Unlike Al Qaeda, the Taliban are interested in their homeland, not ours. Things are different now than before 9/11. The Taliban know how costly Osama bin Laden's friendship can be. There's a good chance that enough factions in the loose Taliban coalition would opt to disinvite their troublesome guest if we forget about trying to subdue them or hold their territory. This would unwind the Taliban coalition into a lot of straggling, loosely networked groups that could be eliminated or contained using the lessons learned in Indonesia and elsewhere. This means tracking down family and tribal networks, gaining a better understanding of family ties and intervening only when we see actions by Taliban and other groups to aid Al Qaeda or act outside their region.

SCOTT ATRAN, an anthropologist at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, John Jay College and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, is the author of In Gods We Trust.

Scott Atran's Edge Bio Page

One of the urgent threats that humanity faces right now is the risk of pandemics. Either swine flu or bird flu or Ebola, Lassa Fever or West Nile or SARS or any of these diseases. Particularly HIV/AIDS, which was another one of these animal-based zoonotic diseases. I'm worried about global warming as a great exacerbation. It exacerbates the risk of pandemics. It exacerbates the rift between the rich and the poor. It exacerbates the problem of dealing with scarce water and it exacerbates the problems of cities. These are the urgent threats we face.

LAWRENCE BRENT BRILLIANT, M.D., is the President of the Skoll Urgent Threats Fund and Senior Adviser to Jeff Skoll. In this role, he will develop the strategy and approach for the newly launched Fund, as well as advise Jeff Skoll on ways to leverage his various commercial and philanthropic entities to drive positive change on urgent social and environmental issues.

Lawrence Brent Brilliant's Edge Bio Page

Money is human happiness in the abstract, wrote Schopenhauer grimly in the early 19th Century. He then, who is no longer capable of enjoying human happiness in the concrete devotes himself utterly to money. ... But what is happiness? ...

An Edge Original Essay

EMANUEL DERMAN is a professor in Columbia University's Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department, as well as a partner at Prisma Capital Partners. He is a former managing director and head of the Quantitative Strategies group at Goldman, Sachs & Co. His is the author of My Life As A Quant.

Emanuel Derman's Edge Bio page

In the industrial model of student mass production, the teacher is the broadcaster. A broadcast is by definition the transmission of information from transmitter to receiver in a one-way, linear fashion. The teacher is the transmitter and student is a receptor in the learning process. The formula goes like this: "I'm a professor and I have knowledge. You're a student, you're an empty vessel and you don't. Get ready, here it comes. Your goal is to take this data into your short-term memory and through practice and repetition build deeper cognitive structures so you can recall it to me when I test you."... The definition of a lecture has become the process in which the notes of the teacher go to the notes of the student without going through the brains of either.

THE IMPENDING DEMISE OF THE UNIVERSITY
By Don Tapscott

Introduction

In his Edge feature "Gin, Television, and Cognitive Surplus", Clay Shirky noted that after WWII we were faced with something new: "free time. Lots and lots of free time. The amount of unstructured time among the educated population ballooned, accounting for billions of hours a year. And what did we do with that time? Mostly, we watched TV."

In "The End of Universal Rationality", Yochai Benkler explored the social implications of the Internet and network societies since the early 90s.Benkler has been looking at the social implications of the Internet and network societies since the early 90s. He saw the end of an era:

For those of us like me who have been working on the Internet for years, it was very clear you couldn't encounter free software and you couldn't encounter Wikipedia and you couldn't encounter all of the wealth of cultural materials that people create and exchange, and the valuable actual software that people create, without an understanding that something much more complex is happening than the dominant ideology of the last 40 years or so. But you could if you weren't looking there, because we were used in the industrial system to think in these terms.

Benkler believes that these "phenomena on the Net are not ephemeral". And he has spent the last 20 years trying to get his head around the process of understanding what is transpiring.

In a Reality Club discussion "On 'Is Google Making Us Stupid' By Nicholas Carr" W. Daniel Hillis, Kevin Kelly, Nicholas Carr, Jaron Lanier, Douglas Rushkoff and others explored the future of the printed book.

And Shirky, in his recent piece "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable",(with comments from Nicholas Carr, Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas, Marc Frons) wrote:

When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of their most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away.

Enter Don Tapscott, who is looking at the challenges the digital revolution poses to the fundamental aspects of the University.

"Universities are finally losing their monopoly on higher learning", he writes. "There is fundamental challenge to the foundational modus operandi of the University — the model of pedagogy. Specifically, there is a widening gap between the model of learning offered by many big universities and the natural way that young people who have grown up digital best learn."

The old-style lecture, with the professor standing at the podium in front of a large group of students, is still a fixture of university life on many campuses. It's a model that is teacher-focused, one-way, one-size-fits-all and the student is isolated in the learning process. Yet the students, who have grown up in an interactive digital world, learn differently. Schooled on Google and Wikipedia, they want to inquire, not rely on the professor for a detailed roadmap. They want an animated conversation, not a lecture. They want an interactive education, not a broadcast one that might have been perfectly fine for the Industrial Age, or even for boomers. These students are making new demands of universities, and if the universities try to ignore them, they will do so at their peril.

Contrary to Nicholas Carr's proposition that Google is making us stupid, Tapscott counters with the following: 

My research suggests these critics are wrong. Growing up digital has changed the way their minds work in a manner that will help them handle the challenges of the digital age. They're used to multi-tasking, and have learned to handle the information overload. They expect a two-way conversation. What's more, growing up digital has encouraged this generation to be active and demanding enquirers. Rather than waiting for a trusted professor to tell them what's going on, they find out on their own on everything from Google to Wikipedia.

This is a topic that is worthy of a serious conversation by the Edgecommunity and I hope to present comments from contributors in future Edge editions.

— John Brockman

DON TAPSCOTT is the author of 13 books on new technology in society, most recently Grown Up Digital. He recently completed a $4 million dollar investigation of the Net Generation. He is Chairman of the think tank nGenera Insight and an Adjunct Professor at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto.

Don Tapscott's Edge Bio Page

REALITY CLUB: James O'Donnell, Marc D. Hauser