CNN is not the place one thinks of first for science news, but today it was unavoidable, as was, perhaps, the unfortunate presentation of the OPERA neutrino speed results by the hapless "American Morning" anchors.

"You can tell we're a couple of journalism majors trying to do this."

Yes we can, folks, yes we can.

For those seeking a more nuanced understanding, go read the paper.

Yesterday's New York Times has a big piece on technology in education that's worth your time: In Classroom of Future, Stagnant Scores. And while it's a useful read, this kind of story, to me, illustrates issues in both education and journalism.

As much as I love technology, as a student of Neil Postman, I always ask "what problem are we trying to solve," and asking that about kindergartners on laptops returns the null set. Also, I'm painfully aware that gadgets do nothing without the other two legs of the stool: professional development and robust tech support. We still have classrooms that would be familiar to students from Sumer; just adding technology is not transformation.

But this is a failure of journalism, too. There's no apparent awareness of situatedness within the shift from literate to digital culture, and there is an untested belief that we should have definitive, measurable data this early (and yes, just ~30 years of computers in education is early; this is a very big pig going through a very sluggish python's digestive system).

I'm wondering if Plato's students would have done better on standardized tests of oratory in a curriculum delivered through writing.

Sorry to spew. Just makes me cranky.

Back in the 1980s, we crawled through a small door behind a filing cabinet, and we live, now and forever, inside the head of Steve Jobs.

Just look around; there is scarcely an area of technology his vision has not shaped. The mouse, desktop publishing, graphical user interfaces, bitmapped paint programs, digital music, smart phones, CGI animation in movies, tablet computers. Dare I say, the World Wide Web (the first Web server was a NeXT cube.)

Look around: We see a world mediated by Steve Jobs' vision.

And so, although I'm saddened by his departure as CEO, and concerned for his health, I don't share the foreboding and angst of the hyperventilating tech commentators about the future of Apple.

I once heard Tizra's David Durand retell an aphorism about systems. "Let me design the architecture," he said, "And I care not who writes the code."

And beginning in 1984, Jobs specified the architecture for our entire technological ecosystem.

I can still recall vividly the day I touched a Mac for the first time. It was late in 1984, at Macy's in Herald Square in New York, and I remember standing there, drawing rectangles on the screen with the mouse, completely enraptured. For someone who had grown up with punched paper tape and TROFF on Dec-10s, this was certifiable magic.

Of course, it goes without saying that Jobs didn't invent the mouse (thank you, Doug Englebart) or even the bitmapped display (pace, Xerox PARC) but his genius was putting it all together in a package. An irresistible package; one that made the Macintosh more than a computer. (Data point: When my future wife went off to Wharton for her MBA, I bought her a Macintosh 512k instead of an engagement ring. We're still married, 24 years later.)

Steve Jobs, the insanely great visionary, laid the plinth course of modern computing, and everything since has built upon that foundation.

There is nothing more pervasive than the desktop. I have three machines in front of me right now: Windows, Mac, and Ubuntu linux, and all three sport windowed environments inarguably descended from that first Mac.

Sometimes, the visionaries must wander in the desert for a while. Jobs faced some real challenges in the late 80s, when he was forced out of Apple, but what resulted was a whole new step function in computing.

I was at the Educom conference in Pittsburgh in 1986 when Jobs introduced the NeXT machine, and I still recall his pitch line. "People want a 3M machine," he said. "One thousand pixels, one thousand floating point operations a second, and they want it for about a thousand dollars." He showed Pixar's debut film, "Luxo, Jr." and the audience of academics were left drooling.

After the plenary, Jobs had a reception for tech folks from universities, and I was there as the computer coordinator from NYU, so, for the only time in my life, I was close enough to watch Jobs in person. His famed "reality distortion field" is no concoction of the computer press; I saw it in action as he totally pwned a roomful of Ivy League IT directors. I didn't have enough juice to meet him, but I did get to spend an amazing half hour chatting with Dan'l Lewin, one of the NeXT executive suite.

