Roseburn to Leith Walk

I want the UK to stay in the EU, and I want Scotland to be an independent country. But it is hard for one person to have an impact on such major issues. I've decided on a more modest focus: improving cycling in Edinburgh and Scotland, and specifically building more segregated cycle paths.

Thanks to the work of many, including Spokes and Walk Cycle Vote, there is already progress. In 2012 Edinburgh City Council has agreed to commit 5% of its transport budget to cycling, increasing by 1% a year until it reaches 10% next year. One of the first major outcomes is the proposed Roseburn to Leith Walk Cycle route.

The proposal includes a detailed economic case, which is worth a look from anyone interested in promotion of segregated cycling. It predicts that the estimated £6.3M cost will lead to an 88% increase in folk cycling in the affected regions, leading to a £13.1M savings from improvements to health, £5.3M improvement to the GCP (Gross Cycling Product, e.g., increases in tourism and is sales of cycles), and £1.0M of benefits from reduced car usage (such as fewer accidents).

Benefits: Gross Cycling ProductResearch suggests that cycling benefits the local economy and a national study carried out by the London School of Economics (LSE) in 20108 concluded that each cyclist contributes a Gross Cycling Product (GCP) of £230 per year to the economy. This research was supported by a European wide study which found that cycling delivers wider economic benefits in terms of supporting jobs and driving tourism – with cycling having a greater employment intensity than any other transport sub-sector. Applying the findings of the LSE study to the forecast increase in cycling, the scheme will generate a GCP benefit of £5,753,218 over the 10 year scheme life.

Naomi Klein: The Best is Yet to Come

Amidst all the bad news, Naomi Klein shines a ray of light.

Taken together, the evidence is clear: The left just won. Forget the nomination—I mean the argument. Clinton, and the 40-year ideological campaign she represents, has lost the battle of ideas. The spell of neoliberalism has been broken, crushed under the weight of lived experience and a mountain of data.

What for decades was unsayable is now being said out loud—free college tuition, double the minimum wage, 100 percent renewable energy. And the crowds are cheering. With so much encouragement, who knows what’s next? Reparations for slavery and colonialism? A guaranteed annual income? Democratic worker co-ops as the centerpiece of a green jobs program? Why not? The intellectual fencing that has constrained the left’s imagination for so long is lying twisted on the ground. ...

Looking beyond this election cycle, this is actually good news. If Sanders could come this far, imagine what a left candidate who was unburdened by his weaknesses could do. A political coalition that started from the premise that economic inequality and climate destabilization are inextricable from systems of racial and gender hierarchy could well build a significantly larger tent than the Sanders campaign managed to erect.

And if that movement has a bold plan for humanizing and democratizing new technology networks and global systems of trade, then it will feel less like a blast from the past, and more like a path to an exciting, never-before-attempted future. Whether coming after one term of Hillary Clinton in 2020, or one term of Donald Trump, that combination—deeply diverse and insistently forward-looking—could well prove unbeatable.

Scientists for EU

Scientists for EU wrote a cogent letter explaining how the EU advances UK science, and how UK science advantages the UK. You can sign it here.

Please read this letter, add your name and share this link with other scientists.
Scientific advance and innovation are critically dependent on collaboration. To remain a world-leading science nation, we must be team players.
The EU leads the world in science output, is beating the US in science growth – and is rapidly increasing investment in research. The EU is a science superpower. Our place in this team has boosted our science networking, access to talent, shared infrastructure and UK science policy impact. The economy of scale streamlines bureaucracy and brings huge added value for all. International collaborations have 40% more impact than domestic-only research.
Strong science is key for our economy and quality of life. It creates a virtuous cycle, leveraging investment from industry, raising productivity and creating high-value jobs for our future. In fact, 20% of UK jobs currently rely on some science knowledge. Science brings better medicines, cleaner energy, public health protections, a safer environment, new technologies and solutions to global challenges.
If we leave the EU, the UK will lose its driving seat in this world-leading team. Free-flow of talent and easy collaboration would likely be replaced by uncertainty, capital flight, market barriers and costly domestic red-tape. This would stifle our science, innovation and jobs.
It is no surprise that a recent survey showed 93% of research scientists and engineers saying the EU is a “major benefit” to UK research. The surprise is that many voters are still unaware that UK science and its benefits would be demoted by a vote to leave.
We, the undersigned, urge you to seriously consider the implications for UK science when you vote in the referendum on UK membership of the EU.

A week of cycling ideas from Copenhagen

People for Bikes is visiting Copenhagen to learn about its famous cycling infrastructure. A week of stories is archived here, including The Great Copenhagen Loading Zone Compromise and How bikes make Copenhagen's neighbourhood business districts thrive.

David Turner Festschrift

Your chance to submit to a Festschrift for David Turner.

A busy summer

I'll be speaking at the following events.

• Joy of Coding, 17 June 2016, De Doelen, Rotterdam; keynote speaker.
• ACSD, 22—24 June 2016, Torun; keynote speaker.
• BETTY Summer School, 27 June—1 July 2016, Limassol, Cyprus; lecturer.
• International Summer School on Metaprogramming, 8—12 August 2016, Cambridge; lecturer.
• Lambda World, 1 October 2016, Cadiz; keynote speaker.

Hope to see you at one of these!

Papers We Love: John Reynolds, Definitional Interpreters for Higher-Order Programming Languages

I've added online links to the relevant papers (not behind paywalls), copied here.

