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Duke-NUS has adapted Mr. Michaelsen’s method slightly. It calls its variation of the method “Team LEAD, ” which stands for learn, engage and develop. But the essentials of this version remain the same as Mr. Michaelsen’s method.

At the start of the year, students are divided into teams, which remain the same through the year. Before each class, they are given assignments to learn independently and in their teams. In the classroom there is an initial “readiness” phase in which they are tested, individually and in their teams, through multiple-choice questions on a scratch card.

“This is a good way to teach students to work in a team, to be able to express their opinion and critically analyze what other people say,” Dr. Kamei said.

After the readiness phase, they move on to specific case studies, tackled by applying their memorized knowledge, complemented by medical literature and notes.

“Faculty does not talk, but listens to the conversations of the students, who are still working in teams,” Dr. Kamei said. “The students have to explain and defend their answers because they could have found the right answer but for the wrong reasons.”

At regular intervals, as the course progresses, the students undergo peer evaluation focused on their ability to contribute to the team effort. The results of peer evaluation contribute about 10 percent to the final grade.

“This teaching method really helps students learn how to cooperate and work as a team, teaching others,” Dr. Kamei said. “They can also make a direct connection between the basic science materials we asked them to learn and a relevant clinical situation.”

Duke’s medical doctoral program has always been significantly different from the training provided by other medical schools, even in the United States. Duke students cover basic science in one year instead of two. They care for patients a year earlier than their peers at other medical schools and they devote a year to independent scholarship and research. The adoption of the team method is, for now, confined to its Singapore campus, which opened in 2007.

Dr. Kamei says there is some talk about using the method at the U.S. campus, but he says there could be practical difficulties.

“We could do this here in Singapore because we’re starting from scratch, but it’s very difficult to change the way people have been teaching their entire career,” he said. “It’s a completely different way from teaching and lecturing.”

The Singapore government has committed to investing more than $350 million over seven years in Duke-N.U.S. About one-third of this money has gone into building a campus for the school, which will become operational in June. The rest of the money will pay for faculty and staff salaries, start-up research and infrastructure.

The government’s support reflects its desire that Singapore become a leader in medical research and education. In 2000, the government started a program known as the biomedical sciences initiative, investing 3 billion Singapore dollars, or $2 billion, with a goal of making biomedical sciences a main part of the Singapore economy. Duke-NUS faculty and students are expected to work closely with physicians and biomedical scientists in the recently built biomedical science research and development center, known as Biopolis, which has attracted internationally reputed scientists.

Duke’s medical school curriculum, which allows students to devote a year to independent scholarship and research in areas of basic and clinical sciences, was especially appealing, Dr. Kamei said.

“This model of creating a medical school to train medical scientists is an old one, but there aren’t many schools doing it,” he said. “Many schools are now finding that a very small number of their students are going into research or academia and they’re trying to improve that by allowing research during their school year.”

Last Saturday, I went to a concert by a club called Project Global Cooling (PGC). Under the guidance of Clay Burell, its advisor, PGC is a global club held in 6 other countries around the world. The PGC concert was not only held in Korea, but in other countries, all dedicated to stopping global warming, and encourage “global cooling” (Hence, the name). It was held at a place called The Spot in a place near Hongik University in central Seoul. The lineup consisted of Rated-E, Jeong Joo, Poppa Midnight, Kong 151, E.X.Plosive, Dog Soup, and ABC Analysis.

Photo credits to Annie Park

Though there were many students and people that attended the crowd, the crowd was seemed mainly indifferent most of the concert, as the concert attendance was mainly supplied by the incentive of extra credit, instead of passion and fervor for music.

I know that I've caught a wave, Nayan, and so...

Chanda: What was that wave?

Friedman: What was that wave? And I guess that the best way I could
summarize it is that it's a wave of anxiety, it's a wave that basically
I would describe like this: Our parents were sure that they were going
to live better than their parents, and they were just as sure that we,
their children, were going to live better than them. Our generation is
now coming to retirement worried that we may not retire as well as our
parents. And you know what, our kids may not live as well as we do. And
I think that anxiety, that anxiety that we are now being touched by
people who have never touched us before, we're competing with people who
we've never competed with before, and, fortunately, we're collaborating
with people we've never been able to collaborate with before. But for
all those reasons, there is a wave of anxiety out there, that there's a
lot of things changing; a lot of traditional boundaries are being
eliminated, competition is much more intense. And, gosh, I wonder if my
kids are going to live as well as me.

Chanda: So the fear of the unknown, of what is ahead. Things are
changing so fast.

Friedman: It's the fear of the unknown, Nayan, and I would say the
known, because it's the fear of what people see as real competition now,
coming from corners that they've never seen it before, coming in the
white-collar realm, not just the blue-collar realm where we've become
used to it, and not knowing where it stops. OK, the call-center
operator, well that's not important, but my radiologist, you know, is
now using outsourcing to have X-rays read somewhere. My accountant, you
know, can now draw on someone in India to do accounting. So now so many
more things now seem able to be digitized, automated or outsourced.
Where that starts or stops is I think what has a lot of people concerned.

