Social Mode

I’m delighted to see a posthumous apology given to Alan Turing. It’s hard to assign grand meaning or value to these types of apologies usually. Perhaps even in this case. What I think is great about it is that it calls attention to a person who many might not know provided a lot of the infrastructure and media we enjoy today and played a significant role in WWII. He’s not the most popular historical figure but might be one of the top 10 most important.

The statement from the PM is quite good. Find the transcript below.

2009 has been a year of deep reflection – a chance for Britain, as a nation, to commemorate the profound debts we owe to those who came before. A unique combination of anniversaries and events have stirred in us that sense of pride and gratitude which characterise the British experience. Earlier this year I stood with Presidents Sarkozy and Obama to honour the service and the sacrifice of the heroes who stormed the beaches of Normandy 65 years ago. And just last week, we marked the 70 years which have passed since the British government declared its willingness to take up arms against Fascism and declared the outbreak of World War Two. So I am both pleased and proud that, thanks to a coalition of computer scientists, historians and LGBT activists, we have this year a chance to mark and celebrate another contribution to Britain’s fight against the darkness of dictatorship; that of code-breaker Alan Turing.

Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of World War Two could well have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely. In 1952, he was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ – in effect, tried for being gay. His sentence – and he was faced with the miserable choice of this or prison – was chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones. He took his own life just two years later.

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. Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly. Over the years millions more lived in fear of conviction.

I am proud that those days are gone and that in the last 12 years this government has done so much to make life fairer and more equal for our LGBT community. This recognition of Alan’s status as one of Britain’s most famous victims of homophobia is another step towards equality and long overdue.

But even more than that, Alan deserves recognition for his contribution to humankind. For those of us born after 1945, into a Europe which is united, democratic and at peace, it is hard to imagine that our continent was once the theatre of mankind’s darkest hour. It is difficult to believe that in living memory, people could become so consumed by hate – by anti-Semitism, by homophobia, by xenophobia and other murderous prejudices – that the gas chambers and crematoria became a piece of the European landscape as surely as the galleries and universities and concert halls which had marked out the European civilisation for hundreds of years. It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe’s history and not Europe’s present.

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.

Gordon Brown

Prime Minister Brown’s Apology to Alan Turing [Transcript Included]

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Sep 10
Joe Wilson Tells Us What He Thinks!

Poor Joe Wilson. An unknown public servant who voiced his opinion at a public joint session catching hell all day.

It’s probably not a good strategy to heckle the president if you want him to chat with you about your ideas. However, if you don’t think the president is telling the truth and you’re in a public joint session, why the heck not?

Here’s a funny piece from the CBSnews.com Crime blog. Yes, the crime blog. You Lie looks a bit tame, eh?

At least the “You Lie!” got some people to fact check whether it was a lie or not. (it wasn’t… but will it become one once the bill is passed?)

Again, I’m not saying this is a great strategy for getting your point across. Then again, no one had ever heard of this guy before… is there such thing as bad publicity?

You Lie! – And what’s wrong with shouting that?

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Sep 10
Update from TechCrunch that’s mildly interesting…

which mentions this new site dedicated to solving the puzzle.

Amazing how Google can whip up usage with such easy things as “doodles”. today’s Google logo is “unexplained phenomenon”. Browsing around the web you’ll find tons of folks trying to figure out the significance. I’m quite amused by this and how many people are trying to arbitrage the traffic.

Let’s see what’s important about September 5th.

Wolfram|Alpha’s notable events doesn’t reveal anything in particular.

Wikipedia’s September 5th page hints at Discovery landing and Voyager launch, but that’s not right.

The Clues:

Twitter message decodes to All Your O Belong To Us

September 5th

Unexplained Phenomenon

Exeter,NH has a UFO festival.

Here’s some info about Exeter.

UFO info for September 5th.

Google Logo site

In the link for the search there are 3 Os missing…

Then again we’ve had a little run of internet buzz about unexplained things like chupacabra being found...

