![]() ![]() As it moves beyond computing the world into analysing the individual, it is providing fresh new ways to look at life. ![]() After the site's launch in 2009 it was criticised for being limited in what it could do: solve mathematical problems, answer some scientific questions, but nothing out of the ordinary. The Wolfram|Alpha "answer engine" is based on Mathematica, a software program developed by Mr Wolfram that can perform elaborate calculations. And it lets users overlay other data, such as GDP of the country, to make, in this case, a GDP-neutralised heat map. It can create a heat map to visualise the data geographically. Thus, armed with data on homicides in African countries, for example, Wolfram|Alpha can generate various types of graphs (scatter plot, raw data plots, bivariate histograms) to help users understand their information better. Such information is potentially very useful as it comes from the service's own curated databases. Payment will be charged to your iTunes account at confirmation of purchase. At $4.99 per month it gives people the ability to process their own data, or even download Wolfram|Alpha’s information on a query. Become a WolframAlpha Pro member to unlock additional features. In February Wolfram|Alpha rolled out a Pro service. Mr Barthelet declined to be more specific, but it could well entail analysing users' email patterns and other social media behaviour. The company plans to expand into other "personal analytics" services. Since the service began a few weeks ago, more than 400,000 Facebook users have let Wolfram|Alpha examine their digital bits-an outpouring of interest that caught the firm by surprise, says Luc Barthelet, Wolfram|Alpha's executive director. Your correspondent wouldn't have thought he was many times more active in 2011 than this year, in terms of status updates, sharing links, photos, etc (chart below). Enumerating and plotting the vagaries of one's online life is at times surprising. Its latest feature lets people analyse their Facebook account for free. It can compute things like the distance between the Earth and the Moon on your parents' first Valentine dinner, for example. Go to and sign in with your Wolfram ID in the upper right-hand corner to access WolframAlpha Pro. Begun in 2009 by Stephen Wolfram, a British scientist and entrepreneur, the online service serves up answers to queries by harnessing information from its own databases. The number-crunching comes courtesy of Wolfram|Alpha, a sort of search engine for quantifiable facts. When he lamented these facts (on Facebook of course) he was asked the obvious question: “Did you go through your friends list and count?” to process your investing and banking tasks, you'd better lock it down. Knowing that 64 percent of his online friends are male does not help either-more so because only 57 percent of Facebook is comprised of women. Wolfram Alpha (Is a lesserknown search engine than the. Still in his 20s, he does not want to contemplate settling down quite yet. But if you want to make a graph of quantities or compare data from another source, there are nagging problems, like the assumptions upon which these data were based,” said Grey.YOUR correspondent was shocked to learn that 34 percent of his Facebook friends are married. “In order to make data computable, the tricky part is that there’s a lot of information - lots of collections of data where you can get a raw dump. Weisstein.It is sponsored by and licensed to Wolfram Research, Inc. To that end, Wolfram works with many contributors - Mathematica users and experts in their fields - who identify usable, publicly available data sets and work to make it digestible to Alpha. Your input can include complete details about loan amounts, down payments and other variables, or you can add, remove and modify values and parameters using a simple form interface. MathWorld is an online mathematics reference work, created and largely written by Eric W. ![]() “Many people over the weekend went looking for sports statistics, for example,” he said - an area that Wolfram hasn’t gotten to yet, but will. Wolfram plans to add additional data to search, as well. Grey says that going forward, Wolfram will continuously improve the Alpha engine to better understand what people are asking it. That was one of the goals behind Wolfram’s recent private beta test and last weekend’s final shakedown - to make sure that Alpha could interpret many of the queries that it was getting. ![]()
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