Massive, open, online courses (MOOCs) have been hailed as a revolution in higher education but philosophers at San Jose State University (SJSU) have a different take. To them, the companies making MOOCs are higher education’s version of Walmart—powerful, irrepressible, and threatening to drive professors at smaller universities out of business.

They made this case in an open letter to Harvard University professor of philosophy Michael Sandel on April 29. Sandel teaches a MOOC class on social justice that is produced by edX, a non-profit MOOC collaboration between Harvard and MIT. Earlier in April, SJSU signed a contract to license edX content in its undergraduate classes. As part of that contract, the president of SJSU, Mohammad H. Qayoumi, asked the SJSU philosophy department to pilot Sandel’s JusticeX. The philosophy department refused—and in their open-letter to Sandel, they explained why.

In the first place, they argued, MOOCs are a poor way to learn. Good teaching, they explained, has to be personal and interactive but MOOCs are generic and uni-directional: Sandel lectures; his MOOC students listen. Due to similar concerns about MOOC pedagogy, this spring Amherst College became one of the first colleges to decline an invitation from edX to produce MOOC content.

The SJSU letter went on to explain that the real danger with MOOCs isn’t pedagogical—it’s that providers like edX and Coursera (a for-profit MOOC platform based in Silicon Valley) stand to undermine cash-strapped state university systems like California’s. “Let’s not kid ourselves,” the SJSU philosophy department wrote, “administrators at the [California State University] are beginning a process of replacing faculty with cheap online education.” And if this happens, they argued, MOOCs like Sandel’s could end up having a very unjust impact on higher education:

Should one-size-fits-all vendor-designed blended courses become the norm, we fear two classes of universities will be created: one, well-funded colleges and universities in which privileged students get their own real professor; the other, financially stressed private and public universities in which students watch a bunch of video-taped lectures.

Several days after the SJSU letter was published, Sandel issued a response. He explained that his goal with JusticeX was “simply to make an educational resource freely available” but acknowledged that concerns about MOOCs damaging public universities are legitimate. MOOCs are almost certainly here to stay, but the exchange between SJSU and Sandel demonstrates that after several years of feverish adoption, there are still a lot of issues to work out.

Vietnam native Diem Chau's sculptures are improbable from the start. There's no way it's possible, you'd think, to carve a gazelle on the tip of a pencil. But she does, and not just gazelles. Here's a fly, there's a chameleon. And not just on pencils. She has a whole series of crayon sculptures, too, depicting each letter of the alphabet and its representative figure--U is for urchin, H is for handstand. Yet her work prompts delight beyond technique. Pencils and crayons are creative tools and Chau's work suggests they have yearnings of their own: "I've always wanted to be a koala," says the green crayon; "Please remake me as an iguana," says orange.

Images courtesy of Diem Chau.

For 25 years Peter Payack of Cambridge ran a popular underground arts project called “Phone-a-Poem.” The concept was simple, but also quirky and subtle, like the medium it celebrated. Payack would mail cassettes to poets along with a note asking if they might record themselves reading one of their poems. According to an article in the Harvard Gazette, nearly everyone agreed, including some of the biggest names of the time, like Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, and Donald Hall. Payack, who is a poet himself, would then place the recorded poems in an answering machine. Anyone could call in and listen and many did—Phone-a-Poem received thousands of calls every week.

Payack ran Phone-a-Poem from 1976-2001. Now his cassettes are archived at Harvard University, and this spring they’ve been featured in an exhibit at the Woodberry Poetry Room in Lamont Library that concludes today. If you don’t make it over there in time, you can listen to six of the recordings below.

It remains to be seen what effect the Marathon bombing will have on participation in future years' races: Will more people try to run as a way to celebrate the triumph of a great event? Or will runners be scared away by the memory of this year's attack and the fear of future violence?

Participation in the Boston Marathon also hinges on the more general issue of how to set qualifying times. In 2011 race organizers lowered qualifying times by five minutes in order to pare the overwhelming number of people who were becoming eligible for the race (this year's race was the first where the new qualifying times were applied). A recent study published online in March in the Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance assessed the fairness of these qualifying times and found that different relative standards exist between men and women and across age groups.

Paul Vanderburgh of the University of Dayton compared men's and women's qualifying times for each age group to the world records in those categories. He found that the men's qualifying times were consistently about 50 percent slower than the world records for each age group, but that the relationship between world record and age group varied considerably for women. This led Vanderburgh to conclude that current qualifying standards are too lenient for women age 18-54, too strict for women age 55-80, and just right for men. However, he notes that if women's qualifying standards were changed to hew proportionally and consistently to world records as they do for men, about 40 percent fewer women would end up BQ'ing, leading to a dramatic gender imbalance in the overall field.

The economics department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, has long been known for producing unconventional research—and this month a trio of professors there made headlines with a new paper debunking arguably the most influential economics study of the last several years.

