Speakers:
Rafat Ali, Publisher and Editor, paidContent.org
Dean Rotbart, Host, Newsroom Confidential
David Sifry, Founder and CEO, Technorati
Jonathan Weber, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, New West

Moderator:
Tina Sharkey, Senior Vice President Network and Community Programming, AOL

Blogging has gone from 0 to 36 million blogs worldwide in less than a decade. 75,000 new blogs will be created today. 27% of internet users engage in blogs, whether, creating, writing, or reading, every month. At this rate, the blogosphere is doubling every 5 months. Consumers spend 4 hours a week writing their blogs.

Professional blogs are a slightly different animal. Engadget has 17 million page views a month. Citizen journalism isn’t just about blogs. Look at YouTube and wikipedia. This is the generation that creates their own content, starting with an away message when they’re 14 years-old, to doing blogs.

As news production and consumption undergoes a radical transformation. What is relationship between blogs and media? What will happen to the traditional newsroom?

 Panelists:
Nathan Nankivell, Senior Researcher, Office of the Special Advisor at Joint Task Force Pacific Headquarters, Canada
Shelly Singhal, Chairman and CEO, SBI Group
Paul Smith, Associate Professor, Asia-Pacific Center for Securities Studies, U.S. Department of Defense
Perry Wong, Senior Research Economist, Milken Institute

Moderator:
Graham Earnshaw, Editor-in-Chief, Xinhua Finance News

China's growth in 2005 was at a whopping 9 percent for the ninth year in a row. But impressive growth also brings impressive environmental problems.

Find out how a Canadian researcher, a CEO, a US Department of Defense and an economist would play the environmental clean-up game in China after the jump.

Speakers:
Gary Becker, Nobel Laureate, Economic Sciences, 1992; University Professor of Economics and Sociology, University of Chicago; FasterCures Board Member
Vaclav Klaus, President, Czech Republic
David Rubenstein, Co-Founder and Managing Director, The Carlyle Group

Moderator:
Paul Gigot, Editorial Page Editor, The Wall Street Journal

The world grew last year at pace of 4.8%, the third straight year of a growth rate over 4%; this growth is in spite of rising interest rates, security threats, and extraordinary oil prices. The highest sources of growth have been the US, China, India, Russia (which is a special case because of energy related growth), and Japan. However, Europe’s Big Three, France, Germany, and Italy, had anemic growth and high unemployment rates.

Other notable features of global expansion features have been extraordinary US import of capital and goods, which is unusual for a developed economy. Are we in the US living behind our means, or do we have policies that are inviting to foreign investors?

How sustainable is the expansion? What is driving growth? What are the main threats to this expansion?

Everything you ever wanted to know about global economic growth from the perspectives of economics, politics, and finance is right after the jump.

Moderator: Howard Soule, Senior Fellow, Milken Instiute, Managing Director of Knowledge Universe Health and Wellness, LLC

Panelists:
Caldwell Esselstyn Jr., Preventive Cardiology Consultant, Department of General Surgery, Cleveland Clinic
Francine Kaufman, Professor of Pediatrics, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California; Head of the Center for Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism, Childrens Hospital Los Angeles
Samuel Klein, William H. Danforth Professor of Medicine; Director, Center for Human Nutrition, Washington University School of Medicine
Dean Ornish, Founder and President, Preventive Medicine Research Institute; Clinical Professor of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco
Harold Schmitz, Chief Science Officer, Mars Inc.

If you read nothing else on this post, this is the one sentence takeaway: No matter what you think now, you are too fat and you already have heart disease, so you better start eating plants. And chocolate.

There's a handful of women gathered in front of an empty table inside the AOL Cyber Pavilion. One of them is clutching a small ivory colored book to her chest talking to the woman next to her. "...going to the market, getting fresh fruit, just simple things like walking more..." The other women are listening and nodding. None of them know each other, but people seem to have an understanding when it comes to losing weight.

The small crowd is waiting for Mireille Guiliano, author of French Women Don't Get Fat, doing a book-signing that coincides with the conference theme of health, nutrition, and aging.

