The following message was sent today from the Coordinating Committee of UCU at London Metropolitan University to all members:
The Board of Governors finally announced resignations at their meeting
yesterday. The Chair of the Governors has resigned with effect by end of
March. The other lay governors specifically associated with the Audit
Sub-Committee (effectively we understand virtually all the lay governors)
will resign in the summer. We assume an entirely new Audit Committee will
be in place by April 2010.
UCU understands that the formal announcement will be made today in the
form of an agreed joint communication from the Chief Executive of HEFCE
and the Chair of the Governors. We understand that the announcement will
include a statement that the new Vice Chancellor Professor Gillies will be
taking forward the action against members of the Executive group who were
in post during the period covered by the Melville/Deloitte Report and this
could include disciplinary action with the possibility of individual
suspension whilst his inquiries are proceeding.
Of course, as you will know from the Melville Report it was Sir David's
view that all members of the Executive group in post at the time should
take 'collective responsibility' for the failings that he identifies. UCU
shares this view.
Whilst UCU welcomes the announcements of the impending resignations of the
Board of Governors (clearly members will understand that this is a
considerable victory for the unions and, more importantly, for the
university), we are unable to commend the agreed order of their departure.
In current circumstances a delayed and staggered resignation is utterly
inappropriate.
We include below the statement from our Staff Governor Dr Kay Dudman that
was read out at the meeting itself.
"It is clear that London Metropolitan University's future and safety is at
stake. HEFCE has made apparent that there is a clear and immediate risk
that funding will be withdrawn unless they are convinced that their
financial support of the university with public funds is safeguarded to
their satisfaction. It is noted that HEFCE itself is not without blame,
as cited in the Melville report, in particular for failing to make a
written record of meetings.
London Metropolitan University cannot survive without public funds. The
honourable, and indeed the only, course of action is for the members of
the Board of Governors who were serving during the period in question to
resign, and that the Executive, as highlighted in the Melville report,
should follow suit. Their sacrifice will be for the good of the
institution as whole, and allow London Metropolitan University the
opportunity to flourish once again under the leadership of a new Vice
Chancellor, a new Board of Governors, and a new Executive.
I know that the driving force behind those who offer their services to the
Board of Governors is the ultimate welfare of the institution, and I am
therefore certain that the necessary steps will be taken in order to
ensure the University's survival. Resignation is the price that has been
demanded, and the price that must be paid. Resignation is now a
necessity."
UCU entirely agrees with this. An immediate resignation was the only
acceptable action that the governors and the executive (or at least the
named members of the executive) could have taken yesterday. The Board of
Governors and the named members of the Executive were required to
‘consider their position’ in the letter from Sir Alan Langlands 20th
November following HEFCE’s receipt and acceptance of the Melville/Deloitte
Report. It is clear that the Governors were initially very reluctant to
comply with this and have only done so as a result of HEFCE threatening
immediate withdrawal of further funding to the university. It is also
clear that HEFCE were specific in requiring the departure of Peter Anwyl
as Chair and any members of the Governors who had served on the Audit
Committee. This, we understand, included Sir Michael Snyder.
In office the Board have not at any point acted in the wider interests of
the university. The slow drawn out manner of their departure is
transparently a face saving exercise and is entirely consistent with their
previous actions and inactions that have been governed by narrow personal
self interest and self-esteem and not in any way and in any time the wider
good of London Met.
The next year is likely to be critical for the university. In previous
emails we referred to the announced short fall of £600 million from the HE
sector as a result of a public funding cuts. We also pointed up the
failure of London Met to secure any specific funding from HEFCE’s
Strategic Development Fund (potentially £10 million) despite the Interim
Vice Chancellor announcing this as one of his specific ambitions last
summer. How can the retention of a discredited Board of Governors until
the spring and summer be anything but counterproductive to the future of
the university? How can we hope to secure any new funding until they go?
How also their retention do anything but handicap Professor Gillies in any
action he finds it necessary to take against the Executive? What possible
benefit can be served to the university by them remaining in office?