That influential study is “Growth in a Time of Debt,” by Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff (whose research about inflation was featured in Ideas in 2011), which argued that national debt hurts economic growth when the ratio of debt to GDP exceeds 90 percent. The paper was published in 2010, in the midst of economic debates on both sides of the Atlantic about the proper balance between fiscal stimulus and austerity. It was cited seemingly everywhere, including by Congressman Paul Ryan and high-ranking officials in the Eurozone, as proof that the only way out of our economic malaise was to start cutting government and paying down debt.

But the UMass economists—Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin-- found significant errors with Reinhart and Rogoff’s methods. These included data omissions, questionable decisions about how to weight data, and a coding error in the Excel spreadsheet Reinhart and Rogoff used to calculate their final results. The UMass team revised Reinhart and Rogoff’s calculations in light of these issues and found that when the adjustments are made, “average GDP growth at public debt/GDP ratios over 90 percent is not dramatically different than when debt/GDP ratios are lower.”

Reinhart and Rogoff responded quickly, on the Wall Street Journal’s economics blog and with a long op-ed in the New York Times. They acknowledged the coding error but disputed the other charges and said that their fundamental result remains in tact. For lay readers it can be hard to figure out which side has the stronger case. It helps to know, then, that both liberal economist Paul Krugman and libertarian economist Tyler Cowen have written that they find the UMass critique convincing.

The whole dust-up has also highlighted a basic issue present all along with Reinhart and Rogoff’s 2010 paper: It can’t speak to causality; that is, it can’t tell whether high debt slows economic growth or whether slow economic growth leads to high debt. Reinhart and Rogoff have acknowledged this limitation all along, but it was largely ignored in the initial rush around their paper. Now it’s getting more attention.

For the UMass economics department, this moment in the limelight is consistent with a long tradition of iconoclastic thinking. On April 24, Dylan Matthews of the Washington Post had a great piece on the history of the department. He explained how in the 1970s it was remade around a coterie of Keynesian and Marxist economists. Today, faculty members still concentrate on understudied research areas like feminist and LGBT economics, and on using empirical analysis to question tenets of economic thinking—which is just what they’ve done in this case.

For another good piece on the controversy, see John Cassidy's post at the New Yorker.

We’re used to controversies around the teaching of evolution but here’s one place you might be surprised to learn Darwinian thinking is still struggling to take hold: medical schools. It’s not that the medical establishment doubts evolution, it’s just that traditionally it hasn’t viewed it as particularly relevant to taking care of patients.

“It’s not too hard to demonstrate that doctors are ignorant about real fundamentals of evolution,” says Randolph Nesse. “They’d flunk their first quiz in an evolution course.”

Nesse, who teaches evolutionary biology at the University of Michigan and was trained as a physician, has for more than two decades been leading the charge to make evolution a bigger part of how doctors are trained. He argues medical schools do a good job teaching doctors the mechanisms by which diseases attack the body, but pay insufficient attention to the more general question of why our bodies have evolved with vulnerabilities to pathologies like cancer and diabetes in the first palce.

“A doctor who has a deep foundation in evolution will think different about disease,” says Nesse. “Instead of just seeing disease as some screw-up in the machine, they will ask of every disease, why didn’t natural selection make the body more resistant to this particular problem?”

Evolutionary thinking about health can be flimsy sometimes. Recent years have seen the rise of the so-called “paleodiet,” based on the idea that since most of our evolution took place in prehistoric time, we should eat like prehistoric people. In her new book “Paleofantasy” biologist Marlene Zuk reveals the lack of evidence supporting the paleodiet and other evolutionary health fads. For their part, evolutionary biologists say that their jobs are only made harder by this loose appropriation of their thinking.

“A lot of people in the lifestyle world want to use the label of evolutionary medicine to describe things that are loose-goosey,” says Stephen Stearns, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University and a leading advocate for evolutionary medicine. “It makes my life more difficult, because the more rigorous insights tend to get lumped in with the less rigorous insights.”

And it’s those more rigorous insights that proponents of evolutionary medicine claim medical students aren’t getting. Stearns, Nesse, and Jeffrey Flier, Dean of Harvard Medical School, were among 13 co-authors of a 2010 paper called “Making evolutionary biology a basic science for medicine.” The core of their argument is that evolutionary medicine provides doctors with a unified way to think about the human body, as opposed to considering each part of the body in terms of its discrete function. Evolutionary biologists also argue that evolutionary thinking has the potential to help crack some of the biggest health problems of our time, including the increase of autoimmune disorders, the rising menace of antibiotic resistance, and the intransigence of cancer.

Not everyone agrees. Skeptics of evolutionary medicine argue that understanding why human beings evolved with a vulnerability to something like obesity doesn’t change the way a doctor would treat an obese patient. They agree that evolutionary biology is a useful perspective for doctors to have, but don’t think it’s necessarily any more essential than many other disciplines vying for space in crowded medical school course schedules.

