Monthly Archives: August 2012

Women’s suffrage and the world’s oldest person

posted on 29 August, 2012 with tags , ,

The Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which granted women the right to vote, was ratified 92 years ago this month.1 Less than a century is certainly short enough that some women who are alive today were born without the right to vote. But, then, they would’ve been too young to vote at the time [...]

Patenting away an open science opportunity

posted on 28 August, 2012 with tags , , , , ,

By almost any measure, Jack Andraka, the 15-year-old science prodigy from Maryland, should be a hero of the open science movement. After all, he has gotten a lot of well-deserved attention in the past few months for his work developing a new test for pancreatic cancer. By his own estimates, the test he developed is [...]

Stanford Cryptography and #CryptoParty

posted on 23 August, 2012 with tags , , , ,

I recently finished the free online Stanford cryptography course offered through Coursera and taught by Dan Boneh. It’s a challenging class, with at least four hours of lectures a week, and it actually took me two attempts to get all the way through it. I’m really glad I did though: cryptography is a tremendously empowering [...]

SXSW panel proposals

posted on 19 August, 2012 with tags , , , , ,

I’ve submitted two proposals for panels at next year’s South by Southwest festival in Austin. I really hope one of them gets picked. The PanelPicker is currently open for voting (I’d appreciate your votes!) and then I’ll know later this year if I’m in. Ebooks: A Coming War for the Soul of the Library will [...]

Bike Rac-Man

posted on 13 August, 2012 with tags , , , , ,

For some reason I’ve never been able to not see this.

Public transit and lawful access

posted on 6 August, 2012 with tags , , , , ,

Eric King recently posted a link to London’s Oyster Card FAQ page explaining Transport for London’s policy on requests for information from police — it rejects 5-10% of requests for providing insufficient information. It inspired me to look up Clipper Card’s policy. As I suspected, it doesn’t report any similar numbers, but it says in [...]

Questioning copyright’s trade-off

posted on 2 August, 2012 with tags , , , ,

This post is cross-posted from the EFF Deeplinks blog. The idea behind copyright is simple — it is supposed to be a balance in the service of the public interest. There’s a trade-off: for accepting a restriction on certain speech, the public benefits from the production of more new creative works each year. That delicate [...]