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Preserving endangered sounds and discovering Ctrl-F

A rescued timberline wolf howls at The Wild Animal Sanctuary on Oct. 20, 2011 in Keenesburg, Colo.

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You hear my voice on the radio or because of technology. Technology builds things, it advances civilizations, it lets you see and hear more than you ever could. You can have a conversation with someone on another continent, hear a concert in a different hemisphere, instantly.

But what sounds do we lose in the name of progress? Bernie Krause has been recording natural sounds for decades. His site wildsanctuary.com has over 3,500 hours of natural sounds. He says the sounds are getting more scarce.

"When I first started," Krause says, "I could record for 15 hours and get one hour of useable material. Now I have to record almost 2,000 hours to get an hour of usable material. From my perspective, technology has really impeded on natural sound and caused us not to hear it instead of to hear it. And it's one of the most serious problems when we go out and record. Aircraft of all kinds, private and commercial as well as motorcycles that you can hear seven or eight miles away. So that's technology to me."

Krause says nature has its own rhythm. White noise machines try to imitate nature but they don't quite get it right. "The replacement sounds are the sounds of human endeavor," he says, "and these are noises which are kind of random, and because they're random and have no real information in them that's useful to our survival, they really aren't very healthy at all."

Also in today's program, only about 10 percent of the population knows about Ctrl-F, the easy keyboard method of finding anything on a screen. I guess those that know about it figure everyone does. Those that don't would never think to ask. We talk to Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic about this phenomenon.

About the author

John Moe is the host of Marketplace Tech Report, where he provides an insightful overview of the latest tech news.
rsivan's picture
rsivan - Nov 22, 2011

I am an experienced programmer very familiar with CTRL-F in Firefox and other browsers.
However this time part of the blame should go to Google, Microsoft and other search engine applications: the default search software behavior is to show you a page of results, and, upon clicking one of the results, it brings you the page containing the term you searched for, but it does not help you navigate that term inside the page; you are on your own (you need to press CTRL-F and retype your search term). All of that should be done for you by the search software, in an ideal world.
There are some user-developed plug-ins that help with this but I claim that this behavior should be built-in in Google search and others.

ChromeJob's picture
ChromeJob - Nov 21, 2011

Anything on screen, huh? So CTRL+F in Firefox will find the text of your blog entry in Microsoft Word?

I think you mean to say its a commonly used convention for "Find" (in rare cases Find & Replace) in many, many applications. But it usually only works within that application.

Wonder if you guys thought to include the Windows (Win+F) and Mac (Command+F IIRC) operating system equivalents.

esaveraid's picture
esaveraid - Nov 21, 2011

You need to fix the link.... it doesn't go to the correct part of his website.