Showing posts sorted by relevance for query Turing's. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query Turing's. Sort by date Show all posts

Thursday, February 2, 2017

Turing's law: UK posthumously pardons thousands of gay men

On Christmas Eve in 2013 Alan Turing received a posthumous pardon from the crime of being homosexual in Britain in the 1950's.  Tuesday, thousands of other men received similar posthumous pardons.

The Guardian has the story:
UK issues posthumous pardons for thousands of gay men
Justice minister hails ‘momentous day’ as so-called Turing’s law receives royal assent, but critics say move does not go far enough

"Tuesday 31 January 2017
Thousands of men convicted of offences that once criminalised homosexuality but are no longer on the statute book have been posthumously pardoned under a new law.

"A clause in the policing and crime bill, which received royal assent on Tuesday, extends to those who are dead the existing process of purging past criminal records.

"The general pardon is modelled on the 2013 royal pardon granted by the Queen to Alan Turing, the mathematician who broke the German Enigma codes during the second world war. He killed himself in 1954, at the age of 41, after his conviction for gross indecency.

"Welcoming the legislation, the justice minister Sam Gyimah said: “This is a truly momentous day. We can never undo the hurt caused, but we have apologised and taken action to right these wrongs. I am immensely proud that ‘Turing’s law’ has become a reality under this government.”

"There is already a procedure in place for the living to apply to the Home Office to have their past convictions, relating to same-sex relationships, expunged from their criminal records.

"Under what is known as the disregard process, anyone previously found guilty of past sexual offences that are no longer criminal matters can ask to have them removed.

"A disregard can be granted only if the past offence was a consensual relationship and both men were over 16. The conduct must also not constitute what remains an offence of sexual activity in a public lavatory.
...
"Rewriting history will not be easy. The complexity of the evidence, for example, that led to Oscar Wilde’s conviction in 1895 for gross indecency – including evidence of procuring male prostitutes – would make it difficult to assess.

"The gay rights organisation Stonewall has suggested the playwright and author, who was sentenced to two years hard labour in Reading jail, should be entitled to a pardon.

"The Ministry of Justice said there would be no historical limit in relation to past offences. It declined, however, to say whether Wilde would be among those deemed posthumously pardoned."

Tuesday, December 24, 2013

A Royal Pardon for Alan Turing takes effect today

Here's a chilling story from the BBC about the great Alan Turing, who effective today is pardoned in Britain from his 1952 conviction for homosexuality. The ghost of Christmas past reminds us that what is regarded as repugnant can reverse itself over time.

Royal pardon for codebreaker Alan Turing

"Computer pioneer and codebreaker Alan Turing has been given a posthumous royal pardon.

"It overturns his 1952 conviction for homosexuality for which he was punished by being chemically castrated.

"The conviction meant he lost his security clearance and had to stop the code-cracking work that proved critical to the Allies in World War II.

"The pardon was granted under the Royal Prerogative of Mercy after a request by Justice Minister Chris Grayling.

...
"Turing's work helped accelerate Allied efforts to read German Naval messages enciphered with the Enigma machine. He also contributed some more fundamental work on codebreaking that was only released to public scrutiny in April 2012.

"His later life was overshadowed by his conviction for homosexual activity, a sentence we would now consider unjust and discriminatory and which has now been repealed," said Mr Grayling.

"Turing deserves to be remembered and recognised for his fantastic contribution to the war effort and his legacy to science. A pardon from the Queen is a fitting tribute to an exceptional man."

The pardon comes into effect on 24 December."

Friday, February 2, 2018

San Francisco Will Clear Thousands of Marijuana Convictions

What happens when a formerly repugnant transaction goes from being illegal to being legal?
The NY Times has the story:
San Francisco Will Clear Thousands of Marijuana Convictions

"Thousands of people with misdemeanor convictions for marijuana possession dating back 40 years will have their criminal records cleared, the San Francisco district attorney’s office said Wednesday. San Diego is also forgiving old convictions.

"Recreational marijuana became legal in California this year, and the law allowed those with prior low-level offenses to petition for expungement, a process that can be costly.

"But in San Francisco and San Diego, people need not ask. George Gascón, San Francisco’s district attorney, said his office would automatically erase convictions there, which total about 3,000.

"An additional 4,900 felony marijuana charges will be examined by prosecutors to determine if they should be retroactively reduced to misdemeanors.

"San Diego has identified 4,700 cases, both felonies and misdemeanors, that will be cleared or downgraded."
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See my earlier posts on Turing's Law, named for Britain's 2003 posthumous pardon of Alan Turing who had been convicted of a crime when homosexual acts were illegal.