Clearly London Met needs new governors, new management and a new start
now. This is an imperative not an impatient demand. UCU and UNISON
officers will be meeting Professor Gillies on Friday morning. We will
obviously be relaying this message to him and we will be putting to him
our views regarding new structures of governance and management at the
university. Specifically we will be asking him to announce immediately a
suspension of any further job losses that have already been announced for
July 2010 under the Cost Improvement Plan.
We include below the link to the video of the chaotic scenes outside
Moorgate at yesterday’s meetings. Speakers at the rally included Alaisdair
Hunter President of UCU, Jeremy Corbyn MP, Paul Mackney, ex-General
Secretary of UCU and representatives from Unison and from national and
local NUS. As you will see from the video, students at London Met took
action themselves and were right to do so, but it should not have taken
all this to get rid of the governors.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AymfQib2Yg
A further statement will be made later this week.
Mark Campbell UCU Chair
Cliff Snaith UCU Secretary
Debbie Rees UCU Membership Secretary
Yaz Djebbour UCU North Chair
Peter Cambridge UCU H & S Officer
David Hardman UCU City Chair
Jane Holgate UCU City Secretary
Wednesday, 16 December 2009
Friday, 20 November 2009
All that jazz
A bulletin from the Psychonomics Society 50th annual meeting in Boston, MA.
The Psychonomics Society conference is pretty big and covers many topics relating to human and animal cognition. Almost every year something fairly novel catches my eye. This year, it was a talk by Michael Schober and Michelle Levine (presented by the former), concerning the relationship between onstage coordination and improvisational quality in jazz musicians.
Now, this brief account is necessarily sketchy as I didn't manage to note every single detail, but I think the basic finding here is very interesting. In jazz, the improviser has to make a series of musical choices in relation to what the other players are doing. There is apparently a whole lore about coordination in jazz, with an emphasis on the necessity to coordinate section changes, but also the need for players to focus and concentrate whilst improvising a solo.
The study reported here recruited 30 experienced jazz and saxophone duos, and asked them to play a specially composed piece which included two improvised solos of 20 bars each. After an opportunity to rehearse the duos played in one of three conditions: (a) together - the face-to-face condition, (b) in separate spaces but with a video and audio connection, and (c) in separate spaces with only an audio connection. Audio recordings of their performances were rated on several criteria by three professional performing musicians, each with over thirty years' playing experience and previous experience of sitting on musical juries.
On a post-performance questionnaire, the face-to-face players reported being better able to concentrate than did the players in the other conditions. However, their improvisations were given the lowest ratings by the judges (who, remember, were blind to the conditions). The most highly-rated performances were those in the audio condition.
Among the other findings was that the sax players improved with practice whereas the pianists did not. However, the performance of the saxophonists was highly dependent on the pianists, who clearly laid the foundation that enabled the sax players to shine.
The Psychonomics Society conference is pretty big and covers many topics relating to human and animal cognition. Almost every year something fairly novel catches my eye. This year, it was a talk by Michael Schober and Michelle Levine (presented by the former), concerning the relationship between onstage coordination and improvisational quality in jazz musicians.
Now, this brief account is necessarily sketchy as I didn't manage to note every single detail, but I think the basic finding here is very interesting. In jazz, the improviser has to make a series of musical choices in relation to what the other players are doing. There is apparently a whole lore about coordination in jazz, with an emphasis on the necessity to coordinate section changes, but also the need for players to focus and concentrate whilst improvising a solo.
The study reported here recruited 30 experienced jazz and saxophone duos, and asked them to play a specially composed piece which included two improvised solos of 20 bars each. After an opportunity to rehearse the duos played in one of three conditions: (a) together - the face-to-face condition, (b) in separate spaces but with a video and audio connection, and (c) in separate spaces with only an audio connection. Audio recordings of their performances were rated on several criteria by three professional performing musicians, each with over thirty years' playing experience and previous experience of sitting on musical juries.
On a post-performance questionnaire, the face-to-face players reported being better able to concentrate than did the players in the other conditions. However, their improvisations were given the lowest ratings by the judges (who, remember, were blind to the conditions). The most highly-rated performances were those in the audio condition.
Among the other findings was that the sax players improved with practice whereas the pianists did not. However, the performance of the saxophonists was highly dependent on the pianists, who clearly laid the foundation that enabled the sax players to shine.
