I recently watched a short TED Talk on the physiological effects of ambient sound, and how unaware we can be of these effects. One interesting tidbit is that bird song is supposedly very relaxing and helps people focus. The evolutionary story around that is that bird song is an aural cue that there are no predators around. Presumably, this is true for other animals than humans, so the effect might be traced long into our history.

In any case, I decided to try this for myself, and my subjective experience of the last few days is that it works. I feel more focused, more “in my body.” You can try it for yourself real quick with this Youtube playlist of birdsongs. I’m actually using high-quality recordings from Naturespace. These have a 3-dimensional quality to them, and are tuned to different headphones, but they cost a couple bucks. They also sell iPhone apps.

I recommend listening at low volume for 10-15 minutes to judge the effect for yourself.

Here’s another quick roundup of recent, interesting talks.

Saul Griffith: Inventing a super-kite to tap the energy of high-altitude wind

This is a short update on what Makani Power is up to. Some inspiring videos of their efforts to harness high-altitude wind power (the second most-plentiful renewable energy source, after solar.) It looks like they have the autonomous kite-flying control systems working; impressive!

P.W. Singer: Military robots and the future of war

“In this powerful talk, P.W. Singer shows how the widespread use of robots in war is changing the realities of combat.” Singer discusses the reality of automated warfare currently in play in the Middle East. There are many complicated, troubling implications of this shift in warfare. For example, remote killing distances our soldiers from the physical violence that they inflict. The violence is put at a remove, and the resulting recorded media loses its context. A lot of clips of drone strikes are online. Soldiers will often to refer to them as “war porn” and set them to music. On the other hand, the availability of this systematic video and data collection provides opportunities for public oversight.

Another point: automated warfare may lose for us the war of ideas that we are waging against insurgent groups. Here’s the contrast between the message intended and the perception on the ground:

Bush administration official: “It plays to our strength. The thing that scares people is our technology.”

Lebanese news editor: “This is just another sign of the cold-hearted, cruel Israelis and Americans who are cowards because they send out machines to fight us. They don’t want to fight us like real men. They are afraid to fight. We just have to kill a few of their soldiers to defeat them.”

Dan Ariely asks, Are we in control of our own decisions?

“Behavioral economist Dan Ariely, the author of Predictably Irrational, uses classic visual illusions and his own counterintuitive (and sometimes shocking) research findings to show how we’re not as rational as we think when we make decisions.”

Ariely gives a quick summary of several studies that show clearly how the presentation of various options can affect the choices we make. There are clear implications on user interface design, here.

Some more notes:

Sarah Deborah Scranton: Scenes from “The War Tapes”

Filmer of the war tapes, a personal look into the lives of soldiers in Iraq. The presentation achieves this intimacy not only through clips of the documentary, but also through the personal stories of Scranton herself. Wouldn’t it be cool if every polarized political debate be given this context, first?

Robert Wright: How cooperation (eventually) trumps conflict

Moral development, History has a direction. “Non-zero-sum-ness” as the driver for these trends, but also as the thing that links us in negative outcomes as well.

Deborah Gordon: How do ants know what to do?

Contrary to popular belief, ant colonies don’t have any central intelligence. The queen doesn’t control the behavior of the colony through chemical signals. In a series of experiments over the last 20 years, Gordon has demonstrated that colony behavior is fully emergent. Each ant, operating on a small set of rules (e.g. rate of contact with other ants), contributes a tiny part to colony-wide phenomena that ensure the survival of the whole. The experiments she describes are very cool, as are her descriptions of colony life. Ants seem to blur the line around what we designate an individual organism of a species.

Ben Dunlap: The story of a passionate life

In a talk that is more stage performance than lecture, Dunlap weaves a tightly knit story of his mentors. The experiences of all these men (coincidentally, all Hungarian) draw a picture of life well lived, an emergence from suffering with an unshakeable faith in people and a insatiable desire to learn and create.

Here’s another batch of notes on three TED Talks (you can see all of them here). The Pinker one is particularly interesting, to me; I’m going to solicit comments from an email list I’m on.