Thursday, March 23, 2017

Germany en route to annul historical convictions of gay men

Deutsche Welle has the story:
Germany set to annul historical convictions of gay men

"German men convicted on the basis of a 19th century law criminalizing homosexuality now have a chance at getting late justice in the wake of an expert study commissioned by the Anti-Discrimination Agency.
Their supposed crime was the same during the Nazi era as it was in the federal republic founded in 1949: They loved other men and had homosexual sex.
Those who were caught engaging in homosexual acts or who were denounced as homosexuals were spared no mercy by the state. The law containing the infamous Paragraph 175 outlawing sexual relations between men dates back to the 19th century, but it was applied especially zealously under Nazi rule. The law remained intact even after 1945. Homosexuality was decriminalized in 1969, but Paragraph 175 was not abolished until 1994.
By that time, more than 50,000 men had been convicted for being gay, something that "violated the very core of their human dignity," said Christine Lüders, the head of the government's Anti-Discrimination Authority, in Berlin on Wednesday. At her side was Martin Burgi of the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. The legal expert has compiled a study on the rehabilitation of homosexuals convicted under the law. He's confident it can be done, saying there's no legal barrier to rehabilitating the men.
...
"For laypeople, it's hard to understand why men convicted under Paragraph 175 by the Nazis have been rehabilitated since 2002, while verdicts handed down in the post-war era are still being upheld. The logic is as appalling as it is banal: The Nazi dictatorship was declared an unjust state; the Federal Republic of Germany, on the other hand, is based on democratic principles. That means the men who had the misfortune to be found guilty of homosexuality in the post-war era still have criminal records.
But Burgi says that "collective rehabilitation" of those affected by the law can be achieved with the help of social and democratic principles."

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Here's the Associated Press story from ABC: German Cabinet OKs plan to annul homosexuality convictions

"Germany's Cabinet on Wednesday approved a bill that would annul the convictions of thousands of gay men under a law criminalizing homosexuality that was applied zealously in post-World War II West Germany.

The decision also clears the way for compensation for those still alive who were convicted under the so-called Paragraph 175 outlawing sexual relations between men.

The legislation was introduced in the 19th century, toughened under Nazi rule and retained in that form by West Germany, which convicted some 50,000 men between 1949 and 1969.

Homosexuality was decriminalized in 1969 but the legislation wasn't taken off the books entirely until 1994.

The bill approved Wednesday by Chancellor Angela Merkel's Cabinet of conservatives and center-left Social Democrats still requires parliamentary approval. "
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This echoes recent events in England: see my earlier post on that

Thursday, February 2, 2017

Sunday, October 13, 2019

Matching markets @ Simons Institute are multi-disciplinary

Two recent blog posts at the algorithmic game theory blog Turing's Invisible Hand remark on the multi-disciplinary nature of modern matching theory and market design, which involves economics, computer science, operations research and mathematics...


Matching Markets @ Simons: Driven by Theory, Driving the Economy by robertkleinberg

"A more notable aspect of matching theory in recent years has been its impact on the design of real-world marketplaces. Over the two workshops, a mix of speakers from academia and industry covered a host of markets, including payment routingonline advertisingkidney exchangereal-estatepublic housingride-sharinglong-haul truckingrestaurant reviewsschool choicefood-banks and many many others. A common theme that emerged was that online marketplaces, with the support of good algorithm and mechanism designers, are slowly taking over the economy."

and

Blind Folks and the Evolving Elephant – by Vijay Vazirani

"The “blind men’’ in this case are entire disciplines which can lay claim to the field of matching markets. Of course, the obvious one is economics – the founders of this field, namely Gale and Shapley, were mathematical economists and the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley for work on these markets.
A key enabler was researchers in systems and networking. Their scientific revolutions of the Internet and mobile computing put matching markets on an exciting, new journey and their systems run these centralized markets on powerful computers.
The discipline of algorithm design has had an umbilical connection to matching markets: At the birth of this field lies the highly sophisticated Gale-Shapley stable matching algorithm (1962), whose pivotal game-theoretic property of incentive compatibility follows as a free gift from polynomial time solvability — it was established two decades after the discovery of the algorithm! Yet most researchers, including those in theoretical computer science, are not aware that algorithm design is also a legitimate claimant to this field. Indeed, the very “engine’’ that runs almost each one of these markets is a sophisticated algorithm chosen from the “gold mine’’ of matching theory! Besides stable matching, this includes maximum matching and online matching and their numerous variants."

Monday, June 26, 2017

Overturning old convictions (for being gay) in Germany

Here's the story from the Guardian (in the "better late than never" category):
Germany to quash convictions of 50,000 gay men under Nazi-era law
Parliament votes through measure overturning conviction and offering compensation to the estimated 5,000 men still alive

"Germany’s parliament have voted to quash the convictions of 50,000 gay men sentenced for homosexuality under a Nazi-era law that remained in force after the second world war.
After decades of lobbying, victims and activists hailed a triumph in the struggle to clear the names of gay men who lived with a criminal record under article 175 of the penal code.
"An estimated 5,000 of those found guilty under the statute are still alive. The measure overwhelmingly passed the Bundestag lower house of parliament, where chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition enjoys a large majority.
...
"Germany’s article 175 outlawed “sexual acts contrary to nature... be it between people of the male gender or between people and animals”. Sex between women was not explicitly illegal.
"Although it dated from 1871, it was rarely enforced until the Nazis came to power, and in 1935 they toughened the law to carry a sentence of 10 years of forced labour.
"More than 42,000 men were convicted during the Third Reich and sent to prison or concentration camps.
"In 2002, the government introduced a new law that overturned their convictions, but that move didn’t include those prosecuted after the second world war.
"The article was finally dropped from the penal code in East Germany in 1968. In West Germany, it reverted to the pre-Nazi era version in 1969 and was only fully repealed in 1994.
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See my earlier posts on Turing's Law, named for Britain's 2003 posthumous pardon of Alan Turing.