Contributor(s): Emory Douglas | Emory Douglas, ex Minister of Culture for the Black Panther party, will speak about the history behind the art of the party, and take a look at some more recent works. Emory Douglas was born May 24th, 1943 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Douglas attended City College of San Francisco where he majored in commercial art. He was politically involved as Revolutionary Artist and then Minister of Culture for the Black Panther party in Oakland, CA from February, 1967 until its discontinuance in the Early 1980's. Douglas's art was always seen on front pages of the Black Panther Newspaper and, reflecting the ideals and rhetoric of the Black Panther Party. Offering a retrospective look at artwork created during in the Black Panther Party, Douglas's work has recently been displayed at the 2008 Biennale of Sydney, the Museum of Modern Art in Los Angeles,Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Richmond Art Center, the Station Museum of Contemporary Art. And has appeared in June/July volume of Art in America, PRINT Magazine, and the American Institute of Public Arts.

Contributor(s): George Osborne MP | In a major and wide ranging speech George Osborne will ask why Britain's economy was not better prepared for the looming recession, and will outline what steps should now be taken.

Contributor(s): Howard Davies | Howard Davies is working on a book about the future of central banking to be published in 2009 by Princeton University Press. He will assess the ways in which central banks around the world have responded to the credit crisis and what that implies for their role in financial sector regulation in the future. Howard Davies is Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Prior to this, from 1997-2003 he was Chairman of the Financial Services Authority, the single regulator for the UK financial sector, which was created under his leadership from nine separate regulatory agencies. From 1995-1997 he was Deputy Governor of the Bank of England.

Contributor(s): Lord Lawson, Dr Simon Dietz | Lord Lawson argues the case for a fully formed view of global warming, and against hysterical environmentalism. He looks at the facts behind the headlines and explains that for governments to make informed decisions about the path ahead, they must listen to economists as well as scientists, utilising economic forecasting to assess the likely evolution of the world economy.

Contributor(s): Lord Owen | The course of world history has been critically shaped by the physical and mental illnesses of heads of state, sometimes in the public eye but usually in secrecy. Long fascinated with the inter-relationship between politics and medicine, David Owen uses his deep knowledge of both to undertake a unique study of illness in Heads of Government during the last 100 years. Owen expertly scrutinises such diverse political personalities as Sir Anthony Eden at the time of Suez in 1956; John F. Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961; the last Shah of Iran; and President Mitterrand of France who suffered from prostate cancer. Lord Owen also focuses on the "intoxication of power" and hubristic behaviour in such leaders as David Lloyd George and Margaret Thatcher and in particular President Bush and Tony Blair. Lord Owen outlines some of the safeguards that society needs to address as a consequence of illness in heads of government.

Contributor(s): Professor Catharine Mackinnon | Analyzing the nature of the international in gendered terms, Professor MacKinnon provides a perspective on developments in women's human rights globally. Catharine A. MacKinnon, Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, is a teacher, lawyer, writer, and activist on sex equality domestically and internationally. She has taught at ten law schools including Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Chicago, Osgoode Hall (Toronto), and Columbia, and been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study (Berlin, 1992-3) and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford, 2005-6). Widely published in many languages, her dozen books include Sex Equality (2001), Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989), Only Words (1993), Sexual Harassment of Working Women (1979), and in the last two years, Women's Lives, Men's Laws (2005) and Are Women Human? (2006). She created the concept that sexual violence violates equality rights, pioneering the legal claim for sexual harassment as sex discrimination and, with Andrea Dworkin, recognition of the harms of pornography as civil rights violations. Representing Bosnian women survivors of Serbian genocidal sexual atrocities, she established legal recognition of rape as an act of genocide and won a $745 million verdict at trial. She works with Equality Now, an international NGO promoting sex equality. Empirical studies document that Professor MacKinnon is one of the most widely-cited legal scholars in the English language.

Contributor(s): Professor Robert Sampson, Professor Paul Gilroy | A look at classic urban themes as they are manifested in the contemporary city, focusing on social reproduction of inequality, the meanings of disorder, and the link between the two. Paul Gilroy is Anthony Giddens Professor in Social Theory at LSE. Robert Sampson is Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences and chair of sociology, Harvard University.

Contributor(s): Sir Simon Milton, Professor Ricky Burdett, Deyan Sudjic | What is the new administration's vision for London? Speakers discuss how to design and manage the powerhouses of the global economy, assessing London's development compared to the megacities of the world. Simon Milton was appointed deputy mayor for policy and planning after serving as chairman of London's Local Government Association. Ricky Burdett, chief adviser for the London 2012 Olympics, and Deyan Sudjic, director of the Design Museum in London, are co-editors of The Endless City.

Contributor(s): Dr Gerd Gigerenzer | We think of intelligence as a deliberate, conscious activity guided by the laws of logic. Yet much of our mental life is unconscious, based on processes alien to logic: gut feelings, or intuitions. In his lecture Dr Gigerenzer argues that intuition is more than impulse and caprice; it has its own rationale. This can be described by fast and frugal heuristics, which exploit evolved abilities in our brain. Heuristics ignore information and try to focus on the few important reasons. He shows that biased minds that intuitively rely of heuristics can make better inferences about the world than information-greedy statistical algorithms. More information, more time, even more thinking, are not always better, and less can be more.

Contributor(s): Will Hutton, Martin Wolf | Will Hutton is chief executive of the Work Foundation. Prior to this, he spent four years as editor-in-chief of The Observer and continues to write a weekly column for the paper. He is also a governor of LSE. Martin Wolf is associate editor and chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, London. He was awarded the CBE (Commander of the British Empire) in 2000 "for services to financial journalism". He is also an honorary graduate of LSE.