One of the books that shaped my thinking about media was the late, great Neil Postman’s The Disappearance of Childhood in which he argued that ‘childhood’ — viewed as a protected period in a human being’s life before s/he was deemed fit to play a full role in society — was a social artefact rather than a fact of life. Postman argued that childhood was effectively extended by the invention of printing, because it took longer to get kids to the point where they could fully participate in a print-based society, whereas in an oral society full competence could be achieved by about the age of seven. (Which, incidentally, is probably why the medieval church defined the ‘age of reason’ as seven. When I was growing up, this was the age at which one made one’s First Communion.) His book was mainly about the social impact of broadcast television, which he argued was pushing down the age of competence to lower than medieval values. In a memorable passage, he claimed that American children had become ‘competent’ television viewers by the age of three (which was why one never saw remedial classes offered in television viewing!)

What brought this to mind today was an interesting review by Joyce Carol Oates in the Times Literary Supplement of HUCK’s RAFT: A history of American childhood by Steven Mintz (Harvard University Press). If I didn’t already have a pile of books-waiting-to-be-read a yard high, I might even buy it.

From The Harvard Crimson Online

In a sharp and unexpected rebuke of University President Lawrence H. Summers, members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) voted yesterday that they lack confidence in his leadership.

Voting by secret ballot in a Faculty meeting at the Loeb Drama Center, 218 faculty members affirmed a motion … stating that “the Faculty lacks confidence in the leadership of Lawrence H. Summers.” One hundred eighty-five voted against and 18 abstained from the motion, which was tantamount to a vote of no confidence.

A second motion, expressing regret for Summers’ Jan. 14 remarks on women in science and certain “aspects of the President’s managerial approach,” also passed the Faculty.

The two motions, allegedly unique in Harvard’s history, are largely symbolic gestures. Only the Harvard Corporation, the University’s governing body, can force Summers to step down, and I can’t see them giving him the push.

According to today’s New York Times, the US Department of Homeland Security has identified a dozen possible strikes it views as most plausible or devastating, including detonation of a nuclear device in a major city, release of sarin nerve agent in office buildings and a truck bombing of a sports arena. The document, known simply as the National Planning Scenarios, reads more like a doomsday plan, offering estimates of the probable deaths and economic damage caused by each type of attack.

They include blowing up a chlorine tank, killing 17,500 people and injuring more than 100,000; spreading pneumonic plague in the bathrooms of an airport, sports arena and train station, killing 2,500 and sickening 8,000 worldwide; and infecting cattle with foot-and-mouth disease at several sites, costing hundreds of millions of dollars in losses.

The agency’s objective is not to scare the public, officials said, and they have no credible intelligence that such attacks are planned. The department did not intend to release the document publicly, but a draft of it was inadvertently posted on a Hawaii state government Web site.

Interesting paper by Nancy Leveson on “High-Pressure Steam Engines and Computer Software” which argues that we can learn useful lessons for software engineering from the history of high-pressure steam engines.

Risk induced by technological innovation existed long before computers; this is not the first time that humans have come up with an extremely useful new technology that is potentially dangerous. We can learn from the past before we repeat the same mistakes. In particular, parallels exist between the early development of high-pressure steam engines and software engineering that we can apply to the use of computers in complex systems.