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CNN traveled to "shark alley" off the coast of South Africa, one of the best places in the world to see great whites.

 

 Shark tourism has become big business, bringing in more than $30 million every year to South Africa.

The experience is a major draw for tourists, but it's controversial. Local surfers and swimmers say it is changing shark behavior and may be causing more attacks.

Anderson Cooper swam with these great white sharks -- without a cage -- as part of his report for "Planet in Peril: Battle Lines," airing Thursday at 9 p.m. ET on CNN.

He talked about the experience Thursday morning with "American Morning" anchors John Roberts and Kiran Chetry.

Anderson Cooper: We went diving with great white sharks. There is a big controversy over whether or not these cage tour operators are actually changing sharks' behavior. They chum the water to attract the sharks, tourists get in the water, and so we had the opportunity to go cage diving and also to go free diving with the sharks, which is a pretty rare thing. There's not many people on the planet who actually do it, probably for very smart reasons.

You'll see that tonight on "Planet in Peril." Actually, swimming with great white sharks without a cage, which is among the most remarkable experiences of my life, I've got to say. Anderson dives with great whites »

Kiran Chetry: What do they call that, a free dive with sharks?

Cooper: Yeah, we went free diving with the sharks. The water is chummed with blood, so it's bloody water, and I was just about to get in, and I turned to the guy and said, "Do you have any recommendations?'" And he said, "Project confidence." See how great white sharks are lured to the surface »

Chetry: There you go. Thanks.

John Roberts: He also told you not to breathe, right, because they don't like the noise of the bubbles?

Cooper: Right, they don't like air bubbles.

Roberts: So, meantime you're down there hyperventilating.

Cooper: It's all well and good to say "OK, don't take a breath," but your heart is beating so fast when a huge great white shark is close to you, that you can't hold your breath. So I was actually breathing more and causing more air bubbles. And the sharks open up their mouths and extend their jaws when they're nervous, and that makes me very nervous.

Roberts: You're reminded of when Roy Scheider [in the movie "Jaws"] said, "We're gonna need a bigger boat."

Cooper: For me, I think it was, "I need to get back in the boat."

In my last column, I argued that all infrastructure investment is not the same. If we are to embark on massive investments to stimulate the economy, we should do so with an eye toward producing benefits in the long term. And I argued that education is one such investment.

This assertion generated a lot of pushback from people who feel passionately that any stimulus package should focus on creating jobs right now. Clearly that's important, but it is also not a long-term fix, particularly when the jobs to be created are not likely to be the high-quality, long-term career positions that make for a successful economy. From this perspective, investing in human capital is the way to go. This is not just opinion--there is a lot that we know about the returns to investing in human capital, and we know more and more all the time about which investments yield good returns.

The most essential reading on this topic is The Race Between Education and Technology, by Claudia Golden and Lawrence Katz. Goldin and Katz give a broad historical view of the role of education in economic growth in the U.S. They make the case that, after a century of leading the world in supplying the educated workers needed to serve technology, the U.S. has fallen behind in education. There is other important research by James Heckman of the University of Chicago and Arthur Rolnick of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minnesota on the returns to early childhood education.

Any discussion of investments in education with the goal of preparing the workforce of the future needs to begin in early childhood. In the first five years of life, children undergo tremendous development. If children receive support for growth in language, development of motor skills, social skills and emotional support, they are more likely to succeed in school subsequently and to later contribute to society. Absent that kind of early development, children are more likely to drop out of school, commit crimes and require support from the welfare system. These are the costs that society bears.

Estimates are that early childhood education programs that are focused on children at risk produce returns of as much as 7%-16%, a large portion of which are social returns. This is a good investment. Some of these returns will be lost if the K-12 education system is broken and some of the disappointing results on the benefits of Head Start programs are due to deficiencies in the school systems that the children encounter subsequently. Clearly more has to be done at this level.

Education, as we all know, is a cumulative process. Thus, calling for a highly educated workforce implies, almost by definition, that individuals receive both early childhood development and a solid education from kindergarten on up. Programs like Head Start are important, but without a strong K-12 education that builds upon those accomplishments, students will not be ready to move on to college education.

Unfortunately, as Goldin and Katz document, we have faltered--and even fallen behind--in K-12 education by many measures. One example is that the secondary school graduation rate has declined significantly in the last 25 years.

Watch your back, Monkey Boy. You may have messed with the wrong bunch of PC builders.

A court filing unsealed Thursday as part of a class-action lawsuit against Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) revealed that Hewlett-Packard (nyse: HPQ - news - people ) Chief Executive Mark Hurd e-mailed Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer to complain about HP's "call lines being overrun," with customers struggling to upgrade to Vista. "I'm sure you're aware of this," Hurd added.

The full text of the e-mail has not yet been released, but Hurd's complaints to Ballmer are the latest signs of escalating tensions between HP and Microsoft caused by the launch of Windows Vista in 2007.

The lawsuit accuses Microsoft of slapping labels on PCs that said the machines were Vista-capable when they didn't have the processing power needed to run some of the operating system's most touted features.

E-mails released Nov. 14 as part of the case show Richard Walker, the head of HP's PC business, hinting at the customer trouble to come in a Feb, 1, 2006, e-mail to Ballmer and other members of Microsoft's management team.

I hope this incident isn't a foretaste of the relationship I will have with Microsoft going forward, but I can tell you that it's left a very bad taste," Walker wrote. "The decision you have made has taken away an investment we made consciously for competitive advantage knowing that some players would choose not to."

That e-mail triggered panic at Microsoft. Jim Allchin, then co-president of Microsoft's platforms and services division, quickly sent a follow-up note to Ballmer. "I am beyond being upset here," he wrote.