TEDGlobal 2011: Day Two

Day two of TEDGlobal is in the books. Here's a rundown of what happened on stage.

Session 4: Future Billions

Niall Ferguson—On the End of Western Dominance
Not too long ago, in the 1970s and 80s, the average American was 10 times richer than the average Chinese. Today, that number is closer to two, and by 2020, when China surpasses the United States as the world’s largest economy, the average Chinese will be richer than the average American. Harvard historian Niall Ferguson thinks we are living through the end of an era he calls “the great divergence,” or to put it more bluntly, the end of the West’s domination over the East. The Western dominance over the East began in the 1500s, and Ferguson says it’s because of six specific reasons, which he frames up for the TED crows as six “killer apps.” They are: 1) the scientific revolution (there was none in the east), 2) property rights (in the 1800s you could get free land grants to come work in North America, but land in South America, a continent Ferguson lumps in with the East, was held onto by a small group of Spanish elite), 3) modern medicine, 4) a consumer society, and 5) the work ethic (which also is no longer a dominant Western trait; Koreans work on average 1000 more hours per year than Germans). He believes, however, that these six “killer apps” no longer belong to an exclusive club because “they can now be downloaded by anyone” (i.e. the Internet has opened up knowledge and commerce). “I don’t think the decline of the West is inevitable,” Ferguson says. “But one thing is certain: the great divergence is over, folks.” 

Yasheng Huang—On India Versus China
Economists always like to compare China and India, the Dragon and the Elephant, when they talk about the next great economic superpowers, but according to political economist Yasheng Huang, it’s an unfair comparison. China has had astronomical economic growth in recent years and is “an economic superstar” so anyone compared to China is set up for failure. In fact, there are many differences between China and India. One has an authoritarian government and the other is democratic (leading to the question: is an economy better off in countries with democratic rule?). China has much higher rates of literacy than India. Also, women play a much more crucial role in the economy of China than in India, where men actually have a higher life expectancy than women, a very unusual statistic that, according to Huang, points to systematic gender discrimination. All that said, Huang does believe that India has the economic momentum, and he says if China is to continue to be the economic superstar that it is today, it has to reform its politics. “Political reforms are a must for China in order to maintain its growth.” 

Tim Harford—On Making Good Mistakes
Economist and writer Tim Harford is exasperated by politicians and economists who think simple answers will solve complex problems. He says many leaders and leading thinkers have what he calls the “God complex,” which means that no matter how difficult a problem, they think their answer is the only and best one. “We must abandon the God complex and solve problems with humility,” he says. And that starts by accepting the fact that “there are some problems that don’t have a correct answer.” Most importantly, whatever answer we come up with for, say, the financial crisis, must be done through trial and error, and that takes time, and it takes a fair amount of failure. For Harford, that is one of the hardest things for many people to accept. “It is very hard to make good mistakes,” he says.

Robin Ince—On Having Fun With Science
Radio show host and scientist Robin Ince loves mythology but he prefers science, so he takes pleasure in debunking life’s mysteries, but doing it with comedy and wonder. “I take the scientific theories of the colliding world theory and use them to make us feel better about human life,” he says, and spends his short amount of time on stage making the audience laugh as he explains the science behind everything from getting punched in the face to love and parenting. “Understanding the science behind the wonder and the myth doesn’t diminish the wonder.”

JR
TED Prize winner and artist JR makes a surprise appearance on the TEDGlobal stage to give us an update of his Inside Out Project, which was announced on the TED stage in Long Beach earlier this year. The project helps individuals turn photographs into enormous wheat paste posters that they use to tag public walls in their city or town. The project has spread quickly and JR shows us a video of people from around the world pasting up the smiling, kissing, contorting faces of their countrymen and women in unlikeliest of places (on stairways, rooftops, abandon buildings, the sides of trains, and more). [He’s also been busy in Edinburgh.]

Josette Sheeron—On Eradicating Global Hunger
Anti-hunger activist Josette Sheeron holds up a small red cup and tells the audience that 1 our of every 7 people in the world cannot fill that cup with food each day. “Every 10 seconds we loose a child to hunger,” she says, and then asks the obvious question, “Why?” We have the technology and the food to feed everyone, so why is hunger still a problem? Sheeron has a few conjectures, but most importantly she has taken action to make sure no child goes hungry. She partners with schools to bring food and higher attendance rates. And she has helped to set up Warehouses for Hope in Rwanda, which allows villages to store food during the annual food boom and replenish the store during the annual food bust. 

