Quote:
Originally Posted by Gianfranco
How? If you dig up all the information and leave out the subjective opinions, I don't see how you can make a report "look the way you want". Articles which don't abide by scientific standards are not long lived within the serious fields of research.
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Sorry, but science still has many open ports for subjective opinions, which are in "good science" just very well hidden. You actually are unable to make any scientific research that is 100% unbiased (this is also what spending a lot of time into philosophy of science yielded to me, starting with question what is a "scientific standard", and what makes one research "standard-conform" and the other not).
First of course you never know what "all" information is. At some point you just have to stop, like the device itself, as has been pointed out you'd need to include the research also. Do you have to include the car the researcher uses to get into work? Or would he require a car also if he would work somewhere else if no eInk devices would be researched/produced.
Or a more mudane example. How long do you calculate an eInk device to last? You just cannot "collect" this data, as the devices are much to new, and you would need several years of asking a big number of people to tell you when they throw their device away. Of course you get different data if you say, well most people will buy a device every 2 or for 4 years (or I picked a sample on a mobileread.com poll, which is biased, because there are the more dedicated pepole than the average guy of just buying this device). Its impossible to get a 100% "unbiased" sample.
What about the people that just buy an eInk device and actually hardly use it, because it didn't fit their needs? Can you get them into your sample?
How do you calculate the production costs of the silicium? what do you include what do you exclude. How do you weight the different impacts on the environment this technologies differ. And don't think no wood would be cutted if we removed all pBooks and pNewspapers... Wouldn't you need to replace toilet paper which now can be recycled pPaper to use 100% original wood? I mean the average person is likely to use more toiletpaper a day than he uses pBooks....
The circles of influence grew bigger and bigger, and its impossible to include *all* data. One can pick some, and try to convince the scientific community, its the "relevant" data he picked ... maybe they buy it maybe they don't. I'd say the question like "If everybody used eBooks the environment would be better", is a very difficult question which is unlikely to be answered by any certainity. Beginning with the simple question what "better" actually means.
Don't get me wrong, I'm enthusiastic for eReader devices. But I see very well why the manufactures did chose to not use the environment ettiquete as a big sign to put upon, since this one can easily backfire. There are many more things speaking for eReader devices than environment.