Technology
Wolfram Alpha is written in 15 million lines of Mathematica code and runs on more than 10,000 CPUs. The database currently includes hundreds of datasets, such as "All Current and Historical Weather". The datasets have been accumulated over several years. The curated (as distinct from auto-generated) datasets are checked for quality either by a scientist or other expert in a relevant field, or someone acting in a clerical capacity who simply verifies that the data are "acceptable".
One example of a live dataset that Wolfram Alpha can use is the profile of a Facebook user. If the user authorizes Facebook to share his or her account details with the Wolfram site, Alpha can generate a "personal analytics" report containing the age distribution of friends, the frequency of words used in status updates and other detailed information. Within two weeks of launching the Facebook analytics service, 400,000 users had used it. Downloadable query results are behind a pay wall but summaries are accessible to free accounts.
Read more about this topic: Wolfram Alpha
Famous quotes containing the word technology:
“The successor to politics will be propaganda. Propaganda, not in the sense of a message or ideology, but as the impact of the whole technology of the times.”
—Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)
“Radio put technology into storytelling and made it sick. TV killed it. Then you were locked into somebody else’s sighting of that story. You no longer had the benefit of making that picture for yourself, using your imagination. Storytelling brings back that humanness that we have lost with TV. You talk to children and they don’t hear you. They are television addicts. Mamas bring them home from the hospital and drag them up in front of the set and the great stare-out begins.”
—Jackie Torrence (b. 1944)
“If we had a reliable way to label our toys good and bad, it would be easy to regulate technology wisely. But we can rarely see far enough ahead to know which road leads to damnation. Whoever concerns himself with big technology, either to push it forward or to stop it, is gambling in human lives.”
—Freeman Dyson (b. 1923)