“is the act of drawing from two or more academic disciplines and integrating their insights to work together in pursuit of a common goal. ”

Jeff’s comment scolds academia, saying “Academic departments thrive by defining themselves as sole arbiters of a particular set of ideas and fields.”

If academia hasn’t been serving society, wouldn’t it be overthrown by now?

If a person or group combines stuff from multiple disciplines don’t they require to have enough understanding of the multiple disciplines in order to create useful and new insights, and to also speak each other’s discipline dialect? Like, Mike could combine his academic background Master’s in Linguistics and Supercell Tornadoes to create RDFS for Storm Chasers? :-)

http://www.cimms.ou.edu/~doswell/vorticity/vorticity_primer.html