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 […]
Google Dataset Search
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 […]
Amara’s Law
The current hype around artificial intelligence and machine learning brings to mind Amara’s Law. We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.
Jupyter Notebooks—love ’em or hate ’em?
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 […]
Can autonomous vehicles solve CAPTCHAs?
Wait… We’re apparently on the cusp of being chauffeured around in autonomous vehicles, but websites check that I’m not a computer by having me identify road signs in images?! This can’t end well for someone.