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:
“One can prove or refute anything at all with words. Soon people will perfect language technology to such an extent that they’ll be proving with mathematical precision that twice two is seven.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“If the technology cannot shoulder the entire burden of strategic change, it nevertheless can set into motion a series of dynamics that present an important challenge to imperative control and the industrial division of labor. The more blurred the distinction between what workers know and what managers know, the more fragile and pointless any traditional relationships of domination and subordination between them will become.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)
“Our technology forces us to live mythically, but we continue to think fragmentarily, and on single, separate planes.”
—Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)