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.

To celebrate my two-year anniversary at Instructables, Eric W., Noah, Rachel, and I went to iFly to go indoor skydiving. Two vids are below. The lighting is terrible, but you get the idea. I go second in each video. At the end of the second vid, you can also see the instructor showing off what someone can do after a few hundred hours of experience.

I picked up the basics after about thirty seconds, stabilizing myself and even following the instructor around a bit. You’ll see him communicating with me via hand signals a couple times, though, telling me to make smaller, more controlled motions. Noah picked it up even faster.

You can also check out video from when I went actual skydiving with Logan.

A fun, simplified look at how Kiva works. Kiva has done a fantastic job personalizing microfinance:

A Fistful Of Dollars: The Story of a Kiva.org Loan from Kieran Ball on Vimeo.

Some friends sent me this blog post, which shows how the current planned bailout exceeds the combined expenditure of a number of government spending events from the history of our nation. That post uses the current cost of the bailout ($4.616 trillion), which some friends have noted is closer to $7.6 trillion if one includes unspent guarantees.

These numbers are inflation adjusted, but I was still curious to see how they stacked up in terms of national GDP at their time. I wanted to know how big each event was in proportion to what our nation was producing, since this number has grown dramatically over the last century.

The figures aren’t really apples-to-apples comparisons, since all of these expenditures were multi-year affairs. Having each of them broken into expenditures per year would yield some neat %-of-GDP graphs (different bumps for each item, % of GDP on the y-axis, years on the x-axis; volume representing the total cost of an expenditure.)

In any case, here are the non-matched-fruit comparisons. As you can see, the bailout is still truly massive, on par with (but lower than) the New Deal and WWII (which I added):

The spreadsheet is here.

Note: WWII cost figure from the National D-Day Museum

Marc sent me this short, autobiographical piece. It’s heartbreaking, scary, and timely:

My wife and I fell through many layers of poverty in a few months. First we revisited the genteel poverty known to grad students, the sort of poverty where you have scary dreams about the rent and eat a simple, wholesome diet towards the end of the month. But we fell right through that into the sort of Dickensian privation spoiled first-worlders like me never expected to experience. That’s the kind of poverty a lot of people are going to be experiencing soon—because I’m here to tell you, it can happen here and it can happen to you. And it’s remarkably unpleasant. You may be saying “Duh!” here but you’re probably not imagining the proper sort of unpleasantness. So I’ll try to lay out what to watch for, how to hunker down when it’s not just a matter of cutting back or selling your second car but having no car at all, having no money for heat or food.

Look beyond the heartbreak and scariness, however, and you will find some very, very pragmatic pieces of advice. If you want more, check out this guy’s blog which I wrote about a long time ago.

Google News brought me an interesting mention of Instructables.com: A tongue-in-cheek article titled “Survival 101 for the newly poor” about how DIY resources could be useful during our economic crisis.

What with the opportunities to get back into the finance business so limited these days, a career change might be the best option. How about music? A Web site called Instructables.com has complete instructions for making a guitar out of a discarded Altoids box, a ruler, wire and some wing nuts. If things get really desperate the same site has instruction for building a Smith & Wesson M76 look-alike machine gun out of a pencil, several highlighters and some (what else?) duct tape.

Funny, perhaps, but if things really do get bad, perhaps our urban gardening instructables will see an increase in traffic.

UPDATE: Okay, so it’s funny enough that Instructables is actually going to run a “Party Like it’s 1929″ Contest

Funny, good:

I love how Robb generalizes phenomena, creating useful frameworks that find application in many disparate domains (e.g. economics, politics, warfare, sociology, etc.) His latest is the concept of a “dissipative system,” a system that draws energy from its surroundings to resist entropic forces:

This upshot of this is that it can extract energy from this larger external environment to increase its structural complexity (build itself up through a process called self-assembly). It can also use this external environment to dump the entropy created during the energy conversion process to minimize the deleterious impact on its structure.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking (obsessing a bit, perhaps) about how complexity emerges in various forms (at different physical scales, on different substrates), and how our own individual experiences of consciousness fit into those ideas. Robb’s “dissipative structures” is a useful tool for generalizing the underlying constraint that shapes selection functions for natural selection at every level.

For example, in a later post, Robb begins re-framing economic and conventional warfare in terms of dissipative systems in conflict:

NOTES: Isolate your opponent from the external environment to prevent energy acquisition and trap entropy (force them towards thermodynamic equilibrium and “heat death”). Increase your own connectivity to acquire energy and expel entropy faster (movement farther away from thermodynamic equilibrium and greater structural complexity).

I had this to add, in a comment on that post:

The function that translates energy into complexity is far from constant. It is highly dependent on technology, for example (compare joules required to power the Pony Express vs. fiber optic communcation, per byte.) You might call this “efficiency,” but my suspicion is that the translation function is much more complicated than that.

In any case, struggling over energy sources is necessary tactic for dissipative system, but a system may prevail with lower energy sources if its energy-to-complexity function outperforms.

HASA (Harvard Alumni for Social Action) was started by a bunch of ‘81 alums to advocate the use of the university’s enormous endowment (estimated to go from $35 to $100 billion in the next ten years) for social good. From the site:

Harvard Alumni for Social Action (HASA) is an independent organization open to all Harvard alumni who seek to encourage the University to use donations for social good. HASA members believe that Harvard’s prominence and wealth make it uniquely able to support educational and research institutions in developing countries. HASA therefore works to fund scholarships for African graduate students at Harvard and also to fund infrastructure improvements at needy African universities.

At the moment, the mission sounds like it’s limited to educational grants. I hope they think bigger as more people take interest in the idea and join the org (I just did.) Harvard is a university which presumably has a huge number of innovative ideas around development. Example: the Kennedy School alone probably has half a dozen graduate students thinking about how unhealthy political structures cause the “resource curse” in developing countries (see this TED talk for an interesting discussion on that topic.) Now, imagine if there were huge grants for those graduate students to do research abroad. “Business plan” competitions for social ventures. New departments, even.

I hope HASA expands into a general-use fund directed globally at fixing the social problems that current markets can’t fix on their own. If such things already exist at Harvard and at other schools, I hope HASA finds ways to support them. This is a topic of such enormous interest (academically, politically, and meathook-future realistically.) If they aim higher, perhaps they can draw many orders of magnitude of funding more than they’re currently raising.

A very False Profit topic will be discussed at this week’s “Journal Club”: the idea that capitalist patterns can somehow be applied to eliminating poverty at a higher rate than capitalism in its current incarnation. It starts in about fifteen minutes; I’ll post notes here, later. For now, here are links to our required reading:

• An essay by Muhammed Yunus
• Bill Gates’ speech at Davos (or, watch it on Youtube)
• there’s also a William Easterly critique of the Bill Gates speech that I’ll link to, soon

Update: I may or may not be able to write more about this. David Grosof, our extremely overeducated presenter, rattled off ideas and manged discussion at a rate that I didn’t even try to capture in note form. Most likely, interested parties will have to catch me in person to start up the discusison. I’ve included his initial prompt for discussion, after the jump.

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