parker higgins

Last week I dug into some claims that struck me as bogus, claiming that the LAPD was flying drones to track Christopher Dorner through Southern California. It looks like my suspicions were correct. Lorenzo Francheschi-Bicchierai at Mashable posted a write-up just a few hours after mine, but since he’s a real journalist he called the CBP and checked with them: they stated that “CPB UAS are not flying in support of the search.”

If you’ve been on Twitter today, you’ve probably seen it promoted as fact that surveillance drones have been sent into operation over Los Angeles as part of the multi-state manhunt for former cop Christopher Dorner alleged to be on a killing spree. The worst articles imply that the drones are armed and the government has authorized Dorner’s death, using language that’s ambiguous to the point of being deceptive, which is almost certainly untrue. But a closer look at the articles raises another concern: all of the reports are citing a single article which is flawed at best, and at worst may even be fabricated. Are the police using a drone at all?

There’s recently been a lot of great writing on women and the problem of gender inequality in the tech field. I recommend these three pieces in particular:

Cory Doctorow is coming through town again, this time on his tour for Homeland, the sequel to his excellent young adult novel Little Brother. Cory likes to talk about how his fiction “predicts the present”: taking the bits of future that are already here, just not yet evenly distributed, and applying them more widely. It’s a neat trick that makes his sci-fi seem eerily prescient, and I know Little Brother has been boosted by supporters of Occupy who saw much of their story foretold in his writing.

I’ve identified a little gap in my support of open access publishing that I hope to remedy with this new practice. When I encounter a news article about a new study or paper, the first thing I do is look for the underlying paper. (It’s a good idea anyway, given the standard complaints about science journalism.) If the underlying paper is not available for at least public access, I’m not going to talk about it. As my friend Tom put it, “It’s not published until it’s open access. I’ll talk about it once it’s published.”

I’ve rewritten the introduction to the US Declaration of Independence using the “Up Goer Five” text editor that only allows the 1000 most commonly used words (inspired by this new classic XKCD comic). Here you go:

In the early 90s, the musician Prince dropped his name and started going by an unpronounceable symbol. He called it “The Love Symbol,” and it’s a combination of the traditional male (♂) and female (♀) symbols.

I never know when the things I’m interested in around copyright policy have general appeal, and I definitely thought this vague joke — on the occasion of the 29th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Sony v. Universal (the Betamax case) — was a bit obscure.

I’ve just completed the wrap-up of the first week of Iron Blogger SF, year two, and man am I excited this time around. By almost every measure, Iron Blogger SF has been a success for me: I’ve written many more posts, been much happier with the way my writing has developed, and as a side benefit have gotten much more traffic than I ever have before. (It’s small numbers, as ever, but the graph is up and to the right, so who can complain.)

The world is poorer place today without Aaron Swartz, an extraordinary hacker and activist who took his own life on Friday. It’s been a roller coaster of a few days as I and the people I know try to process this news, sadness and anger turning to grief and resolve. There have been many thoughtful tributes to Aaron, who in only 26 years inspired so many with his character and accomplishments: my colleague Peter Eckersley wrote the touching obituary on EFF’s site; Cory Doctorow, Larry Lessig, Quinn Norton, Jillian York, Rainey Reitman, James Grimmelman, Karl Fogel, Brewster Kahle, Rick Perlstein, Danny O’Brien, Tim Berners-Lee, and many more have written beautiful words that do as much as possible to sum up a truly extraordinary life.