Boaz Almog demonstrates “quantum locking” — which causes a small, supercooled superconductor to levitate above a magnetic track — in this amazing raw footage from TEDGlobal, shot by photographer James Duncan Davidson.

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When it comes to time, there is the past, the present and the future. But during day four of TEDGlobal, speakers seemed especially concerned with the former and the latter.

Kicking off session 11, the first of day four, art diagnostician Maurizio Seracini shared his 30-year quest to find Leonardo da Vinci’s missing fresco “The Battle of Anghiari.” Seracini—the only real-life person mentioned in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code—spoke about the exciting process of excavating art and finding “faces no one has seen for five centuries.” He showed how his team is rendering layers underneath art visible again through an app that runs on tablets, which allows museumgoers to rub the image of a painting in front of them and see what’s beneath the surface.

Later in the session, called “Taking Another Look,” data commons advocate John Wilbanks imagined another way to look beneath the surface, by opening up medical data to drive new discoveries. Policies surrounding informed consent of medical research subjects have not changed since World War II, which has made it impossible for mathematicians and scientists to share health-related data and create sample sizes large enough for conclusive inquiry. Wilbanks imagines a database where, in the future, more than a million participants will give blanket consent for their medical and lifestyle data to be shared and studied.

“Cancer sucks, and, when you have it, you don’t have a lot of privacy in the hospital. You’re naked,” said Wilbanks. “Being naked and alone can be terrifying … but being naked in a group can be quite beautiful.”

Another snippet of the future in session 11: artist Imogen Heap, who gave a beautiful demo of her next-generation music-making gloves.

In session 12, filmmaker Kirby Ferguson looked back to the past, making the bold statement that “everything is a remix.” Ferguson pointed to Bob Dylan, who widely mined the musicians who came before him for ideas. Ferguson even let some famous innovators make his case for him, recalling Henry Ford’s words “I simply assembled the discoveries of other men” and referencing Steve Jobs quoting Picasso’s famous line, “Good artists copy, great artists steal.”

Soon after, management expert Margaret Heffernan shot back to the 1950s, telling the story of ahead-of-her-time epidemiologist Alice Stewart, who realized that childhood cancer was developing as a result of prenatal x-rays. It was a shocking finding that challenged the thinking of the medical establishment — which promptly ignored her, and kept on giving deadly x-rays for two and a half decades until the practice was banned in the ’70s. How did she remain confident over those years? She worked with a statistician who actively tried to disprove her work. His job was “to prove Dr. Stewart wrong.” And he couldn’t.

“It’s a fantastic model of collaboration: thinking partners who aren’t echo chambers,” Heffernan said. She calls on managers to use dissent as a tool for getting the best creative work from their employees. “We have to see conflict as thinking, and then get really good at it.”

Closing the conference, social media theorist Clay Shirky gave a riveting talk about how innovations in organizing the chaos of open-source coding could, in the future, help create democracies where everyday citizens participate. Shirky fused his idea for the future with an example from the past.

“Whenever someone says that something on the internet will change society, you hear this: ‘The thing with the singing cats?” Shirky said. “It didn’t take long after the invention of the printing press for someone to think that erotic novels were a good idea. It took another 150 years to think of the scientific journal.”

Like Seracini, Ferguson and Heffernan, throughout this week’s TEDGlobal conference, speakers reached to the past for lessons about humanity. In session 3, author Karen Thompson Walker spoke about our tendency to fear scenarios that are less plausible but more terrifying. Her example: the whaleship Essex, whose shipwrecked crew preferred to starve at sea rather than land on islands they believed to populated by cannibals. In session 10, historian Laura Snyder pointed to the 1812 “Philosophical Breakfast Club” of Charles Babbage, John Herschel, Richard Jones and William Whewell, which created some of the most basic principles of modern scientific inquiry. The point: science doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and cooperation propels us forward.

