Technically Incorrect

I am not concerned about the future, only because I am told that humans will soon be in the clutch and thrall of robots and perfect harmony will be enjoyed by all. However, I must register the initial frisson of disturbia I experienced on reading a report from the Boston Globe magazine that suggests the iPhone may be a wise toy for 3-year-olds.

No, this is not some mocking suggestion that those who use an iPhone do, indeed, have the minds of children less than 4. It is, rather, a fascinating analysis of what happens when you just hand a 3-year-old an iPhone with the initial aim of keeping the little rodent in your life quiet.

It seems the iPhone's happy, colorful design is not only a great attraction for a little child's imagination, but the keyboard tends to suit tinier fingers rather better than larger ones.

Indeed, there is a considerable possibility that the iPhone might just help in children's education, something app developers have not been slow to realize. The Globe tells us that 60 percent of the apps in the education section of the iTunes store target extremely little people.

Now I know there will be those who worry that if you give a little one an iPhone they will be zapped with gamma rays and all sorts of deleterious electronic waves that will seep into their brains and be an enormous health risk.

One might heed the words of Dariusz Leszczysnki, a researcher for the Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority in Finland, who told a Senate subcommittee: "In my opinion the current safety standards are not sufficiently supported because of the very limited research on human volunteers, children, and on the effects of long-term exposures in humans."

But most of the things parents give children to keep them quiet carry a certain risk to health: plastic toys that kids lick, bite, and try to swallow with the result that all sorts of paint and gunk might enter their bodies; candy that children lick, bite, and try to swallow with the result that they then put on weight; and let's not even start with the quality of teenage babysitting in the world.

It is always fun when serious people offer a confessional.

On Microsoft's Bing blog, director Stefan Weitz decides to tell everyone who will listen that he has been an "avid rocket launcher since 1975."

I am not aware what effect this might have had on his parents, his neighbors, or the local police and fire services as he was growing up, but I can find no evidence that he was ever arrested for such avid launching.

Weitz is now, however, vexed that science is not cool in school.

So he and his friends at the Bingdome have decided to revive child enthusiasm for launching.

Please welcome Mission: 10,000 Rockets, a program designed to get your kids to design rockets that will successfully immolate beyond ashes several countries of which we have not become fond.

No, wait. I haven't got that quite right.

Perhaps something like this will be useful for a trip to the planet Titan?

(Credit: CC Erik Charlton/Flickr)

Mission: 10000 Rockets is, in fact, asking kids to imagine what the next generation of space travel might look like. If you can get your kids to walk away from their Grand Theft Auto and design the rockets of the future, they might get their creations actually built.

No, not to full size, but at least they will be brought to physical being by some "cool artists" whose work might just be worth a fortune one day.

A book of all the designs will also be produced, all the proceeds from which will be returned to schools. And eight extremely fortunate schools will receive $5,000 to fund scientific projects in their cash-strapped establishments.

As a recent job advertisement for an astronaut in the Calgary edition of Craigslist proved, there is a renewed enthusiasm in the space project, some of it no doubt engendered by the very real prospect that our own world will shortly disintegrate.

So what better way to make your children productive this weekend than by getting them to design a spacecraft that might, one day, preserve a little humanity for the residents of the Planet Titan to marvel at?

It's not every day that a high school student gets some advice on social networking from a president.

So it was interesting to hear where President Obama's focus lay Tuesday when talking to 40 students at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Va., before his nationally broadcast speech to America's schoolkids.

There he was in the school library. Books abounded. Yet his focus fell on Facebook. According to the Associated Press, President Obama asked the 40 assembled kids, all sitting politely on nice wooden chairs, to think very carefully about their socially-networked content.

"Be careful what you post on Facebook. Whatever you do, it will be pulled up again later somewhere in your life," he told the kids.

Now you can see that the president, himself the father of two girls, is worried about the future consequences of present actions.

Is the president right to worry about kids' Facebook postings?

