Another great radio piece by Emily Hanford (I caught the end of what I assume was just part of it on the NPR afternoon news show on Sunday) here (audio and transcript both there). She reports the research on the effectiveness of lectures in prompting actual learning: not much. Anyone reading who lectures must listen to/read it. A long excerpt (followed by some comments):

Lecturing was the way just about everyone taught introductory physics. To think there was something wrong with the lecture meant physics instructors would “have to really change the way they do things,” says Hestenes. A lot of them ignored his study and kept teaching the way they always had. They insisted their lectures were working just fine. But Eric Mazur was unusual, says Hestenes. “He was the first one who took it to heart.” Mazur is a physics professor at Harvard University. He came across Hestenes’s articles in 1990, five years after they’d been published. To understand why the articles had such a big impact on Mazur you have to know some things about his history. Mazur grew up dreaming of becoming an astronomer.

“When I was five years old I fell in love with the universe,” he says. “I tried to get my hands on to every accessible book on astronomy. I was so excited by the world of science.” But when Mazur got to university, he hated the astronomy classes.”It was all sitting in the lecture, and then scribbling down notes and cramming those notes and parroting them back on the exam,” he says. “Focusing on the details, focusing on memorizing and regurgitation, the whole beauty of astronomy was lost.” So he switched to physics. It wasn’t as heartbreaking for him to sit in a physics lecture and memorize things. Mazur eventually got a Ph.D. in physics and a job at Harvard University. Like most Ph.D.s, Mazur never got any training in how to teach.

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The Internet Society (ISOC) is twenty years old in 2012. ISOC is a nonprofit with offices in Washington DC and Geneva, and operations around the world. It was created almost as an afterthought by two of the people who helped start the Internet itself; Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn. This was a far-sighted act to help keep the Internet open and evolving, not just in Europe and North America, but all over the world. Ten years ago, a deal was struck to channel into ISOC the surplus funds from running dot ORG. ISOC has expanded rapidly since then, but kept a tight focus on doing more of what it does best.

ISOC does essential work campaigning for public policies that keep the Internet open and offering technical training, especially in developing countries. It has hundreds of local chapters around the world that teach people how to build out the Internet and develop their own professional and technical leadership skills. The chapters push for open and ready access in their own countries and feed in information and viewpoints to ISOC’s global advocacy work.

But let me step aside from how ISOC would probably describe itself, and put some less modest flesh on these bones.
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I have piece in the National Interest about developments in non-carbon based energy. It ran under the headline “The end of the nuclear renaissance”, but that’s only half the story and probably the less interesting half. The real news of 2011 was the continued massive drop in the price of solar PV, which renders obsolete any analysis based on data before about 2010. In particular, anyone who thinks nuclear is the most promising candidate to replace fossil fuels really needs to recalibrate their views. There’s a case to be made for nuclear as a backstop option, but it’s not nearly as strong as it was even two years ago.

Since John wrote his post below, Mark Lilla has come out with a “lengthy attempted rebuttal”:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jan/12/republicans-revolution/?pagination=false of Corey Robin’s argument. Even as New York Review of Books articles by creaky centrist-liberals go, it’s a terrible essay – see further “Alex Gourevitch”:http://jacobinmag.com/blog/2012/01/wrong-reaction/. Even as _Mark Lilla essays on the American right_ (a category that includes a plenitude of incompetent arguments) go, it’s awful. Two things that I think are worth adding to Alex’s takedown.
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Two months ago, I wrote a post which argued, among other things, that the European Union used to be run according to the ‘Community Method’ (according to which member states often used to defer to each other on matters of vital interest, and the Commission had an important role), had moved to the so-called ‘Union Method’ (under which member states were supposed to do stuff on their own, in practice being led by France and Germany), and was now transitioning towards the `ECB Method’ (under which the European Central Bank determined politics). I suggested that this was going to be untenable, and hoped that we might see a push instead towards greater democracy. Well, we didn’t get one. Instead, what we’re getting is the ECB method on steroids. By supporting bank borrowing rather than sovereign state borrowing, the ECB has managed to prop up the system without openly changing its mandate. But by doing this under the table, and without very much in the way of an officially stated long term policy, it has retained and indeed arguably dramatically expanded its political clout.

I don’t have sufficient expertise to make strong claims about whether this will be a sustainable way of propping up bond markets for any significant period of time. What I am convinced of is that it will be a political disaster. As Cosma Shalizi and I argued (Cosma puts it “much better”:http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/838.html than I did) about libertarian paternalism, the problem is that it “break[s] the feedback mechanisms which (1) keep policy-makers accountable to those over whom they exercise power, and (2) allow[s] policy-makers to tell whether what they are doing is working, and revise their initial policies and plans in light of experience.” This dynamic can be extended to explain why the European Central Bank is making a complete hash of the European economy. I’ve spoken to people at the European Central Bank – they are very smart, and very sincerely believe that the best path to long term prosperity is through enforced austerity. They are also – by design – nearly completely insulated from democratic pressure. And despite claiming that they are apolitical, they are in fact playing a profoundly political role, dictating the kinds of domestic institutional reforms that states need to implement if they want to continue getting ECB support.

This means that ECB decision makers are under no very great obligation to think about why they might be wrong, up to the point where complete disaster occurs. And disaster is very likely, if the lessons of the gold standard in pre-World War II Europe tell us anything at all. Enforced austerity does not produce economic growth. What it does produce is political instability.

This is why we should be deeply skeptical of claims for technocracy as a way of making political decisions. Technocracy is supposed to work better because it is insulated from political pressure. But exactly because of that, it is liable to go off the rails when left to its own devices. Expertise is a very good thing – when it is leavened by democratic accountability. When it is not, it is likely to be responsive instead to its own internal discourses and understanding of the world, which can lead it in some very problematic directions. It isn’t just that the eurozone is an experiment in the economic virtues of imposed austerity (as a means of creating confidence and hence a by-its-own-bootstraps cycle of virtuous growth). It’s that the experiment is already visibly failing. And it’s that despite this visible failure, there is little chance of any reversal of direction, because those who have the power to set the course have no obligation to listen to anyone else, and hence aren’t listening.