Session 5 Emerging Order

Svante Paabo—On Genomes
If we’re all so different, why are we all so alike? This is one of the questions geneticist Svante Paabo evokes during his talk on our genetic history. According to Paabo, we can all trace our ancestry to Africa. As it turns out, many of us also have traces of Neanderthal DNA. The question is, How did this happen, and why are there greater traces of Neanderthal DNA in some sections of the world? Before answering Paabo gives us a primer on genetics (the traits we can see, such as hair, skin, and eye color, are all different, but the majority of our bodies, such as our organs, have no difference whatsoever). As it turns out, Paabo and other scientists now think that some, but not all, early humans mixed with Neanderthals after we began to migrate out of Africa. Paabo’s work is helping to understand our ancestral family tree of our evolutionary past.  

Mark Pagel—On the Evolution of Language
Copy cats: that’s what humans have been for millennia. Or as evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel puts it, we are great at “social theft,” and it’s why we’ve been able to thrive over other animals. Social theft is actually “social learning,” a way of choosing from the best options and then adapting and evolving those options into better ones. Pagel, however, has a problem with language because it’s a barrier to social learning. There are between 7,000 and 8,000 languages in the world. In some of the most densely populated areas on earth, such as in Papua New Guinea, there are over 100 different languages. People on that island nations who are separated by less than a mile could be speaking different languages. For Pagel, this is a problem. “Different languages slow the flow of ideas and cultures,” he says. And now that we are becoming globally connected via the Internet (Pagel shows one of the most interesting slides of the conference here: a visualization of geographic Facebook connections that literally forms a map of the world), making different languages even more of a barrier. “If language is the conduit for the free flow of ideas and thus advancement,” Pagel asks, “Should there be one common language in the world?”

Elizabeth Murchison—On Contagious Cancer
Cancer researcher and doctor Elizabeth Murchison introduces the crowd to a disturbing notion: the idea of cancer as a contagious disease. Working in Tasmania, she and a her team have discovered such a form of cancer in Tasmanian Devils, and it’s threatening to kill off these animals into extinction. Showing a series of gruesome photos, Murchison explains the cancer they’ve found—tumor growths in the mouth of the creatures that have entirely different DNA than the animals themselves (“as different to the animal as the person you’re sitting next to is to you”). And it seems to be thriving. As it turns out, the devils are transmitting it by biting into each other and implanting cancer cells. Murchison points out that it is currently not likely that humans can transfer cancer between each other, but it is not out of the question. 

Cynthia Kenyon—On the Fountain of Youth
“Have you ever wanted to stay young and put off aging?” This is the question geneticist Cynthia Kenyon asks the crowd, but it’s a question that’s been asked by humans for thousands of years. Kenyon may have found the fountain of youth we’ve all been looking for. She and her team have successfully extended the life of the microscopic C Elgans worm, and their experiments are informing how this might be possible for humans. They did this after considering the idea that there might be aging genes, and they isolated one called the DAF-2 gene, which they were able to mutate in the C Elgans worm to slow its aging. Kenyon now theorizes that the FOXW3A protein that “sits” on similar human DNA could be targeted by medication and theoretically slow the aging process. 

Session 6: The Dark Side

Misha Glenny—On Hackers
Author Misha Glenny spoke at TEDGlobal 2009 about his book McMafia, which is about global organized crime. His new focus are the individuals and groups involved in hacking. “We are in the beginning of a mighty struggle for control of the internet,” he says, and launches into a series of slides profiling some of the most notorious hackers in the world and their exploits (these individuals have been caught and are serving prison terms). Interestingly, most hackers share similar characteristics. They learned their skills in their mid to late teens, they have advanced knowledge of math and science, and they have no real social skills in the outside world (only on the Web). Glenny ends with an appeal: These people should be given jobs with the state to help the authorities stop terrorist and criminal hacking so we can keep control of the Internet. 

Mikko Hypponen—On Cyber Security
The Internet is a rich place with historic implications, but there are problems; potentially big ones. Cyber security expert Mikko Hypponen’s job is to find those problems, and the people behind them. He and his team find hundreds of thousands of viruses every day. Some are hobbyists, but many are written by organized criminals who find ways to steal credit card information and embezzle millions of dollars. Showing the crowd a fantastic demonstration of real time viruses and relating stories of his global travels, Hypponen shows how he and his team decrypt code and do some old fashioned sleuthing to find these criminals. In the end, the lights go down and the screen goes dark, as if there’s a power failure. Hypponen calmly walks over to an overhead slide projector to finish his talk, in order to underscore what would happen if we stopped battling cyber criminals and lost our electric infrastructure and our computers. “If we don’t fight online crime we are risking loosing it all,” he says to a standing ovation. 

