Color me deee-lighted: the notoriously hard-to-please Kirkus Reviews just published a review of Homeland, the sequel to my novel Little Brother, and they loved it. After a glowing recap of the plot, they said,

Such nerd-favorite icons
as 3-D printers, Wil Wheaton and /My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic/
serve as in-jokes, but the concise explanations of real-world
technology and fast pace make it accessible to less technologically
savvy readers.

Outstanding for its target audience, and even those outside Doctorow’s
traditional reach may find themselves moved by its call to action.

My latest Guardian column is “Here’s what ICT should really teach kids: how to do regular expressions,” and it makes the case for including regular expressions in foundational IT and computer science courses. Regexp offer incredible power to normal people in their normal computing tasks, and we treat them as deep comp-sci, instead of something everyone should learn alongside typing.

I think that technical people underestimate how useful regexps are for “normal” people, whether a receptionist labouriously copy-pasting all the surnames from a word-processor document into a spreadsheet, a school administrator trying to import an old set of school records into a new system, or a mechanic hunting through a parts list for specific numbers.

The reason technical people forget this is that once you know regexps, they become second nature. Any search that involves more than a few criteria is almost certainly easier to put into a regexp, even if your recollection of the specifics is fuzzy enough that you need to quickly look up some syntax online.

Here’s what ICT should really teach kids: how to do regular expressions

My latest Locus magazine column is “The Internet of the Dead,” which discusses the collision course the Internet is on with death. It was inspired by my work to preserve the personal data of my old friend Erik “Possum Man” Stewart, who died unexpectedly and tragically in June:

It was while I sat in Possum’s room that I began to think about his computer. It was a homemade Franken-PC that sat under his desk, its wheezy fan making a racket like an ancient refrigerator. After I’d left Possum’s house and headed back to the airport, I got to thinking about that computer. I strongly suspected that Possum would have copied over all the data of his life – all the e-mails and lists and photos and movies and programs and essays and stories and, well, *everything* – onto each new machine, keeping it all live and handy. After all, hard-drives are cheap – especially if you’re building your own tower PC with lots of full-height drive bays – and their capacity increases exponentially, year on year. It’s been a long time since it made sense to keep your archives in a shoebox full of Zip cartridges or floppy drives. If you buy a PC every couple of years, your new machine will almost certainly have more than twice the hard-drive space of your old one. Keeping your data on your live, spinning platter means that it will get saved every time you do your regular backup (assuming you perform this essential ritual!), and if the drive starts to fail, you’ll know about it right away. It’s not like dragging an old floppy out of a dusty box and praying that it hasn’t succumbed to bitrot since it was put away.

Possum never uploaded his consciousness to a computer, but he approximated such a transfer, one keystroke at a time, year after year, filling those noisy, full-height drives with all his secrets, all his creative outpourings, all his minutiae and mundane trivialities and extraordinary profundities. It’s a transfer we’re all effecting, but Possum got a head start on most of us, kicking off the project in the 1980s. That homely, rackety tower under Possum’s desk was him, in some important sense – in the same sense that my laptop holds a good deal of what it means to be me.

Cory Doctorow: The Internet of the Dead

My latest Guardian column is “Why all pharmaceutical research should be made open access,” and it makes the wider case for open access, beyond the obvious truth that publicly funded work should be available to the public:

One of the strongest arguments for public access in scholarly and scientific publication is the “public debt” argument: if the public pays you to do research, the research should belong to the public. That’s a good argument, but it’s not the whole story. For one thing, it’s vulnerable to the “public-private partnership” counterargument, which goes, “Ah, yes, but why not ensure that the public gets a maximum dividend on its spending by charging lots of money for access to publicly funded research and returning the profit to the research sector?” I think this argument is rubbish, as do most economists who have studied the question.

The public good of freely accessible, unencumbered research generates more economic value for the public than the quick-hit sugar-rush you get from charging the public on the way in and again on the way out. This has held true in many sectors, though the canonical example is the massive public return from the US Geological Survey’s freely usable maps, which have generated a fortune that makes the ransoms collected by the Ordnance Survey on its maps of the UK look like a pittance.

That’s why Goldacre’s work is important to this discussion. The reason pharma companies should be required to publish their results isn’t that they’ve received a public subsidy for the research. Rather, it is because they are asking for a governmental certification saying that their products are fit for consumption, and they are asking for regulatory space to allow doctors to write prescriptions for those products. We need them to disclose their research – even if doing so undermines their profits – because without that research, we can’t know if their products are fit for use.

Why all pharmaceutical research should be made open access