“I think evolutionary biology could be taught to a much greater extent, but as a dean who has many passions about education, there are many competing priorities for the time in the curriculum,” says Robert Alpern, Dean of Yale Medical School. As to whether additional medical training in evolution would improve the way doctors treat patients or conduct research, Alpern says, “I don’t think they’d change a lot.”

And this is one of the most interesting things of all about evolutionary medicine: how widely opinions differ about its usefulness. For evolutionary biologists like Nesse and Stearns, evolutionary medicine is tantamount to a revolution in the way we think about health and disease. For Alpern and others in the medical establishment, it’s an interesting perspective without significant practical implications that’s already being taught sufficiently in most medical schools.

There are signs that medicine is moving in the direction of evolutionary thinking. Both the revised Advanced Placement Biology curriculum and the new version of the MCAT, which debuts in 2015, will feature more questions about evolution. And Arizona State University, the University of California, San Francisco, and the University of California, Los Angeles all now have centers devoted to evolutionary medicine.

But overall, boosters of evolutionary medicine remain an insurgent force making a difficult argument—that medical school administrators de-emphasize evolutionary medicine because they don’t quite understand it.

What we want from the marathon bombing trial: Leon Neyfakh on why the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is likely to provide less closure than people may hope. Criminologists who’ve studied prosecutions in terrorism cases (like Timothy McVeigh’s for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing) find that seeing the perpetrator convicted does provide some emotional relief for the immediate victims of those crimes. However, trials usually provides less satisfaction for society at-large. Neyfakh writes, “While Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is, in one sense, an unfathomable monster…he’s also just one 19-year-old from Cambridge, and it’s hard to imagine punishing him in a way that would fully convey the weight of what he is accused of doing.”

A history of American dreams: Andrew Burstein on how the way Americans dream—and think about their dreams—has changed in the last couple hundred years. Burnstein, who is the author of the forthcoming title, “Lincoln Dreamt He Died: The Midnight Visions of ¬Remarkable Americans from Colonial Times to Freud,” explains that in the early 19th-century Americans viewed dreams as a symptom of physiological distress. By mid-century, though, people started thinking of dreams the way we do now—as expressions of deep-seated emotions that perhaps point the way to surprising personal truths. Mark Twain believed in the prophetic power of dreams, and Henry David Thoreau thought, “Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake."

Conversations with evil men: Gal Beckerman interviews James Dawes, author of the book Evil Men. Dawes interviewed former Japanese soldiers, now old men, who committed terrible crimes in World War II. Dawes describes the “vertiginous” experience of sitting across the table, sharing a meal, with men who by any other standard seem perfectly normal—while listening to them talk about the evil things they did in the past. Turning to the marathon bombings and the hints of sympathy that have been shown for the younger bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Dawes says, “Sympathy and understanding can coexist with the fullest punishments we are able to mete out as a culture. I don’t think they have to be opposed. And sympathy doesn’t have to mean forgiveness.”

At this year’s spelling bee, make way for meaning: Ben Zimmer on controversy around a late-breaking rule change for the 2013 Scripps National Spelling Bee—for the first time ever, contestants will have to answer multiple-choice vocabulary questions.

Plus: Kevin Lewis on how men with low-pitched voices are more likely candidates to become CEOs; how ambiverts—people halfway between extroverted and introverted—make the best salespeople; how limits on the sizes in which sugary drinks are sold can actually lead people to drink more than they otherwise would; and more.

Image: Japanese troops marching into Nanking, capital of China, after the city’s capture in 1937. Courtesy of Bettmann/Corbis.

Here’s an idea: If all 138 parking lots owned by the MBTA were covered with canopies layered with solar panels, could we help the environment and save money at the same time? Well, no.

A trio of researchers, including two from Boston University, worked through that thought experiment in a study published in March. They calculated that such a large network of solar panels would be capable of meeting nearly 14 percent of the total electricity demand in Massachusetts while sparing the atmosphere 54 tonnes of carbon dioxide. The photovoltaic canopies would also reduce something known as the urban heat island effect, by providing shade for nearly three million square meters of heat absorbing blacktop.

But here’s the bad news: The project would cost $1.46 billion to implement and, thanks to ongoing maintenance costs, almost none of that would end up being recouped by electricity revenue. Given that, the Boston University study does less to highlight an innovative energy strategy, and more to dramatize the tremendous economic obstacles to a renewable energy future.

UPDATE. Shortly after posting this I received an email from the MBTA explaining that in fact they are already moving ahead with plans to place solar photovoltaic systems at two sites: Readville Yard 5 in Dedham and Wonderland Garage in Revere. The systems will be built by Gehrlicher Solar America Corporation and will provide the MBTA with an estimated $48,900 in annual revenue.

Imagine the sound of an inkjet printer at work, the cartridge making a squeaky sweep across the page. Picture each little dot of ink placed just so on the paper and then, instead of a printer, imagine the whole process being done by hand. That's the concept behind The Human Printer, an aptly named artform cum business started by artists Louise Naunton Morgan and Stina Gromark (who together go by the name Stinsensqueeze). Customers submit digital images and a stable of highly-focused illustrators recreates them dot-by-dot using layers of four colors--cyan, magenta, yellow, and black--just the way a color printer would. The finished product looks grainy and slightly out of focus, perhaps reflecting the mental state of the illustrators just after they apply their last dots. Below, you can watch a time-lapse video of a print being created and see examples of the finished product.