Chanda: Judging by the reaction you have got in Silicon Valley, you have
been almost made into a prophet there. Now how do you see the US high
tech companies adjusting to this flat world?

Friedman: Now, you know, the good news is everything I learned about the
flat world, I learned from companies. I learned from CEO's, CIO's and
CTO's, who were doing it. Two things were happening. One thing is, they
were doing it, but they weren't talking about it. Because no one – who
wanted to talk about outsourcing?

Chanda: Right.

Friedman: And it's one of the kind of reasons that I walked into a
vacuum on this book, an intellectual vacuum, is that the people who are
doing it, and boy they're doing it, they are doing it at the cutting
edge, and thank goodness because they're really driving American
competitiveness and companies forward. But they didn't want to talk
about it. Nobody wanted to talk about it.

Chanda: The other group of people I think who have been very troubled by
your book is the education circle in the United States, I've been
hearing from people who are extremely worried as to what this flat world
means for you as an educated system. What do you think is going to
happen there?

Friedman: Well, you know, if I've gotten feedback from any group, any
single group, more than any other, it's from American educators, school
superintendents, teachers and whatnot. All of whom, you know, sense that
we're not really staying at the cutting edge, that we're not getting
this competition, and we're not strategizing enough about it. And it's
actually quite exciting, there's an incredible amount of experimentation
going on in education in America today. I'm actually an optimist. I'm
actually much more optimistic today than when you and I talked about the
book a year ago. Because I see the reaction not just to the book but to
the moment that the book describes. It's not one of triumphalism, not
"We'll be OK, we'll all be fine." No, no, it's "Whoa, the sky is
falling! Good, that's good." The sky actually isn't falling, you know,
it's not that bad. But that's good, the reaction has been immediate,
it's been energetic and it's been mobilized. And so what I've seen in
going out to schools is a tremendous amount of experimentation about
what is the right approach to improve our math, science fundamentals, to
get more young men and women into math and science. And so what I've
done, is I'm now updating the book, there'll be a new 2.0 version,
there'll be a new version of the book out in mid-April. It's just
expanded and updated, basically. And I've focused a lot, in this book,
this new version, on education, on what I call "the new middle." We knew
what the old middle-class jobs were. Well I would argue that in the flat
world, with certain things being outsourced and digitized, we now really
ought to think about what are the new middle jobs, because there's, we
need a middle class. So what will be the jobs? What I really did last
year, Nayan, was go around to American companies and say, "Who works
here? Him over there, what does he do? She looks like she's got an
interesting job, what's she up to?" And after enough of this, I
basically distilled, down to eight categories, what I called the
categories of the new middle. And these aren't specific jobs, you know,
widget operator here, you know. It's sort of broad categories, and these
will be the new categories of the new middle. I'll go through them very
quickly for you. One is great collaborators. When so many more things
are going to be made in global supply chains, the ability to be a great
collaborator, to be able to work cross-culturally and multinationally,
there's going to be a huge number of jobs around managing and
coordinating these global supply chains. Second are great leveragers,
people who can leverage technology, so one person can do the job of
twenty. Rather than competing with India or China, where twenty people
might do the job of one, you make up for the labor cost by leveraging
technology. Third are great explainers. Boy, there's going to be a whole
industry in explaining. Because there's enormous complexity out there,
so whether you're a teacher, a manager, a journalist, the ability to
explain this complexity is going be in huge demand. Fourth, I would call
great localizers. Great localizers are people who can localize the
global. What does that mean? They can take the power of this global
platform and turn it into a local business. Now that's everything from
the eBay entrepreneur, Mom and Pop who have now started a business on
eBbay, to the garage owner in New Haven, who goes online one day and
says to his partner, "Hey Bill, did you see this? We can get out hubcaps
for half-price from Romania at half the cost that it would take us to
get them from Rochester." So they're leveraging the global platform, by
localizing the global. There'll be a huge industry in that, Nayan.
Fifth, I'd say, are gonna be people who are great adapters. People who
can stay one step ahead of the forces of digitization and automation.
And that's going to apply to a lot of people in a lot of industries.
Sixth would be what I would call people who are passionate
personalizers. If you can bring real passion and a personal touch to any
vanilla task, there's going to be a job for you in the flat world.
Seventh I would call anything green. Nayan, anything green, and there is
a job for you in the twenty-first century. Because green technology is
going to be the industry of the 21st century. So those are some of the
categories that I'm looking at.

Next summer, the company will debut software that allows mobile phone novelists to integrate sounds and images into their story lines.

Adding visuals and vibrations to romance novels' steamy sex scenes could bring the genre an even wider audience.