An interesting read from The Telegraph
“He was one of Britain’s finest minds, the father of modern computing, but his troubled life and classified wartime work meant his legacy was neglected for decades. As the world finally recognises his brilliance, Rob Crilly reports on how a hidden manuscript is to go on auction amid fears it may be snapped up by a private collector.”
Isn’t Capitalism wonderful?
This probably shouldn’t be allowed to pass by without comment on this site.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25495315
Of course, on one level, this is great news for friends, family and the Computer Science community as a whole. It might also be seen as a small step towards righting a larger injustice (although it equally might not). On the other hand, a pardon is really a ‘let-off’ with a slapped wrist; “naughty boy but we forgive you”.
What it certainly doesn’t do is:
It’s doubtful that any of these will ever come to pass …
A somewhat more down-to-earth post, this one; an overview of, and a case study in, the wonderful revolution in Computing and Computer Science currently taking place in British schools. Adapted from a paper presented at the 4th World Conference on Learning, Teaching and Educational Leadership and published in the Elsevier ‘Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences’ journal.
The past few years have been challenging ones for Computing education in the UK. After decades of national neglect, largely overlooked, from the county that invented Computer Science, there has been a sudden impetus to reintroduce computational problem-solving into the school curriculum. Immediate obstacles include a generation of children with no CS background and a need for tens of thousands of new or retrained teachers. The Computing At School (CAS) movement has been instrumental in this quantum transition from an IT to Computing syllabus, as have the British Computer Society (BCS), leading UK university CS departments and a number of major international technology companies. This piece looks at the background to this position and the progress being made to address these challenges. It describes, as an example of many, the work of the BCS-funded Glyndŵr University ‘Turing Project’ in introducing Welsh high-school students and staff to high-level programming and ‘computational thinking’. The Turing Project uses an innovative combination of Lego NXT Mindstorm robots, Raspberry Pi computers and PicoBoard hardware together with the Robot C and Scratch programming platforms. Continue reading
This might seem a bit off-track but a blog inspired, even loosely, by Alan Turing, can hardly not mention Kurt Gödel. In simple terms, it could be said that Gödel was to Mathematics what Turing was to Computer Science but even that’s a pretty one-dimensional portrayal. Both were intrigued by what was possible in science and mathematics and both shed light on how one area of research could be used to model another. Turing’s work with the patterns of nature has parallels with Gödel’s models of the universe. Both were intent on considering the ‘bigger picture’, whether spiritual or part of a ‘master program’. Turing saw order in chaos; Gödel saw God in science. Continue reading
Turing's Radiator 