Like Wilbanks and Shirky, a large number of TEDGlobal speakers imagined the future and advances we might see in it. In session 1, data intelligence officer Shyam Sankar spoke on one of the most futuristic topics possible—the symbiosis between humans and robots. Sankar stressed that while machines are good at calculating, humans are far better at interpreting. He concluded, “Instead of thinking how the computer can solve the problem, design the process around what the human can do with it.”

The next day, in session 5, artist Neil Harbisson took the idea to the next level, calling himself a “cyborg.” Harbisson is color-blind and uses an electronic eye to deliver colors to his brain as sounds. “When I started to dream in color, I felt the software and my brain had united,” he said, in an evocative presentation that introduced attendees to the color of music and the sound of purple.

TEDGlobal 2012 explored the theme of “Radical Openness”—what happens when those in power release information, when crowd-sourcing is a strategy, when creativity goes collaborative, and when technology is pushed in new directions. So what now? That’s up to all of us.

As Heffernan put it in her talk today, “Openness isn’t the end. It’s the beginning.”

An epidemic hidden in plain view

Margaret Heffernan begins her TEDGlobal talk by telling us a story: In Oxford in the 1950s, there was physician named Alice Stewart who was fascinated with the new science of epidemiology. She realized, as a scientist does, that the way to prove herself was to find a hard problem and solve it. The problem she chose was the rising incidence of childhood cancer. Most diseases correlate with poverty, but the childhood cancer of the time was affecting mainly affluent children. She had difficulty getting funding, so she knew that she had only one shot at collecting data. She had to ask every question she could think of.

In a blizzard of data, one thing stood out, says Heffernan, “with a statistical clarity most scientists could only dream of.” By a ratio of 2 to 1, the children who had cancer were born to mothers who were x-rayed when pregnant.

That flew in the face of the conventional theory, that x-rays were safe up to a point. It also flew in the face of the conventional wisdom that new technology doesn’t harm people, and that doctors definitely don’t harm people. And no practicing doctor, it turned out, wanted to hear it. It was 25 years before x-raying pregnant women was abandoned in the US and UK.

“The data was out there, it was open, it was freely available, but nobody wanted to know. A child a week was dying but nothing changed. Openness alone can’t drive change.”

Thinking by arguing

How did Alice know she was right? Heffernan tells us about Alice’s collaborator, a statistician named George. He was the oposite of her in all ways. But, Heffernan points out, he said an amazing thing for a collaborator: “My job is to prove that Dr. Stewart is wrong.” He actively tried to find ways of crunching the data that would “create conflics around her theories,” to do everything he could to show she was wrong. This is what gave her the confidence that she was right.

“How many of us,” asks Heffernan, “dare to have such collaborators?”

This kind of thinking is difficult. It takes “finding people who are very different from ourselves. We have to seek out people with different backgrounds, different experiences, and different ways of thinking, and we have to engage with them.” This, she says, takes a lot of patience and energy. Heffernan has come to think that it’s so difficult “that it’s a kind of love.”

This is difficult enough one-to-one, but most problems come from people in organizations. “How do organizations think? Well, for the most part, they don’t.” They can’t think, she says, because the people in them are afraid of speaking up, afraid of conflict. A survey said that 85% of people in companies felt there were serious problems that they were afraid to talk about. Heffernan thinks of this as a huge problem. “Organization can’t do what George and Alice did. They can’t think together.”

She once worked with an executive for a medical device company. The executive thought the device they were working on was too complicated, and consequently not safe. But no one else seemed afraid, so he was afraid to articulate his doubts — worrying he might look stupid. But it turns out that, when he finally found a way to raise that concern, everybody else had the same questions and doubts. “Yes,” she says, ”there was a lot of debate and argument, but it allowed everyone around the table to be creative.”

How do we make this easy?

She thinks we need to be teaching these skills early and throughout a person’s education. “The biggest problems that we face mostly don’t come from information that is secret, or hidden. It comes from information that is freely available out there, but we are wilfully blind to because we don’t want to handle the conflict that it provokes.”