H/T Design Taxi.

Images courtesy of Stinsensqueeze.

Every twelve years tens of millions of Hindus travel across India for a holy celebration. The event is known as the Kumbh Mela, and it is considered the largest migration of humanity on earth. It is also a unique laboratory—a kind of real-time experiment in metropolis building—that offers researchers the possibility to study just about any questions they can imagine.

“The challenge for researchers is to take this big phenomenon and reduce it to bite-size pieces, to find something to actually study and analyze,” says Tarun Khanna.

Khanna is a professor at Harvard Business School and director of Harvard’s South Asia Institute. He was among a group of about 50 Harvard faculty, staff, and students who traveled to the city of Allahabad in northern India for this year’s Kumbh Mela, which took place from January 14 to March 10. They came armed with data collection tools like geospatial mapping equipment, iPads, and even kites, and a huge range of research questions touching on everything from public health to urban design to how the price of a tomato gets set among the festival’s thousands of vendors.

As an object for social science research, the mela is irresistible. It takes place every twelve years at the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers, where pilgrims come from all over India to participate in ritual bathing (there are also smaller melas, which take place annually in other parts of India). The scale of the event is staggering. The mela has a steady population of a few million people spread over seven-and-a-half square miles of precisely organized encampment, but on a handful of main bathing days officials estimate the population surges towards 30 million—with as many as 80 million people attending over the 53 days of the festival.

One of the most important qualities of the mela, for researchers, is the speed at which it comes together. The festival site is covered for most of the summer with water from the Ganges, which is swollen by the monsoon rains. The water begins to recede in October, leaving government officials and NGO workers with only a couple of months to build the mela’s infrastructure—the roads, electrical grid, water, sanitation, and hygiene systems that will support those millions of people. During its peak days the mela is the largest city in the world, and it’s built nearly overnight.

“The research from our perspective is focusing on the question of how a temporary city is erected,” says Rahul Mehrotra, professor of urban planning and design at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and, along with Khanna and Diana Eck, professor of religion, one of the co-organizers of the mela research. “How does the infrastructure get embedded, what is the metabolism of the temporary city, what are the flows, how do people move.”

Beginning last July, Mehrotra and his research team mapped the evolution of the temporary city. They lofted digital cameras on kites in order to get an aerial perspective of the mela’s development, and they mounted a camera atop a car and mapped several blocks of the festival’s road grid. This effort produced a tremendous database of images, and now Mehrotra is figuring out what to do with it all.

“The challenge now is really how one organizes it to make some sense so that it can be used effectively as a planning tool for the future,” Mehrotra says. Mehrotra is doing some of that work through a research seminar he’s teaching this semester on temporary settlements, that includes case studies of the Kumbh Mela, Burning Man, and refugee and concentration camps.

Data collection was at the heart of Satchit Balsari’s time at the mela, too. Balsari is a fellow at Harvard’s FXB Center for Health and Human Rights and a physician at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. At the mela, he and his researchers wanted to develop a system that would allow for up-to-date disease surveillance at such a large, chaotic event—in order to improve the deployment of healthcare resources and head off epidemics before they started.

“The issue with most of these massive gatherings,” Balsari says, “is their inability to pick up epidemics because the volumes of people are so large and the denominator fluctuates so significantly everyday. Especially at the mela, you can be off by millions of people in a matter of days.”

If epidemiologists don’t know the size of the population they’re studying, it’s impossible to tell whether an increase in diseases like diarrhea or malaria are due to an actual epidemic, or simply to an influx of people. To parse between those possibilities, Balsari’s researchers monitored four of the mela’s 15 hospitals. Using iPads, they logged every new patient and created daily reports of disease incidence. Balsari knew that if cases of all diseases rose and fell together, the changes were likely explained by changes in the overall population of the festival. But, if one particular disease spiked while the others remained constant, it would be a good sign that an epidemic was afoot.

Overall, this year’s mela was relatively healthy, and Balsari credits the festival’s organizers for thoughtful hygiene planning that limited cases of diarrhea and e. coli infection.

“They had 35,000 temporary toilets and latrines,” he says. “But they knew that some villagers would not be comfortable using them, some of them would want to use open-defecation pits, so they factored in these 1,000 night soil sweepers whose only job was, every hour, all day long, to walk around these defecation sites, pick up the soil, and cover it with lime.”

Now back in Cambridge, the researchers’ attention has turned to data management. Tarun Khanna is working with India’s mobile phone providers to get access to cellphone records from the mela. He says it would be the largest database of its kind, and might allow organizers, for the first time, to get an accurate picture of the mela’s population: how many people come, where they come from, how long they stay. But he acknowledges that the principle challenges will be simply figuring out how to manage so much data and extract useful information from it.

