internet pioneers
1/8/2020 From: Vint Cerf via Internet-history
<internet-history@elists.isoc.org>
Date: Wed, Jan 8, 2020 at 7:18 AM Subject: sad news: Peter Kirstein
To: <internet-history@elists.isoc.org>
I am sorry to relay the sad news that Peter Kirstein passed away
this morning (London time). He was a key implementer and promoter of
networking, participating in both the ARPANET and Internet
developments as well as the UK Coloured Book and Open Systems
Interconnection protocols.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_T._Kirstein
vint cerf
Harry Douglas Huskey, a computer pioneer who was part of the famed ENIAC engineering team during World War II, worked with Alan Turing, and designed the Bendix G15,
Robert Taylor, Innovator Who Shaped Modern Computing, Dies at 85
4/14/17
At the time, ARPA was funding three separate computer research
projects and using three separate computer terminals to communicate
with them. Mr. Taylor said, No, we need a single computer research
network, to connect each project with the others, to enable each to
communicate with the others. “I went to see Charlie Herzfeld, who
was the head of ARPA, and laid the idea on him,” Mr. Taylor recalled
in an interview for this obituary. “He liked the idea immediately,
and he took a million dollars out of the ballistic missile defense
budget and put it into my budget right then and there.” He added,
“The first funding came that month.” His idea led to the Arpanet,
the forerunner of the internet.
2016
Raymond Tomlinson, the godfather of email
, died Saturday morning of a suspected heart attack. He was 74.
Tomlinson, who was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2012,
is best known for rescuing the @ symbol from obscurity and, in the
process, shaping the way we talk about being online.
From:Jari Arkko
I received sad news about Ray Tomlinson's death from Craig Partridge
and Vint Cerf yesterday. I wanted to send what they wrote to the
IETF list as well:
I just learned that Ray Tomlinson died this morning.
Ray Tomlinson had been at BBN since 1967. He's best known for
inventing the concept of sending email over a computer network and
choosing the @ sign as the way to split the mailbox name from the
host name. But that's a fraction of his amazing contributions to our
field. Ray was one of a four person team that created TENEX, the
first operating system to support virtual memory using paging. He
wrote one of the first implementations of TCP and, when he found
data being duplicated in the received stream, devised methods to
ensure that sequence numbers were not duplicated that remain
fundamental to TCP/IP implementations today. He worked on the first
object-oriented distributed system and early multimedia email
systems. And I'm sure I'm forgetting at least half a dozen other
ways Ray made our world better.
I knew and worked with Ray Tomlinson during the development of the
ARPANET and its host protocols and benefited, as have billions, from
his seminal work on networked electronic email. More important, from
my personal perspective, was his work with Bill Plummer on the first
PDP-10 TENEX implementation of TCP (and later TCP/IP). In 1975, he
discovered that the TCP as specified in December 1974 had flaws that
led it to fail to detect duplicate packets and, together with Yogen
Dalal, developed the three-way handshake and initial sequence number
selection method to solve this problem. As Craig Partridge
summarizes, Ray was a long-time and creative contributor to the
Internet, operating systems, and many other highly practical
applications in the computer science and communications domains. He
was a self-effacing and humble man and extraordinary performer in
our online world. I will miss his thoughtful, low-key and always
helpful counsel.
>> vint
11/22/13 Willis Ware , a major, early figure in computing passed 93 years old. His first task at RAND was helping to build the "Johnniac," an early computer system. During his career at RAND he advanced to senior leadership positions, eventually becoming the chairman of the Computer Science Department. Willis was influential in many aspects of computing. As an educator, he initiated and taught one of the first computing courses, at UCLA, and wrote some of the field's first textbooks. In professional activities, he was involved in early activities of the ACM, and was the founding president of AFIPS (American Federation of Information Processing Societies). From 1958-1959 he served as chairman of the IRE Group on computers, a forerunner of the current Computer Society of the IEEE. He served as the Vice Chair of IFIP TC 11 from 1985-1994. At the time of his death he was still serving as a member of the EPIC Advisory Board.
Remembering Douglas C. Engelbart, inventor of the mouse
Computer pioneer
Doug Engelbart
died at the age of 88. His work transformed the way people use
computers today by making them accessible and "personal." His
seminal demo of computer graphical user interfaces using a mouse and
keyboard transformed people's careers and changed the course of
their lives on December 9, 1968, Douglas C. Engelbart and the group
of 17 researchers working with him in the Augmentation Research
Center at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA, presented a
90-minute live public demonstration of the online system, NLS, they
had been working on since 1962.
http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html
- A tribute to one of
Silicon Valley's most influential and forgotten researchers
at Xerox Parc event -SVW
From Ed Bryan: Irwin Greenwald—An Appreciation
Irwin Greenwald had a profound effect on my life and my education as
a programmer. The story is worth telling as it shows just what kind
of a guy Irwin was.
