EDGE 62 — January 4, 2000

(50,000 words - on the Web)

THE THIRD CULTURE

"Big, deep and ambitious questions....breathtaking in scope. Keep watching The World Question Center."
— New Scientist (editorial)

SPECIAL EVENT!

THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER:

"WHAT IS TODAY'S MOST IMPORTANT UNREPORTED STORY?"

Edited by John Brockman

THE QUESTION

For the third anniversary edition of EDGE, The World Question Center has reached out to a wide group of individuals distinguished by their significant achievements to respond to the following question:

"WHAT IS TODAY'S MOST IMPORTANT UNREPORTED STORY?"

At publication, an initial 75 contributors have responded. (See list of contributors and their subjects below). Many additional responses are expected in the coming month and will be posted on the EDGE home page as well as an Easy-Print page as they are received. I encourage you to contribute and/or comment on the contributions for "The Reality Club"s.

Because this Edge edition is 50,000 words, far too large for an email, the results have been posted on the EDGE Home page at where they can be viewed (a) by individual contribution, or (b) by clicking on an "easy-print" file. Each contributor has a biographical page with photos and links for recent books which is accessible by clicking on their names at the bottom of their responses.

INTERNET SUPPORT

This year's project will be widely supported by noted Internet sites:-

The Davos World Economic Forum (http://www.davos.ch/index.taf?id=dav0000&lang=en) will introduce the project to its participants as well as on Worldlink: The Online Magazine of the World Economic Forum (http://www.worldlink.co.uk) as well as their nascent Weblog (http://weblogs.userland.com/worldlink/).-

1999 UPSIDE Elite 100 http://www.upside.com/texis/mvm/people/story?id=38225bf20) will be queried and responses will be run on Upside Magazine's Web publication Upside Today: the Tech Insider (http://www.upside.com/).-

Responses from "The Silicon Alley 100" will be presented on The Silicon Alley Reporter's (http://www.siliconalleydaily.com/) Web and email newsletter, the Silicon Alley Daily (http://www.siliconalleydaily.com/). Thanks to Jason Calacanis.-

FEED Magazine (http://www.feedmag.com/), an award-winning online general interest magazine that covers media, technology, science, the arts, and other aspects of pop culture, will complement Edge's invitation only format by linking to Edge and convening public forums.

Special thanks to Lance Knobel of the Davos World Economic Forum, David Bunnell of Upside Magazine, Jason Calacanis of Silicon Alley Reporter, and Steven Johnson of FEED for their continued interest and support

Happy New Year - Let's make ideas glamorous in 2,000!

John Brockman
Publisher & Editor

CONTRIBUTORS AND SUBJECTS

William H. Calvin
Abrupt Climate Change

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
The Reasons For Right-Wing Extremism In Europe And The U.S.

Pattie Maes
What Scientific Research Is Really Like

George B. Dyson
The Size Of The Digital Universe

Douglas Rushkoff
America's Descent Into Computer-Aided Unconsciousness And Consumer Fascism

Howard Gardner
(1) African Civil Wars; (2) Evolutionary Theory Is Not Intuitive; Creationism Is

Roger Schank
The Politicians Who Are Running On Education Platforms Don't Actually Care About Education

Lee Smolin
The Internationalization of the Third Culture

Judith Rich Harris
Parenting Styles Have Changed But Children Have Not

Stewart Brand
The Peace Dividend

John McWhorter
The Transformation Of The American Musical Ear

Paul Davies
The Genocide Nobody Wants to Talk About

Rodney A. Brooks
People are Morphing into Machines

Sally M. Gall
The Potentially Glorious, or Dangerous, Massive Cultural Impact of Mitochondrial DNA Studies

John Gilmore
The World Isn't Going to Hell

Eric J. Hall
The World Is Losing Potable Water At a Rate That Is Unprecedented

Stephen Kellert
The Concept Of Ecology

Thomas Petzinger, Jr.
The End Of Money

Sylvia Paull
Women Are Still Considered Inferior To Men

James J. O'Donnell
The Remaking Of Personality As Seen In Language

Philip W. Anderson
(1) The closing of the High Flux Beam Reactor at Brookhaven National Lab; (2) Eppawala

Stephen Grossberg
How Does a Brain Give Rise to a Mind?