Saturday, 7 November 2009
Top 10 learning tools for 2009
Jane Hart, a social learning consultant, compiles an annual list of popular learning technologies, as voted for by other learning professionals. The top 100 tools for 2008 can be found here. My own top 10 for 2009 (below) is slightly embarrassing because of the emphasis on Google products. I have in fact made some use of the Zoho suite of applications, but there is a terrific level of convenience in having iGoogle set up as my web page, with the other Google products embedded within, many of which synchronise with my phone (an HTC Magic). I can hardly believe that GMail has been squeezed out of my top 10, not to mention YouTube (to which I sometimes upload screencasts that are recorded in Screentoaster), or Google Sites.
- Blogger. My final year students have each set up blogs where they regularly record their thoughts about the material we cover. I also use blogger to record occasional research updates that might be of interest to readers of my textbook, and with a view to incorporating these into a future edition.
- Google search.
- Google calendar. This is particularly useful because it synchs with my Google Android phone and sends reminders to my phone.
- Screentoaster.
- Google Docs.
- Googer Reader.
- iGoogle. This is an excellent way of organising your desktop.
- Twitter.
- Google Android.
- MacBook Air - this is about half the weight of the regular laptops I have previously had and offers the speed of operation that Apple products have become known for. Particularly useful is the facility to record screencasts that is built into the operating system. This could possibly challenge my use of Screentoaster, which I have mostly used up until now.
Monday, 2 November 2009
Measuring utility
This posting is for the benefit of the students taking my class "Judgment and Decision Making". I set the exercise of measuring your utility function for a certain range of monetary values, using two different methods: The Certainty Equivalence Method and the Probability Equivalence Method. Of key interest is whether the two functions look the same when plotted graphically. I did this exercise myself and the results are shown above.
When you do this, I'd like you to insert the graphs into your blog and include some commentary - especially if you find that the two curves look different. The website for plotting the graph is here. Select the option for coordinates plotting. Say you want to enter 5 coordinates, and then select . On the page that appears enter the monetary amounts in the column for X and the utility values in the column for Y. From the menu options to the right enter a short title in the
Sunday, 13 September 2009
Review: The greatest show on earth
Review: The greatest show on earth: The evidence for evolution, by Richard Dawkins. London: Bantam Press. 2009.
In The God delusion Richard Dawkins stated that he was not writing with the intent of converting committed theists but, rather, with the aim of influencing those who were undecided between belief and atheism. After reading The greatest show on earth, I imagine that Dawkins is likewise trying to convince the undecided rather than the hard-core creationists. On the opening page he compares the teacher of evolution to a teacher of Roman history whose class is continually disrupted by "a baying pack of ignoramuses" who vociferously assert that the Roman empire did not exist.
Some might wonder whether a less confrontational tone would be more effective in getting the reader on board. I'm not so sure. Dawkins gives the example of Wendy Wright, the president of 'Concerned Women for America', who was interviewed for the Channel Four documentary The Genius of Charles Darwin. She repeatedly questions the existence of "intermediate" fossils, whilst Dawkins repeatedly ripostes that they are in the museums if only she would care to look. When one listens to Wendy Wright and the many people like her (see some of the risible creationist videos on YouTube) one feels that they are a lost cause.
However, for anyone who is unsure about the case for evolution and is willing to actually read about the evidence, then The greatest show on earth is a brilliant exposition. Each chapter deals with a different aspect of the case and then asks how this could be explained by young earth creationism (creationists who believe that the world was created within the last 10,000 years) or intelligent design (creationism dressed up in the clothing of science).
Along the way Dawkins exposes many of the myths propounded by creationists. For example, although most evolution occurs over millions of years, some evolutionary change can be observed and, indeed, experimentally induced. In one key study, the coloration of guppies evolved to be more or less bright, depending on whether they had been placed in non-predated (or weakly-predated) pools rather than highly-predated pools. Likewise, artifical selection (e.g. dog breeding) is a de facto demonstration that animal forms can change, as opposed to all forms having been place on earth by a creator.