Eddie Reader, who is from Scotland, gives a musical performance.

Pamela Meyer—On Lying and Deception
According to author Pamela Meyer, we all lie or are lied to between 10 and 200 times a day. Some lies aren’t bad (it’s often a good idea to let your significant other know that he or she looks superb on a regular basis, even when they don’t). But some lies are devastating. “Last year, we were deceived by the financial sector to the tune of $1 trillion,” she reminds us. So how can you tell if someone is telling the truth or feeding you a line of bull shit? This is Meyer’s line of work: she’s a liespotter, and by observing facial tics, body language, and vocal intonation, she can tell whether someone is being deceitful or telling the truth. 

Ben Goldacre—On Dubious Science       
Ben Goldacre is a medical doctor, newspaper columnist, and the author of the book Bad Science. His mission: to reveal deceptions in the media and in the medical world that undermine our ability to know the truth. According to Goldacre, clinical trials on new medications are the biggest problem in medicine today.

Karen Tse—On the Fight Against Torture       
“We often think of torture as being for political prisoners or for bad poeple, but it’s much more systematic,” says human rights lawyer Karen Tse. Her goal is to eradicate torture as a regular practice, and the law is on her side. Right now there are 93 countries with laws against torture. The problem is that these countries don't or can't enforce the laws because they don't have enough lawyers on the ground to get to prisoners when they arrive at the police station. Tse started International Bridges of Justice to train and organize lawyers. "We're putting in place a systematic way to get early access to counsel," she says.

Session 7: Bodies

Daniel Wolpert—On Brains and Movement
Neuroscientist Daniel Wolpert is, in his own words, a movement chauvinist, meaning he thinks the prime goal of every brain function is to facilitate or plan for how we move.  “The only reason we have a brain is for adaptable and complex movement,” he says before launching into a very complex talk highlighting studies that back up his assertion, introducing something called the Bayesian Inference, which is a way to apply mathematics to determine how we behave. One of the reasons robots are unable to move anywhere close to the way humans move is because movement is done within a number of complex “noises” that include any number of unpredictable elements (such as how heavy an object is, how far away it is, and what kind of range of motion we have). According to Wolpert, we are constantly predicting and planning movement by “minimizing the negative consequences of this noise.” Heady stuff.

Sheril Kirshenbaum—On Kissing
“Why do we kiss?” asks Sheril Kirshenbaum, the author of the book The Science of Kissing. Apparently we kiss for more than just romantic reasons. We do so to smell and find our way. It’s how we test our security. And, as scientists like to say, it’s how we choose who to mate with. Funny things happen when we kiss. Our breathing becomes irregular, our pulse increases, and our eyes dilate. It also triggers the release of dopamine, seratonin, and oxytocin—the very same hormones and chemicals we release when we fall in love.

Péter Frankhauser and His Robot Rezero
Péter Frankhauser is a roboticist and Rezero is his robot. More to the point, Rezero is his “ball robot,” which means it balances on a ball to move around. The bot took the stage ahead of Frankhauser and then showed off with a number of moves, even doing a little dance number (well, it went around in circles as music played). The most interesting part of the machine is how it keeps itself upright. Seen on stage you can tell that it’s constantly moving as it corrects its balance using laser-like sensors. The adjustments come at the rate of 256 times per second. It’s a useful technology that can be implemented in hospital environments or as people movers.

Marco Tempest, a cyber magician, shows off a unique augmented reality performance using a white stretched canvas, light, and a friendly looking stick figure illustration.

Jae Rhim Lee—On Death and Environmental Decomposition
In “one of the must unusual TED talks ever,” as TED curator and session host Chris Anderson said afterward, TED Senior Fellow and artist Jae Rhim Lee came out on stage wearing what appeared to be black ninja pajamas. What this outfit turned out to be is what she calls a Decompiculture Suit, a prototype for what she hopes is a wearable coffin that will grow flesh and toxin eating mushrooms. Why? Lee points to scientific evidence that our bodies store dozens of toxins such as BPA, and that when we die those toxins get released back into the environment. By donning this suit when she dies, Lee will ensure that her body won’t leave behind the pollution she absorbed during life.

All photos courtesy of James Duncan Davidson / TED

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.