Andy Duncan's Blog, page 4

The buzz on drone journalism

My student Shawn Pillai shares a link to a reblogged Watertown (N.Y.) Daily Times editorial about airborne surveillance drones, coming soon to airspace near you:

Legislation just signed by President Obama directs the Federal Aviation Administration to open the skies to remotely controlled drones within the next three years. It will begin in 90 days with police and first responders ...

Shawn calls this "scary," and he's right. Keep in mind, however, that not only police agencies are planning to deploy drones. Case in point: the four-month-old Drone Journalism Lab at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Lab founder Matt Waite -- who declares, "Drones are an ideal platform for journalism" -- demonstrated one of his drones to an exhilarated (and jittery) crowd at the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting Conference in St. Louis in February. Here's John Keefe's video of the takeoff and landing.

In Urbana, Ill., meanwhile, Matthew Schroyer has founded the Professional Society of Drone Journalists. Here's Schroyer's overview of the topic.

Maybe Frostburg State faculty in journalism, computer science and engineering should get together to talk about this.

Busted

Today's postal mail brought an unpleasant surprise, my first speed-camera ticket. According to Maryland State Police automata, I was going 68 mph in a 55 mph work zone at 9:42 a.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 22, at I-70 and South Street in Frederick County, Md.I was driving three students to the Baltimore airport to catch a plane to a conference. I guess being busted by a speed camera beats being pulled to the roadside by a police officer, with the attendant embarrassment and delay.Instead, the shame has followed me to my house, where it's aggravated by the fact that I was driving Sydney's car at the time. No matter who is driving, the automata write tickets to the car's owner, so the ticket arrived addressed to Sydney. Imagine her delight when she opened the envelope. Imagine her warm words.Since May 2011, cameras at that location have written 3,414 citations, an average of 341 a month. Assuming $40 a pop, and assuming further that everyone cited actually paid, that's $136,560 in total revenue, or $13,656 a month.That's peanuts compared to the lucre generated by the I-95 cameras in Baltimore County, between I-695 and I-895. They've generated 384,062 citations since November 2009, or $15.4 million. See for yourself.According to Maryland SafeZones Facts, these cameras are mounted on white sport utility vehicles marked with the SafeZones logo, and by the time I passed them, I already had passed work-zone warning signs, plus an electronic sign displaying my speed.So it's a fair cop, as Monty Python used to say -- though I apparently could have sped past the cameras with impunity had I been going 1 mph slower.I'm still disconcerted that my public movements are so much more easily tracked by the government than they used to be.

Read in 2011

Of the books I read in 2011, a few favorites, in publication order.

Fiction:
Jim Thompson, The Getaway (1959). Scary and increasingly surreal. Arguably a dark fantasy novel.Stephen King (as Richard Bachman), The Long Walk (1979). Relentless. A lifetime ahead of The Hunger Games.Ted Chiang, The Lifecycle of Software Objects (2010). As with all Chiang's best work, it's not only moving but keeps you thinking for months after you put down the book.Non-fiction:
Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry, Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders (1974).  A spellbinding police procedural, courtroom drama, and personality study. William R. Corliss, Science Frontiers: Some Anomalies and Curiosities of Nature (2 vols., 1994 and 2004). An annotated bibliography of thousands of eyebrow-raising articles in the scientific literature. Astonishment on every page.Ed Cray, Ramblin' Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie (2004). Honest about the man's countless flaws, but awe-inspiring nonetheless.

Marcellus Shale gas overestimated by 80 percent

The U.S. Energy Information Administration says it will cut its estimate of the total natural gas in the Marcellus Shale by 80 percent to match the U.S. Geological Survey estimate, according to The New York Times.  "They're geologists; we're not," an EIA analyst said, rather sheepishly.

To be sure, 84 million cubic feet is still a lot of natural gas, but that USGS estimate itself is generous, because it counts all the gas that's "technically recoverable," meaning using every iota of extraction technology available on the planet.  How much of that would be economically feasible, even amid boom natural-gas prices, is another story.

That supposedly scientific estimates of Eastern gas reserves seem to vary so wildly, depending on who's making the estimate and what's being counted and what time of day it is and whether you hold your mouth just right, is deeply troubling.  I agree with Bill Powers, publisher of Powers Energy Investor:

If the country is going to embrace natural gas as the fuel of the future, there needs to be a lot more transparency in how these estimates are calculated and a more skeptical and informed discussion about the economics of shale gas.

(Thanks to Dale Sams for passing this along.)

Can a bar of soap in the bed prevent leg cramps?

I've heard for years, especially from Sydney's family, that a bar of soap in the bed prevents nocturnal leg cramps.  Having never suffered that malady, I've never had occasion to try it.  Now Snopes.com labels the folk belief "undetermined," on the assumption that no one has proven or disproven it.

I'm inclined, like Snopes, to attribute any benefit to the ever-reliable placebo effect, but I'd still like to know whether any scientists have tested this belief.

A Father's Day remembrance on the Outer Banks

While running errands today, I saw two women and two boys planting a cross beside the U.S. 158 bypass in Kill Devil Hills, N.C.

I stopped to talk and learned the cross marks the site where Victor Wilson of Kill Devil Hills was fatally injured on his motorcycle in May 2010.  The boys are Wilson's sons, who were 13 and 6 when he died. Planting the cross was the family's Father's Day observance.

Here's the original Virginian-Pilot account of Wilson's death, which credits police as saying that a pickup-truck driver leaving the Outer Banks Brewing Station across the highway pulled in front of Wilson's Harley about 7:30 p.m. on May 21, 2010. "Charges are pending," says the story, but I find no follow-up online.

Here's the online obituary, courtesy of Twiford's Funeral Home in Elizabeth City, N.C.

The new cross is in the corner of the Captain George's lot on U.S. 158, a.k.a. South Croatan Highway, at the Goddard Avenue intersection. We drive by dozens of such markers every day; every one is a story.

Procrastination wins again

In our absence this week, the bell post in our front yard finally fell down of its own accord, sparing us a chore we'd been putting off for five years. The timing is good, as Big Trash Day is next week.

This summer's Write-a-Thon(s)

I haven't tried this before, but since I am working on several writing projects this summer, I have declared solidarity with the Clarion West and Clarion UCSD students, and joined the Write-a-Thon fund-raisers for both workshops. Writers and readers, please help me spread the word, and consider joining and/or pledging. Here's my Clarion West Write-a-Thon page, and here's my Clarion UCSD page.

A fine alternate-history illustration

This fine Richard Hess cover for The Oxford Book of Military Anecdotes (Oxford UP, 1985) is a work of alternate history, unlike the book it was commissioned to wrap around. 

I wonder whether Hess read Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series -- though in Farmer's novels, all the world's most famous military leaders didn't wake up on the same patch of riverbank, fortunately.  Moreover, most of Hess' characters are clearly older than 25.

ICFA-31: Sydney

This photo of Sydney Duncan fits none of my other groupings, but I like it, and she's my wife, and she did a great job as author wrangler this year, so she gets a posting all to herself. John Kessel took this photo at the (excellent) Thursday-morning Kathy Goonan / Kij Johnson / Tom De Haven reading.