Another myth exposed by Dawkins is that of the "missing" link in the fossil record. Dawkins points out that evolution would be true even if we had no fossils; molecular analyses of existing species demonstrates more clearly than fossils just how different species are related to each other. But we are lucky that any fossil record has survived, and since Darwin's time many "intermediate" fossils have been found, showing the ancestral forms of many living species. Occasionally, some of the fossils in the pre-human lineage get reclassified as an earlier or a later form. However, this actually supports the evolutionary case by showing how close some of the different forms are to each other. In fact, if we had an entirely complete fossil record then it would be impossible to actually classify different forms because the changes between successive generations would be imperceptible.
Dawkins shows throughout how the creationist case has to fall back either on flat denial of the facts or on implausible forms of special pleading. A case in point is the use of radioactive clocks to determine the age of the earth's rocks. Radioactive clocks depend on the half-life of isotopes - the time taken for half the atoms to decay. Potassium-40 has a half-life of 1.26 billion years, but perhaps a creationist could argue that its half-life was different prior to Noah's flood. Special pleading, yes, but the pleading is worse when you bear in mind that other isotopes have different half-lives, so God would need to fiddle all of these in order to show that the earth was created about 6,000 years ago.
One of the most amusing arguments against creationism is that of our interior physiologies. In contrast to the impressive exteriors of all creatures, the insides are frequently a shambles. For example, in mammals the laryngeal nerve does not pass directly from the brain to the larynx but, rather, takes a detour. Most dramatically, in the giraffe the laryngeal nerve passes right down the neck and back up again, a detour of about 15 feet. The reason for this absurdity lies in the evolution that transformed fish ancestors into mammals, which involved the stretching of the neck and the development of other structures.
Throughout The greatest show on earth the writing is crystal clear. The footnotes - so often a distraction in many books - are either illuminating or amusing. Although I knew the basics of evolution, I still learned a lot from this book. Anyone else who is willing to actually be exposed to the evidence for evolution would be well advised to read it.
In The God delusion Richard Dawkins stated that he was not writing with the intent of converting committed theists but, rather, with the aim of influencing those who were undecided between belief and atheism. After reading The greatest show on earth, I imagine that Dawkins is likewise trying to convince the undecided rather than the hard-core creationists. On the opening page he compares the teacher of evolution to a teacher of Roman history whose class is continually disrupted by "a baying pack of ignoramuses" who vociferously assert that the Roman empire did not exist.
Some might wonder whether a less confrontational tone would be more effective in getting the reader on board. I'm not so sure. Dawkins gives the example of Wendy Wright, the president of 'Concerned Women for America', who was interviewed for the Channel Four documentary The Genius of Charles Darwin. She repeatedly questions the existence of "intermediate" fossils, whilst Dawkins repeatedly ripostes that they are in the museums if only she would care to look. When one listens to Wendy Wright and the many people like her (see some of the risible creationist videos on YouTube) one feels that they are a lost cause.
However, for anyone who is unsure about the case for evolution and is willing to actually read about the evidence, then The greatest show on earth is a brilliant exposition. Each chapter deals with a different aspect of the case and then asks how this could be explained by young earth creationism (creationists who believe that the world was created within the last 10,000 years) or intelligent design (creationism dressed up in the clothing of science).
Along the way Dawkins exposes many of the myths propounded by creationists. For example, although most evolution occurs over millions of years, some evolutionary change can be observed and, indeed, experimentally induced. In one key study, the coloration of guppies evolved to be more or less bright, depending on whether they had been placed in non-predated (or weakly-predated) pools rather than highly-predated pools. Likewise, artifical selection (e.g. dog breeding) is a de facto demonstration that animal forms can change, as opposed to all forms having been place on earth by a creator.
Another myth exposed by Dawkins is that of the "missing" link in the fossil record. Dawkins points out that evolution would be true even if we had no fossils; molecular analyses of existing species demonstrates more clearly than fossils just how different species are related to each other. But we are lucky that any fossil record has survived, and since Darwin's time many "intermediate" fossils have been found, showing the ancestral forms of many living species. Occasionally, some of the fossils in the pre-human lineage get reclassified as an earlier or a later form. However, this actually supports the evolutionary case by showing how close some of the different forms are to each other. In fact, if we had an entirely complete fossil record then it would be impossible to actually classify different forms because the changes between successive generations would be imperceptible.