Yes, I have a NeXT pizza box out in the garage. And while the device didn't appear to succeed, it added several key control points to the curve of technology: unix on the desktop, multitasking in protected memory, and optical drives.

His return to Apple in 1997 began the consolidation of his vision across the computing landscape. From the return of the all-in-one computer in the iMac and the restoration of core design principles with the iBook, Jobs went on from strength to strength.

Geeks like me had been ripping to mp3 for a couple of years, but the iPod made it work for everyone. Then iTunes wrapped an ecosystem around it. The introduction of the first modern operating system, OS X, brought all the ideas of the NeXT box to a consumer level. The iPhone reversed everything that was true about mobile phones and redefined the category. The App Store changed software development business models, literally overnight. And the iPad did what no other tech firm had been able to do in more than ten years: sell tablet computers that people actually liked. Okay, Angry Birds probably helped.

And I haven't even mentioned Pixar, or the way they have completely redefined the animated film. Or the second-order effect that "Stevenotes" have had on raising the game for corporate presentations.

But the flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long, as the god of biomechanics says. And you have burned so brightly, Steve.

In his letter to Apple's board, Jobs said, "I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple's CEO, I would be the first to let you know."

Yes, there is sadness in this. But I only have to look around to be reassured. There is now a whole generation that has grown up knowing nothing but the graceful, elegant interface of the computer seen through Steve's eyes. There is a rising cadre of visionaries who will stand on the ramparts of this spectacular digital edifice and reach even higher. Because they live, and look, and listen, and interact inside the mind of Jobs.

Oh, and one more thing...

You totally rock, Steve. Our best wishes, always.

Full disclosure: I own shares of Apple, and I ain't selling.

Today marks the 100th birthday of the media theorist Marshall McLuhan, and while most of the centenary blurbs will note he coined "the medium is the message," his profound insight into communication theory is much better represented by his notion of the "unified sensorium."

For McLuhan, every technology was an extension of some aspect of humanity, from simple things like the wheel (as a foot) and the gun (as a fist). His insight, in his groundbreaking book Understanding Media, is that when we extend some part of ourselves, it creates an imbalance. And just as the wheel leads to the fractured physical world of cities and suburbs, the imbalances created by extensions of our higher faculties lead to mental and social dislocations.

We often forget — in the same way that fish are not aware of water — that writing is a technology. All human cultures have spoken language, but not all externalized that into a written representation. Many theorists have investigated the shift from oral to written culture, but few have envisioned the impacts as clearly as McLuhan.

In Understanding Media (pp. 88-90), he argues that the alphabet freed us from the "tribal trance of resonating word magic and the web of kinship" and through the power of letters as "agents of aggressive order and precision" gave us "empires and military bureaucracies" where individuals were alienated from their "imaginative, emotional and sense" lives.

The externalization of speech required humans to break down the natural flow of sound into discrete bits so we could inscribe it, and it is no accident that the alphabet is reflected in a clockwork world of interacting bits and pieces: mechanistic science, differential calculus, command-and-control hierarchies, assembly lines, and linear time.

If one reads McLuhan hopefully — and I always have — the digital revolution has the promise of extending the entire human mind as a technology. As the electronic world began to overtake print in the past hundred years, we have seen the breakdown of the profane and sequential. The atoms which persisted since Democritus' time are re-envisioned as 11-dimensional vibrating strings, ecology triumphed over taxonomy, manufacturing morphed into knowledge work, and the world, flattened by speed-of-light communication, became a global village.

McLuhan was not blind to the pain of change: he wrote an entire book, War and Peace in the Global Village, describing the spastic convulsions societies undergo during profound media transitions. (Effects anyone in journalism, publishing, or education these days understands all too well.)

But in the end, there remains the possibility that a the extension of consciousness itself through technology, a projection of the full sensorium in balance, could nudge us back toward a re-balanced psyche and society. And it is that thought that makes me celebrate the insights of this great thinker and teacher on his centenary.

Happy birthday, Marshall.

