In 1952, Bessie Blount boarded a plane from New York to France to give away her life’s work. The 38-year-old inventor planned to hand over to the French military, free of charge, an extraordinary technology that would change lives for disabled veterans of the Second World War: an automatic feeding device. To use it, a person only needed to bite down on a switch, which would deliver a mouthful of food through a spoon-shaped tube.
The Japanese Man Who Saved 6,000 Jews With His Handwriting
“Day and night he wrote visas. He issued as many visas in a day as would normally be issued in a month. His wife, Yukiko, massaged his hands at night, aching from the constant effort. When Japan finally closed down the embassy in September 1940, he took the stationary with him and continued to write visas that had no legal standing but worked because of the seal of the government and his name. At least 6,000 visas were issued for people to travel through Japan to other destinations, and in many cases entire families traveled on a single visa. It has been estimated that over 40,000 people are alive today because of this one man.”
”Alan Turing’s crucial unscrambling of German messages in the Second World War was a tour de force of codebreaking. From 1940 onwards, Turing and his team engineered hundreds of electronic machines, dubbed bombes, which decrypted the thousands of missives sent by enemy commanders each day to guide their soldiers. This deluge of knowledge shortened the war. Bletchley Park, UK — the secret centre where it all happened — rightly gained its place in history. But as with all breakthroughs, many more people laid the foundations.”
Originally shared by Self-Rescuing Princess Society
Today’s the birthday of Margaret Hamilton.
What I find fascinating about her work was the fact that she was building the field of computer software engineering as she went along. The brilliance of her work wasn’t so much that she build a system to help the astronauts reach the moon, but that she built it to basically save them from their own mistakes.
When NASA began its quest to send the first humans to the moon, there was immense pressure to make certain that whomever went up into space also came back down safely. Too much was riding on the success of the moon landing and any mistake could have dire consequences for the astronauts. It would be devastating to the space program if something terrible happened with millions of people around the world sitting on the edge of their seats watching each space launch and landing.
Astronauts are highly trained, intelligent people, selected for their ability to function under extreme pressure. But even astronauts make mistakes, push the wrong button, switch the wrong knob. How do you reconcile the absolute need for “no room for error” with the fact that “to err is human?”
Nice profile of this physicist. “In 1963, Maria Goeppert Mayer won the Nobel Prize in physics for describing the layered, shell-like structures of atomic nuclei. No woman has won since.
One of the many women who, in a different world, might have won the physics prize in the intervening 55 years is Sau Lan Wu. Wu is the Enrico Fermi Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and an experimentalist at CERN, the laboratory near Geneva that houses the Large Hadron Collider. Wu’s name appears on more than 1,000 papers in high-energy physics, and she has contributed to a half-dozen of the most important experiments in her field over the past 50 years. She has even realized the improbable goal she set for herself as a young researcher: to make at least three major discoveries.
[…]
Sau Lan Wu was born in occupied Hong Kong during World War II. Her mother was the sixth concubine to a wealthy businessman who abandoned them and her younger brother when Wu was a child. She grew up in abject poverty, sleeping alone in a space behind a rice shop. Her mother was illiterate, but she urged her daughter to pursue an education and become independent of volatile men.
[…]
Although she originally intended to become an artist, she was inspired to study physics after reading a biography of Marie Curie. She worked on experiments during consecutive summers at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, and she attended graduate school at Harvard University. She was the only woman in her cohort and was barred from entering the male dormitories to join the study groups that met there. She has labored since then to make a space for everyone in physics, mentoring more than 60 men and women through their doctorates.
Quanta Magazine joined Sau Lan Wu on a gray couch in sunny Cleveland in early June. She had just delivered an invited lecture about the discovery of gluons at a symposium to honor the 50th birthday of the Standard Model. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.”
Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a hero, who saved ~30,000 Jews & others fleeing Hitler, 10x that of Schindler, defied his dictator govt & died shunned, in poverty:
“Portugal was neutral during the war. But its Fascist dictator, Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, had actually issued orders banning Jews, Russians and stateless people from entering the country.
“Sousa Mendes, his country’s consul general in Bordeaux, knowingly disobeyed those orders, frantically signing visas day and night just before he was recalled to Lisbon in late June 1940.”
^^^^^
“Starting today I will obey my conscience. As a Christian I do not have the right to let these women and men die.”
“I cannot allow all you people to die. Many of you are Jews, and our constitution clearly states that neither the religion nor the political beliefs of foreigners can be used as a pretext for refusing to allow them to stay in Portugal. I’ve decided to be faithful to that principle, but I shan’t resign for all that. The only way I can respect my faith as a Christian is to act in accordance with the dictates of my conscience.”
One for Edward Morbius’ “Data are liability” file.
>>>
This is a thread for those of you who say coders and developers should take no role in politics. Those of you who watched my #WCLDN talk last year already heard this story. You can hear it again.
This was Rene Carmille, and that is a punch card. Image of Rene Carmille
Rene Carmille was the comptroller general of the French army. He eventually headed up the French census. Census data – innocuous, straightforward facts about people – was tabulated on IBM punch cards. Then the Nazis came.
Rene Carmille had all the data about all the people. He saw what the Nazis wanted to do with that data. So he made a decision about what to do with it. He did his job, externally, for the Nazis, of course.