I first met Irwin in 1960 when I came to Rand to work on computer
operating systems.
Irwin had been at Rand since before the beginning of time, it seemed
to me. Years later I joked that in those days I knew all the
programmers in the world—it wasn't true, of course, but I'm
convinced it was true for Irwin, who was surely one of the very
first programmers back in the day when very few of them existed.
Irwin probably DID know them all.
A few years later in 1963-64 Irwin, I and Joe Smith (now gone for a
few years) worked on the replacement system for JOSS, JOSS II, under
the leadership of Chuck Baker (also gone for some years). Joe did
the compiler/interpreter for the JOSS language, I did the OS and
Irwin did everything else, from the interpretive decimal arithmetic
to the I/O and program backup routines. I was the kid on the team.
The others had decades more experience than I.
The team worked with eye-opening cooperation and teamwork. Whenever
a problem came up everyone tried to figure out how their part of the
code could possibly be responsible for the problem. Never was there
any defense of turf or finger-pointing.
That's a programming teamwork lesson learned from Irwin that I will
never forget.
JOSS was a milestone in computer history, as one of the first online
interactive time-sharing systems. In Rand's archive there are
perhaps 60 papers on JOSS. JOHNNIAC, an IAS-class machine, was the
machine on which the first JOSS system was implemented. It
was rescued from a museum trash heap and donated to the Computer
History Museum in Mountain View, California, where it was restored
enough to still flash some of its lights. It has an honored spot on
the History of Computers time path at CHM. Irwin prepared some
important physics programs for this machine. [2:06 Automatic
translator]
And it didn't stop there. In 1976, Irwin, together with about 60
experienced programmers from the CP-V development team at Xerox,
moved to Honeywell with the challenge to re-implement CP-V and all
its compilers, libraries, databases, communications software and
utilities into CP-6 on a Honeywell mainframe in three years. That we
made it was in no small part due to Irwin, who chaired the CP-6
design review board and enforced proper design and development
standards on all of us.
This was yet another example of Irwin's experience and leadership
skills. This kid is now in his eightieth year, and is very
appreciative of the lessons taught by his mentor, Irwin Greenwald. ~
Ed Bryan
JACK TRAMIEL, the founder of Commodore , died in the US on 8 April 2012 at the age of 83. As the founder of Commodore Business Machines and later owner of the Atari brand name, Tramiel oversaw the introduction of some of the most celebrated machines from the early days of the personal computer, including the Commodore PET, VIC-20, Commodore 64 and the Atari ST.
Internet Hall of Fame 2012 Inductees
Internet pioneers and luminaries from around the world gathered at
the conference to mark the Internet Society's 20th anniversary.
Pioneers Circle
Recognizing individuals who were instrumental in the early design
and development of the Internet: Paul Baran, Vint Cerf, Danny Cohen,
Steve Crocker, Donald Davies, Elizabeth Feinler, Charles Herzfeld,
Robert Kahn, Peter Kirstein, Leonard Kleinrock, John Klensin, Jon
Postel, Louis Pouzin, and Lawrence Roberts.
Innovators
Recognizing individuals who made outstanding technological,
commercial, or policy advances and helped to expand the Internet's
reach: Mitchell Baker, Tim Berners-Lee, Robert Cailliau, Van
Jacobson, Lawrence Landweber, Paul Mockapetris, Craig Newmark,
Raymond Tomlinson, Linus Torvalds, and Philip Zimmermann.
Global Connectors
Recognizing individuals from around the world who have made
significant contributions to the global growth and use of the
Internet: Randy Bush, Kilnam Chon, Al Gore, Nancy Hafkin, Geoff
Huston, Brewster Kahle, Daniel Karrenberg, Toru Takahashi, and Tan
Tin Wee.
Raúl Echeberría, Chairman of the Internet Society's Board of
Trustees, noted, "The Internet, which connects more than two billion
people around the world today, is the result of many important
contributions from creative and visionary individuals over the past
several decades. The 2012 Internet Hall of Fame celebrates the
accomplishments and advancements of 33 talented people who have made
significant contributions to the design, development, and expansion
of the Internet."
Vint Cerf:
November 14, 2011
http://venturebeat.com/2011/11/14/vint-cerf
"When Bob and I started writing the specs for the Internet in
1973"
Only a handful of people can start a sentence anything like that.