She closes with a call to arms: “The truth won’t set us free until we develop the skill, the talent, and the moral courage to use it. Openness isn’t the end, it’s the beginning.”

Q&A

In a short Q&A afterward, host Chris Anderson asks, “Is there anything people in charge of organizations can do to encourage this kind of behavior?”

Heffernan replies that you have to celebrate the people who question their own leaders. “The sad truth is that as the CEO you mostly don’t know what’s going on, because no one will tell you. You have to cultivate and cherish the people who do.”

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

Amy Cuddy must be proud: Clay Shirky walks on stage and promptly strikes a power pose. Then he tells us of a 9-year-old Scottish girl who lives about 50 miles from here. Martha Payne started the foodblog NeverSeconds, for which she took her camera into school to document her lunches, using metrics such as “pieces of hair found in food.” First, she acquired dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of readers. Until, two weeks ago, when she posted that she’d been shut down by her head teacher. No more photos from the lunch room.

“You can guess what happened next,” says Shirky to laughs and applause. “The outrage was so swift, so voluminous, so unanimous that the council reversed itself the same day. ‘We would never censor a 9-year-old,’ they said. Except for this morning.” Shirky asks the obvious question: “What made them think they could get away from this?” The answer is simple: “all of human history prior to now.”

Now, a history lesson to track what happens when a medium suddenly puts new ideas into circulation. It wasn’t always seamless. People assumed the telegraph would lead to world peace. Or maybe the television would. Surely the telephone. “Even the printing press was assumed to be a tool that would enforce Catholic intellectual hegemony across Europe,” he says. Instead there was Martin Luther, the 95 Theses pinned to the door and the 30 Years War. The new forms of media brought more chaos, not less.

“When a lot of ideas come into circulation, it changes society,” Shirky says. “When there are more ideas in circulation, there are more ideas for any individual to disagree with. More media always means more argument. That’s what happens when media space expands.” The Internet is following the pattern, certainly providing us with another space for more argument. He shows a screenshot of some online “discussion” involving the phrase “maggot bastard,” a new one to me. (“YouTube is just a goldmine,” he says.)

“I study social media,” says Shirky, explaining, “I watch people argue.” Now he wants to introduce us to the group of people who represent to him the arguers we should watch most carefully: open-source programmers.

Computing is such an inflexible system, he reminds us, that the canonical system of version control for software was developed to ensure that people didn’t inadvertently (or deliberately) screw it up. Only those with permissions could change things; even they could only change small areas at a time. It’s feudal, a system of one owner and many workers. And it’s totally appropriate for the commercial software industry, the Microsofts and the Adobes. But one programmer decided to try something different. Linus Torvalds, who created Linux, wanted a new way of dealing with version control. He wanted all people to have access to all of the source code all of the time.

The result is Git, distributed version control, which Shirky is here to explain to us. It’s a distributed workflow that brings chaos back into the system. Yet there’s a beautiful innovation to ensure that said chaos doesn’t promptly override said system: a signature that creates a unique identifier for every single exchange. This enables cooperation without coordination. “I tell you this not because it is great that open-source programmers now have a tool that supports their philosophical way of working,” Shirky says. “I tell you all of this because of what it means for how communities come together.”

What it means is that Git’s communities are enormously large and complex. “This doesn’t look like an org chart,” he says, showing us a complicated swirl of lines. “It looks like a ‘disorg’ chart.” Yet there are real reasons to think that this kind of system and technique might be applied to democracy and the law more generally.

First, an acknowledgment. “When you make the claim that something on the internet is going to be good for democracy you often get this reaction: ‘Are you talking about the thing with the singing cats that’s going to be good for society?’” he says. He’s here to answer this accusation once and for all. “It didn’t take long after the rise of the printing press that some people realized that erotic novels were a good idea.” He shows a faintly racy picture from a book published in 1499. He points out that it wasn’t until 1665 that the important scientific journal, Philosophical Transactions was published. Go figure. Sometimes those driving change aren’t the moral guardians of the state.