(Credit: CC SEIU International/Flickr)

He is concerned, no doubt, that practices such as sexting and other possibly absurd types of openness on social networking sites might lead to some future calamity.

But I wonder if this is entirely true. One of the strange effects that time has on human life is to render somewhat meaningless the actions of the past.

Once, people might have been concerned if their employee, or, indeed, their president, had smoked pot at some point in their flailing youth. Now, it seems almost a rite of passage. If you didn't at least try it, you seem just faintly peculiar.

Once you reach a certain age, does anyone really care what you did when you were 14? So isn't it fair to wonder just what effect kids' socially networked indiscretions might have 20 years from now?

Might it be that by then social networking will seem so ridiculously normal, that you will seem strange not to have some something embarrassing in your younger days, available for all to see?

Might it be possible that those who eschew a life exposed online will be seen to be the odd ones, rather than those who let what seems to be a little too much hang out?

I know it may be difficult to imagine, viewing it from our current perspective. I know that employers these days often search the Web for incriminating evidence of the misdeeds of potential employees. ("Aagh. He got drunk at a party three years ago! I'm not employing him!")

But it's extraordinary how quickly the apparently abnormal becomes the norm, especially with the accelerated change created by anything Web-based.

Of course, there will be those of you who will have had your heads turned by another aspect of the president's talk.

Why did he say "Facebook"? And not "MySpace"? And not "Twitter"?

I know there will be at least two boardrooms Wednesday where everyone will be terribly concerned about this apparent endorsement of Facebook's ubiquity.

I wonder if the CEOs of MySpace and Twitter will blog about it, or at least slip some bons mots of concern onto their Facebook pages.

The British are looking very hard in the mirror these days. Perhaps it is related to the belief that the country is running out of money.

In any case, who would have thought that they would choose to give up mandatory education about the Second World War and begin teaching their children about Twitter and Wikipedia?

The plans, leaked to the dastardly press (perhaps some devious cove just twittered a tiny URL to a password-protected site), give children relief from having to learn too many dates, place names, and pesky scientific formulas. You can google all that nonsense, anyway.

But if you can't tweet your progress in toilet training, what kind of adult can you expect to become?

The plans declare that children must leave primary school (to which children go until the unofficial drinking age of 11) fully conversant with the delights of blogging, podcasting, Wikipedia, and Twitter.

While I am aghast that Facebook appears not to be specifically mentioned, my eyes become moist when I see that children will be required to gain "fluency" in keyboard skills and learn to use a spellchecker.

"Very nice, miss. But when do we learn how to tweet our feelings?"

(Credit: CC Spiraltri3e)

Naturally, talking--and, presumably, typing--heads have already offered their 60 pence worth on the topic. Teresa Cremin, president of the U.K. Literary Association, worries about a lack of drama and "no emphasis on reading for pleasure."

Madam, please don't worry. We all read Twitter for pleasure. Can there be any other reason?

Other British critics seem to be worried that Twitter and Wikipedia are merely fads. But ladies and gentlemen, you are the great nation that brought us lasting pleasures such as "Dancing with the Stars," "American Idol," and the Dyson vacuum cleaner thingy. Things that the whole world marvels at and studies every day.

The creators of Twitter and Wikipedia can only hope to match the enduring quality of some of the great British contributions to history, science, and culture.

It was math. It was, no doubt, more opaque than the truth about A-Rod. So a 14-year-old Wisconsin girl texted away.

Until she was taken away.

She was confronted by a school security officer at Wauwatosa High School, after she had ignored the math teacher's request to look at numbers instead of texting them.

At first, according to the police report, she denied having a phone. However, two of her class mates declared that this was not true. The phone, a Samsung Cricket, was then recovered from her person. From "the buttocks area," to be precise.

She was cited for disorderly conduct and will appear in court on April 20.

"Hey, Mom. Guess why the police came to school today?"

