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Amen to Digital Prayer: A click away from answers to it all

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The Mercury 13 Women - A political and not very pretty tale of women in space

 As everyone who has ever had a child in school knows, June comes with a reading list, that group of titles from which your summering youngster must select and report back on in September.

We're lucky in our little cottage because a) said summering youngster likes to read and b) the books on the list are usually pretty good.

This year, one book in particular grabbed me. It made me happy, it made me angry, and it made we wonder how we as a society could justify tossing half our talent pool out of the worlds of technology and exploration for so long.

The book is Almost Astronauts: 13 Women Who Dared to Dream, by Tanya Lee Stone (publisher: Candlewick Press, 2009).

It is written for middle school readers - and I guess it has a happy and inspirational ending in that women have finally commanded space shuttles and presumably little girls are no longer automatically told to marry their dreams rather than to live them. But still...

Let's wind up the way back machine, back to the summer of 1969 ... it is July 20th and Apollo 11 has landed on the moon. Me -- and bunches of other little girls like me -- have been following the story, thinking about space, learning about stars and maybe even dreaming of becoming a scientist or an astronaut. This is inspiration stuff!

But in a traditional American town, our aspirations are quickly snuffed as our teachers tell us that boys are astronauts. Girls can marry them.

And yet, in a largely-hidden chapter of history, women had already successfully passed the tests to become astronauts! We just didn't know that.

In 1959, Look Magazine did a feature on a highly-skilled pilot named Betty Skelton. In collaboration with NASA's PR team, they had her take a number of astronaut tests (which she aced!) and created a cover story that raised the profile of the space program -- yet the highly-qualified Skelton was never really considered an astronaut candidate. It was all a promotion game.

At about the same time, Dr. W. Randolph Lovelace, then chair of NASA's Life Sciences Committee and the doctor who ran the Mercury 7 test program, and Brigadier General Donald Flickinger created a program called Women in Space Earliest, aka Project WISE. It was run largely in secret.

Their first recruit was Jerrie Cobb. She had more than 7,000 air hours (far more than any of the male candidates), and had set the world record for altitude as well holding the world light-plane speed record. Even though the Air Force was not in favor of female pilots, let alone astronauts, she was unquestionably the Right Stuff.

In early 1960 she went to Los Alamos for the full battery of tests: freezing water injected in her ears, radioactive water snaked down her throat, spinning tilt tables, psychological battering - all 87 tests the Mercury 7 men had taken.

She passed them all.

The Lovelace Foundation subsequently recruited 19 women for testing. During the first 6 months of 1961, 13 of them passed each and every test. They were informally dubbed the "Mercury 13" (http://www.mercury13.com/):

Jerrie Cobb, Bernice Steadman, Janey Hart, Jerri Truhill, Rhea Woltman, Sarah Ratley, Jan and Marion Dietrich, Myrtle Cagle, Irene Leverton, Gene Nora Jessen, Jean Hixson, Wally Funk.

They were women ... and moms ... and wives (even a senator's wife!) ... and fiancees ... they were working pilots, working engineers, working teachers ... they had thousands upon thousands of air hours, and they had technical skills, physical abilities, and content knowledge to stand on equal ground with the Mercury 7 men.

But then, in September 1961, political reality hit. Sending a "woman to do a man's job" did not project the image of international strength the federal administration wanted.

Further testing was canceled.

The political process began -- except that after the stellar test results, the question could no longer ask IF women were qualified. Instead, the question morphed into: should qualified women be allowed to play?

Within the year, proponents had worked the system, eventually reaching Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who was also head of the National Aeronautics and Space Council. He was the key person shaping NASA's decisions.

A letter was drafted for Johnson to present to James Webb, the head of NASA. Decades later during the course of academic research, the letter was found -- filed. Johnson had taken the letter and written in large scrawl across the bottom half of the page:

"LET'S STOP THIS NOW! - FILE"

In a 2007 interview Cobb talked about a conversation she had had with the vice president at the time.

"Jerrie," she recollected he said, "If we let you or other women into the space program, we'd have to let blacks in. We'd have to let Mexican Americans in, and Chinese American. We'd have to let every minority in, and we just can't do it."

The proponents got a Congressional hearing too. Space hero John Glenn's testimony included this statement:

The program was over by the end of 1962.

On June 16, 1963, the Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to fly in space.

Yes, this story is history, and maybe we've even made progress since then. And yet it remains a timeless - and cautionary tale, a tale about the intersection of technology and political interests, of the way that resources are thrown away for business or political demands.

Look around us today at the emerging science and technology developments. Take a second and a third even closer look at what is shaping their direction and who is allowed to create it.

Is our science defined by political bent? Is research dictated by business terms at the expense of all else? Are there paths not taken and talents not tapped because a notion of social order?

From bandwidth access to biomedical break-throughs, I suspect the answers are not as pure as we might wish.

It is too late to do more than ponder "what if" for the impact that the "Mercury 13" might have had -- but it is never to late to be aware of our present.

