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I prefer Billy Holiday's version to Robert Merton's:<br>
<br>
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_1LfT1MvzI" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_1LfT1MvzI</a><br>
<br>
Or how about Bill Clinton?<br>
<br>
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqB7UEdhKug" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqB7UEdhKug</a><br>
<br>
By coincidence I just came back from seeing "The Imitation Game." It is obviously show-biz. I had to bite my tongue but it was OK. If you think this movie was bad, don't start me on the problems with "Gravity"! One thing that bothered me in the film was a conversation
Turing was having about a "programmable digital computer." Neither "program" nor "digital" would have been in use at the time, as has been documented by David Grier in an Annals piece, and by myself in my last book. On the plus side, they say that a computer
can "think differently," obviously a dig at Steve Jobs for his mangling of the Queen's English in his ad campaign for Apple.
<br>
<br>
God bless the child,<br>
<br>
Paul<br>
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<p class="MsoPlainText">-----Original Message-----<br>
From: members-bounces@sigcis.org [mailto:members-bounces@sigcis.org] On Behalf Of Dag Spicer<br>
Sent: Wednesday, February 25, 2015 9:47 AM<br>
To: PeterEckstein@comcast.net; John Impagliazzo; Computer, SIG<br>
Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Washington Post article about Turing</p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"> </p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">BTW, Merton’s original Mathew Effect paper is available here:
<a href="http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/merton/matthew1.pdf" target="_blank">
<span style="color:windowtext; text-decoration:none">http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/merton/matthew1.pdf</span></a></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"> </p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">Dag</p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"> </p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"> </p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"> </p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">On Feb 24, 2015, at 5:44 PM, <a href="mailto:PeterEckstein@comcast.net%3cmailto:PeterEckstein@comcast.net" target="_blank">
<span style="color:windowtext; text-decoration:none">PeterEckstein@comcast.net<mailto:PeterEckstein@comcast.net</span></a>> wrote:</p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"> </p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">I consider this interview and the article to be nothing more than PR puffery on the part of Princeton. Isaacson is quoted as saying that Turing did not invent the automatic electronic digital computer, but somehow the article goes on
to give as much glory as possible to Princeton but never mention the names of those Isaacson said were the real inventors--John Mauchly and Presper Eckert. They built ENIAC before there was any clear technology in which to store a program, and, after the
ENIAC design was frozen, they and several others at Penn set out to develop the architecture of a next-generation stored-program computer that they named EDVAC. At some point von Neumann, who had never seen a computer before, joined the group and contributed
to its thinking, and he volunteered to write up their conclusions, which were issued in a typed (and widely distributed) paper that bore his name alone. Von Neumann was, as I believe the article calls him, a protean genius, but attributing the stored-program
concept to him is, indeed, an example of the Matthew Effect gone wild.</p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"> </p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">________________________________</p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">From: "John Impagliazzo" <<a href="mailto:John.Impagliazzo@Hofstra.edu%3cmailto:John.Impagliazzo@Hofstra.edu" target="_blank"><span style="color:windowtext; text-decoration:none">John.Impagliazzo@Hofstra.edu<mailto:John.Impagliazzo@Hofstra.edu</span></a>>></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">To: "Paul Ceruzzi" <<a href="mailto:CeruzziP@si.edu%3cmailto:CeruzziP@si.edu" target="_blank"><span style="color:windowtext; text-decoration:none">CeruzziP@si.edu<mailto:CeruzziP@si.edu</span></a>>>, "sigcis" <<a href="mailto:members@sigcis.org%3cmailto:members@sigcis.org" target="_blank"><span style="color:windowtext; text-decoration:none">members@sigcis.org<mailto:members@sigcis.org</span></a>>></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">Sent: Tuesday, February 24, 2015 2:02:42 AM</p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Washington Post article about Turing</p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"> </p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">Thanks, Paul.</p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"> </p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">Below is the link to the article for those who do not have access to it.</p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/what-imitation-game-didnt-tell-you-about-alan-turings-greatest-triumph/2015/02/20/ffd210b6-b606-11e4-9423-f3d0a1ec335c_story.html" target="_blank"><span style="color:windowtext; text-decoration:none">http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/what-imitation-game-didnt-tell-you-about-alan-turings-greatest-triumph/2015/02/20/ffd210b6-b606-11e4-9423-f3d0a1ec335c_story.html</span></a></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"> </p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">John</p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"> </p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">John Impagliazzo, Ph.D.</p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">Professor Emeritus, Hofstra University</p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">IEEE Life Fellow</p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">ACM Distinguished Educator</p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">Editor-in-Chief, ACM Inroads</p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"> </p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">From: <a href="mailto:members-bounces@sigcis.org%3cmailto:members-bounces@sigcis.org" target="_blank">
<span style="color:windowtext; text-decoration:none">members-bounces@sigcis.org<mailto:members-bounces@sigcis.org</span></a>> [<a href="mailto:members-bounces@sigcis.org" target="_blank"><span style="color:windowtext; text-decoration:none">mailto:members-bounces@sigcis.org</span></a>]
On Behalf Of Ceruzzi, Paul</p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">Sent: Saturday, 21 February, 2015 08:47</p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">To: sigcis</p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">Subject: [SIGCIS-Members] Washington Post article about Turing</p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"> </p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"> </p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">On the front page of today's Washington Post is an article by Joel Achenbach about Turing's 1936 paper and its influence on computer science. All well and good, except later on he quotes the Chair of the Computer Science Department at
Princeton as saying "...Turing invented computer science and John von Neumann built the first stored-program computer." An example of The Matthew Effect ("them that's got shall have; them that's not shall lose").</p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"> </p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">Overall, Achenbach has written an very good summary of Turing's contributions. He also gets one thing right (unless I am mistaken): we really don't know to what extent von Neumann and Turing discussed these concepts when both were at
Princeton.</p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"> </p>
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