Over the next few months the researchers will be tagging and sorting images, analyzing patient flows at hospitals, breaking down cellphone data, and generally trying to wrestle their mela research into something useful—both for improving the next mela, in 2025, and for understanding how temporary settlements operate anywhere in the world. They plan to release preliminary findings at a seminar hosted by the South Asia Institute in August.

*There’s no easy way to get a sense of an event as massive as the mela, but this clip of the ambient noise at the festival helps. Satchit Balsari describes the sound this way:

There is a kind of sound of the mela, where you wake up in the morning to a buzz of a million voices talking. In terms of white noise, it’s a sound you have not heard before, a din of a very concentrated dense population having regular conversation. What gives cadence to this white noise is this continuous rhythmic chanting from morning to night of names of people who have been lost.

You can read more about this research at the Harvard team's blog, Mapping the Kumbh Mela.

Audio clip courtesy of Logan Plaster for the Harvard Kumbh Mela Team.

Image courtesy of Seba Della and Sole Bossio.

Interactive installations are hot these days. In December I blogged about Textscapes, a wall of words at the Vienna International Airport that changes in response to the number of people walking through the terminal at any given time. Now comes Fluidic, an interactive light sculpture designed by WhiteVOID and the Hyundai Advanced Design Center that debuted at Milan Design Week earlier this month. The installation contains 12,000 luminescent spheres, suspended together to make a kind of alluringly amorphous organic form. Lights and lasers play off the spheres, and a 3D scanning system detects spectators' body heat, allowing onlookers to use gestures to manipulate the light patterns that evolve across the spheres. If you get into it, my sense is that the installation allows you to feel as though you're interacting with something primordially essential, or maybe, instead, a kind of benign and welcoming futuristic life form.

Via Colossal.

Images courtesy of Fluid Sculpture in Motion.

Last Sunday the Ideas section included several articles about the qualities that make cities great, and how those qualities--like trust and openness--are tested by events like the Marathon bombing. In that light, maybe it's appropriate that in the midst of last week's chaos, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), which promises to make the world's books free and accessible to all, went live.

Two years ago Ideas ran an interview with Robert Darnton, director of Harvard University's library system, and the person who conceived the idea of the DPLA. Darnton explained in that interview that he was inspired to create the DPLA in response to the tremendous progress Google Books was making towards digitizing all the world's books. While he appreciated what Google Books was doing, he worried that having such a trove of information monopolized by a for-profit company ultimately did not serve the public good. And so he set out to create an alternative--a digital public library that would bring together digital content, including books, documents, audio clips, and photographs, from public libraries around the country.

The idea proved to be irresistible. The DPLA quickly attracted support from foundations and partner libraries like the National Archives and the New York Public Library. It took just two-and-a-half years for Darnton's idea to become a reality, and last Thursday the DPLA officially opened it's Internet doors to the world. (The launch of the DPLA was to have been inaugurated with a party last week at the Boston Public Library that was canceled on account of the bombing and is being rescheduled for this fall.)

As a user, approaching the DPLA can seem daunting: Where do you start among so much content, especially when you can't get even a rough physical sense of what's there? There are any number of different ways. You can look at the DPLA's "Exhibitions," which pull content into themes (current exhibitions include Boston Sports Temples and Prohibition in the United States). Or use the Library Observatory app to browse the different collections under the DPLA umbrella. Or, you can just begin searching. I began by typing in "Western irrigation" on account of the novel Angle of Repose which I've been reading. The DPLA came back with 78 results, including a report from the 1890 census on "Agriculture by irrigation in the Western Part of the United States," a handbook for arid agriculture, and a historical text on the Mormon role in irrigation.

The possibilities would seem to be exciting. You can enter the library here.

Richard Grossman is an economic historian at Wesleyan University and a recently announced winner of a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship. He studies banking and banking regulation and is the author of the 2010 book "Unsettled Account" and the author of the forthcoming title, “Wrong: Nine Economic Policy Disasters and What We Can Learn From Them" that will be published by Oxford University Press this October. Last Friday he got on the phone with Ideas to talk about his new book, his research plans for his time as a Guggenheim Fellow, and a host of current economic issues, from bank bailouts to Benjamin Bernanke to the future of the Euro. What follows is a transcript of that conversation, lightly edited for clarity.

Ideas: You have a book coming out this October about economic policy disasters and what we can learn from them. Tell me about that.

Richard Grossman: I found nine economic policy mistakes over the last couple hundred years and did a sort of economic autopsy to explain why they happened and find themes that runs through the mistakes.

Ideas: What did you find?

RG: The main theme seems to be that things go really wrong when policymakers are taken up by ideology. For example, if some percent of your political party sign a pledge saying they would never under any circumstances vote to raise taxes, I would say that is based purely on ideology. My book is sort of a plea for non-ideological, analysis-based economic policy.

Ideas: How successfully do you think the Obama administration has pursued non-ideological economic policy?