Dawkins shows throughout how the creationist case has to fall back either on flat denial of the facts or on implausible forms of special pleading. A case in point is the use of radioactive clocks to determine the age of the earth's rocks. Radioactive clocks depend on the half-life of isotopes - the time taken for half the atoms to decay. Potassium-40 has a half-life of 1.26 billion years, but perhaps a creationist could argue that its half-life was different prior to Noah's flood. Special pleading, yes, but the pleading is worse when you bear in mind that other isotopes have different half-lives, so God would need to fiddle all of these in order to show that the earth was created about 6,000 years ago.
One of the most amusing arguments against creationism is that of our interior physiologies. In contrast to the impressive exteriors of all creatures, the insides are frequently a shambles. For example, in mammals the laryngeal nerve does not pass directly from the brain to the larynx but, rather, takes a detour. Most dramatically, in the giraffe the laryngeal nerve passes right down the neck and back up again, a detour of about 15 feet. The reason for this absurdity lies in the evolution that transformed fish ancestors into mammals, which involved the stretching of the neck and the development of other structures.
Throughout The greatest show on earth the writing is crystal clear. The footnotes - so often a distraction in many books - are either illuminating or amusing. Although I knew the basics of evolution, I still learned a lot from this book. Anyone else who is willing to actually be exposed to the evidence for evolution would be well advised to read it.
Saturday, 12 September 2009
Derren Brown and the lottery prediction
On 9th September, Derren Brown appeared to predict the results of the UK National Lottery on Channel 4 television. Two days later, he purported to explain this in terms of the "wisdom of crowds". He referred to a study reported by Francis Galton in 1907, in which many people attempted to guess the weight of an ox at a country fair. Although many different estimates were made, the average of these was staggeringly close to the true weight. Brown claimed to have averaged the guesses of a panel of people in order to produce the lottery prediction (the explanation was also mixed up with some stuff about automatic writing and group bonding).
On the blog site of the Guardian newspaper, some people expressed their doubts about the whole wisdom of crowds concept, including the Galton study. I posted the following response (I've corrected a small error in this reprinting):
Regarding the wisdom of the crowds argument, which some people have doubted, aggregating imperfect judgments can improve accuracy but it doesn't apply to the case of lottery numbers. Let's take Galton's example of people guessing the weight of an ox, mentioned in the programme (Galton's paper was published in Nature). In reality, the ox weighed 1198 lbs. If person A guesses the weight to be 1178 lbs then s/he is inaccurate by 20 lbs. Person B guesses the weight to be 1208 lbs and is inaccurate by 10 lbs. Thus, the average level of inaccuracy is 15 lbs. But suppose we average their two guesses; this gives an estimate of 1193 lbs, which is inaccurate by only 5 lbs. Thus, the level of error obtained by averaging the estimates is less than the average error of each individual estimate.
There are a couple of things to note here. First, the two estimates in the example fell either side of the actual weight, a phenomenon called 'bracketing'. With multiple estimates, at least one instance of bracketing is necessary in order that averaging estimates will improve overall reliability. When making estimates about something where knowledge can be applied, even imperfectly, multiple estimates are likely to cluster either side of the true answer. In the case of the lottery, knowledge cannot be applied. Because numbers are randomly determined, there is nothing "real" for guesses to cluster around. Indeed, the numbers 1 and 49 cannot even be bracketed, as guesses can only fall to one side of them.
Second, even where bracketing can occur, thus leading to greater reliability of the averaged estimates, greater reliability does not mean pinpoint accuracy. Rather, it simply means a reduced level of error. In the case reported by Galton, 787 people guessed the weight of the ox and the average of their estimates fell 1 lb short of the correct weight. Thus, even if it were possible to apply the wisdom of crowds to the National Lottery, the notion that this would lead to seven correct answers is risible.
I don't know how Brown did it, but having viewed the video of the "jumping ball" I'm inclined to agree that there was something along the lines of the split screen trickery that many have suggested.
As someone who teaches the psychology of judgment, it does concern me a little that mixing up genuine science with a barrel-load of hokum could damage people's understanding of, or trust in, the former.
