A formative day for Georg Cantor

From Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

An obsession with targets and impacts is killing off the blue-sky thinking that helped Higgs to a Nobel prize

From the Guardian. "Higgs would not find his boson in today's 'publish or perish' research culture".

Also from the Guardian. "Peter Higgs: I wouldn't be productive enough for today's academic system".

The Truth About Numbers

From Tom the Dancing Bug. "That book is full of secular lies! Here's the only 'math' book you'll ever need!"

Will Snowden be Glasgow University's next Rector?

From the Glasgow Herald. Spotted by Mitch Wand.

Chris Cassells, a member of the "Elect Snowden as Rector" campaign at Glasgow University, said a Snowden victory would be a gesture against surveillance culture
"Having Edward Snowden as rector would give us a megaphone with which we can project our views to a global audience particularly on the issue of state surveillance and the very valid and welcome role of whistleblowers in a democracy," explained the PhD student, 27.
"I think he has done a great service to citizens across the world in exposing the corrupt and immoral practises of the NSA and our very own GCHQ.
"Studying at the university is dependent on the free exchange of information and freedom of speech, and I think Snowden's revelations hit to the heart of that."

Separate Scotlandshire may be susceptible to space storms, say scientists

As reported by Och Aye The News.

In a report published today the wholly independent UK Government boffins claim that, if Scotlandshire were to separate from England, it would be left with no cover against celestial peril. The tiny Scottish Defence Force would be unable to prevent a hail of meteors - which could fall from the sky at any time – from causing huge devastation and loss of life.

Dr Alisdair Allan MSP, the Scottish Government's Science & Education minister said, “While the conclusions of the LSE report are undoubtedly accurate, its authors fail to mention that there are no current means of shielding Scotlandshire from meteor showers.

“The kind of technology required to provide protection from celestial objects doesn't even exist. So, to claim that the danger would be increased by independence doesn't make any sense.

"You may wish to ask the UK government what steps they are taking to protect us from being lovebombed by comets, for pity's sake.”

Off the Beaten Track 3: Proofs as Stories

A third talk of note at Off the Beaten Track was Languages for Computational Creativity: Generative Art and Interactive Worlds, by Chris Martens. Her talk included the most inventive application of Propositions of Types that I ever heard: Proofs as Stories. Later, she provided a citation to a longer work, Linear Logic for Non-Linear Storytelling, by some of her collaborators, which uses proofs in linear logic to describe alternative storylines for Madame Bovary. Thanks, Chris!

Off the Beaten Track 2: Take FRP to the limit

A second talk I enjoyed at Off the Beaten Track was Kengo Kido's Integrability in Nonstandard Modeling of Hybrid Systems, because it might hold the secret to resolving a conflict that has bugged me for many years.

Elliott and Hudak's original description of Functional Reactive Animation carefully separated behaviours (continuous maps from time to values) from events (a value is supplied at a given time). However, many developments of Functional Reactive Programming (FRP) instead supply a stream of discrete values, casting out continuity and conflating the notions of behaviour and event. For instance, the discrete approach is taken by Causal Commutative Arrows and by Asynchronous Functional Reactive Programming for GUIs (the basis for Elm).

As I commented in a previous post, streams have the advantage of permitting feedback loops, which permit the definition of important functions such as integral, and relate to the categorical notion of trace: can we combine the advantages of feedback with continuity? Kido's paper suggests a way forward: use discrete streams, but let the time interval between them to approach zero in the limit, as in his language WHILEdt. It would be great to see someone work out the details.

Union in Peril?

It's easy to despair if you favour independence for Scotland. Despite a small slant toward Yes, polls still show No well in the lead. So I found heartening a call to arms by Alan Massie in the Spectator, warning unionists that a vote for Independence is far from far fetched.

Alex Salmond is within striking distance of victory. Why hasn’t England noticed?

Off the Beaten Track: False Starts

Saturday I had the pleasure to attend Off the Beaten Track, a workshop of POPL 2014.  Every single talk was introduced with the phrase 'And now for something completely different ...'

One talk, by Nada Amin and Tiark Rompf (delivered by Nada), argues that 'papers should expose the sausage-factory of designing calculi, and the minefields in the landscape'.