Long-time readers will agree I rarely venture into the self-revelatory navel-gazing critics bemoan in the blogosphere. But when I got together with folks over the recent holiday, there was a certain amount of tap dancing about food options; hence, this post. If you don't care, please move on. Nothing to see here. kthnxbai.

Since January, I've been an ovo-lacto vegetarian, which basically means not eating anything that requires the death of an animal. There are three ways to explain my decision, depending on how you choose to view causation.

The proximate cause was an episode of the Discovery Channel show, Dirty Jobs, called "Custom Meat Processor" that I watched — briefly — in December. Yes, I have known intellectually for a long time where meat comes from. But, for me, it was quite a different experience to hear a TV host shoot a cow in the head and then chop it up. You don't want to click on that link if you're squeamish. Trust me.

The concurrent cause (what lawyers like to call the "but for" test) centers on health impacts. Humans are unquestionably apex predators, and almost certainly evolved as opportunistic carnivores. There is evidence to suggest that we hunted game and ate lots of meat as far back as 500K BCE, but, arguably, that was for nutrient density and protein, needs we can now meet in other ways. While my cholesterol numbers are actually fine, why push my luck. Not to mention zoonotic diseases (cough...BSE...cough). And then, of course, there are the second-order health impacts: hog waste lagoons, factory chicken farms, and the overall environmental degradation from the intense natural resource requirements of producing meat.

However, the ultimate cause, as one might expect, is philosophical, with roots going back to my undergraduate days. While my default mode is pragmatic phenomenology (in which I received dharma transmission in the lineage of C. I. Lewis from Prof. Fernando Molina), I began a long journey to the East in a class with Agehenanda Bharati. So while I was in Molina's seminar — with one other student; impossible to hide — reading The Critique of Pure Reason, I was also studying koans and sloshing around in the cosmic overwhelm of the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

And there is a point, believe it or not, where they come together. Buddhism, as Paddy Chayefsky noted in Altered States, is not a religion, but rather "a state-specific technology operating in service of an a priori belief system." That's something a phenomenologist can get behind, and I was deeply attracted to Zen long before I had one of those peak moments sitting at the dry garden of the Ryoan-ji temple in Kyoto in 1996.

But although I could recite the four vows, I obviously could not commit to "liberating all sentient beings" as long as I was...well...eating them. (Imagine it in LOLCat: "Mouse said, 'wait I haz Buddha nature,' but I eated him.")

So I've been vegetarian since January, and haven't missed anything. Oh, there are minor annoyances, like the afternoon onshore breeze that brings kitchen smells up the street from Flo's Clam Shack, but the most difficult thing has actually been having to repeatedly explain, one-off, why I'm no longer scarfing down cheeseburgers and scrapple. Hence, this post. Thanks for listening.

Editorial note: As may be obvious, I struggled over this, and have probably said either too much or not enough. Both the Principia and Alfred Korzybski warn about the impossibility of capturing reality with language. But I guess that's my job as a writer. Mu.

An online newsgroup is reporting the passing of Ted Carpenter, a brilliant anthropologist and media theorist. He was a long-time collaborator with Marshall McLuhan, and his broad-ranging cultural analyses had a huge influence on the discipline of media theory.

I can still remember the delight and amazement of reading Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me! in grad school. He was a true visionary in the field, and his contributions will be missed. You can learn about Carpenter on Wikipedia, this excellent overview by Harald Prins and John Bishop from Visual Anthropology Review, or visit the online resource site, Virtual Snow.

Our thoughts are with his family, friends, and colleagues at this sad time.

Editorial note: While I have not been able to find a published source to confirm, the Media Ecology Association list where this was posted includes people who worked closely with Carpenter.

Today and tomorrow, the Newport County Radio club will be co-hosting one of the more than 1,400 radio "field days" happening across the country this weekend, in what is both a massive test of connectivity and an opportunity to see and experience what amateur radio is all about.

Local radio folks will be set up at the Gardener Seveney Sports Complex off East Main Rd. all day today and tomorrow morning, and there will be opportunities to watch and maybe even try your hand at broadcasting if you stop by betwen 4-6pm on Saturday or 11am-2pm Sunday. You can read more on Portsmouth Patch.

