Forgotten heroes Nov 18, 2009
LOTTERY'S 'UNSUNG HEROES' 1: Michael Faraday, physicist 2: JM Barrie, author 3: Edward Jenner, smallpox vaccine pioneer 4: John Peel, broadcaster 5: Alan Turing, mathematician 6: Baldrick, Blackadder character 7: Midge Ure, singer 8: Percy Shaw, cat's eyes inventor 9: Tim Berners-Lee, worldwide web inventor 10: Fred Scott, BBC cameraman Source: National Lottery ... " This year, another name burst into the ranks of recognition. Mathematician Alan Turing, ranked fifth in the National Lottery's... (BBC News -- UK)
I'm so sick of being sorry Oct 27, 2009
Alan Turing, a mathematician who helped break the German Enigma codes during the Second World War, was convicted of "gross indecency" after acknowledging to police he'd had sex with a man who later robbed him ... What a shame that the apology that appears to tip it for Tim Dick is PM Brown's apology regarding Alan Turing's conviction over unjust laws criminalising homosexuality. (Sydney Morning Herald -- Opinion)
Important date in history Sep 18, 2009
UK gov't apologizes to gay codebreaker Alan Turing. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown offered a posthumous apology Friday for the "inhumane" treatment of Alan Turing, the World War II codebreaker who committed suicide in 1954 after being prosecuted for homosexuality and forcibly treated with female hormones. (Fresno Bee -- Opinion)
British PM says sorry for computer pioneer's castration Sep 15, 2009
computer pioneer Alan Turing. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has apologised for the treatment of World War II codebreaker Alan Turing, who committed suicide after being convicted and chemically castrated for being a homosexual ... "I wanted Alan Turing to be raised into the pantheon of great Britons, but I felt it would be hypocritical to do so without recognising that Britain treated him so badly," he told Reuters. (Sydney Morning Herald -- Technology)
The Mysteries Behind Society's Most Famous Suicides Sep 15, 2009
There is renewed interest right now in English mathematician Alan Turing, a World War II hero who killed himself in 1954 rather than face criminal charges for homosexuality. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown recently issued an apology for his "appalling treatment." Turing was clearly someone who was way ahead of his time and deeply misunderstood by the society in which he lived. (Time.com)
U.K. offers apology to gay WWII codebreaker Sep 12, 2009
British code-breaker Alan Turing was instrumental in breaking the code, and which is widely thought to have been a turning point in the war ... LONDON - British Prime Minister Gordon Brown offered a posthumous apology Friday for the "inhumane" treatment of Alan Turing, the World War II codebreaker who committed suicide in 1954 after being prosecuted for homosexuality and forcibly treated with female hormones. (MSNBC -- International)
UK apologizes for treatment of codebreaker Sep 12, 2009
Alan Turing, who was prosecuted for being gay, helped crack codes from Germany s Enigma machines ... LONDON - Prime Minister Gordon Brown offered a posthumous apology yesterday for the inhumane treatment of Alan Turing, the World War II codebreaker who committed suicide in 1954 after being prosecuted for homosexuality and forcibly treated with female hormones. (Boston Globe)
Righting a wrong Sep 12, 2009
Alan Turing was forced to take drugs or be sent to prison after his conviction. Gordon Brown may have apologised for the "appalling" way gay computer pioneer Alan Turing was treated, but some believe the prime minister should go further ... Many gay men were "treated" in the same way as Alan Turing - given powerful drugs or electric shocks to "cure" them of their homosexuality. (BBC News -- UK)
Tortured genius Sep 12, 2009
Profile: Alan Turing ... Alan Turing: Credited with innovation in many disciplines ... Alan Turing was a World War II code-breaker. (BBC News -- Technology)
UK gov't apologizes to gay codebreaker Alan Turing Sep 11, 2009
LONDON -- British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has apologized for the "inhumane" treatment of World War II code-breaker Alan Turing. Turing, a brilliant mathematician, helped crack N 000027A8 azi Germany's Enigma communications code - a turning point in the war. (Fresno Bee -- Local)
Disney sets out to make 'The Passion for kids' Sep 11, 2009
PM issues a posthumous apology to Alan Turing, the Second World War code breaker, who killed himself after being convicted of being homosexual. Parents who give lifts to other children from sports and social clubs must register with the new anti-paedophile database. (Yahoo News -- 'The Passion of the Christ')
Smart switching could solve communication tangle Sep 11, 2009
It's high time to apologise for mistreating computer guru Alan Turing and turn him into a Great Briton. 20:39 10 September 2009 12 comments. (Yahoo News -- Instant Messaging)
Treatment of Alan Turing was “appalling” - PM Sep 11, 2009
Treatment of Alan Turing was appalling - PM ... Treatment of Alan Turing was appalling - PM ... The Prime Minister has released a statement on the Second World War code-breaker, Alan Turing, recognising the appalling way he was treated for being gay. (10 Downing Street)
Brown apologises to WWII code-breaking hero Sep 11, 2009
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued a posthumous apology Friday to World War II code-breaker Alan Turing, who committed suicide after he was tried and convicted of being homosexual. Brown said Turing, who took his own life in 1954, had been treated "terribly", adding that the outcome of the conflict could have been quite different without the code-breaker's efforts. (Sydney Morning Herald -- World)
Technology Monitor: A new Turing test Sep 10, 2009
That, at least, was the test proposed in 1950 by Alan Turing, a British mathematician. Turing envisaged a typed exchange between machine and person, so that a genuine conversation could happen without the much harder problem of voice emulation having to be addressed. (The Economist)
All the golden gossip from the British Science Festival Sep 8, 2009
The test is named after the founder of modern computing, British mathematician Alan Turing. Brought up in Guildford, Turing's statue can be seen striding across a concrete concourse at the University of Surrey. (BBC News -- Science)
Thousands call for Turing apology Aug 31, 2009
