TEDGlobal 2011: Day 3

Here's the third full day of the conference. Another solid group of speakers.

Session 8: Embracing Otherness

Thandie Newton—On the Death of Self
Believe it or not, when she was growing up, actor Thandi Newton was, in her words, “a notable nobody.” She was unlike the other kids. She was “other before anything else” and that otherness was her identity. But at 16 years old she found dancing and soon thereafter, acting. In both, she could loose herself or plug into another self. Newton’s TED talk is a personal essay on how she secured her own authentic self and continues to discover who she is. “If we can find our own essence, then our connection to other living things will happen,” she says. “Simple awareness is where it begins.”

Yang Lan—On Social Media in China
As TEDGlobal guest host Pat Mitchell says, Yang Lan “is the Oprah of China, but Oprah would kill for her audience” of 250 million people. Lan owns her own media company in China, and is a hugely popular television personality in that country. The first part of her talk is about how she got her first big break. She was working in a hotel and going to auditions for acting jobs on the side when she decided to join a competition to decide who would be the new host of a national prime time lifestyle television show. She won and immediately became the lead host of a show that already had more than 200 million viewers. After that period of her life, she attended school in California and then started her own media company. The balance of her talk focuses on profiling young people in China and their social media habits. 

Nadia al-Sakkaf—On Being Editor-in-Chief of The Yemeni Times
Nadia al-Sakkaf is the editor of the most-widely read English language newspaper in Yemen, a post she took over from her brother, who took the mantle from their father after he was killed in 1999. She was just 31 when she started as editor-in-chief in 2005, and as a woman she is in very unchartered territory in the Arab world. TEDGlobal guest host Pat Mitchell sits down with al-Sakkaf on stage for a live interview. Al-Sakkaf recounts the first days of her job and how no one respected her authority, especially the male staff and reporters (she ended up firing half the paper’s employees, most of them men: “a woman’s got to do what a woman’s got to do,” she said to applause). She discusses the current political climate in Yemen, and gives insights into the difficulties and importance of being a reporter as protesters continue to meet and the authoritarian government continues to try to tamp down dissension. But she underscores how Western reporting doesn’t expose what she calls “the real Yemen” because they do parachute reporting—drop in quickly for a story they already know they want and then leave. “There’s a lack of research [in most Western articles about Yemen],” she says. “You can’t go into a country for two or three days, and say you’ve done your reporting.”  Al-Sakkaf closes by saying she thinks Yemen will be in a bad situation in the next two or three years. “But we will stand back on our feet, and two years is worth the wait,” she says.

Jarreth Merz—On Discovering His African Identity
Actor and documentary filmmaker Jarreth Merz was born in Ghana, but moved to Switzerland as a boy. There, he became an actor and was continually cast in stereotypical African roles from terrorists to military generals. He became unsure of his identity, and, as he says, “ashamed of my African-ness.” So, in 2008 he decided to return to Ghana to film the country’s presidential election while also getting a glimpse of his heritage and trying to discover his lost identity. The election was fraught with violent protests and corruption after a runoff. He filmed the eruption of violence in the streets with the army shooting civilians, which only fed into his and the world’s stereotype of Africa. But then a remarkable thing happened: The crowd of people continued to protest the results and a new election was held, after which the ruling party lost and peacefully stepped aside to allow for the democratic transition to a new government. It was then that Merz realized that, contrary to stereotype, Africans can govern themselves. Or as he says: “Yes, we Africans can.”

Bunker Roy—On Building a Better School
Barefoot School Founder Bunker Roy captures the TEDGlobal crowd’s attention and imagination by taking us on an unusual story of education and learning. As a boy, Roy had everything: money, a top education, and endless professional prospects. He was even India’s national squash champion. But he gave all that up to start a school in a small village—a school that would only teach the poor. “What the poor thought was important would be reflected in the school,” he said. It teaches practical hands-on work. Attendees do not get diplomas (“The community you work for certifies your skills”). Most of the students are illiterate and they stay that way because the school teaches applied technologies like rainwater collection and solar energy engineering. After establishing the school in India, Roy began exporting his methods to villages in Africa and Afghanistan where he trained grandmothers how to set up solar arrays (“If you want to spread the word about something, you don’t use telephones or telegraphs; you use tell-a-woman”). It’s an inspiring story of success, care, and most of all persistence. “You don’t have to look for solutions outside,” Roy says. “Listen to the people on the ground. They have all the solutions in the world.” He ends with a quote from Gandhi: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” 

Session 9: Living Systems

Alain de Botton—On Atheism 2.0
Author and philosopher Alain de Botton returns to the TEDGlobal stage (he last spoke her in 2009) to talk about what he calls Atheism 2.0, the idea that Atheists have lots to learn from religion. The institution of the church provides help, unlike secular institutions of higher learning, which, says de Botton, don’t prepare us for the real world. They also value art, provide direction, and are collaborative— things secular societies are not good at. In short, the church is communal, wealthy, and branded, and everyone from solitary writers to businesses can learn from it. “You may not agree with religion but at the end of the day religions should not be abandoned to the religious alone,” says de Botton. “They are for all of us.”