“Look for where changes are happening; look on the margins,” he advises. “There are millions of projects on Github. Look around the edges and see people experimenting with the political ramifications of the system.” Someone uploaded the Wikileaks cables with software to read them, he says. Someone else uploaded a tool for detecting naturally occurring haiku in State Department prose. The audience is loving it.

So why can’t this capability spread beyond open-source programmers? Why not apply these tools to democracy or to the writing of parliamentary bills?

“I’d love to tell you that the fact that open-source programmers have worked this out means that innovation is inevitable,” he says. “It’s not. Part of the problem is lack of information. The bigger problem is power. The people experimenting don’t have legislative power. The people with legislative power are not experimenting with participation. They are experimenting with transparency, but transparency is openness in one direction.”

Shirky closes by returning to Martha Payne. “The thing that got Martha Payne’s opinions out to the public was a piece of technology. The thing that kept them there was political will, an expectation of citizens that she not be censored.” The last decade has given us no less than a new form of arguing. “It is large, distributed, low cost and compatible with the ideals of democracy. Are we going to let the programmers keep it for themselves, or are we going to press it into the service of society at large?” Shirky is a crowd pleaser, for sure. What an inspirational and uplifting way to round off this year’s TEDGlobal.

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

Where some people saw a social network too far, Daria Musk saw an opportunity. In the summer of 2011, she joined Google+ and decided to perform a live concert via its video chat feature, Hangouts. Her concerts can last up to eight hours, and in just a few months she turned from a self-described lonely girl and unknown singer to a global star, with more than 1.6 million fans all around the world. We weren’t able to grant her eight hours on the TED stage, but she turned up for ten minutes to tell us her story, sing us a song–and even connect to Google+ to hook up with some of her people, including her mother and brother and a few lucky fans around the world.

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

Architecture writer Andrew Blum has always focused on the physical landscape: our cities, our buildings, the places in which we live and work. Yet along with the rest of us, he says, he’s realized that over the past few years our relationship with the physical world has changed. We look at screens, a world with no physical presence. Thinking about this, Blum realized that he had no clear picture about the physical nature of the Internet.

Then something happened. Blum’s internet broke. A sadly all-too-common occurrence, it nonetheless prompted a revelation. “The cable guy came to fix it, and he started with some dusty cables behind the couch which he followed out of the building to the basement to the backyard, where there was a jumble of wires along the back wall. Then he saw a squirrel. ‘There’s your problem,’ he said. ‘A squirrel is chewing on your internet.’” This, says Blum, seemed ridiculous. “The internet is a transcendent idea,” he says. “It was unequivocally not something a squirrel could chew on.”

So Blum got to wondering what might happen if he carried on tugging on that wire in his backyard, to see where it might go and whom he might meet along the way. So he did. He’s spent the past three years tracking the physical world of the Internet for his new book, Tubes, and it turns out: “It’s a remarkable place filled with data centers that use as much electricity as the cities in which they sit,” he says. “And it’s surprisingly physical and surprisingly intimate.”

What fascinated Blum the most was the undersea cables that stretch around continents to help make the Internet a global phenomenon. Incredibly small on one level, on another they are incredibly expansive, stretching for thousands of miles along the ocean floor. And while the physical process is simple — light goes in on one side of the ocean and light comes out on another — it’s equally incredibly sophisticated. The fibers are the thickness of a hair, yet these cables connect continents.

Blum introduces us to Simon Cooper, an English man who until recently worked for Tata Communications. “We’ve only communicated via the Telepresence system, which makes me think of him as the man inside the internet,” Blum jokes. Cooper helped Tata to lay cables across both the Atlantic and the Pacific, to build a “belt around the world,” and he helped Blum get access to watch what happens when a cable is actually being laid, “when a continent is being plugged in.”

With four days’ notice, Blum headed to a beach south of Lisbon. And, just as Cooper had described, “a little after 9 o’clock, this guy will walk out of the water.” He was carrying the messenger line, the first link between sea and land. The process from then on is entirely physical. The cable, hanging in the water from orange buoys, is aligned, and the the diver gets back into the sea and cuts it free of its buoys with a large knife.

