The Hidden Energy Cost of Web Advertising

Advertising is an important source of income for many websites. To get the attention of the unsuspecting (and probably uninterested) visitors, web advertisements (ads) tend to use elaborate animations and graphics. Depending on the specific technology being used, displaying such ads on the visitor's screen may require a vast amount of CPU-power. Since present day desktop-CPUs can easily use 100W or more, ads may consume a substantial amount of energy. Although it is important for environmental reasons to reduce energy consumption, increasing the number of ads seems to be counterproductive.\ud The goal of this paper is to investigate the power consumption of web advertisements. For this purpose we used an energy meter to measure the differences in PC power consumption while browsing the web normally (thus with ads enabled), and while browsing with ads being blocked.\ud To simulate normal web browsing, we created a browser-based tool called AutoBrowse, which periodically opens an URL from a predefined list. To block advertisements, we used the Adblock Plus extension for Mozilla Firefox. To measure also power consumption with other browsers, we used in addition the Apache HTTP server and its mod_proxy module to act as an ad-blocking proxy server.\ud The measurements on several PCs and browsers show that, on average, the additional energy consumption to display web advertisements is 2.5W. To put this number into perspective, we calculated that the total amount of energy used to display web advertisement is equivalent of the total yearly electricity consumption of nearly 2000 households in the Netherlands. It takes 3,6 “average” wind turbines to generate this amount of energy

Critical view of anaphylaxis epidemiology: Open questions and new perspectives

In contrast to the majority of allergic or hypersensitivity conditions, worldwide anaphylaxis epidemiological data remain sparse with low accuracy, which hampers comparable morbidity statistics. Data can differ widely depending on a number of variables. In the current document we reviewed the forms on which anaphylaxis has been defined and classified; and how it can affect epidemiological data. With regards to the methods used to capture morbidity statistics, we observed the impact of the anaphylaxis coding utilizing the World Health Organization's International Classification of Diseases. As an outcome and depending on the anaphylaxis definition, we extracted the cumulative incidence, which may not reflect the real number of new cases. The new ICD-11 anaphylaxis subsection developments and critical view of morbidity statistics data are discussed in order to reach new perspectives on anaphylaxis epidemiology. © 2018 The Author(s)