Tuesday, May 04, 2004
Turing: Laid the Foundation for Invention of Software0 Comments:
In its ‘The Great Innovators’ series, BusinessWeek (May 10, 04) writes about Alan Turing:
It was a 1936 paper by Cambridge University mathematician Alan M. Turing that laid the foundation for the electronic wonders now crowding into every corner of our lives.
Turing invoked the notion of a ‘universal machine’ that could be given instructions to perform a variety of tasks. Turing spoke of a ‘machine’ only abstractly, as a sequence of steps to be executed. But his realization that the data fed into a system also could function as its directions opened the door to the invention of software.
A Google for Global Politics
In its ‘Innovators’ series, Time (May 3, 04) writes:
At www.e-parl.net, cyberspace is used as a town hall for legislators from around the globe. Membership in the e-Parliament is open to the world’s 25,000 democratically elected national legislators, including those in the US Congress. Though the group is still at what [one of the co-founders] calls the ‘level of experiments’ as organizers figure out how best to harness email, web chats and intranets to serve members, several hundred lawmakers have already signed, representing countries from Brazil to India.
Non-legislators can join a related forum, paying a fee that depends on the size of their organization. The goal: to devise common solutions to common challenges. E-Parliament is setting up a database that will allow legislators to search for like-minded colleagues – those working on, say, early-childhood education or counter-terrorism issues.
The e-parliament is already having an impact. For legislators who want to create a movement beyond their borders, it is launching action networks for lobbying and strategizing. In March 2003, Norwegian MP Ingvlid Vaggen became the first to turn an e-Parliament discussion into potential law when she took [an] energy efficiency issue to her legislature.
The initiative is founded by Nicholas Dunlop, a New Zealander and longtime leader of international political networks and William Ury, an American and a co-founder of Harvard Law School’s negotiation program.
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