In the background, he sifted through the data to find recruits for the French Resistance. He and his team went further than that. They did things like leave boxes of census records – thousands of people’s data – in a back room, unprocessed.
Then he and his team engaged in – if not invented – ethical hacking. They physically hacked their IBM punch card machines so that nothing could be entered into column 11: religion. That data, for those thousands of people, was missing.
He and his team were caught, and interrogated, and tortured. Rene Carmille died at Dachau. I have been there. There is a smell of burning flesh in the air. It is still there.
As is his legacy. In the Netherlands, 73% of Dutch Jews were found, deported, and executed. In France, that figure was 25%. It was that much lower because they couldn’t find them.
They couldn’t find them because Rene Carmille and his team got political and hacked the data.
On #HolocaustMemorialDay , as the people in the data we collect and store and share face threats we never thought we would see again, you need to be prepared to go that far when the day comes when it is you handling the data.
This seems like a good place to mention that the US Bureau of the Census likes to talk about how strict they are about privacy, even once turning away FBI agents who arrived at the Colorado Springs BOC office with a warrant for confidential Census data. But…
…during WWII the BOC provided block-by-block data on people of Japanese ancestry for the purpose of sending them to concentration camps, something that was officially denied or simply ignored until records research confirmed it in 2000. And…
…in 1943, the BOC provided specific names and addresses of all persons of Japanese ancestry in the Washington DC area, on the request of the US Treasury Secretary, which was also denied until further research confirmed it in 2007.
And the specifics of the request and response indicate that other requests may have been made and fulfilled prior to the one now documented, to the extent that this was then a routine transaction.
What especially disturbs me personally about this is that I worked on a federal contract for BOC from 2007-2008 and again from 2012-2014. Our mandatory data-confidentiality training included the Colorado Springs story…
…but no acknowledgement that the Census Bureau had ever been less than perfect and morally upright in its protection of the confidentiality of respondents’ data.
has officially apologized for the WWII block-level data disclosures, but this is far from just ancient history: in 2004 records requests revealed the previous year, BOC supplied ZIP-code-level data on residents of Arab ancestry broken down by nationality to DHS…
…only apparently later requesting the required statement justifying the need for such data.
When popular fervor or official policy turns against a group, we must not assume that things we always thought were bulwarks against abuse actually were or will continue to be — in fact they are often turned into tools of the very oppression they are supposed to protect against.
One for Edward Morbius’ “Data are liability” file.
>>>
This is a thread for those of you who say coders and developers should take no role in politics. Those of you who watched my #WCLDN talk last year already heard this story. You can hear it again.
This was Rene Carmille, and that is a punch card. Image of Rene Carmille
Rene Carmille was the comptroller general of the French army. He eventually headed up the French census. Census data – innocuous, straightforward facts about people – was tabulated on IBM punch cards. Then the Nazis came.
Rene Carmille had all the data about all the people. He saw what the Nazis wanted to do with that data. So he made a decision about what to do with it. He did his job, externally, for the Nazis, of course.
In the background, he sifted through the data to find recruits for the French Resistance. He and his team went further than that. They did things like leave boxes of census records – thousands of people’s data – in a back room, unprocessed.
Then he and his team engaged in – if not invented – ethical hacking. They physically hacked their IBM punch card machines so that nothing could be entered into column 11: religion. That data, for those thousands of people, was missing.
He and his team were caught, and interrogated, and tortured. Rene Carmille died at Dachau. I have been there. There is a smell of burning flesh in the air. It is still there.
As is his legacy. In the Netherlands, 73% of Dutch Jews were found, deported, and executed. In France, that figure was 25%. It was that much lower because they couldn’t find them.
They couldn’t find them because Rene Carmille and his team got political and hacked the data.
On #HolocaustMemorialDay , as the people in the data we collect and store and share face threats we never thought we would see again, you need to be prepared to go that far when the day comes when it is you handling the data.
This seems like a good place to mention that the US Bureau of the Census likes to talk about how strict they are about privacy, even once turning away FBI agents who arrived at the Colorado Springs BOC office with a warrant for confidential Census data. But…
…during WWII the BOC provided block-by-block data on people of Japanese ancestry for the purpose of sending them to concentration camps, something that was officially denied or simply ignored until records research confirmed it in 2000. And…
…in 1943, the BOC provided specific names and addresses of all persons of Japanese ancestry in the Washington DC area, on the request of the US Treasury Secretary, which was also denied until further research confirmed it in 2007.
And the specifics of the request and response indicate that other requests may have been made and fulfilled prior to the one now documented, to the extent that this was then a routine transaction.
What especially disturbs me personally about this is that I worked on a federal contract for BOC from 2007-2008 and again from 2012-2014. Our mandatory data-confidentiality training included the Colorado Springs story…
…but no acknowledgement that the Census Bureau had ever been less than perfect and morally upright in its protection of the confidentiality of respondents’ data.
has officially apologized for the WWII block-level data disclosures, but this is far from just ancient history: in 2004 records requests revealed the previous year, BOC supplied ZIP-code-level data on residents of Arab ancestry broken down by nationality to DHS…
…only apparently later requesting the required statement justifying the need for such data.
When popular fervor or official policy turns against a group, we must not assume that things we always thought were bulwarks against abuse actually were or will continue to be — in fact they are often turned into tools of the very oppression they are supposed to protect against.