Phil Zimmerman
creator of the
Pretty Good Privacy
software that so many people adopted to encrypt their email was the
target of a federal criminal investigation that derived from his
making it widely available for download. The government dropped its
case in 1996. Today, PGP is the most widely used encryption program
in the world. PGP is the reason Zimmerman is going to be inducted
into the Internet Hall of Fame.
Now offering
Silent Circle
, an encrypted email, encrypted mobile calls, encrypted VOIP
teleconferencing and encrypted instant messaging, all in one place.
Silent Circle will offer services both to consumers and
corporations, but also to human-rights groups, dissidents and
nongovernmental organizations working in dangerous or sketchy places
where governments tend to monitor communications. There's also a
promise of no backdoors offered for any individual, organization or
government.
|
Robert E. Kahn
is Chairman, CEO and President of the Corporation for National
Research Initiatives (CNRI), which he founded in 1986 after a
thirteen year term at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA). CNRI was created as a not-for-profit organization to
provide leadership and funding for research and development of the
National Information Infrastructure.
After receiving a B.E.E. from the City College of New York in 1960,
Dr. Kahn earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton University in
1962 and 1964 respectively. He worked on the Technical Staff at Bell
Laboratories and then became an Assistant Professor of Electrical
Engineering at MIT. He took a leave of absence from MIT to join Bolt
Beranek and Newman, where he was responsible for the system design
of the Arpanet, the first packet-switched network. In 1972 he moved
to DARPA and subsequently became Director of DARPA's Information
Processing Techniques Office (IPTO). While Director of IPTO he
initiated the United States government's billion dollar Strategic
Computing Program, the largest computer research and development
program ever undertaken by the federal government. Dr. Kahn
conceived the idea of open-architecture networking. He is a
co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocols and was responsible for
originating DARPA's Internet Program. Until recently, CNRI provided
the Secretariat for the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Dr.
Kahn also coined the term National Information Infrastructure (NII)
in the mid 1980s which later became more widely known as the
Information Super Highway.
In his recent work, Dr. Kahn has been developing the concept of a
digital object architecture as a key middleware component of the
NII. This notion is providing a framework for interoperability of
heterogeneous information systems and is being used in many
applications such as the Digital Object Identifier (DOI). He is a
co-inventor of Knowbot programs, mobile software agents in the
network environment. Dr. Kahn is a member of the National Academy of
Engineering, a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of AAAI, a Fellow of ACM
and a Fellow of the Computer History Museum. He is a member of the
State Department's Advisory Committee on International
Communications and Information Policy, a former member of the
President's Information Technology Advisory Committee, a former
member of the Board of Regents of the National Library of Medicine
and the President's Advisory Council on the National Information
Infrastructure.
He is a recipient of the AFIPS Harry Goode Memorial Award, the
Marconi Award, the ACM SIGCOMM Award, the President's Award from
ACM, the IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computer and Communications Award, the
IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal, the IEEE Third Millennium Medal,
the ACM Software Systems Award, the Computerworld/Smithsonian Award,
the ASIS Special Award and the Public Service Award from the
Computing Research Board. He has twice received the Secretary of
Defense Civilian Service Award. He is a recipient of the 1997
National Medal of Technology, the 2001 Charles Stark Draper Prize
from the National Academy of Engineering, the 2002 Prince of
Asturias Award, and the 2004 A. M. Turing Award from the Association
for Computing Machinery. Dr. Kahn received the 2003 Digital ID World
award for the Digital Object Architecture as a significant
contribution (technology, policy or social) to the digital identity
industry. In 2005, he was awarded the Townsend Harris Medal from the
Alumni Association of the City College of New York, the Presidential
Medal of Freedom, and the C & C Prize in Tokyo, Japan. He was
inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in May 2006, and
awarded the Japan Prize for his work in "Information Communication
Theory and Technology" in 2008. He received the Harold Pender Award
from the University of Pennsylvania in 2010.
Dr. Kahn has received honorary degrees from Princeton University,
University of Pavia, ETH Zurich, University of Maryland, George
Mason University, the University of Central Florida and the
University of Pisa, and an honorary fellowship from University
College, London.
J.D. Falk - In Memoriam*
17 November, 2011
J.D. Falk was a founder of CAUCE, and one of the nicest people in
the anti-spam community. Besides being a board member of CAUCE U.S.
since its inception in 1997, he went on to support the organization
as a member of the CAUCE North America Executive. His tireless
efforts helped to make CAUCE what it is today.
During his career, J.D. worked at Erols, Priori, Critical Path,
MAPS, Yahoo!,Microsoft, and Return Path, but perhaps his most
important contributions in fighting online abuse were to the
Messaging Anti-abuse Working Group, wherein his tireless efforts
organizing the MAAWG meetings were literally immeasurable.
