Category: Technology

Could machine learning mean the end of understanding in science?

If prediction is in fact the primary goal of science, how should we modify the scientific method, the algorithm that for centuries has allowed us to identify errors and correct them?

Interesting piece by UofT’s Amar Vutha on how machine learning is reshaping the scientific landscape. I fundamentally disagree that the goal of science is predicting nature. Predicting is great for applied problems like weather-forecasting, but neglecting the understanding of things bears a great risk, because then the scientific method is basically reduced to guessing what the next step could be and is no longer effective at iterating towards a fundamental truth. With all due respect, let’s leave that “goal-oriented” approach to problem solvers and engineering.

How to delete Time Machine snapshots on your Mac

Nice post by Glenn Fleishman about how to delete Time Machine snapshots on Mac. Ever since APFS, Timemachine snapshots are automatically generated and deleted if Hard Disk space becomes rare. However if you want to manage that yourself (as most powerusers tend to want) here’s your solution.

Overcast 4.2: The privacy update

Nice informational post by Marco Arment about how the new Overcast 4.2 protects your privacy while listening to podcasts.

One of the ways publishers try to get around the limitations of the current model is by embedding remote images or invisible “tracking pixels” in each episode’s HTML show notes. When displayed in most apps, the images are automatically loaded from an analytics server, which can then record and track more information about you.

This is the first time I heard about tracking-pixels and I am horrified by the idea. As much as I am fascinated by data-analysis, I think this is just plainly wrong, one shouldn’t aquire data like this and I am convinced that these recent developments in podcasting are misguided.

Scientists plan to establish a European Lab for Learning & Intelligent Systems

Today leading scientists in Europe have designated a plan for a multinational European Artificial Intelligence Institute.

ELLIS will be a top employer in machine intelligence research, on par with Berkeley, Stanford, CMU, and MIT. It will also be a world class venue to get trained in the field: in conjunction with universities, it will develop a highly attractive European PhD program, and it will strive to retain the best graduates within ELLIS to groom them into the next generation of senior scientists.

Europe will be able to play a major role in the scientific and societal revolution that is underway.

Although some people may argue that it is already too late, I think it is worthwhile to put the effort and money into it.

Also Ian Sample from The Guardian wrote an interesting article about the development.

Scientific Python on macOS X

After some frustrating experience with MacPorts regarding failed builts and outdated versions I decided to setup my python development environment anew and do some things differently. Basically I followed Joern Hees’ fantastic blog post to switch away from my old environment with MacPorts and Conda and onto a fresh install using homebrew and virtualenv and pyenv.

A Word to the Wise

set up some taps and update brew
brew tap homebrew/science # a lot of cool formulae for scientific tools
brew tap homebrew/python # numpy, scipy, matplotlib, ...

The taps mostly don’t exist anymore or are deprecated, doesn’t matter too much though, since most of the packages have been migrated to the homebrew core tap.

pip install virtualenv

Of course virtualenv does exist, however there are some compatibility issues regarding the macos graphics backend and the usage of tensorflow; therefore one can either change the graphics backend to TgAgg or use pyenv instead.

An Additional Tip

Switching environments can be a hassle and therefore I suggest implementing a little bash function into your .profile file like this:
sc() {
export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
source ~/venv/science/bin/activate
}

To be honest, I am quite happy with how this solution worked out and sadly the hardest part was to get rid of all the old stuff I had installed previously, but I won’t get into detail here; luckily with this new solution that won’t a problem.