Decision Mechanics

Insight. Applied.

Robot brothels

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I’m not sure if robot brothels actually exist, but it seems that we are OK with people visiting them.

Two surveys run by the University of Helsinki found that the majority of respondents found it was morally acceptable—as long as you are single.

One of the major barriers to the wider use of robots (such as autonomous vehicles) is the willingness of society to mingle with them. Seems like that is becoming less and less of a problem.

Google Dataset Search

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Google have created a tool to make it easier to discover datasets—Google Dataset Search.

One potential downside is that it requires dataset owners to provide metadata. While the Google brand means that this might get some traction, not all dataset owners are motivated to help the cause. Publication of datasets is now mandated by some funding bodies, but that doesn’t mean that the datasets have to be discoverable. Ideally we’ll see funding bodies now mandating the addition of metadata.

While we wait for Google Dataset Search to evolve, we can still rely on curated repositories and lists such as

Jupyter Notebooks—love ’em or hate ’em?

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Jupyter Notebooks are popular with data scientists. Microsoft even offers a free, hosted, “no-install” service for Python, R and F#.

However, there are some downsides to notebooks—mostly to do with software engineering best practices.

Joel Grus gave a provocative talk at JupyterCon 2018 entitled “I Don’t Like Notebooks”. Yihui Xie then followed up with a response to Grus’ talk.

Both authors make a good case and have interesting points. As ever, the truth is that notebooks are good in some situations and not so good in others.

Personally, I use both. Notebooks for smaller, exploratory, data science projects and IDEs (Visual Studio Code, PyCharm and RStudio) for everything else.