From Vice’s Motherboard and my friend Alex Pasternack, here is a great short documentary on an alternative nuclear energy model that many interviewed believe would have safety and economic benefits. Moving from a uranium and plutonium fuel cycle to one based on thorium, they say, would produce reactors whose failure state would be a safe one. The doc is a sympathetic view of folks who may look like cranks—but what’s to say they’re not on to something?*

*I have literally no idea whether this would work. As your local nuclear physicist.

Following yesterday’s demonstrations against U.S. Congressional legislation that could severely constrict free speech and online innovation, I argue in Al Jazeera English that private interests in internet policy are here to stay.

It would have been the most expensive political ad buy in the history of the world. Google’s search engine, the most visited website in the world, displays a black block over its logo. Wikipedia, the sixth most visited site globally, has disabled its English-language service. This unprecedented action to oppose legislation under consideration in the US Congress signals the importance of the private sector in Internet policy – and it won’t stop here.

Private companies are almost entirely responsible for your ability to read this article. The text travelled through a purchased operating system, over an enterprise office network, through privately-owned wires and fibre optic cables, and finally reached the privately-run “cloud” service in which it was composed. If you’re overseas from Al Jazeera’s servers, the message also travelled through privately-owned undersea cables-the bedrock of international communication and finance.

Many experts, including Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard and the leaders of the MIT Media Lab, have described in detail the threat to free speech, innovation, and the technology business posed by the legislation: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate. Most people, however, learned of the controversy through today’s online demonstrations, in which the online goliaths of our day have filled the picket lines.

Read the rest at Al Jazeera English.

Ian Miller, a former classmate of mine who continues to work at the intersection of Chinese history and the history of agriculture and human productive capacity, has proposed a discussion on what it would mean to be “a nomadic academic.” His post is excellent, and should be read.

I got to writing a rather lengthy comment in response, and thought I’d put it here, selfishly, so that I don’t lose it.

Ian argues that “information has become diffuse,” and that scholars need strategies for the gathering and consumption of information that befit this dispersion. Instead of a few hand-copied books or a few hugely important libraries, information can be grazed and one must move among different sources and types of sources to gather the fullest picture. This he compares to the sparse biomass of the steppe, where people need tools like horses (for travel) and livestock (for storage of biomass to eat later) to gather enough to survive. Nomadic societies move across space to gather enough resources, where sedentary agriculturalists stick around and exploit the dense resources in a given spot.

What does this mean for an academic? First, it means that the advantage of residency at a library like the one at Harvard is diminished. Though the well there is deep, the information environment has changed. Information was always diffuse, but now there’s no excuse for ignoring far away sources. Second, it means that, as Ian argues, scholars need tools to gather diffuse information.

Now, my comment. A scholar must eat and obtain resources. Usually, this is accomplished through affiliations with the feudal, bureaucratic institutions we’re all so familiar with. Even as the mode of knowledge production and information processing has shifted, we have seen few new ways to feed a scholar. So, I want to propose one (that I, ahem, may be trying out).

The institutional structure of academia encourages people to walk one of a relatively closed set of paths. You need a degree in something, and that something is defined by a department or committee—a bureaucratic entity. The authority for deciding what can be studied, at least nominally, lies in a hierarchical institution with limited autonomy at lower ranks.

With the new information environment, however, knowledge production has a tendency to skip across “disciplines” or perspectives and to employ a wide variety of sources. Even in libraries, research is done with keyword searches, and someone interested in a particular moment in history may find a mathematical text that refers to it. Such topic-based search is really new, and it performs one of the functions that librarians used to provide (thankfully, they have other jobs and recent innovations). It’s as if a sedentary agriculturalist had to eat twenty crops to use the local land, but they decided they really only wanted strawberries, and the strawberries of the region were spread out. Our former omnivore now must spend each day walking from one strawberry patch to another. This only works if there’s a map of strawberry patches; otherwise, a random walk would result is starvation. Search engines and keyword searches produce such a map for any given topic, so the nomadic scholar bounds across sources, languages, and types of media to follow the map.

Now, we have a nomadic scholar, following a topic across institutional divisions in academia. Who’s going to hire this rube? Here, I think, we have the trouble for a researcher in the contemporary information environment. So, I propose that in addition to diffuse sources of information, a scholar in the new mode will need diffuse sources of physical sustenance, shelter, and other biological non-negotiables.

In my case, this means a combination of academic support and more standard jobs. The question for me is how well I can continue knowledge production from outside an academic institution. I don’t need a university to provide information for me, academic databases notwithstanding. My information gathering habits are portable. My academic experience so far serves to partially credential my work even as I work from outside. So, can the conversation move away from the institutions of academia and into a diffuse realm fueled by diverse contributors? Will academic employment stop being a standard component of scholarly production?

What do you think?

Here we have a great (partial) paragraph from Alexandra Samuel* on the conservatism of political science, based on her experience heading back to the meeting of the American Political Science Association in Seattle after a few years “away” from the discipline.

I am most intrigued by the idea of unsettling a field that one APSA blogger excorciated for its innate conservatism. That conservatism is not so much a political position (like many academic fields, political science skews left) as a temperamental one. As I noted last week, this is a conference in which people still focus on publishing books and talking at you on panels. They take notes on paper, and nobody seemed to be having a panic attack at the lack of wifi. The Internet revolution has arrived, and given way to the social media revolution, and political science has remained largely unchanged except for the appearance of a few booths hawking e-textbooks and software tools for data analysis. And that conservatism makes sense, in a way, because we’re talking about a field based on the idea that research is a cumulative and incremental process in which each researcher builds on those who have gone before. [more]

I agree that such conservatism makes sense in a way, but I also find it regrettable. As Samuel notes, the Information Technology and Politics section is, predictably, a bit different, but it’s also small. Political scientists, I think, face a relevance dilemma: how can they be relevant to society, to readers or information consumers outside the discipline’s guild, and of course to students.

It is no longer the case that almost every academic with a blog studies the internet, but active use of online media would help academics understand the way their students communicate. Professors should be on Facebook and other platforms that are so essential to the way college students communicate. The professor’s teaching job, after all, is to communicate with students. The research task is to produce scholarship that will endure. Consider readers who grew up with the internet and social media, and tell me a manuscript with lumbering literature reviews is the way to share knowledge.

</rant>

* Of course, I mistyped Samuel’s name as Samuels. Apologies, and it’s fixed.