Ever since Euler (at least), papers in mathematics tend to present a polished solution at the cost of hiding the insights that led to the solution's discovery. Only rarely does one see papers that describe an approach that failed, even though, arguably, knowing what not to do can be as important as knowing what to do.

This leads me to make a suggestion. Every paper is expected to contain sections, where relevant, on
design, implementation, performance, theory, and related work. We should also include, where relevant, a section on 'false starts': research directions that failed to pan out. That is, 'false starts' should be on the checklist of what to cover when first organising a paper. Papers with such material exist, but they are rare; we should make them a common case.

What are your favourite papers that clearly explain a false start?

Take a lawyer’s advice – visit the occupied territories

Even committed Zionists are beginning to understand that Israel is consistently violating fundamental human rights in Palestine. This article, by a lawyer, focusses on how Palestinian children fare. Spotted via JFJFP.

By David Middleburgh, Jewish Chronicle
January 17, 2014

I have just returned from a three-day tour of the West Bank and east Jerusalem, organised by the pro-Israel, pro-peace organisation, Yachad. The participants were all passionate Zionists and, were it not for some grey hairs and wrinkles, we could have been a youth group. In fact, we were all senior lawyers or individuals with a particular interest in the rule of law.

The purpose: to understand the legal context to the occupation. The centrepiece, a unique visit to the IDF military courts that maintain law and order (for Palestinians only) in the West Bank, unique in that we were the first organised group of British Jews to visit the courts. In the course of the tour we met a very broad spectrum of people from representatives of Israeli NGOs, a senior employee of the Yesha Council, which represents settlers, and a senior adviser to Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman.

Arrest of child

My conclusions? First, there is no substitute for finding out what is really happening on the ground by visiting and asking difficult questions. I had made numerous assumptions from both Jewish and non-Jewish media, which were simply wrong.

Secondly, those who consider that stories of systemic breaches of human rights under the occupation are an anti-Israel myth are deluding themselves.

We spent a morning at the military courts observing young Palestinian boys, aged 13-17, being processed, and speaking to their mothers. It is clear that children are invariably arrested in night raids by the army at gunpoint, cuffed and blindfolded and held, often for hours, in that condition, denied access to food, water and toilet facilities, interrogated without being advised of their rights, without a lawyer and without their parents.

Boy arrested by IDF, Nabi Saleh, 2011

Military Court Watch, an Israeli NGO, has carried out a detailed forensic review and they found over 50 per cent of children were arrested in night raids and 83 per cent of children blindfolded. All of the children we saw in court were in leg shackles.

There was a shocking passivity of the Palestinians we observed at court. Parents and detained children smiled and joked with each other and we did not see a single case of anger. That’s not to say parents did not care that their children were being imprisoned.

Israeli occupation forces detain a Palestinian youth in the West Bank city of Hebron on 22 September 2013, during protests against road closures for the benefit of Jewish settlers. Photo by Mamoun Wazwaz / APA images

But conviction rates are 99.7 per cent. The passivity bespeaks a people who have become resigned to their reality. They recognise there is no longer any point in fighting for basic rights. I felt that the court system was clearly a figleaf for a system of arbitrary justice where the guilt of the child is beside the point. The courts are part of a system that effectively keeps Palestinian society in a state of constant fear and uncertainty.

So why do the authorities bother with the expense of maintaining the pretence of justice? The answer is that without scrutiny it is possible to pretend that the system is fair. So, defendants are legally represented and proper rules of evidence apply.

Boy arrested on suspicion of throwing stones, Silwan, December 26, 2010. No further information

Arrest of boy, Silwan, 2011. No further information.

A much reproduced photo, for obvious reasons of a police swoop on young boys in Jerusalem, 2010. No further information.

Scrape away the veneer, and the charade is exposed with convictions routinely obtained based upon forced confessions and defendants facing remand without bail pending trial for periods in excess of sentences when pleading guilty. No sane defendant would plead not guilty in this Catch 22 situation.

I would argue that diaspora Jews who are true friends of Israel have a duty to visit the territories to understand the problem, and then to lobby friends in Israel to strive for a just end to this situation.

If we do nothing, can we complain if we awake one day and Israel has sleepwalked into the status of a pariah country?

David Middleburgh is a partner in the London firm of Gallant Maxwell solicitors