Time for a "Turing/Berners-Lee" Day?

On this day, in 1937:

Alan Turing’s paper entitled "On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungs-problem" appeared on November 12, 1937, somewhat contemporaneously with Konrad Zuse’s work on the first of the Z machines in Germany, John Vincent Atanasoff ‘s work on the ABC, George Stibitz’s work on the Bell Telephony relay machine, and Howard Aiken’s on the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator.

Later renamed the Turing Machine, this abstract engine provided the fundamental concepts of computers that the other inventors would realise independently. So Turing provided the abstraction that would form the basic theory of computability for several decades, while others provided the pragmatic means of computation.

And on this day a little later, in 1990:

The attached document describes in more detail a Hypertext project.

HyperText is a way to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will. It provides a single user-interface to large classes of information (reports, notes, data-bases, computer documentation and on-line help). We propose a simple scheme incorporating servers already available at CERN.

Maybe we should declare this date the Turing-Berners-Lee Day?

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Thanks for Keeping us in the Picture

Although e-petitions don't often accomplish much (the apology for Alan Turing being a notable exception), they do have the virtue of forcing the UK government to say something. In response to this:

“We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to remove new restrictions on photography in public places.”

we got this:

It is a statutory defence for a person to prove that they had a reasonable excuse for eliciting, publishing or communicating the relevant information. Legitimate journalistic activity (such as covering a demonstration for a newspaper) is likely to constitute such an excuse. Similarly, an innocent tourist or other sight-seer taking a photograph of a police officer is likely to have a reasonable excuse.

Since most people can't *prove* they had reasonable excuse for taking a photo - is "because it was a nice shot" *reasonable*? And how do you *prove* it was reasonable at the time? - this very high legal bar obviously implies that non-journalistic Brits had better not take any snaps of Plod because, otherwise, you're nicked.

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Why Gordon Brown is Not Turing Complete

Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can’t put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him.

Kudos to Gordon Brown for at last apologising to the memory of this poor man. Or at least partial kudos, since he doesn't quite seem to have taken those words fully to heart.

If we wish to render some justice to Turing, there would be no better way than to ensure the preservation of Bletchley Park, perhaps the central theatre of his work, as a monument to him, and to the thousands of others involved in the early years of code-breaking and computing in this country. If Gordon Brown is sincere in his apology, and these are to be more than a politician's easy words, he should make that happen now.

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Is this Google's ActiveX Disaster?

I remember very well the days in the mid 1990s when it became clear that Microsoft's ActiveX technology, which grew out of OLE, a way for creating compound documents, was essentially the world's greatest browser malware construction kit. Since then, ActiveX exploits have probably caused more harm in the Windows world than any other aspect of Microsoft's flawed platform. So it is with some consternation that I find that Google seems to have learned nothing from history....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Bestriding the Narrow World

Welcome back, Colossus.

Open Data in the Age of Exponential Science

There's a very interesting article in this week's Nature, as part of its 2020 Computing Special (which miraculously is freely available even to non-subscribers), written by Alexander Szalay and Jim Gray.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Gray a couple of years back. He's a Grand Old Man of the computing world, with a hugely impressive curriculum vitae; he's also a thoroughly charming interviewee with some extremely interesting ideas. For example:

I believe that Alan Turing was right and that eventually machines will be sentient. And I think that's probably going to happen in this century. There's much concern that that might work out badly; I actually am optimistic about it.

The Nature article is entitled "Science in an exponential world", and it considers some of the approaching problems that the vast scaling up of Net-based, collaborative scientific endeavour is likely to bring us in the years to come. Here's one key point:

A collaboration involving hundreds of Internet-connected scientists raises questions about standards for data sharing. Too much effort is wasted on converting from one proprietary data format to another. Standards are essential at several levels: in formatting, so that data written by one group can be easily read and understood by others; in semantics, so that a term used by one group can be translated (often automatically) by another without its meaning being distorted; and in workflows, so that analysis steps can be executed across the Internet and reproduced by others at a later date.

The same considerations apply to all open data in the age of exponential science: without common standards that allow data from different groups, gathered at different times and in varying circumstance, to be brought together meaningfully in all sorts of new ways, the openness is moot.