parker higgins

The Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which granted women the right to vote, was ratified 92 years ago this month.¹

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 168 times faster and 26,667 times cheaper than the existing state-of-the-art test. He says the insight for the test came to him while he was “chilling out in biology class,” and that it was helped along by search engines and free online science papers.

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 subject, and learning the theoretical foundation can be not just educational but inspirational. In one early lecture, Boneh lays out a basic tenet that really spoke to me:

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.

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

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.

This post is cross-posted from the EFF Deeplinks blog.

I can’t believe six months has already passed, but I realized the other day that I’ve been running Iron Blogger SF for half a year now. A lot has happened: we’ve added a bunch of members and lost a few, too. We’ve had great meetups, gotten to know each other a bit better, and with a convention of the Global Iron Blogger Council this month,¹ we’ve even expanded the rules to establish reciprocity for members of different global chapters. Very nice.

Two articles that crossed my desk today described the difference between the two kinds of hackers. Howard Rheingold offered this distinction in his memoir of the WELL: