All posts by Paul Stradling

News

Notable Notes About … The New £50 Note

Bletchley Park code-breaking hero and wronged computer pioneer Alan Turing is to feature on the UK £50 note from 23rd June.

Alan Turing

Despite breaking WWII Nazi Germany’s Enigma machine code, allowing enemy messages to be read and thereby shortening World War II and saving countless lives, Alan Turing’s genius and heroism was overshadowed by a conviction in 1952 for gross indecency relating to Turing’s homosexuality.  The conviction, for having an affair with a 19-year-old Manchester man, led very sadly to Turing being forced to opt for a ‘chemical castration’ (being given female hormones) as the only alternative to imprisonment, which led to Turing committing suicide aged only 41. The UK mathematician, developmental biologist and computer science pioneer was finally granted a posthumous royal pardon in 2013.

Father of Computer Science

After studying at King’s College Cambridge, in 1936 Turing published his paper “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem”, with which Turing proved that his “universal computing machine” could perform any mathematical computation if it were representable as an algorithm. This, plus his work developed at Bletchley Park is why Turing is widely thought of as the father of modern computer science. Turing was also the co-creator of the first computer chess programme.

Biologist

Alan Turing was also a pioneer of morphogenesis, and used mathematics to understand how natural patterns, such as the spiral formation of the seeds in a sunflower head and the arrangement of spots on a leopard can form.

Features of the £50 Note

The new £50 with Alan Turing’s face on it (the last of the Bank of England’s collection to switch from paper to polymer) will feature :

– A photo of Turing taken in 1951, and a table and mathematical formulae from Turing’s seminal 1936 paper “On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem”.

-The Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) Pilot Machine, which was one of the first electronic stored-program digital computers.

– Technical drawings for the British Bombe, the machine specified by Turing and one of the primary tools used to break Enigma-enciphered messages during WWII.

– A quote from Alan Turing, given in an interview to The Times newspaper on 11 June 1949: “This is only a foretaste of what is to come, and only the shadow of what is going to be.”

– A copy of Turing’s signature.

– Ticker tape depicting Alan Turing’s birth date (23 June 1912) in binary code.

– Two key security features: a metallic hologram which changes between the words ‘Fifty’ and ‘Pounds’ when the note is tilted and a large see-through window with a gold and green foil on the front depicting a finely-detailed metallic microchip image.

– A silver foil patch with a 3D image of the coronation crown.

– The Queen’s portrait in the see-through window with ‘£50 Bank of England’ printed twice around the edge. (The small clover shapes on the outside of the window are based on architectural features at Bletchley Park.)

– A smaller see-through window in the bottom corner of the note, the shape of which is based on architectural features at Bletchley Park.

– A red foil patch containing the letters ‘AT’ is based on the image of a sunflower head linked to Turing’s morphogenetic work in later life.

Landmark Moment In Our History

Director of GCHQ Jeremy Fleming said: “Alan Turing’s appearance on the £50 note is a landmark moment in our history. Not only is it a celebration of his scientific genius which helped to shorten the war and influence the technology we still use today, it also confirms his status as one of the most iconic LGBT+ figures in the world. Turing was embraced for his brilliance and persecuted for being gay. His legacy is a reminder of the value of embracing all aspects of diversity, but also the work we still need to do to become truly inclusive.”

Questions

Questions have, however, been asked about why £50 notes don’t appear to have diverse ethnic minorities represented on them and, apart from the Queen and Jane Austin (who are both white), there are no other women featured on banknotes currently.

The Turing Pattern Project

To mark the launch of the new £50 note, the Bank of England and Sheffield University are running ‘The Turing Pattern Project’ with UK primary schools.  This project shows children how to use Alan Turing’s biological mathematical algorithm, acting as computers would, to create the pattern of a giant puffer-fish.