J.D. was a prolific author, his writing published on CircleID, at
his employer Return Path's website, and in the RFC process at the
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). His contributions went far
towards making the Internet a better, safer place for us all.
Perhaps the coolest tribute thus far is that the IETF, at the
encouragement of Dave Crocker and Murray Kucherawy, published RFC
6449 moments prior to J.D.'s passing. - neil
John McCarthy, 1927-2011 Creator Of Lisp, John McCarthy, Dead At 84
A titan of computing for 50 years whose achievements will shape the
next 50
http://spectrum.ieee.org/
October 2011 Gene Schultz, R. I. P.
Gene formed and managed the Computer Incident Advisory Capability (
CIAC
) — an incident response team for the U.S. Department of Energy —
from 1986-1992. This was the first formal incident response team,
predating the
CERT/CC
by several years. He also was instrumental in the founding of
FIRST
— the Forum of Incident Response & Security Teams. During his 30
years of work in security, Gene authored or co-authored over 120
papers, and five books. He was manager of the I4 program at SRI from
1994-1998. From 2002-2007, he was the Editor-in-Chief of
Computers and Security
— the oldest journal in computing security — and continued to serve
on its editorial board. Gene was also an associate editor of
Network Security
. He was a member of the accreditation board of the Institute of
Information Security Professionals (
IISP
).
March 27, 2011 Paul Baran, Internet Pioneer, Dies at 84
nytimes.com/2011/03/28/technology/28baran.html
Paul Baran, an engineer who helped create the technical
underpinnings for the Arpanet, the government-sponsored precursor
to today's Internet, died Saturday night at his home in Palo Alto,
Calif. He was 84. The cause was complications from lung cancer,
said his son, David.
In the early 1960s, while working at the RAND Corporation in Santa
Monica, Calif., Mr. Baran outlined the fundamentals for packaging
data into discrete bundles, which he called “message blocks.” The
bundles are then sent on various paths around a network and
reassembled at their destination. Such a plan is known as “packet
switching."
Mr. Baran's idea was to build a distributed communications
network, less vulnerable to attack or disruption than conventional
networks. In a series of technical papers published in the 1960s
he suggested that networks be designed with redundant routes so
that if a particular path failed or was destroyed, messages could
still be delivered through another.
Mr. Baran's invention was so far ahead of its time that in the
mid-1960s, when he approached AT&T with the idea to build his
proposed network, the company insisted it would not work and
refused.
“Paul wasn't afraid to go in directions counter to what everyone
else thought was the right or only thing to do,” said Vinton Cerf,
a vice president at Google who was a colleague and longtime friend
of Mr. Baran's. “AT&T repeatedly said his idea wouldn't work,
and wouldn't participate in the Arpanet project,” he said. In
1969, the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency
built the Arpanet, a network that used Mr. Baran's ideas, and
those of others. The Arpanet was eventually replaced by the
Internet, and packet switching still lies at the heart of the
network's internal workings.
Paul Baran was born on April 29, 1926, in Grodno, Poland. His
parents moved to the United States in 1928, and Mr. Baran grew up
in Philadelphia. His father was a grocer, and as a boy, Paul
delivered orders to customers in a small red wagon.
He attended the Drexel Institute of Technology, which later became
Drexel University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in
electrical engineering in 1949. He took his first job at the
Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation in Philadelphia, testing parts
of radio tubes for an early commercial computer, the Univac. In
1955, he married Evelyn Murphy, and they moved to Los Angeles,
where Mr. Baran took a job at Hughes Aircraft working on radar
data processing systems. He enrolled in night classes at the
University of California, Los Angeles.
Mr. Baran received a master's degree in engineering from U.C.L.A.
in 1959. Gerald Estrin, who was Mr. Baran's adviser, said Mr.
Baran was the first student he ever had who actually went to the
Patent Office in Washington to investigate whether his master's
work, on character recognition, was patentable. “From that day on,
my expectations of him changed,” Dr. Estrin said. “He wasn't just
a serious student, but a young man who was looking to have an
effect on the world.”
In 1959, Mr. Baran left Hughes to join RAND's computer science
department. He quickly developed an interest in the survivability
of communications systems in the event of a nuclear attack, and
spent the next several years at RAND working on a series of 13
papers — two of them classified — under contract to the Air Force,
titled, “On Distributed Communications.”