Erik Hersman—On Innovation in Africa
Erik Hersman, aka the White African and the founder of Ushahidi, takes the stage for a short talk about “a new narrative of Africa.” It’s the story of innovation. Hersman shows several past projects that have come out of the continent from William Kamkwaba’s windmill to a sustainable school to the ever-spreading use of Ushahidi, a website where people anywhere can report on acts of violence or disaster and contribute to an openly available visual map of the hot spot. His point is that new ideas coming out of Africa should no longer be the exception. It should be expected. “To those from Africa, until we own the narrative about our continent, someone else will,” he says. “To those outside of Africa, I would say take another look.”

Paul Snelgrove—On Oceans
Oceans cover 70 percent of the planet. They produce half the oxygen we breathe and make up half the global biomass. The ocean floor is the largest habitat on earth—larger than all other earth habitats combined. And yet, scientists know more about the surfaces of the Moon and Mars than they do about the bottom of the ocean floor. That’s why marine biologist Paul Snelgrove is part of an huge effort to create an oceanic census of the world’s marine life. He and a team of scientists around the world have been studying and documenting everything from sea birds to deep ocean thermal vents. Using robotic submersibles and other technologies like sonar, they also found new life in the darkest reaches of the ocean that has never before been identified, discovering an average of four to five brand new species each day. These included giant lobsters, “yeti crabs,” “Jurassic shrimp,” and giant kelp. They tracked never-before-known shark and bird migrations. It’s all an attempt to try to stop the destruction of the oceans and, as Snelgove says, “try to preserve what’s left.” 

Pauline Chen—On End-of-Life Care
Liver transplant surgeon Pauline Chen sees a lot of death. For years, she turned away from it. Her TED talk is how she managed to turn towards it and help her patients manage the end of their lives. “Most people have difficulty acknowledging their own mortality,” she says right off the bat. “We even have difficulty embracing death when death is imminent.” She then tells the story of how she spent many years of her career trying to ignore her patients’ end-of-life sagas because she couldn’t bear to see them die when they hadn’t accepted death themselves. But after taking inspiration from writers, “who struggle against familiarity” and “try to see even the most routine things in a different light,” Chen realized how to put away her fear and continue to care for her patients to the last breath. “I believed that I had the power to do more than just cure.”

Conductor Charles Hazelwood talked about trust and music on the TEDGlobal stage. 

Session 10: Feeling

Alison Gopnik—On Thinking Babies
How and what babies think has long been thought of as nothing more than irrational emotions. According to Berkeley child development psychologist Alison Gopnik, now we know they do think. “Babies are learning more than we thought in a short time,” she says. But the question remains, Why? And how? According to Gopnik, scientists have learned that longer childhoods are connected to bigger brains and smarter animals. In other words, childhood is an important learning period. “Babies are the research and development department of the human species,” she says.  

Paul Bloom—On Why We Like What We Like?
It’s a fact that most people value an original Van Gogh over a forgery, even though that forgery looks exactly like the original. But why? Why do origins matter so much? That’s what psychologist Paul Bloom is on stage to tell the audience. He thinks it’s because we are natural born essentialists, meaning we value the essence of a thing. The catch is that if we believe that something is real, even when it isn’t, we still value it as if it were. There are plenty of studies to back this up, and Bloom shows some to the audience. For example, if you believe you’re drinking expensive wine, you enjoy it more. In fact, you have the same physiological response (the same parts of the brain light up as if you really were drinking a $200 bottle of Chateau St. Michele). 

Paul Zak—On Oxytocin
“Neuroeconomist” Paul Zak, aka Dr. Love, thinks we are obsessed with morality, and he believes that oxytocin is the moral molecule. He came to this conclusion after testing whether people would be more moral if he gave them high doses of oxytocin (which he harvested from people’s blood) while doing a test to see if people would give away money. During his test, he also realized that a person didn’t need to be injected with oxytocin to feel happy and generous; it happens when we connect with others, even when we connect online. His prescription? “Hug 8 times a day.” 

Todd Kuiken—On Bionics
In recent years, prosthetics have advanced tremendously. Yet, those who loose limbs still have limited ranges of movement, and they certainly can’t feel. That’s changing, and biomedical engineer Todd Kuiken and his team in Chicago have made robotic prosthetics that can move with thought and can feel. They call their process “targeted reinnervation” and it’s done by rerouting nerves from the brain into the chest muscle above the missing arm, and then wiring those nerve endings into the prosthetic. For example, by thinking “open your hand,” the muscle in your chest flexes and triggers the response in the arm. During experiments on patients, Kuiken and team also discovered that when they touched a reinnervated person in the chest muscle that person could feel their missing hand or arm, so they are now beginning to be able to duplicate feeling in the prosthetic as well. For Kuiken, robotic prosthetics represent “the stuff of life meeting machines.”

Sam is the director of publishing for frog where he oversees frog's global content, editorial, and digital publishing strategy. He is also the editor of design mind, frog's print and online media platform. Sam is the author of numerous books of non fiction and has written for Dwell, Metropolis, GOOD, and other magazines.