Professor not too Keyne on Keynes

Harvard history professor Niall Ferguson has apologised for saying that John Maynard Keynes, an influential British economist who died in 1946, did not care about society's future because he was gay and had no children. Prof Ferguson, born in Scotland, made the comments at a conference in California on Thursday. He has now apologised "unreservedly" for what he called "stupid" and "insensitive" remarks, but that doesn't excuse his lapse in judgment. It is possible to be gay, childless, or both while still caring about the future of society. In other news, the boring university lecture is going to be the first major casualty of the rise in online learning in higher education, says Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. The custodian of the world's biggest online encyclopaedia says that unless universities respond to the rising tide of online courses, then new major players will emerge to displace them in the way that Microsoft arrived from nowhere alongside the personal computer. "I think that the impact is going to be massive and transformative," says Mr Wales, describing the importance of the MOOCs (massive open online courses) that have signed up millions of students.