About the same time that Mr. Baran had his idea, similar plans for
creating such networks were percolating in the computing
community. Donald Davies of the British National Physical
Laboratory, working a continent away, had a similar idea for
dividing digital messages into chunks he called packets. “In the
golden era of the early 1960s, these ideas were in the air,” said
Leonard Kleinrock, a computer scientist at U.C.L.A. who was
working on similar networking systems in the 1960s.
Mr. Baran left RAND in 1968 to co-found the Institute for the
Future, a nonprofit research group specializing in long-range
forecasting. Mr. Baran was also an entrepreneur. He started seven
companies, five of which eventually went public. In recent years,
the origins of the Internet have been subject to claims and
counterclaims of precedence, and Mr. Baran was an outspoken
proponent of distributing credit widely. “The Internet is really
the work of a thousand people,” he said in an interview in 2001.
“The process of technological developments is like building a
cathedral,” he said in an interview in 1990. “Over the course of
several hundred years, new people come along and each lays down a
block on top of the old foundations, each saying, 'I built a
cathedral.' “Next month another block is placed atop the previous
one. Then comes along an historian who asks, 'Well, who built the
cathedral?' Peter added some stones here, and Paul added a few
more. If you are not careful you can con yourself into believing
that you did the most important part. But the reality is that each
contribution has to follow onto previous work. Everything is tied
to everything else.”
Mr. Baran's wife, Evelyn, died in 2007. In addition to his son,
David, of Atherton, Calif., he is survived by three grandchildren;
and his companion of recent years, Ruth Rothman.
Subject: Re: [IP] Paul Baran
Dave , We will all miss Paul and his positive, encouraging spirit. His ideas and insights literally helped spark what will be seen by historians as one of the major turning points in human history. He was quite active and vital to the end of his life. Exactly one year ago, March 27, 2010, I had the following email message from him in response to a speech draft I shared with him:
Hi Peter
Yes, your message finds me alive and well and busier than ever - as a retirement failure (I know the theory, but fail in implementation). I'm still busy with new technology development and nascent ventures. Thank you for your most gracious words and describing the reality of how things get done and the duality of motivation. Thank you for introducing me to him 40 years ago.
Peter
Peter A. Freeman, Emeritus Dean & Professor, Georgia Tech www.cc.gatech.edu/people/peter-freeman Tel: +1-202-294-5399 (mobile)
Paul Baran's 1971 forecasts on the future internet
Here's a fascinating excerpt from Paul Baran's 1971 forecasts on the future of network information services, from a private, unpublished study, recently discovered and posted yesterday by the Insititue for the Future, the research lab Paul co-founded in 1968
IFTF Celebrates Paul Baran: Forecasting the Internet http://iftf.org/PaulBaran2 An Evening with Paul Baran who will discuss the origin and development of his accomplishments—which span a lifetime of entrepreneurial activity, including 150 papers, 40 patents, and five start-up companies—and how these continue to have an impact on our everyday lives.
Educational CyberPlayGround: Michael Hauben Inventor of the word
"Netizen"
Concepts HOT SITE Awards
internet
PIONEER
Michael Hauben
www.edu-cyberpg.com/IEC/hauben.html
Educational CyberPlayGround:
Internet
Pioneer
David Farber
Learn about
Internet
Pioneer
Dave Farber on the Educational
Educational CyberPlayGround:Jean Jennings Bartik Computer
Pioneer
For forty years, their roles and their
pioneering
work were
Gleason Sackmann's Biography and the Mailing List Netiquette
Primer on the...
Gleason Sackmann
Internet
Pioneer
First to wire North Dakota's
Educational CyberPlayGround
®
Community, K 12 Education Mailing lists and...
ABOUT GLEASON SACKMANN
Internet
Pioneer
First to wire North Dakota
Learn about the African American
Pioneers
on the Educational CyberPlayground®
Learn about the first African American
Pioneers
on the
|
Daniel J Weitzner
serves as Associate Administrator for Policy at the United States
Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information
Administration (NTIA). NTIA is principal adviser to the President on
telecommunications and information policy.
Prior to joining NTIA, Weitzner created the MIT CSAIL Decentralized
Information Group, taught Internet public policy in the Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science Department, and was Policy Director
of the World Wide Web Consortium. He founded the Web Science
Research Initiative with Tim Berners-Lee, Wendy Hall, Nigel Shadbolt
and James Hendler. Weitzner was co-founder and Deputy Director of
the Center for Democracy and Technology, and Deputy Policy Director
of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Weitzner has law degree from Buffalo Law School, and a B.A. in
Philosophy from Swarthmore College. His writings have appeared in
Science magazine, the Yale Law Review, Communications of the ACM,
Computerworld, Wired Magazine and Social Research.
