Four short links: 9 June 2017
Text Analysis, Specific Phones, AI Copyright, and Minecraft for R
- scattertext — fun tool for finding distinguishing terms in small-to-medium-sized corpora. (via Lynn Cherny on Twitter)
- Shanzhai Archaeology (We Make Money Not Art) — counterfeit consumer goods, sold at lower prices and boasting multifunctional performance, targeted at particular audiences. My favourite: The Power Bank Phone: Ghana is currently going through a major power grid crisis: blackouts in the city can last for 36 hours on end. As a result, a significant business activity has grown around the sale of portable USB chargers that can charge electronic devices or even power bulbs. The Power Bank Phone, designed for this particular market, combines a 10000 Mh USB charger, an LED flashlight, and 3 sim card slots to connect the entire family or to take advantage of promotions offered by different operators.
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Copyright? Comparative Analysis of Originality in Artificial Intelligence Generated Works — paper on the vexing topic of copyright in works generated by AI. Modern copyright law has been drafted to consider originality as an embodiment of the author’s personality, and originality is one of the main requirements for the subsistence of copyright. So, what happens when you remove personality from the equation? Are machine-created works devoid of copyright? Do we need to change copyright law to accommodate autonomous artists?
- R Interface to Minecraft — a project to interface the R language with Minecraft. The resulting R package, miner, is now available to install from Github. The goal of the package is to introduce budding programmers to the R language via their interest in Minecraft, and to that end there’s also a book (R Programming with Minecraft) and associated R package (craft) under development to provide lots of fun examples of manipulating the Minecraft world with R.