The author hasn't arrived yet, and the woman in the front, named Dale, is a huge fan, singing the praises of how the book changed her life. She was skeptical about the book at first, but she admits that she "used to diet very strictly, drink diet soda." decided on a whim to "see what they (French women) do and what their philosophy is." Apparently for Dale, the philosophy worked.

Mireille Guiliano is tiny, bright, dressed in black and white, and is utterly charming when she removes her chartreuse-framed sunglasses and flashes a smile. Perhaps its her French accent when she answers questions about that makes her sound oh-so sophisticated. She reveals that the success of this first book has motivated a second, French Women for All Seasons. It is due out in November and will have more recipes that encourage simpler cooking. She also now has a website, which she was reluctant to create at first. She realizes however, that young people, college students, are enthusiastic about the book.

The International Ballroom is beyond packed to capacity, and it certainly isn't for the cold-poached chicken breast with Thai-flavored slaw for lunch.

The Lunch Panel of Nobel Laureates in Economics discusses a few of the hot buttons in as many of the seven conference tracks they can fit into 90 minutes: Climate, Education, Finance, Health, Industry, Media, and Regions.

Opening Remarks: Michael Klowden, President and CEO, Milken Institute

Panelists: 
Gary Becker, Nobel Laureate, Economic Sciences, 1992; University Professor of Economics and Sociology, University of Chicago; FasterCures Board Member

Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Laureate, Economic Sciences, 2002; Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology, Professor of Public Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University

Myron Scholes, Nobel Laureate, Economic Sciences, 1997; Chairman, Oak Hill Platinum Partners; Frank E. Buck Professor of Finance Emeritus, Stanford University Graduate School of Business 

Moderator: Michael Milken, Chairman, Milken Institute; Chairman, FasterCures / The Center for Accelerating Medical Solutions.

Introductory video focuses on the Milken Institute's Think Tank and their mission.

Mike Klowden opens the panel with the theme of the conference is "Building a Prosperous Future," obligingly thanks a very long list of sponsors, and gives out a few conference statistics. There are 2700 registrants from 50 countries, and 47 US states. Eighty percent of the 390 speakers and panelists are new to global conference.

The panelists take turns introducing each other.

Mike Klowden introduces Myron Scholes, who used to be a professor at the Univeristy of Chicago before settling on the West Coast at Stanford. Myron is a pioneer in financial theory as a contributor to the Black-Scholes model in Options Theory. Options Theory has been a major force in the modern revolution in finance with respect to how to price out options. Myron also applies his theories in real-life, running his own hedge funds.

Myron introduces Daniel Kahneman, who received a Nobel prize in economics as a psychologist, not an economist. Danny applies psychology to Prospect Theory - individuals value gain much less than they value loss, and act accordingly. His work was the birth of behavioral economics, behavioral finance and the concept of individual decision-making, i.e. how individuals' comparison of incentives to costs is crucial to human behavior.

Danny introduces Gary Becker, both an economist and social scientist. His work, the Theory of Human Capital, is a way of thinking about rational decision making. For example, is smoking rational, particularly for young college students who have knowledge that there is no positive correlation between smoking and health?

This is a global economic conference, and yet I was pretty surprised to see a few "sponsor" exhibit tables from companies that I wouldn't have expected. Big-time investors - of course. Banks - yes. Law firms - I don't see why not.

GNC? The giant vitamins and supplements retail distributor? Eaturna? A healthy prepared foods purveyor in southern California? It felt more like the West Hall of the Natural Foods expo I went to last month than a Global Economics conference. Seems odd. Why?

Because one of the biggest, hottest topics here at the conference is Health, and more specifically, the coming medical revolution as it relates to a large, rapidly aging population. The conference actually started yesterday (Sunday), with the entire day was dedicated to sessions with titles like "Longevity, Biological Age, and an Aging Population," and topics like innovation in medicine, and the role of good nutrition to healthy aging. The general conference today (Monday) kicked off with an enormous session on the Future of Health Care.

It's all about the Baby Boomers, y'all.

I'll let you know how that sample of Fish Body Oil 1000 from GNC works out this afternoon.