Stagg Newman - Chief Technologist, FCC National Broadband Plan
team
Chief Technologist, FCC National Broadband Plan team
Rob Curtis at fcc.gov>, Tom Brown at fcc.gov
The takeaway
from the response time relationship however, is that an increase
in throughput commensurate with increases in memory and object
sizes will be necessary to maintain the present state of affairs,
and a trajectory of even greater throughput improvements will be
necessary for increased usability."
[
jargon / buzzword bingo
]
Educational CyberPlayGround:
InternetPioneers
Discuss Net Neutrality Issues.
Internet
Pioneers
speak out on Net Neutrality 2009. HOME
www.edu-cyberpg.com/Internet/Net-Neutrality.html
Educational CyberPlayGround: Why can't I send email? Blocking
port25 explained...
Resources Net-Neutrality
Internet
Pioneers
Discuss Net
www.edu-cyberpg.com/Internet/networks.html
Educational CyberPlayGround: Gap Between Rich and Poor
Access, rights right to know Issues:
Internet
Pioneers
Discuss
www.edu-cyberpg.com/Technology/gap.html
British mathematician Alan M. Turing
, who in 1950 suggested that if a computer could successfully
impersonate a human by carrying on a typed conversation with a
person, it could be called intelligent. The Turing Test is an
adequate test of machine intelligence.
Dennett notes that PARRY
is the only programme known to have passed the Turing Test -
psychiatrists were unable to distinguish between real patients and
simulated ones.
UK gov rejects call to posthumously pardon Alan Turing
2/6/12 Wartime codebreaker's 'absurd' conviction must stand
theregister.co.uk/2012/02/06/turing_pardon_call_rejected/
The UK government has turned down a call to posthumously pardon Alan
Turing. A petition to pardon the war-time codebreaker for a 'gross
indecency' conviction attracted more than 23,000 signatures,
prompting the tabling of early day motion in the House of Commons
last week. Turing was arrested and eventually convicted for
homosexuality in 1952. The conviction meant he was no longer allowed
clearance to work on secret government projects. In addition he was
forced to undergo a degrading hormone injection programme (chemical
castration) as an alternative to a prison sentence.
Turing spiralled into depression and ultimately took his own life
two years later, in 1954.
2012 Alan Turing: Inquest's suicide verdict 'not supportable' Alan Turing, the British mathematical genius and codebreaker born 100 years ago on 23 June, may not have committed suicide, as is widely believed. At a conference in Oxford on Saturday, Turing expert Prof Jack Copeland will question the evidence that was presented at the 1954 inquest. He believes the evidence would not today be accepted as sufficient to establish a suicide verdict.
Three years ago, former UK prime minister Gordon Brown issued an
apology for government's treatment of Turing, describing it as
"horrifying" and "utterly unfair" as well as praising Turing's
outstanding contribution to the war effort. The apology fell short
of the criminal pardon that some - but not John Graham-Cumming, the
British programmer behind the 2009 Alan Turing apology campaign -
had wanted. However when the issue of granting a posthumous pardon
was raised in the House of Lords a government minister said the
option had already been considered and rejected at the time of the
2009 apology. Lord Sharkey said that even though Turing had been
"convicted of an offence which now seems both cruel and absurd", a
pardon is not appropriate because he was found guilty of something
that was a criminal offence at the time.
PIONEERS, Hero's' & GOOD DEED DOERS
The U.S. Department of Justice is flashing a green light to
whistleblowers in its own ranks.
http://www.justice.gov/oig/press/2012/2012_08_08.pdf
http://www.law.com/jsp/cc/PubArticleCC.jsp?id=1202567182355&New_Ombudsman_to_Set_the_Tone_for_Whistleblowers_at_DOJ
Professor Dr. Leon Eisenberg
---[[
My Uncle
]]
Is psychiatry more mindful or brainier than it was a decade ago?
Gene vs Culture Coevolution: Genes give rise to culture, societies
with this culture then affect the fitness of its members, and hence
culture guides genetic evolution. The product is us.
Culture guides genetic evolution, and in a more immediate way
chemical environment (nutrition, toxins), especially of the young
and yet unborn, guides the expression of genes.
The evidence for gene-culture coevolution is extremely clear, and
the two ideological positions, one that trivializes genes and the
other that trivializes culture are obviously wrong and ideological.
David Goldenberg
- [[
My Cousin
]]
Record collector and film preservationist who accumulated a
trove of more than 10,000 classic recordings.
One of the earliest pioneers Visionary,
Michael Hart
,
died
at the age of just 64.
Hart began
what turned into the free etext library
Project Gutenberg
in 1971 - fully 12 years before Richard Stallman began to
formulate his equivalent ideas for free software.
