Wolfram Alpha Is Not Your High School Research System
If Wolfram Alpha had been around when I was in high school it would have made my math and science homework a whole lot easier. Other than solving physics equations, Wolfram Alpha can be used for a whole lot more. The smart database just released a new endeavor called the Documentation Center.
The Documentation Center is still in the preliminary version, but it can be used for:
“The Wolfram System’s unified computation and dynamic document architecture makes possible a new level of interactive presentation—notably allowing finished “slides” on which full interactive input and dynamic computation can still be done. The Wolfram Language’s cell-structured documents also conveniently allow calculations leading up to graphics or other elements to be maintained in the underlying document, but hidden for presentation.”
A whole new interactive level with data is a great idea! It makes it more interesting and Wolfram Alpha gives the chance to improve its quality. Browsing through the new Documentation Center, however, is confusing. It’s not explained how it can be used, only what it can do. Perhaps it requires a purchased membership. It looks like a system for the one percent.
Whitney Grace, March 09, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
US Policy of Isolating Russia and Expanding NATO Is a Dismal Failure
“How is crowd organization produced? How are crowd-enabled networks activated, structured, and maintained in the absence of recognized leaders, common goals, or conventional organization, issue framing, and action coordination? We develop an analytical framework for examining the organizational processes of crowd-enabled connective action such as was found in the Arab Spring, the 15-M in Spain, and Occupy Wall Street. The analysis points to three elemental modes of peer production that operate together to create organization in crowds: the production, curation, and dynamic integration of various types of information content and other resources that become distributed and utilized across the crowd. Whereas other peer-production communities such as open-source software developers or Wikipedia typically evolve more highly structured participation environments, crowds create organization through packaging these elemental peer-production mechanisms to achieve various kinds of work. The workings of these ‘production packages’ are illustrated with a theory-driven analysis of Twitter data from the 2011–2012 US Occupy movement, using an archive of some 60 million tweets. This analysis shows how the Occupy crowd produced various organizational routines, and how the different production mechanisms were nested in each other to create relatively complex organizational results.”