On the blog site of the Guardian newspaper, some people expressed their doubts about the whole wisdom of crowds concept, including the Galton study. I posted the following response (I've corrected a small error in this reprinting):
Regarding the wisdom of the crowds argument, which some people have doubted, aggregating imperfect judgments can improve accuracy but it doesn't apply to the case of lottery numbers. Let's take Galton's example of people guessing the weight of an ox, mentioned in the programme (Galton's paper was published in Nature). In reality, the ox weighed 1198 lbs. If person A guesses the weight to be 1178 lbs then s/he is inaccurate by 20 lbs. Person B guesses the weight to be 1208 lbs and is inaccurate by 10 lbs. Thus, the average level of inaccuracy is 15 lbs. But suppose we average their two guesses; this gives an estimate of 1193 lbs, which is inaccurate by only 5 lbs. Thus, the level of error obtained by averaging the estimates is less than the average error of each individual estimate.
There are a couple of things to note here. First, the two estimates in the example fell either side of the actual weight, a phenomenon called 'bracketing'. With multiple estimates, at least one instance of bracketing is necessary in order that averaging estimates will improve overall reliability. When making estimates about something where knowledge can be applied, even imperfectly, multiple estimates are likely to cluster either side of the true answer. In the case of the lottery, knowledge cannot be applied. Because numbers are randomly determined, there is nothing "real" for guesses to cluster around. Indeed, the numbers 1 and 49 cannot even be bracketed, as guesses can only fall to one side of them.
Second, even where bracketing can occur, thus leading to greater reliability of the averaged estimates, greater reliability does not mean pinpoint accuracy. Rather, it simply means a reduced level of error. In the case reported by Galton, 787 people guessed the weight of the ox and the average of their estimates fell 1 lb short of the correct weight. Thus, even if it were possible to apply the wisdom of crowds to the National Lottery, the notion that this would lead to seven correct answers is risible.
I don't know how Brown did it, but having viewed the video of the "jumping ball" I'm inclined to agree that there was something along the lines of the split screen trickery that many have suggested.
As someone who teaches the psychology of judgment, it does concern me a little that mixing up genuine science with a barrel-load of hokum could damage people's understanding of, or trust in, the former.
Friday, 11 September 2009
UK government's apology for Turing's mistreatment
The online petition (link below) for an official apology over the treatment of Alan Turing has produced the following response from Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Cutting and pasting from the original email led to a few formatting errors, which I've tried to fix, but some may remain.
Understandably, the message focuses on Turing's codebreaking work during the second world war, but many of us also celebrate his contributions to cognitive science.
DH
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thank you for signing this petition. The Prime Minister has written a response. Please read below.
Prime Minister: 2009 has been a year of deep reflection – a chance forBritain, 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 tohonour 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 takeup 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 andcelebrate another contribution to Britain’s fight against the darkness ofdictatorship; that of code-breaker Alan Turing.
Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work onbreaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that,without his outstanding contribution, the history of World War Two couldwell have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we canpoint 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, thathe 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 chemicalcastration 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 dealtwith 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 LGBTcommunity. This recognition of Alan’s status as one of Britain’s mostfamous victims of homophobia is another step towards equality and longoverdue.
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 warare 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
If you would like to help preserve Alan Turing's memory for futuregenerations, please donate here: http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/
Petition information - http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/turing/
Understandably, the message focuses on Turing's codebreaking work during the second world war, but many of us also celebrate his contributions to cognitive science.
DH
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thank you for signing this petition. The Prime Minister has written a response. Please read below.
Prime Minister: 2009 has been a year of deep reflection – a chance forBritain, 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 tohonour 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 takeup 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 andcelebrate another contribution to Britain’s fight against the darkness ofdictatorship; that of code-breaker Alan Turing.
Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work onbreaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that,without his outstanding contribution, the history of World War Two couldwell have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we canpoint 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, thathe 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 chemicalcastration 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 dealtwith 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 LGBTcommunity. This recognition of Alan’s status as one of Britain’s mostfamous victims of homophobia is another step towards equality and longoverdue.
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 warare 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
If you would like to help preserve Alan Turing's memory for futuregenerations, please donate here: http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/
Petition information - http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/turing/
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