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.

This post isn’t really a set of notes. I was working during the keynotes with only one ear open to the talks. My ears perked up now and again during Tim O’Reilly’s talks. Here are little decontextualized nuggets that caught my attention:

• Tim uses the term “information shadows,” to refer to the unique identifiers and metadata around things in the world. The virtual side of Bruce Sterling’s “splimes.”
• Owning a namespace (@nagutron) is super powerful. Interesting that this convention actually came from the users. Contrast to the long facebook profile URL with id string; people don’t really feel like they own those.
• Clever bit of data harvesting: Power spikes when appliances start up have signatures that can actually identify make and model (AMEE, power monitoring startup in UK, discovered this.)
• “Antigenic cartography” is the term for 2d and 3d visualizations of genetic traits of related organisms. Used for flu virus mutation drift tracking.
• We are beginning to develop a “planetary skin” of sensor data. Tracking every bit of the planet’s health and human behavior. It’s still low-res, but just the beginning. Web 2.0 + World = “Web Squared”
• The Power of Less – Moore’s Law applied to world problems. Change the mindset to exponentially increasing efficiency.
• Gov 2.0 Summit

Jay Smooth soothes the cognitive dissonance between excitement over Obama’s win and disappointment over his center-left-ness:

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

This is an interesting strategy for eliciting online action that I’ve been seeing, lately: Have a video where the talking head actually sits around and waits for you to do something. It creates an artificial social pressure to act.

Here’s MoveOn’s latest email to me, asking for small donations to contested Senate races. Eli Parisier is basically just waiting around for the whole second half of the video. It was weird, but it worked on me:

Here’s a similar tact that I saw, recently:

Not that I need more reasons to support Barack Obama, but here’s author Irwin Tang breaking down one of the least-pleasant aspects of John McCain:

I’ve finally started educating myself on the current economic crisis. However we move past this current credit crunch (soft landing vs. hard landing), the fact is that Americans will likely face a lower standard of living within our lifetimes. You might not have believed that the decline of the American Empire had begun up until 2008, but it’s clearly in motion now.

Unfortunately, the imperial decline could have dire effects, worldwide. Whatever your opinion on the fairness of an empire, one thing it can promote is stability. If our capacity to service our national debt diminishes to the point where we have to remove our military presence from the hundred or so nations where we have bases, we may see scores of regional wars in the power vacuum.

Additionally, an empire in decline has few resources to devote to stewardship of the enviroment (or, put more simply, long-term planning.) We can elect as progressive a government, come November. The US may simply be unable to withstand the political and economic costs of raising energy prices in order to combat global warming.

Perhaps another nation will take up the role of “global policeman.” Perhaps dramatic new technologies will save our GHG-saturated climate. The future is unknown, but the dire scenarios are looking worse and more likely than ever.

Funny, good:

via Lessig Blog

My enthusiasm for Obama has been curbed substantially over the past few months (campaign financing, FISA, etc.) but I’m still excited to support and vote for him in the general election. I just had my hopes too high.

In any case, my father recently made a contribution to the Obama campaign, and sent this letter along with it (after the jump.)

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