Then the engineers prepare to connect it, firstly using hacksaws to shave at the plastic sheathing, finally working “like jewelers to get the hairline fibers to connect.”

Finally, once the cable is connected, the engineers replace the manhole cover, cover it with sand, and then: “We forget all about it,” he says. “That’s a shame. We talk a lot about the cloud, and when we put something on the cloud we give up some responsibility for it; we are less connected to it.”

Perhaps, he suggests, we might rethink our relationship with the Internet. To close, he quotes Neal Stephenson: “Wired people should know something about wires.” As far as Blum is concerned, we should know where the Internet comes from. “We should know what it is that physically connects us all.”

[Images c/o Andrew Blum]

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

In 1964 Bob Dylan was near the pinnacle of his career, pouring out now-classic songs at a near-miraculous pace. But a few critics claim that he is stealing other people’s songs. Could it be true? Ferguson plays “Nottamun Town,” a traditional folks song, then Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War,” and asks us to hear the similarity — and it’s clear the melody and structure relate. He plays “The Patriot Game” by Dominic Behan, then Dylan’s “With God on Our Side.” (In this case Dylan admits he probably hear the original and forgot about it, and later it probably “bubbled back up in his brain.”) Finally, he plays “Who’s Gonna Buy You Ribbons” by Paul Clayton, then “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” by Bob Dylan — and yes, the lyrics are very similar.

It’s estimated that 2/3 of the melodies Dylan used in his early songs were borrowed, a very typical number for folk singers. Woody Guthrie told him: “Don’t worry about tunes. Take a tune, sing high when they sing low, sing fast when they sing slow, and you’ve got a new tune.”

Decades later, when Danger Mouse dropped his Grey Album, combining the Beatles’ White Album and Jay-Z’s Black Albumm Apple Records sent him a cease-and-desist order. The difference, asks Ferguson? “This is a remix. It’s new media created from old media. Copy, transform, combine — these are the basic elements of all creativity. I think everyting is a remix, and I think this is a better way to conceive of creativity.”

American copyright and patent laws run counter to this notion that we build on the ideas of others, but it’s a principle that creators in most fields acknowledge. Take Henry Ford, who said “I invented nothing new. I simply assembed the discoveris of other men, behind whom were centuries of work.” This happens in technology as well. Ferguson shows a clip from a Steve Jobs keynote in 2007 in which he introduces multi-touch on the iPhone. Jobs: “We invented it, and boy are we going to patent it.” Cue Jeff Han, in a clip from TED2006 in February a year earlier, saying: “This isn’t new. It’s the small pieces that are different.”

Here we see patents doing counter to what they are intended to do, which is promote innovation. There were no software patents in the ’80s, when Xerox pioneered the GUI. Would a young and inexperienced Apple have withstood the legal assault from a much larger company like Xerox? Early Steve Jobs quoted Picasso (great artists steal); more recently he said: “I’m going to destroy Android because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to to go thermonuclear on this.” Economists will call this loss aversion.

He takes on the laws that treat creative works as property and their unintended negative effects. Massive rewards or settlements plus huge legal fees create a strong cognitve bias against loss. Result: the last four years of lawsuits over smartphones. Is this promoting the progress of technology and the arts?

Dylan, much later in life, recorded a song based on a tune by Blind Willie McTell, who said, “I jump ‘em from other writers, but I arrange ‘em my own way.”

Watch Kirby’s TEDxTalk from TEDxFortWayne >>

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

A sick brick

“I want to make my friends understand: China is too complicated,” begins Michael Anti. “You can’t tell a one-size story.” According to some, China is a brick, helping the world economy. According to others, it’s a sick country, with no access to Facebook. (The second phrase was as claimed in the Facebook IPO papers.)

“If you’re a fan of Game of Thrones, you know how important a wall is for an old kingdom. It prevents the weird things from the north,” says Anti. China also had a wall to prevent invaders. But now, he says, it has a great firewall, the biggest in the world. That wall works to separate China from the world, and also separates Chinese internally, into sections.