Google Trends on the matter

unexplained phenomenon

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Sep 5
Was able to get this config up and running. There’s only one gotcha…

the Dell Studio XPS doesn’t have the Intel VT turned on by default in the bios. You must enable this AND shutdown the computer completely for it to be recognized by VMWare. A restart isn’t enough. This setting is in the Advanced tab in AO7 version of the BIOS.

Windows 7 in VMWare on Dell Studio XPS with Ubuntu

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Sep 5
I laughed when I opened my email this morning. I had my daily dose of barackobama.com spam

Russell —

Opponents of health insurance reform have power. Some reap huge profits from the status quo. Others take large campaign contributions from those who profit.

So they’ll do anything to keep the current system in place. When fact-based arguments don’t work, they attack President Obama with outlandish lies about a government takeover and euthanizing the elderly. And once that doesn’t work, they’ll go even further.

We don’t know what they’ll do next. What we do know is that we’ll have to be prepared for anything — ready to set the record straight, ready to make sure the media and Congress see the overwhelming support for reform, and ready to pass real reform this year.

But we’ll need the resources to do it — to pay for rapid-response ads in key districts and states, organizers to put together large rallies and grassroots events throughout the country, and the best technology available to empower volunteers — all at a moment’s notice. Can you chip in $25 or more to help us pass real reform, this year?

Is this not hilarious? “Some reap huge profits from the status quo.” “Can you chip in $25 or more to help us pass real reform, this year?”

Yes, indeed. Let’s fight money with money! ads with ads. C’mon, man!

Reform doesn’t take big ads and big bucks. It takes leadership. Congress and Barack Obama need to use their PUBLIC forums (tax payer paid!) and talk about a bill that people actually want.

What might be keeping reform at bay is exactly this double talk messaging. To fight money we need money! To keep the media from misrepresenting the situation we want to give media money!

Stop the media massaging and just lead us to reform.

Power. From The Desk of Barack Obama

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Sep 2
Joe Meno put together a great novel in “The Great Perhaps.”   I’m certainly a biased reader when it comes to stories about the complexity of life and human relations. My bias balloons when the writer is a Chicagoan writing about Chicagoans. I was excited to read this book and it delivered for the most part.

The main thrust involves an intellectual/academic family’s struggle to deal with the difficulty in finding a simple meaning to it all.   It’s a middle-agers coming to grips with reality type story. The characters are perfectly interesting, if not a little underdeveloped and relying on caricature to fill them out. The main character is a bit of a nutty professor in marine science, his wife also a forlornanimal behavior researcher, and their kids are full of tean angst, one a budding communist the other an exploratory Christian. There’s also an aging grandfather winding down life in a nursing home.   All of them struggle with meaning in different ways and criss crossing each other constantly.

These characters don’t find an absolute truth to cling to, as the title suggests.   Science, religion, politics, psuedo affairs, leave it all behind…. none of it provides an answer for this family.   At the end of this book, by no means the end of the story, this family has only slightly advanced in their search. The parents more than the kids move forward in their thinking and yet it seems to be a very slippery, fragile place. Meaning and truth seem like that – don’t they?

One irritant for me was the jumpiness of the storylines. I found the flashbacks of the extended family history to be some of the least interesting vignittes. These flashbacks chopped up the story a bit too much and really weren’t that interesting to read.

If you were to finish your summer reading with a quick, witty, and thought provoking ready, this is a great choice. perhaps.

The Great Perhaps Review

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Aug 30
Business Week has a really great article about the value of basic research in R&D Labs to future economies.

Many of the classic scientific research labs, such as Bell Labs and RCA Labs (now Sarnoff Corp.), were started and funded by companies with virtual monopolies and very strong, predictable cash flows. They were able to embrace the uncertainty and serendipity of pure research in the context of their business. But such companies don’t exist today. With the increasing focus on shareholder value that began in the 1990s as global competition heated up, Fortune 500 companies could no longer justify open-ended research that might not directly impact their bottom line. Today, corporate research is almost exclusively engineering R&D, tending more toward applied research with a 3- to 5-year time horizon (or shorter). IBM, Microsoft MSFT, and Hewlett-Packard HPQ, for example, collectively spend $17 billion a year on R&D but only 3% to 5% of that is for basic science.

