No one likes being reduced to a number. For example, there is much more to my financial picture than my credit score alone. There is even scholarly work on weaknesses in the system to compute this score. Everyone may agree the number is far from perfect, yet it is used to make decisions that matter to me, as Moshe Y. Vardi discussed in his Editor's Letter "Academic Rankings Considered Harmful!" (Sept. So I care what my credit score is.

Adi Livnat (alivnat@univ.haifa.ac.il) is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Evolutionary and Environmental Biology, and Institute of Evolution at the University of Haifa, Israel. Christos Papadimitriou (christos@cs.berkeley.edu) is the C. Lester Hogan Professor in the Computer Science Division of the University of California at Berkeley.

The theory of computability was launched in the 1930s, by a group of logicians who proposed new characterizations of the ancient idea of an algorithmic process. The most prominent of these iconoclasts were Kurt Gödel, Alonzo Church, and Alan Turing. The theoretical and philosophical work that they carried out in the 1930s laid the foundations for the computer revolution, and this revolution in turn fueled the fantastic expansion of scientific knowledge in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Thanks in large part to these groundbreaking logico-mathematical investigations, unimagined number-crunching power was soon boosting all fields of scientific enquiry. The motivation of these three revolutionary thinkers was not to pioneer the disciplines now known as theoretical and applied computer science, although with hindsight this is indeed what they did.

Analyses performed using Spark of brain activity in a larval zebrafish: embedding dynamics of whole-brain activity into lower-dimensional trajectories. The growth of data volumes in industry and research poses tremendous opportunities, as well as tremendous computational challenges. As data sizes have outpaced the capabilities of single machines, users have needed new systems to scale out computations to multiple nodes. As a result, there has been an explosion of new cluster programming models targeting diverse computing workloads.1,4,7,10 At first, these models were relatively specialized, with new models developed for new workloads; for example, MapReduce4 supported batch processing, but Google also developed Dremel13 for interactive SQL queries and Pregel11 for iterative graph algorithms. In the open source Apache Hadoop stack, systems like Storm1 and Impala9 are also specialized. Even in the relational database world, the trend has been to move away from "one-size-fits-all" systems.18 Unfortunately, most big data applications need to combine many different processing types. The very nature of "big data" is that it is diverse and messy; a typical pipeline will need MapReduce-like code for data loading, SQL-like queries, and iterative machine learning. Specialized engines can thus create both complexity and inefficiency; users must stitch together disparate systems, and some applications simply cannot be expressed efficiently in any engine. In 2009, our group at the University of California, Berkeley, started the Apache Spark project to design a unified engine for distributed data processing. Spark has a programming model similar to MapReduce but extends it with a data-sharing abstraction called "Resilient Distributed Datasets," or RDDs.25 Using this simple extension, Spark can capture a wide range of processing workloads that previously needed separate engines, including SQL, streaming, machine learning, and graph processing2,26,6 (see Figure 1).

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. I really don't know much about this beyond what's in the video, but we don't see a lot of Russian robots around here, so: It looks to be a project from the Russian equivalent of DARPA, designed to go into space by 2021. This video of Agile Justin feeling up different kinds of rods was a finalist for both "IROS Best Paper on Cognitive Robotics" and "IROS Best Student Paper": This is cool because until this point, building pneumatic robots required making molds and casting custom parts.

The new MacBook Pro was always going to be expensive. But it is very expensive indeed in the UK, after the prices were shifted because of the falling pound. The computers are as much as £500 more expensive than previous models, because of a combination of the currency changes and the upgrades introduced by Apple. Buying the cheapest version of the MacBook Pro with Touch Bar that was released yesterday will cost customers £1,749. Customers can spend as much as £2,699 on stock models of the computer, if they buy the 15-inch version.

European privacy experts have sent letters to WhatsApp telling it to stop sharing people's data with Facebook. WhatsApp announced in recent weeks that it would start handing over information about the people who use it to Facebook, so that its parent company could use that data to better target ads. But the company didn't give a very easy way of opting out of it, and the deal has drawn the attention of customers and regulators. Now EU privacy watchdogs have told WhatsApp and Facebook that the deal must be stopped until it can be checked whether it is legal or not. Presumably if the deal is found to be illegal then it will be forced to stop.

Adult website Pornhub says that it can save Vine, the video sharing company, by buying it. The company has sent an official letter to Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Vine's owner Twitter, offering to buy the company. In doing so it hopes to help avoid it being shut down entirely, as Twitter and Vine have announced it will do. The company does make clear that the site would turn into a porn site. The letter sent to Mr Dorsey by Pornhub CEO Corey Price says that Vine would be restored "back to its NSFW glory".

Apple has launched its latest products in its headquarters in Cupertino, California. In the 24 hours since, I've been trying out the new MacBook Pro for size. First of all, I should point out that this is the entry-level MacBook Pro, not the more expensive MacBook Pro with TouchBar. TouchBar is the ground-breaking innovation where the top row of function keys is replaced with a long, touch-sensitive display strip. I tried this briefly and it's frankly pretty amazing. But I'll be reviewing that and the sapphire-crystal power and Touch ID button also found on the MacBook Pro with TouchBar in due course.

Uber should treat its drivers in the U.K. as employees, paying them at least minimum wage from the moment they are available to work until they log off and providing them with paid time off, a London employment tribunal has ruled. The drivers and Uber must now make proposals to the judge how they will comply with the ruling, made following a preliminary hearing. What they agree will have consequences for Uber and businesses like it across the U.K. It could push costs up, increasing Uber's incentive to develop its own self-driving car. Drivers and other on-demand workers around the world are finding that the flexibility to choose their working hours touted by Uber and companies like it comes with a high cost: The absence of other benefits often taken for granted in other jobs. For the two test claimants in the London case, former Uber drivers Yaseen Aslam and James Farrar, those missing benefits included paid time off for vacations or illness, and a guaranteed minimum hourly income during periods when they made themselves available to Uber yet were not offered paid work.