DanG BloG: yet another DanG BloG

  If the network is the computer (and we think it is), then what do you do with it?  Well, hopefully lots of things that involve education and helping others, creating and contributing.  Otherwise the participation age is not so participatory.  Relatively off the radar has been a tool in the works for some time and coming on line tonight, May 15th at 7pm CDT, called Wolfram Alpha that just might be the next big thing.  If not, it will be extremely useful for education in mathematics and science, as well as a host of other categories where computing has been less about computation and more about assembling piles of hardware and software.  So, ok, what is it?  Easiest answer is here (and is anyone but me amused that the "loading..." percentage comes up as "NaN%" on a site with the sheer brilliance of Mathematica and its creators?  I'm guessing that's on purpose because Mathematica could probably show it to you in 3D...)

http://www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html

  Stephen Wolfram himself explains what it is best here: http://blog.wolfram.com/2009/03/05/wolframalpha-is-coming/

I've excerpted from another article below a summary of what the tool is in case you're curious but don't want to plow through the articles, though:

quoted from http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/08/wolfram-alpha-computes-answers-to-factual-questions-this-is-going-to-be-big/

"A Computational Knowledge Engine for the Web

In a nutshell, Wolfram and his team have built what he calls a “computational knowledge engine” for the Web. OK, so what does that really mean? Basically it means that you can ask it factual questions and it computes answers for you. It doesn’t simply return documents that (might) contain the answers, like Google does, and it isn’t just a giant database of knowledge, like the Wikipedia. It doesn’t simply parse natural language and then use that to retrieve documents, like Powerset, for example. Instead, Wolfram Alpha actually computes the answers to a wide range of questions — like questions that have factual answers such as “What country is Timbuktu in?” or “How many protons are in a hydrogen atom?” or “What is the average rainfall in Seattle?” Think about that for a minute. It computes the answers. Wolfram Alpha doesn’t simply contain huge amounts of manually entered pairs of questions and answers, nor does it search for answers in a database of facts. Instead, it understands and then computes answers to certain kinds of questions."

  Examples of using this kind of tool are extensive, and some of the knowledge domains available initially are listed in the posting below. I think some of the categories in mathematics and science are particularly interesting and will be very useful in education for those subjects in particular:

http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/05/11/wolframalpha-examples/