Longtime pubcasting voice Carl Kasell, 75, is retiring after three decades of rolling out of bed at 1:05 a.m. for Morning Edition, according to a statement to staffers at NPR. He’ll stay on as judge and scorekeeper for the popular quiz show Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me! NPR noted that his role on the show “turned him from a newsman into a rock star!” He’s been with the program since its inception in January 1998. Kasell has been in broadcasting for 50 years, with NPR since 1975. He’s won several major broadcast awards, including a Peabody he shares with Morning Edition and another he shares with Wait Wait.

Sesame Workshop is making a $7.5 million investment in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) education with its new Math is Everywhere initiative, the Workshop announced today. The grant is from PNC Financial Services Group Inc. Math is Everywhere, part of the Workshop’s $100 million Grow Up Great program, will develop multiple media, bilingual (English and Spanish) resources to teach early mathematics skills for young children along with best practices for the adults in their lives, including parents, childcare providers and teachers. The effort is part of President Obama’s “Educate to Innovate” campaign, also announced today, to boost science and math achievement over the next decade.

A Rutgers law professor is getting input from NPR, PBS and CPB, along with independent media-makers and community activists, for a report suggesting ways to develop a blueprint for system’s future “as it makes a transition from public broadcasting to a network of services that range over many platforms,” according to a Rutgers statement. She’s examining the intersection of public media, best practices, governance and public policy. Goodman advised the Obama-Biden transition team on telecommunications and media law, and briefed incoming administration officials on technology innovations. She also is a research fellow at American University’s Center for Social Media.

Health-care legislation now pending in Congress may be one of the best new sources of support for public-service content, public TV’s lobbyists are saying.

Now a dot-com called Kachingle is starting to roll out an online service designed to make voluntary support easy for even the most Internet-dazed, pledge-averse, marginally committed and low-budgeted Medici to virtually toss coins, or dollars, to reward the online media they love and appreciate.

Winter D. Horton Jr., a leader in public broadcasting since the 1960s, died Nov. 12 in Pasadena, Calif. He was 80. In 1964 Horton was among the founders of Los Angeles public television station KCET. From 1965 until 1970, he served as v.p. for development at National Educational Television, a predecessor of PBS. In 1972 and 1973, he was a consultant to the Children’s Television Workshop, producers of Sesame Street. In the 1970s and ’80s he founded and headed Centre Films Inc., which created films, videos and documentaries for PBS and commercial networks. Also in the 1970s, Horton met Robert Bennett, who was elected to the U.S.

Bill Moyers will retire his weekly series at the end of April, at the same time its Friday-night stablemate, Now on PBS, comes to the end of its run. This means not only a reduced presence for one of PBS’s journalistic stars and the possible idling of two prize-winning public-affairs production teams, but also the mixed opportunity/problem of a 90-minute opening on the network’s Friday-night feed. PBS will announce plans in January for its public-affairs lineup to take effect in May, according to a statement from the network last week, and declined to comment on the plans prematurely. Moyers, who is 75, told Current he had planned to retire from the weekly Bill Moyers’ Journal on Dec.

Ruth Seymour, who built a successful but insistently idiosyncratic Los Angeles station and Internet music source with go-it-alone intuition, announced this week she’ll retire at the end of February. She’s 74 and will have managed Santa Monica’s KCRW-FM for 32 years. Current’s story.

PBS is part of Google’s new initiative to make millions of videos on YouTube accessible to deaf and hearing-impaired users. The search engine company unveiled new technologies on Thursday that will automatically bring text captions to the videos, reports the New York Times. The technology captions only English, but users may take advantage of Google’s automatic translation system to read in 51 languages. Initially YouTube is focusing on providing captions for educational channels such as PBS and National Geographic, and videos from universities including Stanford, Yale, Duke, Columbia and MIT. More will come later.

Native Public Media and the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Initiative today released a study, “New Media, Technology and Internet Use in Indian Country: Quantitative and Qualitative Analyses.” The report melds data on tech use among 120 tribes, and case studies of six successful projects. Video of the report’s Washington presentation here.

Details on most sessions at January’s NETA conference are now online. The confab is at the M Resort in Henderson, Nev., about 15 miles from Sin City.

Two pubTV films are on the short list for Documentary Feature Academy Award nominations, PBS says. Both docs, Food, Inc. on POV and Garbage Dreams on Independent Lens, will air next year. Both now advance to voting by the Documentary Branch Academy. For a full list of films moving foward, see the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences website. Oscar nods will be announced Feb. 2, 2010, with the 82nd annual Academy Awards show on March 7.

Another new media site has sprouted, this time in Florida, reports Creative Loafing Tampa Bay. The online paper, 83 Degrees, is published by Detroit’s Issue Media, which has created several other online pubs. It’s edited by Diane Egner, former content director at Tampa NPR affiliate WUSF. Local governments, universities and corporations are funding the effort. ““If you’re watching PBS, you know there are certain underwriters for certain programs,” Egner told . Each of our partners is underwriting specific issues that we cover.” The site’s coverage will include the new economy, innovations, investments, the environment.

The Senate Commerce Committee on Thursday passed the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act (STELA), its version of the satellite reauthorization bill, according to Broadcasting & Cable. The bill allows satellite operators to carry out-of-market network TV station signals for viewers who don’t received an adequate signal from their nearby station. It’s an issue the Association of Public Television Stations has been working on for several years, much of the time spent in negotiations with the DISH Network. “APTS is pleased with the firm action taken today by the Senate Commerce Committee to end the discriminatory behavior by DISH Network against local public television stations,” APTS President Larry Sidman said in a statement.

PubTV’s Design Squad show was on hand to launch T-shirts into the air at last week’s Education Technology Showcase on Cap Hill. The fun with T-shirts showed how engineering could be “used to solve real-world problems,” reports TMCNet’s Education Technology page. In attendance were Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Senators Patty Murray, Jeff Bingaman, Kay Hagan and Ted Kaufman and other officials. The event, sponsored by the Education Technology Directors Association, highlighted programs funded by the National Science Foundation.