A cold, rainy, miserable day. Not nice enough to go out even to do archery. We did some work, editing and uploading the Big Bash photos and doing other club stuff.

We also got an email from a Canadian academic who interviewed us about our work nearly two years ago. The information from this will be incorporated in a book, being published shortly, we think – there have been some delays with it because of the publisher, not the content. However, Lynn Anderson, the researcher, has had a smaller article published, looking at the carbon footprint of physical and online conferences. She took took one of our SDP conferences as the example of an international virtual conference and used this to work out the carbon footprint differences between different types of conferences. One interesting – and astonishing – finding was that:

“had the SDP conference taken place in London, England, instead of online, the per capita emissions would have been greater than the per capita emissions of Brazil for all of 2005. In fact, the per capita emissions for this one conference, taking place over three days, would have been greater than the per capita emissions of at least 86 different countries for the entire year of 2005.”

She also found that if we had the conferences in London, people would be paying more than US$2600, rather than the $69 that we were charging in 2005.

So we’re really honoured to get international academic acknowledgment for the work we do.

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