TED global 2011: forget Glastonbury, this is Nerdstock

Rebecca MacKinnon TED global talk: we take back the Internet!
A Chair could develop? Are cities of biology? And who is the Sultan of Facebookistan? Yes, it can be only the beginning of this year's TED Global Conference in Edinburgh, the annual Mindfest, in which some of the brightest scientists in the world, largest thinkers, and the most innovative ERS to share their "ideas in the value of spreading".
It is an undeniably exclusively affair - tickets cost almost 4000 £ and Prime Minister and Hollywood actresses tend to drop from - but what to best TED can nerds is. Forget Glastonbury, this is Nerdstock, where for a week, neuroscientist and quantum physicists get like rock stars (think standing ovations, mass adulation and the enticing possibility groupie sex) Act.
But then, TED is nothing if not ambitious: this year's theme? It's just the small matter of "The material of life".
Rebecca MacKinnon International bloggers network global voices online claims that it starts as one act. Private enterprise they argued, are to exercise the kind of control and makes the earlier only Governments had. They are censorship (such as Apple in Israel, where it banned a Palestinian app), apply or respond to requests from regime (like Apple again in China, where there is a app Dalai Lama moved has) and creating, what she calls "a new layer of private sovereignty".

In the old days there were nation States; in the new world order, there are supra-national companies who are exercising power without restraint. So as the American Declaration of independence opens up the concept of "consent of the governed', she says we must pass a"consent from the network".

Lee Cronin: We are very near is the most important steps, the dead things alive makes it to understand. Photo: James Duncan Davidson/TED
What is the minimum unit of matter, that may have passed through Darwinian evolution? The answer according to Lee Cronin, Professor of chemistry at the University of Glasgow is a single cell, and this raises a whole series of questions. Such questions, what is life? Is biology special? Is 'optimizable'? And if we can do things that mimics life, we can then make life? Cronin says this.

What is the probability that somewhere in the universe there is non-carbon-based life? He says almost 100%. He tries to create inorganic life a whole range of different reactive formats in his laboratory. "We very come close to understanding the most important steps that makes alive dead things," he says.

He sounds a warning, however. There are embryos take into account: "If the pen could replicate this could be a little be a problem."
Kevin Slavin: we have lost sense of what is actually happening in this world, we have made. Photo: James Duncan Davidson/TED
Algorithms are not only a series of statements, to say that a computer what to do. You have a force in their own right, after Kevin Slavin, co-founder of the games company code / be. The world has today become a place where algorithms fight for supremacy. The financial markets now consist of a set of algorithms trying to outsmart the other can set, and no one exactly sure more what it is exactly that we do. "We have lost sense actually in this world happened, we have made."
He cited the example of the "Flash crash" if at 5.42 am on 6 may last year, 9% of the Dow Jones index simply disappeared "and no one knew where it went". No person was in the control; It was simply a series of computer algorithms, they fight against each other. That, he says, is not information: it is culture.
Yves Rossy: I have the feeling, almost a bird! Photo: James Duncan Davidson/TED
"It's fun!" jumps from an airplane to Yves Rossy, a Swiss airline pilot, who regularly on a few wings, belt and transforms his body into a body. The wings have their own jet pack but no steering or brakes:, amount to won arches his back, and if he wants to go in a dive, he shifts his shoulders.

"With this small wiring and these small wings I feel, be almost a bird!"
See here to fly him in action over the Grand Canyon.

Or may Japan. Because if there is social mobility after are, is the United States (followed closely by Great Britain) the worst place to live on Earth, after Richard Wilkinson, Emeritus Professor of social epidemiology at the University of Nottingham.
His research has shown that the more inequality ie, the greater a country - the gap between rich and poor - fewer people each other, the more heart disease, which they suffer, confidence is the increase in the number of murders and the higher level of insanity that they suffer.

Status anxiety, according to Wilkinson, is not a kind of existential malaise: it affects all people in all walks of life and all nation States. If you really want to, he claims diabetes or depression address, teen pregnancy, or infant mortality rate, then you must hold back to increase city bonuses and taxes.

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