A really quick post but I wanted to point towards Google Squared, which seems to have some idealogical overlap with Wolfram Alpha though for the average internet user is probably infinitely more useful.
Have a look at the google research blog for information about why you should care.
In the same week that Google announces Google Wave, this is impressive stuff!
If the weather isn't letting you get a good look at the moon tonight, and you're not otherwise being more creative, you could do a lot worse than watch this talk by Clay Shirky, one of the most eloquent and knowledgable spokespeople on the new wave of interactive internet media. This talk, on the cognitive surplus. My favourite quote, from part 1:
Desperate Housewives functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.
A trillion words, a billion five-word sequences, 13 million unique words appearing over 40 times! This is what has been accumulated from a Google research team in their project on n-grams.
Several aspects of this project have occurred to me before and I can see some more areas in which the research could be extended.
Google has been trawling the web for the fabric with which it is made - words - looking for the frequency with which words occur and, perhaps more interestingly, combinations of words.
This has many obvious uses - in particular in automatic error detection and in translation. It's a crude method, but if a machine can learn the structure of a language through a huge database of its current uses the chances of more natural translations increases greatly.
One idea I had while learning Chinese in Beijing came from the fact that while it's very simple to buy box sets with 'the thousand most common Chinese characters', actually, due to the structure of the language, what would be most useful would be lists of the most common character pairs, and combinations of four characters. The meaning usually comes from pairs of characters where each one individually can give only a vague idea of the meaning. This I would love to have and presumably could be quite easily be generated from an appropriate n-gram database. (If anyone already knows details about such a database, please tell me!)
And being Google, all of this data - around 24 Gigabytes, with the billions of combinations they've found is available for free which I can imagine will be of great use to linguistics departments around the world.
(*Note that the Google post shows that this news is not new, coming as it does from 2006*)
Thanks to the Google Operating system blog.
I was going to blog about this later, but I can't wait. I'm currently sitting at home nursing a horrible air-conditioning induced cold, but watching these 20 minute videos online, I'm absolutely mesmerised.
The TED conference (Technology. Entertainment. Design), held every year in Monterey California, gets together the real global innovators in so many areas, from experts in computing, consciousness, architecture, global poverty, future problems and solutions for humanity, ageing, slowness, happiness, and much, much more to talk about where we are today and where we will be in one, five, ten, fifty years down the line.
Many, many videos are online and almost every one I've seen so far has made me excited by the prospects in so many disciplines. A lot of it is speculation, but it's speculation from world experts who have already made a difference. It's inspiring and it's hugely exciting.
The first talk I watched is currently featured on the home page of SciTalks which I spoke about here, and I was immediately hooked.
I should be resting properly and although watching these videos isn't exactly stressful it is really motivating me to get up and get things done, anything, important things, to be a part of all this.
Below I've embedded some of the videos I've watched so far which have impressed me most but please if you find other videos which you are inspired by tell me.
Hans Rosling: New insights on poverty: No more boring data.
Neil Gershenfeld on Fablabs and personal empowerment for individual driven technological developments:
Aubrey De Grey on the future of longevity and the possibilities of living to 1000:
Burt Rutan on the future of space flight:
Blaise Aguera y Arcas on Photosynth and the future of imagery on the web:
Dan Dennet on dangerous Memes:
Jeff Hawkins on how brain science will change computing:
I don't know if you can view my profile but I will continue to update my favourites as I watch more which I think are worth a viewing here.
Although I've embedded these by linking to the Youtube videos you can watch them directly from the TED site (link above).