RG: I’m not in love with everything they’ve done but I would say they have been relatively non-ideological. It’s clear [with the Democrats] that there is no “we will never do X” where X is some basic thing like raising taxes that governments have been doing for hundreds of years.

Ideas: You have a positive view of Ben Bernanke’s tenure as Chairman of the Federal Reserve. What do you like about what he’s done?

RG: A few things. One is transparency. If you had told me or any economist twenty years ago that the Chairman of the Federal Reserve was going to have a news conference four times a year to explain what they’ve done we would have said you’re crazy. Before World War II most of the central banks in the world were technically private institutions and the guys running them really weren’t accountable to anyone. It’s like glasnost, they’ve become more transparent. It’s not just that it’s good for citizens, it’s also good policymaking for the Fed to make clear what it’s going to do.

Ideas: You’ve written about how bankers in the past have responded to bailouts. After the collapse of Lehman Brothers there were worries that bailouts would end up abetting the same bad behavior in the future. What does history tell us about that?

RG: I believe bailouts do encourage bad behavior but it’s not just the bailouts themselves. Economics is all about incentives and when you line incentives up badly you get in trouble. It used to be in this country before the Great Depression that if you owned shares in a bank and the bank went out of business not only would you lose the shares, the bankruptcy court could come to you and make you pay an additional amount. Now they talk about this as “skin in the game,” which means the more the burden of excessive risk taking is placed on the people making the decisions, the more careful they’re going to be about making those decisions.

The conclusion I draw from this is we have to be very careful about getting the incentives right. In the early 2000s, when we cut taxes three times in four years, when we increased spending on two wars, when we had really easy monetary policy, way easier than any of the standard models tell us we should have, and the regulation was being loosened, I think it was a recipe for disaster. The incentives [to take risks] were so strong.

Ideas: You’ve also written about the financial problems in Europe. Some people are saying that the dissolution of the Euro is inevitable. Do you agree?

RG: No. The Euro was a mistake but now that they’re in it there are too many incentives to maintain it. The Greeks don’t want to get out because if they get out more money is going to flee the country—people estimate their GDP might fall by another quarter. And the Germans for sure don’t want to get out because if they get out, it’s going to be very difficult for them to find anyone to buy Mercedes-Benzes outside of Germany ever again.

Ideas: Why would leaving the Euro kill German exports?

RG: They would have to have a new currency. Suppose they reintroduce the German mark. The German mark would become extremely valuable, and when the value of your currency is very expensive it makes the price of your exports very expensive to people who buy them.

Ideas: Looking ahead, what do you plan to do during your time as a Guggenheim Fellow?

RG: One thing I’m interested in is, if a state had a particular regulation 50, 100, 150 years ago, does it affect the regulations that they have today? When California was set up, for example, it had no usury laws—you could lend money at whatever rate you wanted—but if you were in Massachusetts there were very strict lending limits. The question is, can we look across states over time and see if there are things from when they began regulating that persist until today.

Vulnerability in an open city: Ideas editor Stephen Heuser on how the same characteristics that make cities vulnerable to tragedies also make them great. In urban life, everyday we interact with strangers, on the subway, on the street. Recent research shows that this open quality of cities is what makes them so dynamic; it’s why so many new ideas originate in cities, and why 90 percent of our gross domestic product comes from our densest urban areas. Heuser writes, “It is possible to see dynamism and risk as flip sides of the same coin.”

The disaster network: Ideas deputy editor Amanda Katz on how, from 9/11 to the Boston bombing, technology has changed the way we respond to mass tragedies. Katz was near the World Trade Center on 9/11 and she recalls how in the chaos, cellphone networks were overwhelmed and people posted “homemade fliers, pleading for leads on missing loved ones.” Technological changes since 9/11 meant that last Monday, though, we barely had to wait a minute to find out if people we knew were safe. “What’s the value of millions of people not spending hours in stomach-turning suspense, but being able to find loved ones and reach out to strangers immediately?” Katz writes. “It’s hard to quantify. But when I think back to the blank, solitary morning I spent on Sept. 11, I can only give thanks for the astonishing, vital network we have built in the 12 years since.”

How cities reshape themselves when trust vanishes: Thanassis Cambanis on what happens when fear takes over a city. He writes about Baghdad, where fear has completely reordered life: public places have shut-down, ethnic neighborhoods have turned into self-contained sub-cities, and residents have given up urban amusements to gain just a little more security. He also writes about how fear has created a similarly stark transformation in Beirut, where he lives now.

We are all Bostonians now: Maria Konnikova on how events like the Boston bombing demonstrate that many psychology experts have misunderstood urban social dynamics. Psychology pioneer Stanley Milgram wrote about how urban life deforms social bonds, but the collective response to the marathon bombing shows that cities also draw us together. Konnikova thinks about all the generosity exhibited among strangers this past week. She writes, “In the face of extreme circumstances, we recategorize ourselves. Our personal sense of self recedes, and instead, a new, collective sense of who we are rises to the fore.”