Steven Pinker: A brief history of violence

Pinker lays out a story of humanity that I believe to be true, but has been challenged repeatedly by those I’m close to: A long history of dramatically-declining violence and a commensurate increase in our empathy towards the other. He describes this history at the scale of millennia, centuries, decades, and individual years, calling it a “fractal” decline. He also draws from thinkers over the last hundred years to lay out four explanations for why this decline has occurred:

1. Thomas Hobbes: Life in a state of nature is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” The Hobbesian solution to this problem was the “leviathan state,” a central authority with a monopoly on violent power. The Machiavellian explanation here would give some credit to the rise of central governments for the
2. Life is Cheap: When suffering and early death are commonplace, the consequences of violence seem less dramatic to us. As wealth and quality of life increase, so does our value of that life, even if it is of the Other.
3. Robert Wright: Nonzero-sum games can often result in parties benefitting when they trade or cooperate rather than enter into violent conflict. Over time, the greater ability of parties to communicate has allowed more and more people to discover these nonzero-sum dynamics in more and more situations.
4. Peter Singer: The “expanding circle” of empathy. This, too, has been borne along by increasing wealth, access to communication technologies, and education.

There are holes that one can poke in this description of our history. Pinker’s narrative is very Euro-centric (what happened in China during these centuries? Africa?) It also completely ignores the incidence of sexual violence towards women; It’s hard to say if that how much that has declined over the ages, if it has.

Overall, though, I think Pinker is right. I’d be interested to see any data that contradicts the trend line that he can draw from hunter gatherer times to our own.

Bill Clinton: TED Prize wish: Let’s build and health care system in Rwanda

Clinton discusses the work of his foundation, and how it fits into the larger picture of social inequalities and development work. He stresses the importance of focusing on systems rather than taking on problems piecemeal. The Clinton foundation cut out middlemen in Haiti, cutting per-annum costs of anti-retrovirals from $3500 to $500, and then reduced it further to $190 by helping the pharmaceutical companies change their business models (from “jewelry store” to “grocery market.”) Mentions Paul Farmer’s Partners in Health; they are working with PIH to reproduce that system in Rwanda. In time, they want to develop a health administration system that can be adapted for any number of other countries. An interesting thought on “fund leakage”: On corruption in developing nations, Clinton mentions that he believes that lost opportunities due to health problems are a much greater problem, and they in fact feed corruption.

Juan Enriquez: Why can’t we grow new energy?

Playing on words, Enriquez extends the definition of “bioenergy” to include coal and oil, which of course were originally plant and animal matter, eons ago. He describes the possibility of using biological processes to convert underground oil and coal into gas, thus allowing us to extract the energy content without mining, and thus greatly increasing the reserves we have access too (3x, possibly.) He likens the possible growth of such an industry to the “green revolution” that allowed the productivity of agriculture to boom in the 20th century: think in terms of biology, not chemistry, in order to scale massively.

Of course, this is not a carbon-reduction technique (in fact, it sounds like a perilous way to keep dirty energy costs very low.) Enriquez proposes it only a “bridge” to new tech.

Another, separate idea: stabilizing oil prices by taxing to set a floor on oil prices, giving alternative fuels a floor to work with (and thus be able to invest against.)

As usual, you can see all of the TED talk notes, here.

I’ve been consuming TED talks at a fairly rapid pace for a year now, and they keep on coming. As I’ve been going along, I’ve been capturing brief notes on the ones that I’ve found interesting. Going forward, I’m going to post small batches here. This is mostly for my own reference, but maybe the internets will also find them useful.

Here are the first three (you can see all of them here):

Ron Eglash: African fractals, in buildings and braids

I rolled my eyes a couple times as he was introducing his topic, but as the talk went on, most of my skepticism was addressed, and then I was totally absorbed. He seems to have found many instances where fractal math was consciously used in African culture for very practical engineering and cultural purposes. He has also found that this conscious use of fractals is not present in other non-state societies. He finishes his talk by mentioning how these cultural uses can actually be used in the US to show African-American students that their heritage includes a rich mathematical history, as well.

Matthieu Ricard: Habits of happiness

A Quebecois molecular biologist-turned monk relates the basics of Buddhism, from a Westerner’s point of view. This talk is simple and straightforward, they way I like my explanations of Buddhism. There is a good balance here that represents my belief in mindfulness practice: part subjective experience, part science.

Amory Lovins: We must win the oil endgame

Author of the book Winning the Oil Endgame sees the path to an oil-import-free U.S. as a profitable, not a costly one. His ideas are comprehensive, including new materials for making cars lighter, “feebates” to change buying incentives per weight class of car (rather than between them), and an overall focus on efficiency. The latter one is interesting, as he makes those savings clear by pricing efficiency in terms of $/barrel of oil displaced. He is very glib with his free-market cheerleading, however, and explain very well why profit motives haven’t already pushed our industries to make these changes on their own. Some of his comments about the military wanting to defend America rather than oil pipelines in foreign countries are incredibly naive; it’s not our people on the ground who make policy, it’s the politicians who are financially bound to arms manufacturers.

Again, you can see all of the ted talk notes, here.