Interesting Links for 11-04-2016

[andrewducker]

Africa's great opportunity for reform (tags: africa government Education tax economy ) The Largest Ever Analysis of Film Dialogue by Gender: 2,000 scripts, 25,000 actors, 4 million lines (tags: gender data research visualisation movies ) Bitcoin Start-Up Gets an Electronic Money License in Britain (possibly cheaper way to convert pounds to

Comments

[danieldwilliam]

I think the shifting of people from the government to the organisations working, for, with or against the government is a well known issue. It's noticable in tax but it also affects I think pretty much every line of government activity or policy. Done energy policy for the government - go and work for an energy company. Or vice versa. Been a criminal lawyer, become a Procurator Fiscal. Or vice versa. Worked in the navy, go and work for a shipbuilder.

I'm personally not sure how much of a problem it is in general. I'm also not exactly sure how it could be controlled without unjustly impinging on the liberty of people to work for whomever offers them the best deal or reducing the flow of information and knowledge between different parts of the economy.

Clearly there are opportunities for explicity corruption or more likely implicit corruption.

[andrewducker]

Oh, I don't mind people moving back and forth. But the fact that someone who worked for/with the Cameron family before is now head HMRC bothers me because:
1) It seems unlikely that this would happen by chance.
2) This person was specifically working on how to evade tax. Putting them in charge of tax seems like putting the fox in charge of the hen house.

[a_pawson]

On the other hand the fox may know a thing or two about catching chickens, and be best positioned to do something to stop it. It's sort of akin to software companies recruiting (ex) hackers to tell them where they are vulnerable and fix them.

[danieldwilliam]

Certainly, there is good reason to be sceptical about a situation where someone who has been professionally helpful to the Prime Minister is now the holder of an important state job. I don't think it is evidence of corruption per se but it is a Thing That Makes You Say "Mmmh

[simont]

All Prior Art algorithmically creates all possible new prior art, thereby making the concepts not patentable

Surely not? There's bound to be something in the law already that stops this working.

In a copyright rather than patent context, there certainly is: the fact that something was produced as the output of an algorithm doesn't make it a copyrightable work, so, for example, I don't get to claim copyright on every single instance of Sudoku that was produced by the programmatic random generation code in my puzzle collection. But if I went through a large amount of the output and personally picked out a subset of puzzles I thought were particularly good, then that filtered-down subset would become copyrightable, because the act of selection by a human is deemed to be where the necessary creative input for copyrightability took place. (Perhaps even sensibly so, though you won't hear me saying that too often about copyright law

[andrewducker]

I'm not sure that anyone has considered making this a part of patent law before.

I'm intrigued though. If I generate an image algorithmically then it's not copyright. But if someone then generates that same image algorithmically can _they_ copyright it, even though it already existed?

[simont]

But if someone then generates that same image algorithmically can _they_ copyright it, even though it already existed?

I believe so, and even more, they don't even have to have regenerated it themself. If you generate a big slew of images algorithmically and then I go through them and select ones that I like, then the copyright is mine, because all you did was algorithmic generation (which doesn't count) and I'm the one who provided the 'creative input' in the form of filtering (which does

[danieldwilliam]

There's something in the provenance idea about the standards of creativity required for patents or copyright.

The standard for copyright in the UK are quite low. The right protects the very particular expression of an idea rather than the idea itself. You and I can both write a comic about an anthropmorphic mouse. I get Mickey Mouse and you get Maus and both of us get copyright. If I translate or annotate your out of copyright work I get copyright in the complete edition but not in the original out of copyright work.

Patents have a higher standard of novelty. Even in the US where things are laxer I think. You have to produce a genuinely new product or process. If I take your invention of a conveyor belt for moving apples past a series of pickers and packers and apply it to oranges I've probably not been creative enough to get a patent.

[threegoldfish]

According to a birder's tweet I saw, that's actually most likely a pheasant or grouse taking off from the snow. This is a bird strike: https://twitter.com/RosemaryMosco/status/718103053296132097

[andrewducker]

Thank you!

Feariesafsd guide to edambro

[snarlish]

'buried in an unmarked grave... which could be this one... no one's saying otherwise.'

Had to stop, eyes were tearing up.

RE: Feariesafsd guide to edambro

[snarlish]

oh god, stomach aching, couch breaking, coughing up phlegm.... The greyfriar's joke just gets better and better.