Science matters. Technology matters. But they and their practitioners do not operate in a vacuum. We all need to press for full use of resources and for an open embrace of those who would and could contribute -- if only we are willing to keep our eyes open and unlock the door. 

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Summer of Science

In July, enquiring minds turn to ... science?

I was out and about the other week at a kick-off event at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy in Buzzards Bay for something that the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education  and the southeastern Massachusetts region's post secondary schools are calling "Summer of Science"

It's a campaign to highlight the summertime science, technology, education, and math (STEM) programs for middle and high school students. That means both various short-term programs as well as day camps about topics like environment, marine studies, robotics, and ... geography.

I have to admit, I never really put geography in the STEM category until I was totally drawn into a huge 22 foot tall globe.

Year read that right - it was a crane-your-neck-to-see-it-all sphere, right there in full display at the kick-off. Turns out said globe is part of Bridgewater State College's mobile geography courses.
 
This globe was like a mondo beach ball that towers over your head, a sort of inflatable earth that you walk around or and walk inside of ... which presents the relationships between parts of the globe in a very tangible way. And quickly reminds you that geography is STEM study afterall.

In the two years that EarthView (<a href="http://www.bridgew.edu/earthview" target=new>http://www.bridgew.edu/earthview</a>) -- that's the giant beach ball globe's name -- has been rolling around the region, it and its handlers have taught some memorable geography lessons to more than 15,000 K-12 students.

Now your or I might remember geography as something that nestles beside the smell of chalk boards and the squeaking sound of pull down maps in memory, but Dr. James Hayes-Bohanan, says to banish that thought.

Hayes-Bohanan is one of the globe handlers and a Professor of Geography as Bridgewater State - and an something of evangelist for the the study of the discipline.
 
Geography, he says, is a study that helps people see the interconnections that one place has with every other place. As technology links us all tighter an tighter together, it become a highly relevant lens for seeing an shaping the world.
 
Ah-ha - a lens for seeing and shaping the world!

Various dignitaries at the event, including MA Secretary of Education Paul Revielle, talked a great deal of the need for STEM to support our state's competitive position - but I believe the role of STEM is much more profound than that.
 
As frequent readers know, I believe that STEM matters - and not just for the literal content it delivers.

•     STEM skills, including geography, are a great way of training us in the key 21st century skills of creative thinking, problem solving, collaboration, and communication.
• They show us how to imagine, how to try/fail/try again, and how the points of interconnection wave around us all.
•  They give us training we need to be natives in the post-industrial world, in a world gone digital, a world gone global, a world that is shifting constantly.

Back-to-back with my little Summer of Science outing, I happened to read a think-piece by Chris Dede. He's the Timothy E. Wirth Professor in Learning Technologies at Harvard's Graduate School of Education and one of the US Department of Education's 15-person technical working group that helped develop the draft of the 2010 National Educational Technology Plan.

"If we were to redesign education not to make historic models of industrial-era schooling more efficient, but instead to prepare students for the 21st century – simultaneously transforming teaching in light of our current knowledge about the mind – what types of learning environments might sophisticated information and communication technologies enable us to create?" he asks.

To me, a commitment to STEM and a plan to rethink how we think about school go hand-in-hand. They represent two sides of the same question: how do we prepare our kids for the world they'll control?

Our industrial schooling - the rows of desks, the emphasis on memorized standards, the focus on rote and repetition, on the naked 3Rs, on the drive for scores and ranks ... these all mirror the factories that dominated the last century.

The world that a US 7th grader in 1928 or 1951 or 1965 would control was a world where a a lifelong job/social contract in the widget factory was the key to security, where scientific manufacturing was the key to America's greatness.

It was a world where Geography meant naming capitals of great powers and labeling the globe in neat categories.

It was also a world that had been to absorbing immigrants into the American fabric at a fast pace, immigrants whose children quickly needed to share a standard set of American knowledge and industrial structure to fit into the American dream.

Of course, we all know that world no longer exists ... but the education system to feed it still does.

"The many affordances of modern technology can now support both a broader suite of roles involving "teaching" and a range of educational delivery systems beyond the walls of the school," writes Dede.

In other words - neat rows and reciting the multiplication tables are not enough.

"As discussed by the “teaching” subset of the working group, schools as custodial institutions are a starting point for considering
the work of teaching, but a “distributed” model of human and technical infrastructure encompasses a wider context of formal learning outside of classrooms ..." he continues

And schools are no longer the center of the universe!

The process of teaching for a world of digitally-connected global citizens means more than memorizing facts fed to you by the teacher of authority.

Instead, the process for the world we live in now needs to incorporate the tools that surround us, using them in ways that are bit like social networking or distributed computer networks.

It means thinking about the tools of teaching the way you would think about the world through a STEM lens: creative, collaborative, distributed, with threads of communication linking it together.

