This one’s a bit tougher. These days, the standard accepted range for saxophone is between a B♭ below the treble clef to an F♯ above it. That’s about two and a half octaves, or a total of 32 notes. ((The glib answer, of course, is that there are twelve notes, repeated in various octaves.)) It’s possible, if a bit convoluted, to play a low A and a high G, so we can add two for a total of 34 notes.
The Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which granted women the right to vote, was ratified 92 years ago this month. ((It had been introduced 41 years earlier by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, but sometimes it takes a few decades to move the Overton window towards sanity.))
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 anyway. Is there still a woman alive today who could have been denied a vote in a presidential election on the basis of her gender? ((Of course, considering the shocking war on women being waged by the current GOP, there must be plenty of examples of disenfranchisement on the basis of gender. In this post I’m just looking at the timing of the Nineteenth Amendment.))
As it turns out, the answer to that question seems to be yes. The world’s oldest living person happens to be an American woman named Besse Cooper, and she celebrated her 116th birthday this weekend. She was born in 1896 in Sullivan, Tennessee, but moved to Monroe, Georgia during World War I. That means she would have been living in Georgia when she turned 21 on August 26, 1917. (I’m going with 21 instead of 18, because that was the national voting age before the passage of the Twenty-sixth Amendment in 1971.)
1918 was a Senate election year, and Ms. Cooper would have been denied the right to vote in that race. Incumbent Thomas Hardwick lost in the Democratic primary, but two years later was elected governor. One of his most notable acts, incidentally, was appointing the first woman to serve in the Senate, Rebecca Latimer Felton. Her appointment was basically ceremonial — she only served for one day — but to date she’s still Georgia’s only female Senator.
Anyway, cut to two years later and the first presidential election since Ms. Cooper’s 21st birthday. Because of the recent ratification, women all over the country were set to vote for the president for the first time. Georgia, however, was not only the first state to reject the amendment, but also continued to resist it even after its ratification. In particular, the legislature refused to allow women to vote at the polling station because they had failed to register in April and May of that year, before they were legally allowed to do so. ((This point is actually a bit contentious. The source I link to seems credible, but I’d like to hear from people who know more about this.)) Women in Georgia apparently weren’t allowed to vote until the 1922 mid-term election, and the state didn’t formally ratify the amendment until 1970.
Georgia went to James M. Cox, but Warren Harding won the national vote in a landslide. Four years later, Ms. Cooper may have been able to vote for the president after being denied the first time. Ninety-two years later, she may be the only living woman in the country to have had that experience.
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.
On its face, this is a major victory for open science. The right person was able to find the right materials and combine them in such a way to make some important scientific progress, all because there were few barriers in place to stop him. Even better, he was rewarded for this development immediately, with a bounty much greater than most high school sophomores can expect to see in a year — for his efforts, he was awarded the Intel Science Fair grand prize of $75,000, and smaller category prizes for a total of $100,500.
I want to close it up there, and just congratulate him on being such a remarkable example of the power of open access. But, alas, there’s a hitch. From the long Forbes article about his discovery:
He says he’s been contacted by four companies, including Quest Diagnostics, about potentially licensing or commercializing the idea. “I got a really fierce patent lawyer right after I won ISEF,” says Andraka, laughing, from his home in Maryland.
I have a few problems with that statement. Underlying all of them: why is he even seeking a patent? Patents are Constitutional only insofar as they promote the progress of science and the useful arts. But in this story, it was the lack of restrictions that allowed progress.
A patent would undermine at least one significant component of his discovery. It’s all but inevitable that the impressive savings from his test will be reduced when the cost of lawyers, licensing, and monopoly pricing get factored in. It’s still going to be much cheaper than the existing test, but it will also be less widely available as its distribution is limited by the single point of licensing.
Further, it’s not even clear he’s eligible for a patent since the Supreme Court ruling in Mayo v. Prometheus. That case, decided earlier this year, actually concerned a patent on a medical diagnostic test. The Court held that observations of a natural correlation do not constitute patent-eligible subject matter.
Nobody’s knocking his achievement, and it’s incredibly impressive and good for humanity that Jack Andraka was able to make this discovery. I just wish he’d take a page from the book of the great Jonas Salk, who, when asked who owned the patent on his breakthrough polio vaccine, responded simply:
Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?
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:
There’s a very central theorem in crypto, and it really is quite a surprising fact, that says that any computation you’d like to do, any function F you’d like to compute, that you can compute with a trusted authority, you can also do without a trusted authority. …
Instead, what the parties are gonna do, is they’re gonna talk to one another using some protocol, such that at the end of the protocol all of the sudden the value of the function becomes known to everybody.
Boneh is talking, in this example, about elections and private auctions, but the broader message is striking. Any function that’s possible with an authority is possible without one. Any group can devise a method for communicating internally and producing results without a requirement to put trust in a party on the outside.
This central theorem gave me new perspective on the connection between anarchy and cypherpunks. I knew that the government classified crypto technology as a munition during the “crypto wars” of the ’80s and ’90s, but I’d always assumed that the government feared its use to assist in acts of violence. I realize now how much more subversive it can be.
I had looked in the wrong place of Weber’s model of governmental authority as a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force; while the government could claim to be concerned about crypto’s use in creating violence, it may have really been worried about its undermining the government’s monopoly on legitimacy. Any function that’s possible with an authority is possible without one.
The rest of the class was interesting as well, and the math involved feels clever but simple, complex but not complicated. I recommend it to anybody who’s given some thought to cryptography but wants to know more.
Of course, for some purposes a full class on cryptography is total overkill. It’s useful to gain a more complete understanding of the theoretical background, but for most it suffices simply to be literate. For everybody, but especially for people in high-risk situations — people who face threats from sophisticated, even state-level attackers — it’s important to know how to use the sophisticated tools that are available.
That, so far as I understand it, is the genesis of #CryptoParty. It’s a set of global get-togethers where more experienced users can teach beginners how to use the commonly available tools that tap into the incredibly powerful technology of cryptography. I hope that a beginner walks away from a #CryptoParty with an understanding of not just PGP, OTR, and the like, but with an idea of why threat models are important, what attack vectors she ought to consider, and — most importantly — a network of people and resources she can contact for even more knowledge.
As far as I know, #CryptoParty is still less than 48 hours old, but it’s popping up with events all over the world. I’m planning to get together the SF chapter, if you can help with that, please drop me a line!
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 be with my friends Audrey Evans and Nancy Sims (@CopyrightLibn) and cover the issues libraries face as publishers push for an ebook licensing model to replace the current 108 and first sale regime. I made a video to explain the panel:
The second panel proposal is called Drones Gone Wild, and will be with my colleague Trevor, as well as Ryan Calo and Nabiha Syed, who’s currently a First Amendment Fellow for the New York Times and who has been instrumental in the EFF/MuckRock drone request campaign. (Trevor and I previously spoke together about drones at HOPE and we co-operate @drones.) We’ll be talking about the rise of domestic drones and the privacy problems they introduce.