Prof. Boerner's Explorations

Seniors find an alternative unemployment insurance process… This article reviews the increase in the senior citizens opting for early retirement with Social Security when they find themselves out of work and unable to find a new job. It is a waste of brain power and experience, but for some it is the only option available. This option is being taken even through they take a ‘hit’ in the form of lower benefits than if they had waited until 66/67…

Early retirements strain Social Security system – Yahoo! News 
Source: news.yahoo.com

WASHINGTON – Big job losses and a spike in early retirement claims from laid-off seniors will force Social Security to pay out more in benefits than it collects in taxes the next two years, the first time that’s happened since the 1980s.

The deficits — $10 billion in 2010 and $9 billion in 2011 — won’t affect payments to retirees because Social Security has accumulated surpluses from previous years totaling $2.5 trillion. But they will add to the overall federal deficit.

Applications for retirement benefits are 23 percent higher than last year, while disability claims have risen by about 20 percent. Social Security officials had expected applications to increase from the growing number of baby boomers reaching retirement, but they didn’t expect the increase to be so large.

What happened? The recession hit and many older workers suddenly found themselves laid off with no place to turn but Social Security. … [MORE]

Parents: Check out this recall of Tylenol for Infants/Children… There is a possible contamination of Tylenol’s manufacturing process. It is said that the product is safe, but when our children are involved, it behooves us to remain vigilant. Check this out…

Tylenol recalls Infant and Children’s formulas: What you need to know – Parenting on Shine 
Source: shine.yahoo.com

Johnson & Johnson’s McNeil unit, the makers of Tylenol, are voluntarily recalling 57 lots of Infant Tylenol and Children’s Tylenol due to a possible bacterial contamination. According to an Associated Press report, the company has contacted wholesalers and retailers about the recall, in which an inactive ingredient in the formula didn’t meet internal testing requirements, resulting in the detection of B. cepacia bacteria in a raw material that did not go into the finished product.

What does that mean? Apparently that no bacteria were actually found in the finished product–i.e. the bottle you may have picked up in the store–and that "the likelihood of a serious medical event is remote." But in compliance with the FDA and as an overall precaution, the product is being recalled. … [MORE]

by Gerald Boerner

“I take photographs with love, so I try to make them art objects. But I make them for myself first and foremost – that is important.”
— Jacques-Henri Lartigue

“Photography to me is catching a moment which is passing, and which is true.”
— Jacques-Henri Lartigue

“It’s marvellous, marvellous! Nothing will ever be as much fun. I’m going to photograph everything, everything!”
— Jacques-Henri Lartigue

Bonus: Thought for the Day…
“I take photographs with love, so I try to make them art objects. But I make them for myself first and foremost–that is important. If they are art objects at the same time, that’s fine with me.”
— Jacques-Henri Lartigue

Bonus: Thought for the Day…
“Photography is something you learn to love very quickly. I know that many, many things are going to ask me to have their pictures taken and I will take them all.”
— Jacques-Henri Lartigue

Bonus: Thought for the Day…
“I have never taken a picture for any other reason than that at that moment it made me happy to do so.”
— Jacques-Henri Lartigue, in Master Photographers – The World’s Great Photographers on their Art and Technique

Bonus: Thought for the Day…
“Robert, Zissou and Louis are too big and I am too small. Most of the time they won’t let me play with them; I have to be a spectator.”
— Jacques-Henri Lartigue

Bonus: Thought for the Day…
“I have two pairs of eyes – one to paint and one to take photographs”
— Jacques-Henri Lartigue, in Dialogue With Photography by Paul Hill

Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894 – 1986)

Jacques Henri Lartigue was a French photographer and painter. He started taking photos when he was 6, his subject matter being primarily his own life and the people and activities in it. As a child he photographed his friends and family at play – running and jumping, racing wheeled soap boxes, building kites, gliders and airplanes, climbing the Eiffel Tower and so on.

