Hydrogen economy

I think that I have written about the likelihood that we will burn a whole bunch of coal in the future, but if I have I can't find the post. Maybe it was in my forthcoming Energy & Environment piece (a link to that when it is available).

Anyway - one of the things that is often not mentioned, but that is increasinly recognized, is that you have to make the hydrogen and that takes energy and that energy has to come from somewhere. And then we are back to coal. Unless we can do it with renewables...

Nature reports a recent article that argues that wind power will be insufficient to provide all of the hydrogen that a fully developed hydrogen economy will require. Rather than an argument against moving toward hydrogen, I take this an argument for the development of "clean coal" technologies.

Aside
I also suspect that nuclear is in our future, but my long-standing concerns about waste continue. Again I take this as a positive argument for continued effort to solve that problem.
End

Big Change at NSF

For years (since around 1940) the NSF has often required cost sharing on projects that it has funded. This was especially true for projects that bought equipment. That requirement has now been all but eliminated.

This is important because it removes a bias against smaller institutions. Equipment proposals are often large and hence the matching portion would be large. This has prevented less well off institutions from competing for important Federal funds and over the long-haul would limit the frontier across which we can advance our understanding.

There is a caveat of course. Another implication is that because NSF must now fund all of its projects, it will be able to fund a smaller number of them and thus the competition for limited funds will become more intense, but it still provides an opening for high quality efforts from smaller institituions.

A final caveat is that this move also frees up a pretty good chunk of discretionary money at larger institutions. How will that money now be used?...

Aside
If the link above has expired and you are a Chronicle subscriber, the article can be found here. If you are not a subscriber, contact me and I will get you the text...
End

academic separateness

The core of university strength is its ability to produce and disseminate knowledge. Central to that strength is a set of practices that ensure that its knowledge activities meet minimum standards in quality. Quality control has evolved within the academy through the development of tenure and other review processes (e.g. committees on instruction). Our current portfolio of intellectual and practical challenges now requires that we recognize knowledge holders beyond academic institutions and whose stature is determined by processes quite different from those that colleges and universities are familiar with.

Separateness is deeply engrained in the history of academic freedom. That separateness has its origins in the clash between the theological roots of most of our colleges and universities and the rationalism that emerged in parallel with Darwinism in the mid-19th century (Metzger 1955) and that we now associate with scientific objectivity. It has been reinforced by the professionalization of academic disciplines and by feedbacks that call for communities of scholars to define expertise and to certify new members.

Against this historical backdrop, scholars are now turning attention to problems that span several traditional disciplines and, in doing so, have recognized the need for augmented norms in order to evaluate expertise and manage quality. While it is perhaps early to say that the problem has been solved within the academy, ad hoc solutions are well known and evolving.

Expertise that is quantified or recognized by metrics that have little or no overlap with academic credentials poses an as yet unsolved problem. If we are to advance our knowledge networks, we need to solve it.