Entries Tagged 'News releases' ↓

Is it necessary to present Wolfram Alpha, the new online research tool everybody is talking about those days? Obviously not! This is why we prefer to express our thoughts on it in 5 cons and 5 pros about Wolfram Alpha

5 cons on Wolfram Alpha

1. Wolfram Alpha is not a search engine but a Computational Knowledge engine. What in earth does this stand for?

Easy: Wolfram Alpha is not able to perform searches in an easy way. You have to put search terms with the right and correct words!

2. What kind of information is available in Wolfram Alpha?

Not a lot. Alpha is very specific. The best you can look for is mathematics, chemical compounds, dates, units or even the temperature in Madrid…Don’t get disappointed, we’ve warned you.

3. Wolfram Alpha is not clever on the contrary to what it claims to be

Information retrieval is based on a semantics and words tagging. With Alpha, if a word has not yet been tagged for one of its meanings in a context, you won’t get anything of it. What a pity! For example, try to ask it “Who discovered polonium?. It is not able to answer, while in google the same question is easily answered.

4. Wolfram Alpha is for hype people!

I mean, who is going to ask “How many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man?” in order to have this result mentioning Bob Dylan. What if we ask “Who is Luke’s father?“, well, here goes the answer namely not much.

5. Wolfram Alpha is not a resource for biomedical information.

Despite what you’ve heard about it, Alpha doesn’t provide life science publications as novoseek does.

5 Pros on Wolfram Alpha

1. Wolfram Alpha, this is not a search engine! It’s better.

The way information is treated and presented is far from what you’ve seen and experienced until now. It is not Google nor Wikipedia. It is able to “computate” almost anything you ask it. Try solve a x^2 + b x + c = 0 for x

2. Wolfram Alpha could revolutionize learning and searching on the internet

Although it takes much to learn how to use it and obtain effective results, it could be an interesting tool for pupils, students and professors.

3. Wolfram Alpha has some surprises and easter eggs for you to discover.

Here goes the top 10 easter eggs in wolfram alpha. There may be more, it’s up to you to look for them.

4. The Wolfram Alpha team is working hard to keep it updated.

If there are some failures, be patient and for sure they’ll be fixed soon. The “Give us your feedback” box at the bottom of pages is there for you to point out these.

5. They are working on making Wolfram Alpha more user friendly

According to statements, they will release an API and more detailed search boxes in order to make searches easier.

Obviously, search engines on the internet are bringing changes and new ways of accessing information. Is this another step towards web 3.0 ?

Swine Flu epidemics started a couple of weeks ago now and it has been largely covered in social medias. By social medias, I mean all those platforms where one is able to speak and share real-time information about swine flu. Like for other recent and outbreaking news, real-time information has shown its great and useful possibilities. In fact, recently they have been consulted and used to be broadcasted on mainstream channels such as television. I will insist on the “Twitter thing“, but not only and this is why we can talk of social medias.

The importance of Twitter has been largely acknowledged these past months. For example, this man twitting directly about the plane landing in the Hudson river or the Mumbay attacks. These are examples who have settled a new order in information releases. On one because people like you and me would be likely to become reporters -would they want it or not- able to release information and pictures. On the other hand because it would get people involved and react to attacks, threats or needs faster, as it was done for this hospital in Mumbai.

However, Swine Flu is pretty different: the epidemics is best managed by the WHO organization and there is few people like you and me could do besides informing about what is this disease about (H1N1, Influenza, etc). Are social medias information relevant for Swine Flu ? Is everyone entitled to speak about the Swine Flu on real time information platforms and social medias? Are there limits to one’s use of twitter? And, most importantly, are social medias infected with Swine Flu?

I was stuck by the amount of information people have been releasing on Swine Flu, regardless their specialty or their areas of interest. It just seems everybody had something to say and something to share on that matter. I admit that I (as part of the marketing team) decided too to enjoy this phenomenon to put a search example on H1N1 and swine flu in novoseek. But hey, we’re not the black sheep, other search engines did so, I’ll let you guess which ones.

To give you an idea of the phenomenon, let’s check on trends for swine flu in twitter. Obviously it’s been a hot potato on twitter. But not only. And interestingly, searches for this term experimented a great increase…that quickly dropped.

I understand this is something legitimate –getting worried and twitting about it. However not all of the twitts seem to be justified nor important. Indeed, people started joking about it or -even worse- spreading false information. And I sense that the “you can get swine flu by eating pork” comment is about to become a famous example. Trustworthy people have already been writing about it.

Don’t get me wrong, the problem is not in people joking about swine flu but in the information reliability. Since everyone can follow the hot news using the # hashtags in Twitter Search, it triggers a debate. How to find reliable information among users? Who can be trusted? Who should be avoided ? These are questions that matter-of-factly appear to me and should raise your conscience too.

According to the following statistics for Swine Flu in Google Trends we notice that the drop of interest is almost as fast as its rise. Are we dealing with a serious pandemics here, or just some buzz effect? I am wondering…

The fact is swine flu has had its days and information –good or bad- has spread like fire over social medias. People would speak about it on Facebook too. This map shows how people have been updating their status mentioning “swine flu” in it. It has gone west to east.

This is a good illustration of how people started mentioning swine flu in social medias regardless the reliability or truth of information they would state. One more example, people would start making business over it and enjoying the phenomenon, worries or hysteria (no matter how you call it)… It seems like using the Swine Flu keyword was the key to success. You don’t believe me? Have a look at this advertisement in Google when you perform a search for “prevent swine flu“.

You’ll tell me that it’s always been this way, people would tend to enjoy people’s worries and buzz events. But I fear that Swine Flu has reached a new step.

Where are we going with social medias? Is the epidemics matter enough for people to be entitled to tell all sort of things over the internet? Do we have to find a way to select and filter our contacts ? Should we move to other (new?) platforms? There are questions I don’t know how to answer but I’d sure like to have your opinion about.

Hello World

Hello world is the basic sentence for a programmer who is learning a new language or testing a new piece of code. I wanted to use this tag because it is the same thing here. It is our first post, we are starting our test of a new language, a so called corporate blog.

You are probably thinking: “Oh!!! a corporate blog, ah!!! One of those places where they will write about their product all the time, yes!!! how interesting??”

Don’t get me wrong, it is not like we are not going to talk about our product or our company, it’s a part of what we are and if we evaluate the time we dedicate to our job, I must say it’s a substantial one. However our goal with this blog is to give our perspective of the information technology in the biomedicine market: web 2.0, search engines, social networks, health 2.0, user experience, our experience with users, text mining, technology, biomedical resources in the Internet and why not, business strategies.

We just hope to be able to transmit our enthusiasm, dedication and excitement to our goal of helping the life science community to deal with data and information.

By the way, I have to thanks Darryl Leon for coming up with, what ended to be the name of this blog: Knowledge beyond words