Last week in Vienna, where Beethoven, Haydn, and Mahler once walked, scholars came together to argue about Radiohead, file sharing, and the economics of music.

At a conference known as Vienna Music Business Research Days, two American economists renewed their long-running dispute about whether or not peer-to-peer file sharing is responsible for the worldwide decline in CD sales.

The quarrel centers on a widely cited paper by Felix Oberholzer-Gee, a professor at the Harvard Business School, and Koleman Strumpf, who now teaches at the University of Kansas. Mr. Oberholzer-Gee and Mr. Strumpf argued that file sharing does not have a net negative effect on the recorded-music industry. They arrived at that conclusion by examining the relationships among American record sales, American file sharing, and school holidays in Germany during the last quarter of 2002. (If file sharing injures CD...

"Within the confines of the lecture hall, no other virtue exists but plain intellectual integrity," wrote Max Weber.

That may be so. But some of Weber's intellectual grandchildren—i.e., the leaders of the American Sociological Association—believe that it also helps if instructors bring to their lecture halls a well-designed syllabus and a decent idea of how to engage students with the material.

To promote those smaller virtues, the association has just unveiled Trails, a digital repository where sociologists can post syllabi, lesson plans, bibliographies, and other teaching resources. The site already holds more than 2,700 items, and its doors are open for new submissions.

Not every submission will be automatically archived. Materials will be assessed by peer-review committees for their fidelity to a set of principles of high-quality teaching that have been identified by the...

Add this to the reasons you might not want to allow texting in your classroom:

Above the Law, a legal blog, reports that a Georgetown University law professor unwittingly caused a national media frenzy on Thursday when he used a Paper Chase-style pedagogical gambit.

According to Above the Law's report, Peter W. Tague began his criminal-law course Thursday morning by telling the class that the U.S. Supreme Court's chief justice, John G. Roberts, would soon announce his retirement for health reasons. At least one student in the class immediately began sending notes to the outside world.

Within 20 minutes, Radar Online, a gossip site that is a corporate sibling of the National Enquirer, published an "exclusive" about the alleged news. From there the rumor moved on to The Drudge Report and dozens of other blogs.

But Mr. Tague had only been trying to prove a point. As one student wrote to...

Americans tend to have fewer close confidants today than they did two decades ago -- but that isn't because they're all huddled over their computers playing World of Warcraft or reading the Volokh Conspiracy.

A report released Wednesday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project suggests that the Internet and other new communication technologies have, if anything, a modestly positive effect on the size and diversity of people's friendship networks.

The study found that using the Internet is associated with having more, not fewer, intimate friends. And Internet users are generally no less likely than nonusers to maintain face-to-face ties with their neighbors. Bloggers, for example, are 72 percent more likely than the general population to belong to a local voluntary organization.

So the common fear that old-fashioned kinds of social capital will evaporate as people spend more time on...