The End of Labs

It’s not just a shame, it’s actually a very bad strategy in play right now and for the future. I once remarked at company retreat I was at that often a company or industry matures so much that it’s only strategy is to invent just for the sake of inventing, with the idea that completely new revenue streams might evolve. I was quickly slapped down by a major executive, “We need to work on things that can be commercialized now.” I knew then the fate of that company would be mostly an arbitrage of wall street expectations. And that’s exactly what it, and 1000s of other companies have become. This is also why this particular recession is so painful – most companies have no institutional ability to innovate. Two decades of chaising the near term exit, the 30% stock market rocket shot leave industry stagnant.

Know one knows what the next big idea is. And no one will figure that out without basic research. And by big ideas, I mean things like the printing press, the Internet, germ theory, genetics, the Wheel. You know – THE BIG STUFF that powers generations of commerce.

Short Term Business Vision Dominates

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Aug 30
What do you make of Michael Vick, Ted Kennedy, Dick Cheney and Michael Jackson? Villians? Heros? Role-Models? Titans? Flawed? Deserving? Entitled? Charismatic? Faithful? Loyal? Disturbed? All of these things? None of these things?

These people, as all people, are infinitely complex. However, in the mass media (TV, radio, news, magazines) they are portrayed in very simple ways. Snippets of complexity stitched together into caricatures.   As proof of the over simplicity flip on the TV or browse your favorite news, sports, politics, or music site. There is the rare exception (abcnews Ted Kennedy section) and usually it is buried on a website special section (you decide if that’s mass media).

Mass Media needs to generate and dramatize conflict. When media fails to do that it usually doesn’t gain mass appeal.   There is a reinforcing loop for mass media producers to generate caricatures that get consumers to disagree and or promote that caricatures and the more consumers do this the more mass media produces. If a person is presented in all their complexity it grows ever more difficult for a consumer to outwardly respond (e.g. blog, talk around the water cooler, call into radio shows…). There is also limited time and space (and consumer attention) for mass media. Broadcasting or publishing detailed profiles of people is physically impossible.

Yes, it is possible for a dedicated consumer to find the rich profiles and details they desire.   I do have a personal fear though – mass media drives so much of the political and social discussion and the world moves so fast that fewer and fewer consumers take the time to uncover the details. Political marketers know this. The Health Care discussion is a very good case study in how mass media fails to provide a robust intellectual platform.   There’s no one to blame. Mass media has to make money for their shareholders and consumers do what they do. Perhaps just a talking point and something to consider as we go about our lives.

People are Complicated yet Oversimplified in the Media – why?

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Aug 30
This is a really neat, quick piece about Usain Bolt’s impact on sports writers and their comments about humanity and sport.

Usain Bolt

A good example of our unexpected things can shape thinking and approaches. My favorite take on this so far is over at ScienceBlogs. I love it that someone plotted the model of 100m times to see how far out Bolt is on the predicted trajectory of speed improvements.

Maybe we’ve got the model wrong. Maybe he’s an outlier and the model is right.

I have a prediction of my own: after the fun of this track event is over… somebody is going to argue he’s doping.

Usain Bolt Performance Effects

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Aug 21
For fun, let’s see who’s got the most accurate projected path.

CNN

Accuweather

National Hurricane Center

Ok, so the graphics side by side don’t really give you a way to gauge this… dig around.

The infographics and surrounding stories love to promote “worst case” even if that worst case really isn’t likely. No one will read the stories and visit these sites if the authors don’t keep the hint of major land impact. Duh. The trouble with this kind of news reporting is that it becomes hard to trust these graphics and stories if they stretch the facts and the worst case scenario doesn’t come to pass. Methinks this is part of the issue the news media has when the public doesn’t respond when a storm is actually on target for a population center. Then again, if you don’t report worst case scenario, no one pays attention until it’s too late.

Hurricane Bill’s Projected Path – who’s got the right model?

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Aug 19