too well. Instead of doing it yourself, set up testing as you would with other usability testing: find someone who is not familiar with the product and its design, set the scene, give them a task, encourage them to think out loud, and observe how they attempt to complete it.

Abuser testing

The goal of this testing is to understand how easy it is for someone to weaponize your product for harm. Unlike with usability testing, you want to make it impossible, or at least difficult, for them to achieve their goal. Reference the goals in the abuser archetype you created earlier, and use your product in an attempt to achieve them.

For example, for a fitness app with GPS-enabled location features, we can imagine that the abuser archetype would have the goal of figuring out where his ex-girlfriend now lives. With this goal in mind, you’d try everything possible to figure out the location of another user who has their privacy settings enabled. You might try to see her running routes, view any available information on her profile, view anything available about her location (which she has set to private), and investigate the profiles of any other users somehow connected with her account, such as her followers.

If by the end of this you’ve managed to uncover some of her location data, despite her having set her profile to private, you know now that your product enables stalking. Your next step is to go back to step 4 and figure out how to prevent this from happening. You may need to repeat the process of designing solutions and testing them more than once.

Survivor testing

Survivor testing involves identifying how to give information and power to the survivor. It might not always make sense based on the product or context. Thwarting the attempt of an abuser archetype to stalk someone also satisfies the goal of the survivor archetype to not be stalked, so separate testing wouldn’t be needed from the survivor’s perspective.

However, there are cases where it makes sense. For example, for a smart thermostat, a survivor archetype’s goals would be to understand who or what is making the temperature change when they aren’t doing it themselves. You could test this by looking for the thermostat’s history log and checking for usernames, actions, and times; if you couldn’t find that information, you would have more work to do in step 4.

Another goal might be regaining control of the thermostat once the survivor realizes the abuser is remotely changing its settings. Your test would involve attempting to figure out how to do this: are there instructions that explain how to remove another user and change the password, and are they easy to find? This might again reveal that more work is needed to make it clear to the user how they can regain control of the device or account.

Stress testing

To make your product more inclusive and compassionate, consider adding stress testing. This concept comes from Design for Real Life by Eric Meyer and Sara Wachter-Boettcher. The authors pointed out that personas typically center people who are having a good day—but real users are often anxious, stressed out, having a bad day, or even experiencing tragedy. These are called “stress cases,” and testing your products for users in stress-case situations can help you identify places where your design lacks compassion. Design for Real Life has more details about what it looks like to incorporate stress cases into your design as well as many other great tactics for compassionate design.




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