(Credit: CC Eron Gpsfs)

I was unaware that schools employ security officers whose job appears to consist of covering for teachers' inability to get their students interested in algebra.

But this 14-year-old appears to be, as they say in riveting crime shows, already known to the police. The police report states: "The student is known to me and the administration on the basis of prior negative contacts."

What heinous acts this 14-year-old have committed before? Twittering in the school toilets, perhaps. Or posting nasty things about her teachers on Facebook.

I am philosophical today. Would you take a slow walk with me and listen to a story that may not have an ending?

I was in my favorite sushi restaurant the other night when Dan, a man in a Tommy Bahama shirt, leaned over to me and, through thickly alcoholic breath, said: "There are more banks going down. Mark my words."

Normally, a Tommy Bahama shirt signifies "my brain is dead and my eyes have turned to disco balls." However, Dan is, I know, a retired accountant. The very finest, wiliest, (relatively) honest kind.

With his words still nuzzling my ears, I got home and picked up a book I was reading called Ahead of the Curve. I reached a chapter in which the author was interviewing at Google.

(Credit: CC Esparta)

The author, Philip Delves Broughton, is a former New York and Paris bureau chief of the highly conservative Daily Telegraph newspaper, who suddenly decided to enter the Harvard MBA program because he felt he needed to learn about the realities of business.

One of the the realities, for him, was that Google, which originally was interested in employing him in the marketing department for its Book Search, ended up interviewing him 14 times.

In the end, Broughton was interviewed by people at Google's New York office who made it clear that the company was now wondering whether he could do hard-core sales.

After this interview, Broughton knew that his corporate daze was complete: "I decided I was going to quit before I was pushed (...) They told me they were sorry and that I could always come back. But I wanted the company expunged from my life. I wanted to scrub away the mask I had worn for them all these months. I uninstalled all the Google features on my computer and made Yahoo my default search engine."

Perhaps Broughton was just unsuited for the unsuited, but corporate, life at Google.

However, if you wander along to his conclusions about the direction of corporate life in general, you too might pause to put a word into the search box on your browser. The word might be "soul."

"HBS does not need to promise to 'educate leaders who make a difference in the world,'" writes Broughton. "It suggests that business, with its priorities and decision-making approach, has a right to impose its will on the world. But business needs to relearn its limits, and if the Harvard Business School let some air out of its own balloon, business would listen."

Broughton has a solution as simple as your IT guy has when your computer crashes and you have no idea how to fix it: "HBS need only promise to educate students in the processes and management of business. It would be a noble and accommodating goal and would dilute the perception of the school and its graduates as a megalomaniacal, self-sustaining elite."

Could anyone in the tech world be accused of wanting to create a "megalomaniacal, self-sustaining elite"? I will keep my subjective objectivity to myself on that question. But Broughton's strangely sobering book ends with the story of HBS's perhaps most famous student.

No, not Jeffrey Skilling of Enron. A chap called Robert McNamara.

McNamara was the U.S. Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War. According to the journalist David Halberstam, McNamara had no trust for anyone "who did not speak his language of statistics and hard data."

Naturally, South Vietnamese officers would think of a number between 30 and 4,000 and declare it hard data--a small subterfuge that led McNamara to disbelieve anything real people such as his own country's soldiers told him when they returned from the battlefields. And, well, if you've watched the documentary The Fog Of War, things didn't really end all that well.

Perhaps Dan, Ahead of the Curve, and the discomforting Wall Street events of this week have made me wonder more than usual if there really is safety in numbers, even binary ones.

Oh, what am I worried about?

Harvard Business School bears no comparison to the tech world. No one goes into the tech business just to worship the numbers and make money without any thought as to what kind of world they're ushering in, do they?

Let's ignore Broughton's slightly portentous final question about his alma mater: "Has society allotted too much authority to a single, narcissistic class of spreadsheet makers and PowerPoint presenters?"

Thank you for walking with me. Do you fancy some sushi? Dan might be here again tonight. He might have other shirts.