Alan Turing is said to be the founder of computer science. Thousands of people have signed a Downing Street petition calling for a posthumous government apology to World War II code breaker Alan Turing ... Alan Turing was given experimental chemical castration as a "treatment" and his security privileges were removed, meaning he could not continue work for the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). (BBC News -- UK)
Scientists on the brink of creating computer with human brain? Aug 12, 2009
Not one computer or robot has come near passing the famous 'Turing Test', devised by the brilliant Cambridge scientist Alan Turing in 1950, to prove whether a machine could think. It is a simple test in which someone is asked to communicate, using a screen and keyboard, with a computer trying to mimic a human, and another, real human. (The Drudge Report)
Secret heroes Jul 21, 2009
German changes to the Enigma machines during the war meant much greater resources were required to crack them, and that was where the inventiveness of Alan Turing and the other British code-breakers was key. The Enigma configurations changed daily - and the "key for the day" could be any one of about 364,000 million possible settings. (BBC News -- Europe)
How Proteins Assemble Into Complex Patterns Jul 9, 2009
This simple organizational mechanism - dubbed stochastic self-assembly - is related to the self-organizing patterns first described in 1952 by the British computer scientist Alan Turing. It is not widely appreciated that complex periodic patterns can spontaneously emerge from simple mechanisms, but that is probably what is happening here, said Jan Liphardt, the biophysicist who led this research. (Science Daily)
Glenn Beck, Chatterbot May 8, 2009
Alan Turing, a British mathematician, is widely recognized as the father of computer science, and is perhaps best known for his key role during World War II in breaking the code of the Germans' encryption machine. What became known as the first appeared in a in which Turing proposed a contest in which an interrogator communicated with two people he could neither see nor hear. (Slate)
Mollusks Taste Memories To Build Shells Apr 3, 2009
Famed computer scientist Alan Turing showed in 1952 how local activation/lateral inhibition could work chemically, and biologist Hans Meinhardt used this chemical model to create realistic seashell patterns in the 1970s, which he published in a 1995 book called "The algorithmic beauty of sea shells.". At that time, the neural basis of shell patterning hadn't been widely accepted, though Oster and Ermentrout published an earlier version of the neural model in the 1970s. (Science Daily)
Kylie and Judy left out of gay icon list Mar 28, 2009
But there will be Alan Turing, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Margarethe Cammermeyer and Mstislav Rostropovich. Minogue, Garland, Minnelli and Streisand may be adored by gay men across the world but they will not be part of an exhibition announced by the National Portrait Gallery in London called, simply, Gay Icons. (Sydney Morning Herald -- Entertainment)
The Enigma machine: a building block for secure email Mar 27, 2009
Within Ultra the most famous, and probably greatest, mind was that of Alan Turing. It was Turing who perfected primitive pseudo-computers dubbed bombes, to sift through German Enigma correspondence and determine the daily rotor setting. (Fairfield Minuteman, CT)
• British code crackers reunite, with pride unbroken Mar 25, 2009
Tuesday's event was to honor a rebuilt replica of the Turing Bombe, the machine invented by mathematician Alan Turing that was an outsized forerunner of the modern computer. That invention deciphered the Germans' top-secret messages that were encoded by the Nazis' typewriter-like Enigma machines. (Burley South Idaho Press, ID)
THE TECH CHRONICLES A daily dose of postings from The Chronicle's tech... Mar 13, 2009
The award is named for British mathematician Alan Turing, who helped lay the groundwork for computing with his code-breaking research during World War II.. The association praised Liskov for such conceptual breakthroughs as finding ways to organize complex programs and, more recently, her efforts to make software more resistant to errors and hacking. (San Francisco Chronicle -- Technology)
Barbara Liskov wins Turing award Mar 12, 2009
The prize, named after British mathematician Alan Turing, is awarded annually by the Association for Computing Machinery. ACM president Professor Dame Wendy Hall said of Liskov: "Her elegant solutions have enriched the research community, but they have also had a practical effect as well. "They have led to the design and construction of real products that are more reliable than were believed practical not long ago," she added. Professor Liskov will be presented with the award in June. Bookmark... (BBC News -- Technology)
MIT professor wins Turing Award Mar 10, 2009
The award, known in technology circles as the Nobel Prize of computing, is named for legendary British mathematician Alan Turing, who helped the Allies break German naval codes during World War II. It will be presented to Liskov by the Association of Computing Machinery, a scientific society, at a conference in San Diego in June. Liskov, 69, an institute professor and associate provost at MIT, is being honored for her innovations in "building the pervasive computer system designs that power... (Boston Globe)
Getting your geek on: a review of The BBook of Geek Feb 19, 2009
Briggs digs deep: Visicalc, Perl, Red Dwarf, Nethack, Metropolis, Brazil (which, really, you shouldn't miss), Alan Turing, and Jonathan Coulton. Each topic gets a two-page spread. (Ars Technica)
The history of UK computing Feb 7, 2009
When pushed, he said, they might be able to remember the name of Alan Turing but few know of any others beyond that. Turing established the conceptual and philosophical basis for the rise of computers in a seminal 1936 paper called "On Computable Numbers". (BBC News -- Technology)
Code-cracking and computers Feb 7, 2009
The man who made Colossus was Post Office engineer Tommy Flowers, who had instantly impressed Alan Turing when asked by the maverick mathematician to design a machine to help him in his war work ... After the war Bletchley veterans Alan Turing and Max Newman separately did more work on computers using the basic designs and plans seen in Colossus. (BBC News -- Technology)