He also photographed many famous sporting events, including automobile races such as the Coupe Gordon Bennett and the French Grand Prix, early flights by aviation pioneers including Gabriel Voisin, Louis Blériot, Louis Paulhan and Roland Garros, and tennis players such as Suzanne Lenglen at the French Open tennis championships.

Although little seen in that format, many of his earliest and most famous photographs were originally taken in stereo, but he also produced vast numbers of images in all formats and media including glass plates in various sizes, some of the earliest autochromes, and of course film in 2 1/4” square and 35mm. His greatest achievement was his set of around 120 huge photograph albums, which compose the finest visual autobiography ever produced.

While he sold a few photographs in his youth, mainly to sporting magazines such as La Vie au Grand Air, in middle age he concentrated on his painting, and it was through this that he earned his living, although he maintained written and photographic journals throughout his life. Only when he was 69 were his boyhood photographs serendipitously discovered by Charles Rado of the Rapho agency, who introduced him to John Szarkowski, then curator of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, who in turn arranged an exhibition of his work at the museum.

From this, there was a photo spread in Life magazine in 1963, coincidentally in the issue which commemorated the death of John Kennedy, ensuring the widest possible audience for his pictures.

By then as he received stints for fashion magazines, he was famous in other countries other than his native France, when until 1974 he was commissioned by the newly elected President of France Valéry Giscard d’Estaing to shoot an official portrait photograph. The result was a simple photo of him without the use of lighting utilizing the national flag as a background. He was rewarded with his first French retrospective at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs at the following year and had more commissions from fashion and decoration magazines flooding in for the rest of his life.

"All the jumping and flying in Lartigue’s photographs, it looks like the whole world at the turn of the century is on springs or something. There’s a kind of spirit of liberation that’s happening at the time and Lartigue matches that up with what stop action photography can do at the time, so you get these really dynamic pictures. And for Lartigue part of the joke, most of the time, is that these people look elegant but they are doing these crazy stunts."
— Kevin Moore (Lartigue biographer)

His first book, Diary of a Century was published soon afterwards in collaboration with Richard Avedon, and from then on innumerable books and exhibitions throughout the world have featured Lartigue’s photographs. He continued taking photographs throughout the last three decades of his life, finally achieving the commercial success that had previously evaded this rather unworldly man.

Although best known as a photographer, Lartigue was a capable if not especially gifted painter and showed in the official salons in Paris and in the south of France from 1922 on. He was friends with a wide selection of literary and artistic celebrities including the playwright Sacha Guitry, the singer Yvonne Printemps, the painters Kees van Dongen, Pablo Picasso and the artist-playwright-filmmaker Jean Cocteau. He also worked on the sets of the film-makers Jacques Feyder, Abel Gance, Robert Bresson, François Truffaut and Federico Fellini, and many of these celebrities became the subject of his photographs. Lartigue, however, photographed everyone he came in contact with, his most frequent muses being his three wives, and his mistress of the early 1930s, the Romanian model Renée Perle.

His Legacy…

The paradox of photography, its unpredictable generosity and democratic inclusiveness is exemplified in the story of Jacques-Henri Lartigue. Late in his life, Lartigue would be hailed as one of the founders of modern photography. In reality, he was the ultimate amateur, who in a remarkable series of family albums assembled a portrait of turn-of-the-century France, as it appeared to the eyes of a fun-loving boy, from the age of 8 to 18.

"He is essentially the gifted amateur. He has got access to all the best equipment, the state art equipment, he has a father who is passionate about photography, he is a subscriber to all of these magazines – he’s just got all the advantages. But he is also, throughout his entire life, you understand this about him – that he understands the look of the world at any given moment; he understands how things look; how women look at a certain period in time; and how to capture the essence of that moment, whatever form that’s in."
— Kevin Moore (Lartigue biographer)

Striking though they are, Lartigue’s pictures are not without precedent. Instant photography, which arrested movement for humorous effect, was a cliché of the amateur repertoire. Lartique simply did what everyone else was doing, but with more flair and more daring.

Background and biographical information is from Wikipedia articles on:

Jacques-Henri Lartigue that can be found at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques-Henri_Lartigue

Also, an article on Jacques-Henri Lartigue found in: 
Peter Stepan. (2008) 50 Photographers You Should Know. New York: Prestel.

by Gerald Boerner

“Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.”
— Alan Turing, mathematician, cryptanalyst and computer scientist

“Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.”
— Alan Turing, mathematician, cryptanalyst and computer scientist

“We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.”
— Alan Turing, mathematician, cryptanalyst and computer scientist

“A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human.”
— Alan Turing, mathematician, cryptanalyst and computer scientist

Bonus: Thought for the Day…
“No, I’m not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I’m after is just a mediocre brain, something like the President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.”
— Alan Turing, mathematician, cryptanalyst and computer scientist

Bonus: Thought for the Day…
“Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity.”
— Alan Turing, mathematician, cryptanalyst and computer scientist

Bonus: Thought for the Day…
“I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.”
— Alan Turing, mathematician, cryptanalyst and computer scientist

Bonus: Thought for the Day…
“In the time of Galileo it was argued that the texts, ‘And the sun stood still … and hasted not to go down about a whole day’ (Joshua x. 13) and ‘He laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not move at any time’ (Psalm cv. 5) were an adequate refutation of the Copernican theory.”
— Alan Turing, mathematician, cryptanalyst and computer scientist

Bonus: Thought for the Day…
“Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity. The activity of the intuition consists in making spontaneous judgements [sic] which are not the result of conscious trains of reasoning… The exercise of ingenuity in mathematics consists in aiding the intuition through suitable arrangements of propositions, and perhaps geometrical figures or drawings.”
— Alan Turing, mathematician, cryptanalyst and computer scientist

The Automatic Computing Engine (ACE)

The Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) was an early electronic stored-program computer design produced by Alan Turing at the invitation of John Womersley, superintendent of the Mathematics Division of the National Physical Laboratory. The use of the word Engine was in homage to Charles Babbage and his Difference Engine and Analytical Engine. Turing’s technical design Proposed Electronic Calculator was the product of his theoretical work in 1936 "On Computable Numbers" and his wartime experience at Bletchley Park where the Colossus computers had been successful in breaking German military codes. In his 1936 paper, Turing described his idea as a "universal computing machine", but it is now known as the Universal Turing machine.

On 19 February 1946 Turing presented a detailed paper to the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) Executive Committee, giving the first reasonably complete design of a stored-program computer. However, because of the strict and long-lasting secrecy around the Bletchley Park work, he was prohibited (because of the Official Secrets Act) from explaining that he knew that his ideas could be implemented in an electronic device. The better-known EDVAC design presented in the First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC (dated June 30, 1945), by John von Neumann, who knew of Turing’s theoretical work, received much publicity, despite its incomplete nature and questionable lack of attribution of the sources of some of the ideas.

Developer: Alan Turing

Alan Turing, was a British mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and computer scientist. Turing is often considered to be the father of modern computer science. He provided an influential formalization of the concept of the algorithm and computation with the Turing machine. In 1999 Time Magazine named Turing as one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century for his role in the creation of the modern computer, stating: "The fact remains that everyone who taps at a keyboard, opening a spreadsheet or a word-processing program, is working on an incarnation of a Turing machine.”

During the Second World War, Turing worked at Bletchley Park, Britain’s codebreaking centre, and was for a time head of Hut 8, the section responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. He devised a number of techniques for breaking German ciphers.