Papers we love: John Reynolds, Definitional Interpreters for Higher-Order Programming Languages

7 June 2016, Skills Matter, London.
Certain papers change your life. McCarthy's 'Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and their Computation by Machine (Part I)' (1960) changed mine, and so did Landin's 'The Next 700 Programming Languages' (1966). And I remember the moment, halfway through my graduate career, when Guy Steele handed me Reynolds's 'Definitional Interpreters for Higher-Order Programming Languages' (1972).
It is now common to explicate the structure of a programming language by presenting an interpreter for that language. If the language interpreted is the same as the language doing the interpreting, the interpreter is called meta-circular.
Interpreters may be written at differing levels of detail, to explicate different implementation strategies. For instance, the interpreter may be written in a continuation-passing style; or some of the higher-order functions may be represented explicitly using data-structures, via defunctionalisation.
More elaborate interpreters may be derived from simpler versions, thus providing a methodology for discovering an implementation strategy and showing it correct. Each of these techniques has become a mainstay of the study of programming languages, and all of them were introduced in this single paper by Reynolds.

Related material

• John Reynolds, Definitional Interpreters for Higher-Order Programming Languages, 1972.
• John Reynolds, Definitional Interpreters for Higher-Order Programming Languages, 1998.
• John Reynolds, Definitional Interpreters Revisited, 1998.
• John Reynolds, The Discoveries of Continuations, 1993.
• John McCarthy, Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I, 1960.
• John McCarthy, Towards a Mathematical Science of Computation, 1962.
• Peter Landin, The Next 700 Programming Languages, 1966.
• Gordon Plotkin, Call-by-value, Call-by-name, and the Lambda Calculus, 1975.
• Robin Milner, A Theory of Type Polymorphism in Programming, 1978.
• Fermin Reig, ed, Reminiscences of Influential Papers, SIGPLAN Notices, 38(12):9—10, December 2003.

Papers We Love: John Reynolds, Definitional Interpreters for Higher Order Languages

I will be speaking on John Reynolds paper, Definitional Interpreters for Higher Order Languages, at Papers We Love, London, 6:30pm Tuesday 7 June; details here.

Speaker's Trust removes all trace of Leanne Baghouti

Leanne Baghouti, a British-Palestinian won her local round of Speaker's Trust "Speak Out" competition with an impassioned talk about Palestinian human rights. Her talk, and all sign that she had won the competition, were later deleted from the competition web site.

A colleague characterised her talk as "full of anti-Semitic and aggressive material from sources in the Middle East". I watched the video, and heard nothing anti-Semitic. It is a word that should be used with care.

Speaker's Trust has released a statement regarding the matter:

“There are two fundamental rules that are made explicit during the training: the speech must have a positive and uplifting message – in fact this is one of the core terms of the agreement with the Jack Petchey Foundation [and] a speaker should never inflame or offend the audience or insult others and this, by definition, means that propaganda is ruled out absolutely from the outset… Speakers Trust and Jack Petchey Foundation judging panel decided unanimously against sending Leanne Mohamad through to the next stage and she will not be speaking at the Grand Final. These were precisely our concerns.”

And another:

Our primary duty of care is to the young people we work with and we cannot tolerate any form of insult or abuse. We are concerned and saddened that Leanne’s experience has been less than positive.
Leanne Mohamad is the Redbridge Regional Final winner and there has never been any suggestion that she should be disqualified. Almost 190,000 young people have spoken out over the years on any topic which they feel passionately about and none has ever been banned from the process or silenced.
We are, however, a small charity without the capacity to moderate comments 24 hours a day and it was considered essential to protect Leanne by temporarily suspending the regional video over the bank holiday, until we were able to consult with her school and family.
Of 37 talented regional Champions only fifteen can be voted through to the Grand Final. This selection process took place on Saturday 21st May based on standard judging criteria and without any external influence or input.
The general “rules” of effective public speaking are guidelines to help speakers to create a speech that will connect with a large and diverse audience and every speech was judged on its own merits. At the heart of what we do lies the determination that all of our young speakers, irrespective of background, race or creed, should be able to speak out in a safe and supportive environment.

Omar Barghouti banned by Israel for travelling for supporting BDS

Omar Barghouti, a Palestinian living in Israel, has been denied the right to travel, for no reason other than that he is an effective supporter of BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions). Glenn Greenwald interviews him in The Intercept.

Despite having lived in Israel for 22 years with no criminal record of any kind, Omar Barghouti (above) was this week denied the right to travel outside the country. As one of the pioneers of the increasingly powerful movement to impose boycotts, sanctions, and divestment measures (BDS) on Israel, Barghouti, an articulate, English-speaking activist, has frequently traveled around the world advocating his position. The Israeli government’s refusal to allow him to travel is obviously intended to suppress his speech and activism. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was one of the world leaders who traveled last year to Paris to participate in that city’s “free speech rally.” ...

Sarah Leah Whitson of Human Rights Watch told the Electronic Intifada that “Israel’s refusal to renew Barghouti’s travel document appears to be an effort to punish him for exercising his right to engage in peaceful, political activism, using its arsenal of bureaucratic control over Palestinian lives.” She added: “Israel has used this sort of control to arbitrarily ban many Palestinians from traveling, as well as to ban international human rights monitors, journalists, and activists from entering Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories.” ...

Barghouti: Many people are realizing that Israel is a regime of occupation, settler colonialism, and apartheid and are therefore taking action to hold it to account to international law. Israel is realizing that companies are abandoning their projects in Israel that violate international law, pension funds are doing the same, major artists are refusing to play Tel Aviv, as Sun City was boycotted during apartheid South Africa. ...

We live in a country where racism and racial incitement against indigenous Palestinians has grown tremendously into the Israeli mainstream. It has really become mainstream today to be very openly racist against Palestinians. Many settlers and hard-right-wing Israelis are taking matters into their own hands – completely supported by the state – and attacking Palestinians.