Lefty
Yank
There’s been lots of buzz in the tech community about a site called Wolfram|Alpha, which is set to launch in about a week — likely on May 18, according to a spokesman.
On first glance, Wolfram|Alpha looks like a search engine: it has a box where you type in a question or query terms. That’s about where the similarities end, though, because, unlike Google or Ask, Wolfram|Alpha is kind of like an enormous calculator. It takes your question and crunches out an entirely new answer, even if the answer isn’t something that’s been posted on the Web before.
Confused? You’re not alone. An example should help.
Say you’re an investor and you want to see how two companies are faring against each other on the market. You could type in “IBM versus Apple” and Wolfram|Alpha will generate graphs and tables to compare the stocks over time. It also give you the Web-based sources used to generate the data, so you know where the numbers are coming from.
The site also solves equations and shows the steps it took to do so, which will be of interest to high school students and math majors. Not into number crunching? If you live near the coast, you could type in “tides in ____” and find charts of tidal and lunar information. You could also graph that against other cities, which would be cool if you’re a surfer.
Source http://scitech.blogs.cnn.com/
I am really looking forward to using this. It sounds really promising if it works.
On first glance, Wolfram|Alpha looks like a search engine: it has a box where you type in a question or query terms. That’s about where the similarities end, though, because, unlike Google or Ask, Wolfram|Alpha is kind of like an enormous calculator. It takes your question and crunches out an entirely new answer, even if the answer isn’t something that’s been posted on the Web before.
Confused? You’re not alone. An example should help.
Say you’re an investor and you want to see how two companies are faring against each other on the market. You could type in “IBM versus Apple” and Wolfram|Alpha will generate graphs and tables to compare the stocks over time. It also give you the Web-based sources used to generate the data, so you know where the numbers are coming from.
The site also solves equations and shows the steps it took to do so, which will be of interest to high school students and math majors. Not into number crunching? If you live near the coast, you could type in “tides in ____” and find charts of tidal and lunar information. You could also graph that against other cities, which would be cool if you’re a surfer.
Source http://scitech.blogs.cnn.com/
I am really looking forward to using this. It sounds really promising if it works.