Why surreal took over: Ben Zimmer on the words people turn to after tragedies. Right after the bombing last Monday, users searching Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary entered words like “casualty” and “incendiary,” but by the evening a new word was trending: “surreal.” Zimmer looks at why we use “surreal” to describe events we can’t understand. He writes, “When there are no words, ‘surreal’ ends up working as a proxy for more complex, inchoate emotions that are difficult to verbalize.”

Image of a crowd in London for Margaret Thatcher's funeral courtesy of Lisa MacGregor/Reuters.

Bedbugs are one of the great menaces of our time, seemingly as easy to catch as the common cold, and impossible to eradicate without turning your life upside down. But at long last, hope arrives, in the form of a new study touting an old remedy for this insidious pest.

The study, which was published on April 10 in the Journal of the Royal Society and discussed earlier this week on the Smithsonian’s blog, examined an unlikely counter-bedbug strategy: kidney bean leaves. The authors report that bean leaves have long been used to combat bedbugs in Eastern Europe, where afflicted homeowners scatter the leaves around their beds at night, the bugs crawl over them and get stuck, and then the leaves are burned in the morning. In the current study the researchers, from the University of Kentucky and the University of California, Irvine, used a scanning electron microscope to observe exactly why the method works—they found that kidney bean leaves are covered with tiny hooked hairs called trichomes, which pierce the legs of the assaulting bedbugs, holding them fast.

How is it possible that such a basic solution has been hiding in plain sight all this time? The authors explain that kidney bean leaves actually received a burst of attention in 1943 with the release of a study called “The action of bean leaves against the bedbug.” But they conjecture that in the chaos of World War II, and with bedbugs receding as a public health concern in the 1950s thanks to the flagrant application of pesticides like DDT, people quickly forgot about the remedy.

But now bedbugs are back and perhaps kidney bean leaves can teach us how to stop them. The researchers used their analysis to build traps that mimicked the impaling action of the hairs, but they found that even their best designs were less effective than the real leaves at stopping bedbugs. They expressed hope that other researchers would improve on their trap designs, but in the meantime, gather kidney bean leaves while you can—the rush is on!

Via The Browser.

Image of a bedbug courtesy of the Centers for Disease Control and Wikimedia Commons.

It's not that unusual to hear free-market-minded economists argue for the legalization of drugs, but few do it with quite the gusto of Harvard professor Jeffrey Miron. In a March interview with the German newspaper Der Spiegel, Miron made several familiar legalization arguments-- that legalization would lead people to safer drug use (more smoking, less injecting), fill government coffers through increased taxation and reduced law enforcement costs, and put an end to the crime and violence that flourishes in a black market environment.

But Miron went further than that. He argued that we violate the basic American principle of self-determination by prohibiting people from doing something they enjoy doing. The Der Spiegel reporter replied that maybe it's good to protect people from themselves sometimes, and, also, one man's drug use is the rest of society's problem. Miron replied that the "prohibition lobby exaggerates substantially to help it achieve its goals." He referenced research which indicates that drugs are less addictive, less dangerous to users' health, and less likely to cause antisocial behaviors like aggression than conventional wisdom has it.

And the picture he paints of a legalized world is downright sunny. Miron estimates that if drugs were legalized the U.S. government would save $85-$90 billion per year, the national murder rate would fall by 25 percent, and we wouldn't see any real increase in drug use (on that last point he cites the case of Portugal, where drugs were legalized several years ago and he says rates have barely budged). Miron does allow, however, that legalization would change his own behavior. "If drugs were legal tomorrow," he said, "I'd go out and give them all a try. I doubt I would use them more than once; but after all the research I have done on this issue, I am curious!"

Read the rest of the interview here.

"You look really good in cardboard." It's not a compliment we're used hearing, but it might become more common if more people saw Italy-based artist Chris Gilmour's work. For the last decade Gilmour has created life-size replicas of a whimsical range of objects out of cardboard and glue: microscopes, roadsters, guitars, typewriters, drum sets. His work, which exhibited last month as part of the art festival SCOPE New York 2013, lends a palpable degree of nobility to the workaday objects he recreates with it. The intricate detailing of each piece and the nostalgic brown finish invite you into Gilmour's cardboard world- a place, maybe, where there's winking magic in every object, and people pray it never rains.

Images courtesy of Chris Gilmour.

A lot of romance surrounds hackers. We’re drawn to the idea of the lone savant burrowing his way into a computer system by pluck and ingenuity—not with any nefarious intent, but just to see if it can be done.

Hacker romance is at the heart of a thoroughly enjoyable review of Phil Lapsley’s new book “Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell,” which ran in the Los Angeles Review of Books on April 11. It tells the story of an underground community of hackers who, for two decades, used high-pitched chirps and beeps to turn the AT&T phone network into their own personal playground.