Twelve Puzzles

To celebrate Alan Turing’s image being featured on the new £50, GCHQ has created its “hardest puzzle ever”, the #TuringChallenge. The online puzzle, which anyone can attempt, requires a string of puzzles which get increasingly difficult to be solved.  If the first 11 puzzles are answered correctly, the answers should take the form of 11 single words or names which the Enigma simulator will be needed to decode. See details here: https://www.gchq.gov.uk/information/turing-challenge.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

Alan Turing’s incredible mind, aptitude for maths and science, and his work in cracking the Enigma code at Bletchley Park resulted in millions of lives being saved through the shortening of the war in Europe, and in the rapid evolution of computer science that has fed directly into the digital world and workplace that we know today. Despite being a national hero, how Turing was treated is widely regarded as shameful, and the posthumous pardon and apology, along with being honoured on a banknote have been ways in which the UK has been able, in some small but public ways, to right some the wrongs of the past, honour a truly great scientist, and contribute to a greater understanding and acceptance of sexual differences and diversity.

News

Live Teams Transcriptions

Microsoft has launched a live transcription tool for Teams. In other words, it provides a written record of the spoken word during a meeting.

How it works

The tool identifies each speaker and automatically captures in real-time what each speaker says. As a result, the transcript is available during and after meetings. The speech is transcribed by AI-based Automatic Speech Recognition technology.

As a result, the technology uses a meeting’s invitation, participant names and attachments to improve accuracy and recognise jargon for each transcript automatically.

Using live transcription

To use the tool, the admin must turn on the ‘Allow Transcription’ policy which enables the meeting organiser to start a transcription. Participants are notified that the setting is on and can choose to hide it from their meeting view. If attendees do not want to be identified, they can turn off speaker attribution in their profile settings. After that, the transcripts will be available in a column to the side. Microsoft advises that the tool is not guaranteed to be 100% accurate.

Storage

After each meeting, the saved transcript is downloadable in Teams. In addition to being accessible from desktop and web, it is in the Teams calendar meeting event and through the transcript tile in the chat. The files will be stored in the meeting organiser’s Exchange Online account. However, only the organiser or admin can delete it.

Privacy and security

Microsoft says that no-one at Microsoft can see a meeting’s content. The models are automatically deleted after each meeting. Subsequently, Microsoft doesn’t use or store this data for improving its own AI.

Availability

The tool is available for scheduled Microsoft Teams meetings (in U.S. English) to public cloud customers. They should have licenses for Microsoft 365 E3, Microsoft 365 E5, Microsoft 365 Business Standard, and Microsoft 365 Business Premium SKUs.

What does this mean for your business?

Finally, the tool’s introduction is another move in the market battle between Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Although Zoom beat Microsoft to announcing a live transcript feature, Microsoft won in terms of delivering the feature. 

Above all, the live transcript tool will help users to either follow meetings more easily, catch up on meeting content, helping multi-tasking and being an extra accessibility feature.

Read more: Working from home

News

Tech tip – how to adjust sound for specific apps

Personalising our experience with technology is becoming easier and more important to users. But do you know how to adjust sound for specific apps? Adjusting volume settings allows you to remove unwanted noise and prioritise specific sounds like email notifications, for instance. 

Changing the volume levels of individual applications can be done quickly and easily on Windows 10. If you want to have better control of the volume of your computer, follow our simple guide below: 

Using sound settings 

Firstly, click on the ‘start’ button in the bottom left of the screen and then select ‘settings’. Alternatively, you can type ‘settings’ into the search bar next to the ‘start’ button. You can also right-click on the speaker symbol located on the toolbar and select ‘open sound settings’. 

Once you have opened the settings page, click on ‘system’ and then open the ‘sound’ option. Next, select ‘app volume and device preferences’ which can be found under the ‘advanced sound options’ section. You will find this by scrolling down the page. 

There you can adjust the master volume or levels of specific apps you have open and system sounds. These will be adjusted as part of the master volume. 

Adjusting sound using the volume mixer 

To use the volume mixer, right-click the speaker symbol on the taskbar and select ‘open volume mixer’. Any apps that are open and making a noise will be visible on the mixer. The master volume and system sounds will be visible at all times on the mixer. 

You can then use the volume sliders to increase or decrease the output of each app. If you would rather silence, you can choose to mute apps completely.  

If you want to find read more tips on how to make the most of your tech, simply visit our news section.