During field days, amateur radio folks test out their equipment and skills, contacting other stations around the globe in a demonstration of communications that doesn't require modern infrastructure. You never know when this might come in exceedingly handy (like, say, after a hurricane).

I'll admit that I find this stuff particularly cool, because radio really was the beginning of weaving the world into one global village through electronic communication. When you think about the history of media, remember that until the telegraph, complex messages could only travel as fast as something could physically carry them (leaving Roman signal fires aside for just a moment). The jump to radio — which was the Internet of its day — suddenly allowed people to connect across national boundaries, around the globe. And while there were certainly forces that tried to turn it into one-way commercial broadcasting *cough* General David *cough* there were, and are, plenty of folks who fire up the tubes and take up their microphone or key to reach out across the ether as proto-citizen journalists.

If you have some time — especially if you have kids — you might want to stop by and check it out. Maybe I'll see you there!

The following is reproduced, by request and permission, from the blog of Prof. Lance Strate of Fordham University.

Children are the Living Messages We Send to a Time We Will Not See
Lance Strate, Time Passing

I want to ask you to help me correct an inaccuracy out here on the net, an inaccuracy that amounts to an injustice. Here’s the story:

The Disappearance of Childhood

Neil Postman wrote, “Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.” This is the first sentence that opens his book, The Disappearance of Childhood, which was originally published in 1982 by Delacorte Press.

I can remember being a young doctoral student in the old media ecology program at NYU, I was just 22 when I started there in 1980, and seeing Neil writing the book with a black felt tip pen on yellow legal pads.

Postman's introduction, where "Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see" is clearly visible.

Neil Postman wrote “Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see” as the first sentence of the Introduction to that book, appearing on p. xi. Here, take a look:

The Disappearance of Childhood was the second of Postman's major works providing a critical analysis of television's influence on culture. It was preceded by Teaching as a Conserving Activity, and followed by Amusing Ourselves to Death. And if you find Postman's media ecology scholarship at all interesting and valuable, and especially if you've read Amusing Ourselves to Death and you haven't read The Disappearance of Childhood, then you will find The Disappearance of Childhood to be a delightful companion piece, a well-crafted extended essay, and important work of cultural criticism.

Postman begins by writing that “children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see,” because he was writing about communication, which involves the sending of messages through a channel to a receiver. In the case of messages sent to the future, the receiver may be unknown to us, but the basic idea still applies. This view originates in the post-war era with the Shannon-Weaver Model:

The Shannon-Weaver model

The Shannon-Weaver Model was modified by communication theorist David Berlo circa 1960:

The Berlos "SMCR" model

But the important point is that Postman was writing about communication, and thinking about children, and childhood, in terms of communication. The idea that children are our legacy, a way of projecting something of ourselves into the future, is a time-honored, traditional notion. But thinking of children as messages, as part of the process of communication, is a relatively new orientation.

And as any good media ecology scholar knows, in 1964 Marshall McLuhan declared that "the medium is the message," by which he meant (among other things) that the messages we send are influenced in significant ways by the medium that we use to create and send them And The Disappearance of Childhood is all about how children as messages are influenced by the media that they use, and that we use to prepare our children to carry on for us in the future. And it is about how childhood is a message that is influenced by the medium that we use to create it.

Yes, create it, because childhood is a cultural construct (albeit one based on an underlying biological reality), a message we send to ourselves about biological and social reproduction. In print culture, children came to be seen as special and innocent, and in need of extended protection as they were cloistered away in schools, while television culture has returned us in some ways to a view of childhood that does not allow for much distinction between children and adults, hence the title The Disappearance of Childhood (which also signals the disappearance of adulthood).

But you really have to read the book to get Postman's argument. And I only provide this cursory summary to underline the fact that Postman's quote, “children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see,” with its particular emphasis on children and communication, originated out of a very specific set of circumstances, and its meaning is quite clear in that context. But it also has a wonderfully poetic quality, evocative and compelling, and works quite well standing alone. Some might even be fooled into thinking it is some kind of ancient proverb, despite its clearly contemporary sensibility.

“Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see” is Neil Postman's most famous quote. So what's the problem, you might ask? And I'm glad you did. The problem is that when you Google the quote nowadays, you get something like this:

Google hits for "Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see"

Whitehead's book

How did this come to be, you might ask? And I'm glad you did. You see, this John W. Whitehead wrote a book entitled, ironically enough, The Stealing of America.

And this book was published in 1983, a year after The Disappearance of Childhood. [... images of copyright pages removed to save space; see Prof. Strate's blog]

And just to dispel any lingering doubts, here is p. 68 of Whitehead's book, where he specifically cites Postman.

The Disappearance of Childhood also is included in the list of references that appear at the end of the book.

Whitehead's unquoted string.

So, are you ready now? Ok, here is how Postman's quote appears in Whitehead's book, starting on the bottom of p. 116 and continuing on to p. 117:

Ah ha, you may be saying! Caught red-handed! Well, the problem is that the circles that Whitehead travels in, and the readership that he picks up, is quite different from those associated with Postman. So who knew? It would have been quite the coincidence to come across it back in the 80s, or even the 90s. But, the quote being so poetic and memorable, it got picked up from Whitehead's book, and reproduced all over the place with the wrong attribution. It appears in some baby book, which probably amplified the error significantly.

Who is this guy, anyway, you might ask? Well, you can read about him on this page from the Rutherford Institute website: About John W. Whitehead. And you can read about the Rutherford Institute on their Wikipedia entry: Rutherford Institute.

Not that it matters much. I am writing this, and asking for your help, not to cast blame or level accusations. Postman was certainly the easygoing, forgiving sort of person who would not have made a big issue out of this. But speaking for those of us who honor his memory, and who believe in credit where credit is due, we would like to set the record straight.

The problem is that it is very hard to set the record straight on the web. It is very hard to get the content of websites changed. You can send a message, but it may be that the site is no longer active, or no longer actively supervised, or it may be that the individuals associated with the site just don't want to be bothered, or just don't care. Believe me, attempts have been made, and met with no success.

But, the main thing to do when dealing with problems like this is to accentuate the positive (see my previous post, Digital Damage Control). So, I am asking you to help to get the word out on the web, anyway that you can.

Please feel free to repost all or part of this entry on your own blog or site or elsewhere on the web. Or write your own post about this situation, using any part of this post that you care to, it is entirely open and available for copying and revising.

If you do post this or a similar message anywhere else, let me know, and I will add an acknowledgment and link at the end of this post.

And/or, please link to this post.

And/or, spread the word and the link via Twitter, Facebook, and other social media. If you tweet, Neil Postman wrote, “Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see,” that will be less than 50 characters, so you can add, please retweet, include a link to this post or another one, and/or note that we want to remedy an injustice.

I ask that you please help me to get this particular message out there, get more positive posts and listings out there, and at least we can start to set the record straight.

Neil Postman did not live to see this time of Google and social media, but today, March 8th, 2011, is the 80th anniversary of his birth, and if he were still with us, he would joke about how what we are doing here is launching Operation Childhood, and probably ask if there wasn't some better way for us to spend our time, like reading a good book. But deep down, he would be very much appreciative of the messages that we now can send on his behalf.

So I ask you to be a living message now, and for the future.

Full disclosure: Neil Postman was my dissertation advisor, and one of the few people who believed me, in 1987, when I said that this thing called "hypertext" was a completely new communication paradigm. I have read "The Disappearance of Childhood," and can personally attest that this quote rightly belongs to Neil.

The Portsmouth Town web site, portsmouthri.com, just relaunched today, and it's a breath of fresh air. It's based on the RI.gov template, and finally brings order to the site navigation and gets the java applet and blink tags off the home page.

Kudos to the Town Hall folks for making this transition happen! Go check it out.

The Torrington RegisterCitizen is the future of news: http://bit.ly/hkKLMV and Jay Rosen's WikiLeaks analysis just might explain why http://bit.ly/eg4MS4