As reviewer Jason Brown explains, in the 1940s and 1950s phone companies shifted from human switchboard operators to an automated system in which machines used “control signals” to route calls. The main signal was a high-pitched 2600 hertz tone that signaled that “a phone was on the book and should not be billed.” But in the late-1950s a seven-year-old blind kid with perfect pitch named Joe Engressia figured out how to whistle that tone exactly, confusing the automated system and allowing him to make free phone calls. The hacker pastime that came to be known as “phone phreaking” was born.

Over the next twenty years phone phreakers proliferated, publishing manuals, swapping tips, and talking with each other in these newly created blind spots in the phone network. Most of the phone phreakers were mischievous but harmless. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were phone phreakers. The most famous phone phreaker of all was John Draper, who went by the name “Captain Crunch”—a handle inspired by the kids’ breakfast cereal that, during that period, happened to come packaged with whistles that sounded at precisely 2600 hertz.

But not everyone got into phone phreaking for the fun of it. Lapsley’s book details how mafia bookies, whose business required lots of expensive long-distance calls, quickly adopted the practice. In the 1960s AT&T began trying to root out phone phreakers and in 1976 Captain Crunch went to jail solely for playing games on the phone network.

Brown explains that Lapsley’s book is a romantic look at an antiquated hobby and also a warning note. Today, as the recent, tragic case of Aaron Swartz demonstrated, the federal government has no sense of humor about hacking, regardless of the motives that inspire it. Lapsley posits AT&T’s crackdown on phone phreaking in the 1960s as the moment when that sensibility began to take hold.

It's often noted that most marriages these days are between people with similar educational backgrounds: College graduates marry college graduates; high school dropouts marry high school dropouts. Sociologists call this type of sorting "endogamy"- the practice of marrying people who are like you- and they argue that this trend has the effect of reinforcing inequality in America by segregating the haves and have-nots into distinct communities that don't mix.

Earlier this month on his blog Family Unequal, University of Maryland sociologist Philip Cohen published two charts that neatly summarize the state of marriage and education for people who tied the knot in 2011. Cohen created separate charts, which are based on the 2011 American Community Survey, for men and women because women are slightly more likely to marry down the educational ladder than men (in part because women earn more college degrees than men). As you'll see, the segregating trend is true broadly, with 71 percent of college graduates marrying other college graduates. It is also true on a more fine-grained level: 48 percent of women who drop out of high school marry another high school dropout; 25 percent of women with a PhD marry another PhD.

These marriage groupings likely owe as much to who we hang out with as to strong personal biases against inter-educational mixing: Doctoral students study alongside each other for years, and high school dropouts probably spend a lot of the time they're not in school with other people who made the same choices.

Michael Crichton's "Jurassic Park" set an entire generation to thinking: Is it really possible to bring extinct species back to life? The answer for dinosaurs is still, sadly, no, but as an article by Carl Zimmer in this month's National Geographic explains, biologists are getting a lot closer to resurrecting a number of other animal species that have previously been wiped from the planet.

The trouble with dinosaur resurrection is that T-Rex and his friends died off too long ago and all their cells have decayed. But for more near-term extinctions, it's relatively easy to find cellular material that can serve as the basis for what researchers call "de-extinction." For example, the National Geographic article makes it sound like you can't dig anywhere in the Siberian permafrost without hitting meat locker-size pieces of wooly mammoth tissue. And the educated hope is that that tissue will serve as a seed that brings wooly mammoths back to life 10,000 years after they last walked the earth.

The process for de-extinction is roughly the same whether you're after a mammoth, a Chinese river dolphin, or a passenger pigeon (which went extinct via BB gun in 1900). First, find intact cells. Second, reprogram those cells so that they operate like an embryo. Third, implant that embryonic material in the closest surviving relative of the extinct animal and hope the pregnancy takes.

Scientists are pretty good at finding and reprogramming cells. It’s the last step that’s the hardest. In the case of the wooly mammoth, researchers from the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation in Seoul and the North-Eastern Federal University in Siberia intend to insert a mammoth nucleus into an elephant egg that has been emptied of its own nucleus, and then to implant that egg back into an elephant. The only problem, as the article explains, is that no one has ever successfully harvested an egg from an elephant, let alone re-implanted one. A new mammoth may be some time off, but the article explains that a secretive lab in Australia which runs something called the Lazarus Project may have already achieved de-extinction with the quirky gastric brooding frog, which went extinct in the 1980s.

Zimmer’s article builds up a lot of enthusiasm for de-extinction but it also raises a number of serious questions that surround the research. One of the more dampening ones concerns the actual definition of de-extinction. Is it enough just to recreate an animal in a lab, or does the species have to flourish in the wild before we can really say we’ve brought it back to life? And if a species does have to flourish in the wild, what do we do in situations where a de-extinct animal’s natural habitat doesn’t really exist any more? Do we throw it into a new environment, and what may be the unintended ecological consequences of doing that?

All of this is to say that what’s true in your own life is likely true in de-extinction research: It’s relatively easy to find your old address, and much harder to really go back home.

Image of mammoth skeleton courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.