Synthesis Studios

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle! You’ve surely heard it before.  The “three Rs” of waste reduction, often represented by the triple arrow triangle printed on recycling bins and plastic bottles everywhere.  These three words are simple steps that everyone can take to prevent waste from reaching the landfill.

But, in the interest of catchy alliteration, has this phrase misstated the importance of each action?  The U.S. Pollution Prevention Act of 1990, which serves as the source of the “three Rs” (called R3), intended the following:

“The Pollution Prevention Act of 1990 sets up the R3 hierarchy of preferred approaches to protecting the environment. First and foremost, pollution should be prevented at the source whenever feasible (Reduce). If waste streams cannot be prevented, they should be Reused, Recycled, or treated. Disposal should be the last resort.”

In representing R3, Sandia National Laboratories uses instead a trapezoidal hierarchy with “Reduce” shown at the top as the largest shape, and “Reuse” “Recycle” “Treatment” and “Disposal” each whittling down in successively smaller shapes.  This graphic clearly conveys that reduction should be the top priority.

Then, why does it seem that recycling is the most touted and famous of the “R”s?  Why is the triangular arrow symbol equally representative of both R3 and recycling?

For one, recycling is an easier sell than asking people to stop buying the newest gadget or to carry reusable mugs everywhere they go.  With a toss of yesterday’s newspaper into the appropriate bin, anyone can be an environmentalist.  The responsibility is off your shoulders as soon as the paper leaves your curb and starts its journey of transformation into tomorrow’s newspaper.

But, what happens when this system breaks down?  The New York Times had an article last month about how the market for recyclable materials has slumped dramatically in the struggling economy.  Instead of being recycled, your newspaper is likely languishing in a warehouse, perhaps fated to the landfill after all.  The economic incentives that have buoyed the recycling market have disappeared.

So, what to do?  Certainly, don’t stop recycling – the market will hopefully rebound and sending waste directly to the landfill is still a far worse choice.  But, perhaps give a harder look to reduction, for both waste and energy.  Recycling (like buying carbon credits) can make you feel better about your consumption, but cannot be counted on to ease the impact that the initial action made on the world.

This story was originally published on 8 January 2009 on “What’s on?” — the blog for WattzOn.com.

Earlier this week, Raffi was wondering what NTP would do with tonight’s leap second. This morning, curiosity got the best of me and I found a good explanation from the German time-keeper maker Meinberg. Basically, NTP will just pass the fact that there is a leap second along to the OS, and it’s up to the OS to decide how to handle it. The really interesting bits come from how the OS then handles it, since most applications can’t handle 23:59:60. If you are really interested, the Meinberg explanation has some great graphs of an NTP client skewing Window’s clock to account for the second.

The really interesting bits come from how the OS then handles it, since most applications can’t handle 23:59:60.

I personally think an easier way to take care of this problem would be for everyone to grab the heaviest object they can find and run east. If Newton knew what he was talking about, we could speed the rotation of the earth and wouldn’t have to bother with leap seconds (then again, that would only be about 8.7×10e-14 of the earth’s mass, and does anyone know how the earth’s population is distributed compared to latitude?)

Many people don’t realize just how important the channel on which they run their wireless network is. Changing the channel can make all the difference for spotty performance; you might be trying to talk over someone. Imagine trying to have a conversation in a crowded room — when the person you are talking to misses a word, you have to repeat yourself. Your computer can have the same problem. I noticed this sitting even at my desk in Porter Square. Eight of the fifteen networks I can see are on channel 6! Every time one of these tries to communicate, it’s going to block the others.

Imagine trying to have a conversation in a crowded room — when the person you are talking to misses a word, you have to repeat yourself. Your computer can have the same problem.

So how do you pick the best channel? Most consumer grade routes, your DLinks and Linksi (is that plural?) will pick channel 6 right out of the box. Channel 6 is right in the center of the bandwidth available for 802.11g, so most WiFi antennae are tuned for it. If you don’t feel like scanning the area to see what’s around you can pick something slightly off of 6. Moving just one number is not always enough to help, as the way the protocol is structured channels within 10 MHz of each other may overlap. This means you’re best off going with something less than 4 or greater than 8.

You might be wondering why this matters. This November (hopefully) the IEEE 802.11n standard will be finalized and we should start to see a lot more devices using it. The added bandwidth and range will be nice, but it is going to amplify this problem. Not only can this reach further, but it has the capability to use two different channels for more bandwidth. Luckily for those of us who want to skirt this problem, all 802.11n transmissions have to be wrapped in an 802.11b header. Because of this we’ll still be able to see and avoid them with our current cards.

If you’re having trouble with your wireless network, it might be worth your time to check out iStumbler, a great tool for seeing what radios are around you. And if you like colorful graphs as much as I do, you’ll be happy to see they have a dashboard plugin to show you what’s in the air.

We’re really happy to announce that David Mellis is heading over to Denmark to join the faculty of the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design. He will be sorely missed around the office, but for all the reasons to move on, we can’t think of a better one — we’re thoroughly elated for him.

For sometime now, I’ve come to know and rely on the occupant of the first desk’s thoughts and guidance. Since David has joined our team, he has really helped me and Synthesis solidify our relationship with interaction and UX design for both projects we take on for clients, and for those that are our own. I will gladly credit portions of Synthesis’s design strategies for managing innovation, technology, and UX design to David’s presence in the studios.

David embodies the natural curiosity that every practitioner at Synthesis has.

He constantly asks, in his quiet way, what everybody is up to, loves to hear about all the projects (especially the ones he isn’t directly involved in) and isn’t afraid to throw his thoughts into the fray to either add to the conversation, or mix it up when he feels it could go a different way. We’ve learned a lot from him on how to step back and look at the larger picture of a project — not just on how to get a better picture of what we’re building, but also to get a better picture as to how we’re building it: Are we asking the right questions? What’s our role and relationship with the people who are going to be using the project? How do we make sure we’re “right” and not just from a technical perspective, but whether this project is going to resonate in people’s heads? David has been known to ask and challenge us all with the hard questions, but then stick around to help answer them too.

Synthesis is a close-knit family. When one of us leaves, it, or moves on, we all take a second to step back. David: Godspeed, and good luck. We’ll miss you, and come back and visit when you’re in town.