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We previously discussed using the powerful Wolfram|Alpha tool to look up medical/biological information, but did you know it also works for astronomical information also?

The Wolfram|Alpha blog lists a couple of great tricks, including:

• the ability to identify the stars in the sky based on your location
• looking up information about a specific star’s distance, brightness, spectral class (astronomy nerds out there know the “Oh Be A Fine Girl Kiss Me!” classification system), mass, and even surface temperature!
• looking up information about the next lunar and solar eclipses, sunrises, and sunsets
• looking up general information about the planets in the solar system

What I find most impressive, however, is Wolfram|Alpha’s ability to generate graphical depictions of the information you’re looking for, whether it be understanding what you’ll see when you look up in the sky:

Visualizing the path of the sun for a particular day:

Or getting a sense of the 3-body-configuration of the sun, moon, and earth:

Chalk this up as yet another cool thing you can do with Wolfram|Alpha!

(Image credit: Wolfram|Alpha and Wolfram|Alpha blog)

The “2.0” moniker is often abused to hype up connections with the new dynamic web applications of today. This is why I’ve co-opted it to describe a new application which is to WebMD’s 1.0 as Gmail/Twitter are to old-school webmail/message boards.

As many of you know, WebMD is a leading health information internet portal, providing a wide range of medical information for both casual patients who browse the site and medical professionals. But, while the information WebMD provides is rich and valuable, it is still a static website, valuable, but not dynamic or intuitive or mobile.

Wolfram Research (maker of popular computational algebra system/scientific computing software Mathematica)’s new WolframAlpha search engine attacks the first two challenges. One of the fundamental problems with traditional portals like WebMD is that to find specific information, the user needs to have some idea of where the information is or how it’s stored/used in conjunction with other information – in other words, it requires contextual knowledge. For example, to figure out how to determine if someone is overweight, the user needs to know:

1. That BMI is the relevant metric
2. Where to find how to calculate BMI and where/how to get the information that goes into the BMI formula
3. Compare BMI with relevant comparisons
4. Understand the limitations and implications of the BMI metric

WolframAlpha tries to simplify this by reducing the dependence of the quality of the search results on contextual knowledge. In the BMI example above, WolframAlpha hasn’t quite solved how to easily and quickly answer steps 1 and 4, but it has made it much easier to do steps 2 and 3. For instance, the BMI of a person who is 5’ 10” and weighs 165 lbs and the relevant comparisons (to the US population as a whole, and to clinical definitions of “overweight”, etc.) What’s incredible is that WolframAlpha won’t only provide you with the data, if it’s feasible, it will even provide you with charts and graphs to illustrate them. While this is a far cry from Jeopardy-playing supercomputers, it is a much welcomed change to the current heavily context-dependent search paradigm.

And, WolframAlpha does a lot more than that. On their sample page of examples of health/medical requests, WolframAlpha breaks out several other capabilities:

• find growth charts/body statistics
• compute calories burned
• figure out Blood Alcohol Content levels
• estimate risks/mortality rates for diseases
• look up diagnoses by ICD-9 code
• understand medical test results
• look up information about drugs, hospitals, and public health information

Very cool, and, despite the more technical bent to information, much more usable than a standard search engine query for finding relevant health information. There is great promise in this technology, especially if it’s natural language processing algorithms improve to the point where it can provide useful information for healthcare professionals or curious/nervous patients (perhaps by combing through/organizing the information in WebMD’s healthcare-professional-oriented).

(Image Credits)