Turing had a strong predeliction for working things out from first principles, usually in the first instance without consulting any previous work on the subject, and no doubt it was this habit which gave his work that characteristically original flavor. I was reminded of a remark which Beethoven is reputed to have made when he was asked if he had heard a certain work of Mozart which was attracting much attention. He replied that he had not, and added "neither shall I do so, lest I forfeit some of my own originality."
— James H. Wilkinson, "Some Comments from a Numerical Analyst", 1970 Turing Award lecture, Journal of the ACM 18:2 (February 1971), pp. 137–147

Background on the ACE…

Turing’s report on the ACE was written in late 1945 and included detailed logical circuit diagrams and a cost estimate of ₤11,200. He felt that speed and size of memory were crucial and he proposed a high-speed memory of what would today be called 25 KiB, accessed at a speed of 1 MHz. The ACE implemented subroutine calls, whereas the EDVAC did not, and what also set the ACE apart from the EDVAC was the use of Abbreviated Computer Instructions, an early form of programming language. Initially, it was planned that Tommy Flowers, the engineer at the Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill in north London, who had been responsible for building the Colossus computers should build the ACE, but because of the secrecy around his wartime achievements and the pressure of post-war work, this was not possible.

Turing’s colleagues at the NPL, not knowing about Colossus, thought that the engineering work to build a complete ACE was too ambitious, so the first version of the ACE that was built was the Pilot Model ACE, a smaller version of Turing’s original design. The Pilot ACE had 1450 thermionic valves (vacuum tubes), and used mercury delay lines for its main memory. Each of the 12 delay lines could store 32 instructions or data words of 32 bits. This ran its first program on May 10, 1950, at which time it was the fastest computer in the world with a clock speed of 1MHz.

A second implementation of the ACE design was the MOSAIC (Ministry of Supply Automatic Integrator and Computer). This was built by Allen Coombs and William Chandler of Dollis Hill who had worked with Tommy Flowers on building the ten Colossus computers. It was installed at the Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE) which soon became the Royal Radar Establishment (RRE) at Malvern and ran its first program in late 1952 or early 1953. It was used to calculate aircraft trajectories from radar data, but details of it are still secret.

The principles of the ACE design were used in the Bendix Corporation’s G-15 computer. The engineering design was done by Harry Huskey who had spent 1947 in the ACE section at the NPL. He later contributed to the hardware designs for the EDVAC. The first G-15 ran in 1954 and, as a relatively small single user machine, some consider it to be the first personal computer.

Summary…

During the second half of the twentieth century, the use of computers transformed life in the developed world.  NPL is one of the places that gave birth to modern computing; Alan Turing played a leading role and his plans led to the development of the Pilot ACE and ACE computers.  In the 1960s, NPL played a leading part in the marriage of computer and communications, with the development by Donald Davies of computer networks based on packet switching.

“Although a mathematician, Turing took quite an interest in the engineering side of computer design. There was some discussion in 1947 as to whether a cheaper substance than mercury could not be found for use as an ultrasonic delay medium. Turing’s contribution to this discussion was to advocate the use of gin, which he said contained alcohol and water in just the right proportions to give a zero temperature coefficient of propagation velocity at room temperature.” — Maurice V. Wilkes, "Computers Then and Now", Journal of the ACM 15 (1), (January 1968), pp. 1-7

Background and biographical information is from the Wikipedia articles on:

The Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) that can be found at…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Computing_Engine

Alan Turing that can be found at…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing 

History of NPL Computing that can be found at…
http://www.npl.co.uk/mathematics-scientific-computing/history-of-computing/

by Gerald Boerner

“Gold Star Mothers dedicate themselves to honoring their deceased children, performing community service, helping veterans, and healing one another…”
— William Bennett

Other Events on this Day

• In 1722…
  Samuel Adams, a leader in the call for independence from Britain, is born in Boston.
• In 1777…
  Lancaster, Pennsylvania, becomes the national capital for one day as Congress flees from British-held Philadelphia to York, Pennsylvania.
• In 1936…
  The first national Gold Star Mothers Day is observed.
• In 1941…
  In Baltimore, Maryland, the United States launches the SS Patrick Henry, the first of more than 2,700 Liberty Ships built to carry cargo during World War II.
• In 1964…
  The Warren Commission releases a report concluding that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating President John F. Kennedy.

Dates and events based on:

William J. Bennett and John Cribb, (2008) The American Patriot’s Almanac Daily Readings on America. (Kindle Edition)