Month: August 2009

Categories
Aesthetics Art Computing Generative Art

R

R is a free software statistical programming language. It has an unusual syntax, similar to Perl in a hight wind, and lots of powerful mathematical tools and abstractions included or available in libraries. You use R to wrangle large lists of numbers in a way that will hopefully produce shorter and more manageable lists of numbers. I’m interested in R for quantitative aesthetics, but there aren’t any articles on that so here are some other interesting ones on related topics.

How Facebook uses R to perceive the signs of which users will stay on the service –

http://dataspora.com/blog/predictive-analytics-using-r/

Usung R for psychological research –

http://www.personality-project.org/R/

Notes on the use of R for psychology experiments and questionnaires –

http://www.psych.upenn.edu/~baron/rpsych/rpsych.html

Social Network Analysis in R –

http://www.drewconway.com/zia/?p=1221

Content categorization and other software –

http://gking.harvard.edu/stats.shtml#statisticalsoftware

And because it’s hard searching for “R” via Google, here’s a dedicated R search engine –

http://www.rseek.org/

Categories
Free Culture

Denta

I adapted the source code for Twitta to make Denta, a Free Software client for identi.ca on Android.

Application package

Source code

I’ve changed the package name, the readme and the icons from their Twitta versions to differentiate Denta for the OS and users. But to be clear, this is just a search-and-replace hack of Twitta.

Any bug reports or questions should be sent via the comments for this post. Thanks.

Categories
Free Culture

NPG

The EFF have made a statement –

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/07/eff-defends-wikipedi

They’re a US-based organization defending a US citizen so their defence is US-centric and risks implicitly recognizing the NPG’s excessive copyright claims, which wouldn’t be good for UK citizens. That’s regrettable but entirely understandable.

The excellent Francis Davey has blogged about the NPG’s database right claims –

http://www.francisdavey.co.uk/2009/08/national-portrait-gallery-is-there.html

It’s a considered and detailed discussion of the issues and well worth reading.

Categories
Free Culture Satire

Coals To Newcastle

Having read Marx, Lacan, Deleuze, Negri, Zizek, and possibly having nipped back for a bit of supplementary Spinoza, you might think you are ready to tell Free Software what it has got wrong and how it can be made better. Not so fast! There are just two more things you need to read.

The first is Richard Stallman’s essay “Why Software Should Not Have Owners“. Even just the title will do.

The second is Stallman’s personal website. Especially the political notes.

These sources show that free software contains as part of its ideology a definite if limited answer to the property question and that this limit neither precludes nor can be coherently extended to encompass (rather than exist as part of) a broader progressive political commitment.

Innit.