What makes his death particularly tragic is that his name is
probably
only vaguely known
, even to people familiar with the areas he devoted his life to:
free etexts and the public domain. His initial goal was to digitize
10,000 books; Gutenberg now offers access to more than 36,000
titles, without registration or fee. Hart
campaigned
against extensions of U.S. copyright (the majority of the books in
Project Gutenberg are from prior to 1920, and therefore in the
public domain; the few that still fall under copyright strictures
were released into the public domain with the permission of the
copyright holders). And in a refreshingly non-promotional stance,
Hart eschewed any form of advertising and firmly stuck with the
low-tech interfaces.
I had the pleasure of emailing Michael when we discussed issues
that related to the business models of free ebooks
.
Hart didn't just write about the baleful effect of copyright
extensions, he also fought against them. The famous “Eldred v
Ashcroft” case in the US that sought to have such unlimited
copyright extensions declared unconstitutional originally involved
Hart.
As he later wrote:
Eldred v Ashcroft was previously labeled as in "Hart v Reno"
before I saw that Larry Lessig, Esquire, had no intention of doing
what I thought necessary to win. At that point I fired him and he
picked up Eric Eldred as his current scapegoat du jour.
As this indicates, Hart was as uncompromising in his defence of the
public domain as Stallman is of free software.
In 1971, the year Richard Stallman joined the MIT AI Lab, Michael Hart was given an operator's account on a Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the University of Illinois. Since he estimated this computer time had a nominal worth of $100 million, he felt he had an obligation to repay this generosity by using it to create something of comparable and lasting value.
His solution was to type in the US Declaration of Independence, roughly 5K of ASCII, and to attempt to send it to everyone on ARPANET (fortunately, this trailblazing attempt at spam failed). His insight was that once turned from analogue to digital form, a book could be reproduced endlessly for almost zero additional cost - what Hart termed "Replicator Technology". By converting printed texts into etexts, he was able to create something whose potential aggregate value far exceeded even the heady figure he put on the computing time he used to generate it.
Hart chose the name "Project Gutenberg" for this body of etexts, making a bold claim that they represented the start of something as epoch-making as the original Gutenberg revolution.
He said: "Google is working from the top down. It's very centralized. Project Gutenberg is the opposite: It's decentralized, it's grassroots. From the consumer's point of view, if you're trying to get a quotation from a book, you could get the book from Project Gutenberg and cut and paste, say, the whole "Hamlet" soliloquy. On Google, you can't. Also, ours is totally non-commercial. You won't find advertising on any of our pages."
Douglas C. Engelbart, Inventor of the Computer Mouse, Dies at 88 Douglas C. Engelbart, a visionary scientist whose singular epiphany in 1950 about technology's potential to expand human intelligence led to a host of inventions — among them the computer mouse — that became the basis for both the Internet and the modern personal computer, died on Tuesday at his home in Atherton, Calif. He was 88.7/2/2013
Thinkers Expain Why Things Are The Way They Are In The World --
WHAT ARE MEMES?
Memes
Richard Dawkins invented the term "meme'' in 1976
meme: (pron. 'meem') A contagious idea that replicates like a virus,
passed on from mind to mind. Memes function the same way genes and
viruses do, propagating through communication networks and
face-to-face contact between people. Root of the word "memetics," a
field of study which postulates that the meme is the basic unit of
cultural evolution. Examples of memes include melodies, icons,
fashion statements and phrases.
(1) construct an eight-layered paleopsychological stratum for displaying levels of consciousness and complexity; and
(2) use this multilayered scaffolding for defining and dealing with racial, ethnic, economic, religious, political, and nationalistic tension-zones, hot-spots, and potentially dangerous conflicts.
The Alan Lomax Website
In the early 1930s, Alan Lomax and his father, pioneering folklorist
John A. Lomax, first developed the Library of Congress' Archive of
American Folksong as a major national resource.
NASA"S FEMALE FRONTIERS PROJECT
The New Year is blasting off to a fabulous start. Next week we will
kick off our Female Frontiers project with a web chat featuring
Nancy Roman, NASA's first chief of Astronomy and the first women
to hold an executive level job at NASA
. Nancy's chat will begin our series of interactive events featuring
women who have achieved firsts in their fields. This series of
events honors
Eileen Collins, the first female space shuttle commander of STS-93
scheduled for an April launch
. More details about this event and registration for chats can be
found by linking from the Women of NASA home page at:
http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/women
and from the
Female Frontiers pages
Women of Courage Around the World
Article on how the female candidates did as well or better than
the men
, but weren't even given a chance to go into space. (This is U.S.
NASA space program in the 1960's).
