On 1/20/13 10:43 AM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
What would Good Academia look like?
Overall, I'd say "Good academics" are just members of the set of people
that develop skills to satisfy their curiosity.
Now the problem is not the difficulty of getting word out, it's the
active obstacles to free access to information (e.g. the JSTOR lawsuits
against Aaron Swartz), or the enduring pay walled scientific journals.
The professional incentives that result in non-disclosure agreements is
the problem. I'm less bothered by /. and arstechnica.com type "Hey,
this is neat!" content than I am by half of Science being marketed to
pointy-haired manager types -- paraphrased, dumbed-down article
summaries that aim to communicate the essence of a discovery. (It's
almost meaningless considering the original article is already working
within such a tight word limit that it's virtually impossible to really
communicate the research anyway.)
I'm happy when I see professors starting companies, or traditional
academics publishing with colleagues at Google or IBM research, etc..
The more options individuals have for pursuing their intellectual
interests, the less likely is it that their organizations will be
incentivize them into to varies sorts of exploitation and corruption.
The productivity of the world economy ultimately depends on
intellectual freedom.
Marcus
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
