The cause was a heart attack, said Rosemary Carroll, his former wife.
Obituary @ 'NY Times'
PS: Head over to Willard's blog for a bit of a rarity.
MOⒶNARCHISM
The cause was a heart attack, said Rosemary Carroll, his former wife.
A petition on the No 10 website had called for a posthumous government apology to the computer pioneer. In 1952 Turing was prosecuted for gross indecency after admitting a sexual relationship with a man. Two years later he killed himself.
The campaign was the idea of computer scientist John Graham-Cumming. He was seeking an apology for the way the mathematician was treated after his conviction. He also wrote to the Queen to ask for Turing to be awarded a posthumous knighthood. The campaign was backed by Ian McEwan, scientist Richard Dawkins and gay-rights campaigner Peter Tatchell. The petition posted on the Downing Street website attracted thousands of signatures. Mr Brown said: "While Mr 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."
National legacy
He said Mr Turing deserved recognition for his contribution to humankind. In the statement he said: "So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan's work I am very proud to say: we're sorry, you deserved so much better."
Organisers of the petition welcomed the move and Mr Turing's three nieces said they were "delighted" and "very glad" to see the injustice recognised. 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). Alan Turing is most famous for his code-breaking work at Bletchley Park during WWII, helping to create the Bombe that cracked messages enciphered with the German Enigma machines.
However, he also made significant contributions to the emerging fields of artificial intelligence and computing. In 1936 he established the conceptual and philosophical basis for the rise of computers in a seminal paper called On Computable Numbers, while in 1950 he devised a test to measure the intelligence of a machine. Today it is known as the Turing Test. After the war he worked at many institutions including the University of Manchester, where he worked on the Manchester Mark 1, one of the first recognisable modern computers. There is a memorial statue of him in Manchester's Sackville Gardens which was unveiled in 2001.
The British Government's official figures on the level of illegal file sharing in the UK come from questionable research commissioned by the music industry, the BBC has revealed.
The Radio 4 show More or Less - which is devoted to the "often abused but ever ubiquitous world of numbers" - decided to examine the Government's claim that 7m people in Britain are engaged in illegal file sharing. The 7m figure comes from the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property, a Government advisory body. The Advisory Board claimed it commissioned the research from a team of academics at University College London, who it transpires got the 7m figure from a paper published by Forrester Research.The More or Less team hunted down the relevant Forrester paper, but could find no mention of the 7m figure, so they contacted the report's author Mark Mulligan. Mulligan claimed the figure actually came from a report he wrote about music industry losses for Forrester subsidiary Jupiter Research. That report was privately commissioned by none other than the music trade body, the BPI.
As if the Government taking official statistics directly from partisan sources wasn't bad enough, the BBC reporter Oliver Hawkins also found that the figures were based on some highly questionable assumptions. The 7m figure had actually been rounded up from an actual figure of 6.7m. That 6.7m was gleaned from a 2008 survey of 1,176 net-connected households, 11.6% of which admitted to having used file-sharing software - in other words, only 136 people.
@ 'PC Pro'
You can listen to the BBC Radio 4 show 'More or Less' here or download it here.
IN JUNE 1971, US President Richard Nixon declared a "war on drugs". Drugs won.
The policy of deploying the full might of the state against the production, supply and consumption of illegal drugs has not worked. Pretty much anyone in the developed world who wants to take illicit substances can buy them. Those purchases fund a multibillion dollar global industry that has enriched mighty criminal cartels, for whom law enforcement agencies are mostly just a nuisance, rarely a threat. Meanwhile, the terrible harm that drug dependency does to individuals and societies has not been reduced. Demand and supply flourish.
"It is time to admit the obvious," writes Fernando Henrique Cardoso, former president of Brazil, in the Observer today. "The 'war on drugs' has failed."
Earlier this year, Mr Cardoso co-chaired the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy with former presidents of Colombia and Mexico. They endorsed a collective shift in policy from repression of drug use to harm reduction. Last month, Argentina's supreme court declared the prosecution of individuals for the possession of small amounts of drugs to be unconstitutional. Colombia's constitutional court came to a similar conclusion in 1994.
The trend towards decriminalisation in Latin America is born of desperation. The continent is the world's largest exporter of cocaine and marijuana. Its economies and criminal justice systems have been corrupted by the trade; in some areas the power of the drug gangs rivals that of the state. Something had to change.
Something must change also in the countries that buy Latin America's biggest export. In Britain, more than half a million people aged 16-24 took cocaine last year, according to Home Office statistics. More than a third of all Britons aged 16-59 have taken drugs at some point in their lives; one in 10 in the last year.
Not all of those people are a menace to society. Most of them are not even a menace to themselves. Most who take drugs in their youth stop later on. A generation that has grown up with normalised recreational drug use now occupies the commanding heights of business, media and politics. They might not take drugs themselves, but they are not morally outraged by them.
That is a significant cultural change. The political fixation on drugs prohibition really took hold in the west in the 1960s as much from moral panic about a subversive counterculture as from analysis of the harm caused by particular drugs.
Since then, the law has tried to maintain a distinction between reputable and disreputable substances that neither users nor medical research recognise. Scientific attempts to classify drugs in terms of the harm they do – to the body and society – routinely place tobacco and alcohol ahead of cannabis and ecstasy. The point is not that the wrong drugs are banned, but that the law is nonsense to anyone with real knowledge of the substances involved.
One point of general agreement is that heroin is the big problem. It is highly addictive and those who are dependent – up to 300,000 in Britain – tend to commit a lot of crime to fund their habit. But then it is hard to tell how much of the problem is contained by prohibition and how much caused by it.
Leaving gangsters in charge of supply ensures that addicts get a more toxic product and get ever more ensnared in criminality.
Those arguments do not prove that the solution lies in legalisation, or even just decriminalisation. But as Mr Cardoso argues: "Continuing the drugs war with more of the same is ludicrous."
The entire framework of the debate must change. In Britain, we operate with laws that start from the premise that drug use is inherently morally wrong, and then seek ways to stop it. Instead we must start by evaluating the harm that drug use does, and then look for the best ways to alleviate it; and we must have the courage to follow that logic wherever it leads.