Gordon Moore
Multifaceted individual who has made enduring contributions to our
chemical and scientific heritage through exceptional activity in the
areas of innovation, entrepreneurship, research, education, public
understanding, legislation, or philanthropy.
Akre & Wilson - Reporters
Their award was for their investigation of rBGH, a genetically
modified bovine growth hormone produced by the Monsanto Corp. To
some environmental and science groups rBGH can be linked to human
breast, prostate and colon cancer although it is widely employed by
the American dairy industry while being banned in Canada, Europe,
New Zealand and Japan. FOX Television, their employer, refused to
run their four-part series, because the network had been threatened
with a lawsuit by Monsanto Co., the manufacturer of rBGH. FOX
instead insisted the pair air a report distinctly biased to
Monsanto's point of view. Akre and Wilson, however, continued to
press FOX to run their original story, and were subsequently fired
by the network in 1997.
Corporate Crime Reporter
The death penalty should be applied to corporations convicted of
defrauding the federal government, according to a report released
today by the Corporate Crime Reporter.
2011 WhistleblowerS finally get
financial reward
In a 3-2 vote, the SEC approved a system in which informants will be
awarded anywhere from 10 to 30 percent of any enforced penalty,
provided that the figure exceeds $1 million. Previously,
whistleblowers could only expect a financial return from the SEC in
cases related to insider-trading. The incentive for whistleblowing
has proven to be among the most challenging provisions to implement
in the 2010 Dodds-Frank overhaul of Wall Street.
Jeffrey Wigand, Ph.D.
Tobacco Whistleblower
whose story is featured in the major motion picture "The Insider"
Contact Dr. Wigand
Brown & Williamson - 1996 On April 14, 1994, the seven CEOs of
the major American tobacco companies testified before Congress and
said that nicotine was not addictive. Two years later, Jeffrey
Wigand, a vice president for research and development at the Brown
& Williamson tobacco company, turned to "60 Minutes" to tell a
different story. In an interview with Mike Wallace, Wigand asserted
that his employer knowingly doctored the nicotine content in its
cigarettes so as to enhance its addictive qualities.Wigand also said
that he became the target of death threats, and his story, along
with CBS's internal debate over airing the interview, was the
subject of the 1999 movie,
"The Insider"
Lowell Bergman
"60 Minutes" journalist who fought censorship and got Jeffrey
Wigands' information.
Dr. John Chittick
Walked the earth spreading information and founded
TeenAIDS-PeerCorps
John Glen and
Chuck Yeager
Oct. 14, 1947 first supersonic flight
Elliot M. Katz
D.V.M. graduate of Cornell University, is the founder and president
of
In Defense of Animals
, a national non-profit organization dedicated to ending the
institutionalized exploitation and abuse of nonhuman animals by
working for, and defending the rights, welfare, and habitat of these
individuals. Now 15 years old, IDA has made ending the property
status of animals one of its primary goals. For more info go to
http://www.idausa.org
The Dollywood Foundation Web site URL
http://www.dollywood./foundation.com
The time spent reading is probably the most important minutes spent
every single day. Hats off to Dolly and to all those who recognize
the importance of starting early and in building families of
readers. It is those families who will comprise cities of readers,
counties of readers, states of readers, and finally we may have a
nation of readers. "Dolly Parton gives 5,200 kids a book a month.
Every one of the 5,200 children in Doly Parton's native Sevier
County are eligible to receive a top-quality, hand-picked children's
book every month, from birth until his or her fifth birthday, plus a
special bookcase to hold the 60 volumes. These books are being given
to the children free by the nonprofit
Dollywood Foundation
. Since the program began three years ago, some 91,000 books have
been distributed. The foundation estimates 70 percent of the
preschoolers in the county are enrolled. Last month, the
National Council of Teachers of English gave the program its 1998
Literacy Award
. The cost for a full library, including bookcase, is $350 per
child. The Dollywood Foundation, supported principally by Dolly
Parton's annual fund-raising concerts, has raised more than $200,000
for the program since its inception and has committed to spend $1
million over the next five years. Jerome Harste, and Indiana
University professor specializing in early childhood education, said
he wished public figures in every county would follow Dolly Parton's
example and support public literacy and public education."
Albert Hoffman Father of LSD
Research chemist who synthesised LSD and had the world's first 'acid
trip' on his bicycle.'Father of LSD' Dies at 102
While working with the drug in the Sandoz pharmaceutical laboratory
a few years after first producing it, Mr Hofmann ingested some of
the drug through his fingertips. He went home and experienced what
he described as visions of "fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes
with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colours".
Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who discovered LSD here in 1938