Hmm, when you look at it that way, I'm thinking the Summer of Science is looking like a pretty good way to spend July.

Check out the US Dept of Education's National Education Technology Plan at www.ed.gov/technology/netp-2010

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Net Neutrality meets Vast Wasteland - The role of FCC & our public interest

Incendiary language fired between combatants, clandestine meetings, highly-charged rhetoric ... who knew that dry ole' telecomm policy making could be so dramatic?

Over the past few months, the normally bureaucratic Federal Communications Commission keeps taking a starring turn at the center of public debate and corporate wrangling in moments like these:

• The April federal appeals court ruling in favor of Comcast's blocking tactics which noted that the FCC had limited power over Web traffic under current law -- and the FCC's subsequent counter punch to change that law.

•     * The public battles between factions that have made Net Neutrality a household phrase.
•     * The "secret" meetings with telecom titans and other stakeholders at the end of June.
•     * The decision to put the brakes on Comcast's acquisition of NBC this week.

Sure, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 drew the attention of industry camp followers, but the war cries around Net Neutrality and public interest issues are bringing the biggest general awareness boost to the agency since ... well, since Newton Minnow called television programming a 'vast wasteland.'

Back in May of 1961  Minnow, then the chair of the FCC, gave a landmark speech to the National Association of Broadcasters. It was entitled "Television and the Public Interest."

    When television is good, nothing — not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers — nothing is better.
   
    But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite each of you to sit down in front of your own television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.

In 1961, television was fast becoming entrenched in the mainstream. The very first televised presidential press conference had been held that January by President Kennedy.
 
Color - COLOR! - was the hot new thing. Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color would be debuting in September on NBC. NBC - the same NBC about to be swallowed by Comcast today - was leading the race towards color programming.

By 1961, television was no longer a novelty. Close to 90 percent of US households had acquired a TV set of some sort over the past decade. It was clear that television was an industry on the rise, controlled by three networks. 

Television, of course, did become the medium that marked and shaped the latter half of the century, creating empires of both distribution and content. It changed the way we interact, entertain, and inform. 

Critics say it made us passive and lazy, dumbed us down, and turned off our brains - the boob tube that resulted from that vast wasteland.

However, it also made us visual, showed us places and people and views we couldn't have imagined from words alone, jump-started a generation to reading literacy, and created new forms of expression - the results of programming in the public interest.

In 1961, Minnow's speech brought the good and the bad to the public's attention. The potential for public good ... and the danger of the vast wasteland. People sat up and listened and the regulatory agency quickly moved into the spotlight and took the lead on a push-pull that would go on for years.

If you think TV was world-shaping, though, wait until all the ramifications of the Internet appear. We're at roughly the same developmental stage with broadband and its applications that the world was with television when Mr. Minnow gave us his 'vast wasteland' phrase.

Most of us have some form of connectivity.  Three companies - Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T - control most of our access to it. Empires of distribution and content and application have been built.

Pundits say it is ruining us. Counter-pundits say it is opening new horizons. Early adopters already mourn for the content that is no more.

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was, perhaps, a few years too early. The rewrite was desperately needed, but we were only seeing the tip of the iceberg, the start of the real issues. Those issues are on the front burner today.

The activist FCC we're seeing this year is the FCC we need. It is a policy and regulatory body acting in the spirit of public interest -- the public interest with which it is entrusted.

It is acting in the spirit of Minnow, holding forth on the potential and potential downside of a

•     Net Neutrality is about keeping the network open - keeping it free from the whims of three profit-driven gatekeepers.
•     The National Broadband Plan - although lacking a catchy phrase like 'wasteland' - does makes it clear that broadband is part of the public good and it articulates steps toward keeping it that way. If you've not read it, take a look at http://www.broadband.gov/plan/
•     The statements about wireless bills and use of spectrum for mobile devices maybe aren't perfect, but they are pushing us to think about what we need for the mobile generation we are fast growing into.

Standing up for the public interest isn't always pretty work. Millions of dollars have millions of reasons to hurl mudballs and trash talk. And that's all the more reason the FCC we're seeing is the FCC we need.

Digital technologies are maturing right under our eyes, becoming the norm and becoming the base of all our communication tools. To sell them out to the highest bidder or the deepest pocketbook would be a loss beyond imagination and a tragedy whose outcome we won't fully understand until it is too late.

I know this will make some of you gasp in pain -- but there are things more important and enduring than corporate profit. Let's hope that we -- and the FCC -- never lose sight of them and never lose belief in what they mean.

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There's Something Fishy in this Technology - The Art & Science of Aquaponics

• The salad greens and amazing basil show up on restaurant plates around the region;
  
  
• The tilapia fish end up on the restaurant and home table and are also sold to Nantucket Wild Gourmet & Smokehouse (http://nantucketwildgourmet.com/) in Chatham - which in turn smokes and sells the farmed fish to its national market;
  
  
• The ornamental Koi fish are sold in the wholesale trade and find their way to retailers across Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New York.

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