Brian Goodwin
Quality Pigs

Arnold Trehub
How The Human Brain Models The World

Ivan Amato
The Planet Itself Is Becoming Self Aware

Howard Rheingold
How Will The Internet Influence Democracy?

Clifford Pickover
The Immortalization of Humanity

Hans Weise
That There Are So Many Important Unreported Stories

John Horgan
The Quiet Resurgence of Psychedelic Compounds as Instruments of Both Spiritual and Scientific Exploration

Philip Elmer-Dewitt
O.J.'s Search for the Real Killer

Lance Knobel
Two Stories, One Encouraging, the Other Worrying

Jeff Jacobs
The Lack of Services to Heal Abused Children

Piet Hut
There Are No Things

Freeman Dyson
The Enduring Vitality of the More Moderate Kinds of Religions

Kevin Kelly
The Population Fizzle

Marc D. Hauser
(1) The Health Crisis in Africa and (2) The Poor Level of Educational Distribution

Daniel Goleman
Hidden Consequences of Our Daily Choices as Consumers of Products and Services

Philip Brockman
How Great the Kids Are Today

Terrence J. Sejnowski
Exercise Can Make you Smarter

Bart Kosko
The US Government continued to outlaw first-class mail on Sunday andno one complained

Dean Ornish
The Gobalization of Illness

Keith Devlin
The Death of the Paragraph

Andy Clark
That the Human Mind is Less and Less In the Head

Anne Fausto-Sterling
The End of Gene Control

Eberhard Zangger
A Lost Civilization

Peter Cochrane
Decoding the Human Genome is a Long Term Project

Hans Ulrich Obrist
The Roads Not Taken

Ellis Rubinstein
An Unprecedented Erosion of Traditional "Divides"

Stuart Hameroff
The Paradigm Shift In Understanding The Conscious Mind

David Lykken
The Reduction In American Crime Is An Illusion

Mehmet C. Oz, M.D.
The True Nature of Much of Human Illness Eludes Mankind

Eduard Punset
The End of the Brain

Stephen H. Schneider
Misreporting Complex Scientific Controversies by Mainstream Media

David G. Myers
The Disconnect Between Wealth and Well-Being

Todd Siler
Applying our Lessons from the Nuclear Age to this Age

Joseph Ledoux
Educational Inequities

Verena Huber-Dyson
The Classification Theorem for Finite Simple Groups

Julian Barbour
a) The Proliferation of Jobs; b) James P. Carse's Jewel of a Book

Henry Warwick
"Damned if I know..."

James Bailey
The spread of Universal Visual Literacy

Robert R. Provine
The Walkie-Talkie Theory Bipedalism Was Necessary For Human Speech Evolution

Steve Quartz
The Transformation in Human Life in the Post-Genomic World

Jaron Lanier
The End of Clausewitzian War

Robert Hormats
The Information Revolution Requires A Matching Education Revolution
Daniel Pink

Maslow's America
Timothy Taylor
The Sexual Abuse of Children by Women

Carlo Rovelli
The End of the Dream of a More Gentle World

Peter Schwartz
The Dramatic Fall in the Rate of Growth in Global Population

Leon M. Lederman
Survival Depends on the Race between Education and Catastrophe

Phil Leggiere
Appropriation of the Internet for Large Scale Global Social Protest

Denise Caruso
Maybe Media Is the Real Opiate of the People

Tor Norretranders
A Dollar a Week Will End World Hunger

Delta Willis
Weird Ape Fouls Planet

Charles Arthur
The Peculiar Feedback Loops That Drive Media Reporting of Technological and Science Issues

David M. Buss
Discrimination in the Mating Market


John Brockman, Editor and Publisher | Kip Parent, Founding Webmaster
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