In the past 15 years, Anti says, there have been non-stop cat and mouse games between authorities and the netizens. There are 500 million internet users in China. Even if it were totally isolated from the world, the internet there is still booming. He shows how there are versions of every service Westerners are familiar with: Google, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are all replaced by equivalents. The government blocks all the international services, and clones spring up inside. The policy is simple: clone and block. This fulfills two needs: to satisfy people’s need for social media, but also the need to keep the server in Beijing.

Some leaders, says Anti, haven’t understood this. Mubarak shut down the internet, so people had no choice but to go to the street. In Tunisia, the government allowed Facebook, and didn’t keep control of the servers.

Booming even with censorship

But the firewall and control of the servers doesn’t mean that social media isn’t powerful within China. In July 2011, there was a train wreck in the city of Wenzhou. Immediately afterward, authorities tried to keep quiet, “to literally bury the train.” In response, there were 10 million criticisms on social media platforms. The minister was fired and jailed.

One of the reasons that Chinese tweets have so much power, says Anti, is that they have three times the information volume as English tweets — 140 characters is a paragraph in Chinese. Furthermore, Weibo, the Twitter equivalent, is actually more like Facebook than Twitter, allowing comments and other ways of interacting. With 300 million users, it’s the biggest media platform in China. According to Anti, “It has become the media platform. Anything not mentioned in Weibo does not appear to have occurred for the Chinese public.”

Anti says that this is enabling the people to have strong voices, because they are able to tweet their stories. Call it “a Weibo petition.” Some stories are picked up and re-tweeted by popular online personalities — reporters, lawyers, actors — while others put pressure on local government. It’s becoming a real public sphere.

But there is a flip side. Weibo has a sophisticated censorship system. You can’t post the name of the president of the country, or even search for the surname of the top leaders. If you mention words like “get together” or “meet up” in a post, it might be automatically data-mined, recorded or sent to a pool for analyzing. So why is it sometimes successful?

A complicated picture

Something important is happening in the cat and mouse game, says Anti. There is the big cat — the central government — but also local cats, the local government. The central government tries very hard to control the local governments, which have no access to the data. Again, the servers are all in Beijing.

The most interesting question about the train crash is not why there were 10 million critical posts, but why in the first five days the central government allowed a window of free speech. Simple, says Anti, it was “because even the top leaders were fed up with this guy. They wanted an excuse to punish him. This kind of freedom is targeted.”

Social media has become a political tool of the governing party. This is new technology, but is culturally an update of the cultural revolution, which destroyed every local government.

We are the mouse, says Anti, and the mouse should always fight with the cats. And this fight isn’t restricted to China. In the West there were attempts to restrict internet freedoms, cats with names like SOPA and PIPA. Anti reminds us that “Facebook and Google claim they are friends of the mouse, but sometimes we see they are dating the cats.”

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

Download the rushes used for the session titles created by Circus Family for Session 10: Reframing. These images were created by projecting motion graphics onto a tabletop installation — breaking the visuals and recording them again. Feel free to re-use under the Creative Commons Licence (Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike).

Use this compact 600MB zip file containing hires .mp4 files at 1280×720 resolution.

Make a remix? Hit the comments below or tweet to #TEDGlobal. And Circus Family writes: Let us know what you create with the material — we’re looking forward to versions. Email hello@circusfamily.com.

Mission: Radical spreading from a uniform block to a more freeform organic experimental shape.

Director’s statement: “I wanted to create an explosion of vector abstract pop and colored animation. Organic and geometric shapes, characters growing around the central information.” — Superdeux

Direction and design: Superdeux www.superdeux.com
Animation and sound design: Friends Of Mine www.friendsofmine.tv

Agency: WE ARE Pi www.wearepi.com
Planner: Alex Bennett-Grant
Producer: Jamie Nami Kim
Creative Directors: Hobson-Chant