Exciting scientific news. NASA scientists investigating the ocean below an Antartic ice shelf, where no light penetrates, to allow plant life to grow, found a shrimp and a jellyfish [not shown here]. so far, scientists have no understanding of what food these animals subsist on. but they suspect that this finding of animals 20 miles from the ocean implies that there is considerable life in these apparently inhospitable environments:
Add comment March 16th, 2010
NPR recently had an amazing story by Alix Spiegel of how pharmaceutical company Merck help turn a research term, osteopenia, into a diagnosis “treated,” often ineffectively, by Merck’s drug Fosamax. The story involves the creation of osteopenia, a supposed subthreshold version of osteoporosis or low bone density. I also involves the systematic dissemination of inexpensive “diagnostic” machines for the new disorder that, however, fail to assess bone density where most breaks occur, that is, where it really matters. It involves Merck funding a number of organizations to lobby for the Medicare law to be changed, allowing doctors to be reimbursed for using these new machines of questionable utility. And it involves Merck selling a lot of Fosamax to women with the new “disorder” and making a lot of money. And it involves questions as to whether Fosamax is actually helpful, or may even be harmful, in these women who a few years ago were only experiencing normal aging. It also involves a lack of any plans to conduct the long-term follow-up studies necessary to determine if this treatment is helping, useless, or harmful.
This is a story that tells us so much about what is wrong with our healthcare system. Questionable diagnoses created and treatments administered to make money for large corporations. Alas, the recent reactions to the changed breast cancer screening guidelines suggest that once a constituency of doctors, drug dealers companies, and advocacy groups sees “benefits” from a new prevention approach, it will be extremely difficult to change.
Read or listen to the story here.
January 1st, 2010
My brother-in-law sent me this video. [Tells you something about my family!] It is posted here for those among my readers who share our love of mathematics. The rest of you can ponder what in the world they are singing about:
December 27th, 2009
I have come across an important article from the British Medical Journal that discusses one of the major gaps in what has come to be called Evidence-Based Medicine. Such a gap is a major scandal for the field of medicine:
Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: Systematic review of randomised controlled trials
Gordon C S Smith, professor1, Jill P Pell, consultant2
1 Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Cambridge University, Cambridge CB2 2QQ, 2 Department of Public Health, Greater Glasgow NHS Board, Glasgow G3 8YU
Correspondence to: G C S Smith gcss2@cam.ac.uk
Abstract
Objectives To determine whether parachutes are effective in preventing major trauma related to gravitational challenge.
Design Systematic review of randomised controlled trials.
Data sources: Medline, Web of Science, Embase, and the Cochrane Library databases; appropriate internet sites and citation lists.
Study selection: Studies showing the effects of using a parachute during free fall.
Main outcome measure Death or major trauma, defined as an injury severity score > 15.
Results We were unable to identify any randomised controlled trials of parachute intervention.Conclusions As with many interventions intended to prevent ill health, the effectiveness of parachutes has not been subjected to rigorous evaluation by using randomised controlled trials. Advocates of evidence based medicine have criticised the adoption of interventions evaluated by using only observational data. We think that everyone might benefit if the most radical protagonists of evidence based medicine organised and participated in a double blind, randomised, placebo controlled, crossover trial of the parachute.
November 25th, 2009
Theoretical physicists, in the absence of new data on which to base their theories, are having a lot of fun these days. TIME reports that two prominent physicists explain the repeated problems with te Large Hadron Collider (LHC) through “reverse chronological causation” or sabotage from the future:
Did a Time-Traveling Bird Sabotage the Collider?
Sometime on Nov. 3, the supercooled magnets in sector 81 of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), outside Geneva, began to dangerously overheat. Scientists rushed to diagnose the problem, since the particle accelerator has to maintain a temperature colder than deep space in order to work. The culprit? “A bit of baguette,” says Mike Lamont of the control center of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which built and maintains the LHC. Apparently, a passing bird may have dropped the chunk of bread on an electrical substation above the accelerator, causing a power cut. The baguette was removed, power to the cryogenic system was restored and within a few days the magnets returned to their supercool temperatures.
While most scientists would write off the event as a freak accident, two esteemed physicists have formulated a theory that suggests an alternative explanation: perhaps a time-traveling bird was sent from the future to sabotage the experiment. Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, have published several papers over the past year arguing that the CERN experiment may be the latest in a series of physics research projects whose purposes are so unacceptable to the universe that they are doomed to fail, subverted by the future.
The LHC, a 17-mile underground ring designed to smash atoms together at high energies, was created in part to find proof of a hypothetical subatomic particle called the Higgs boson. According to current theory, the Higgs is responsible for imparting mass to all things in the universe. But ever since the British physicist Peter Higgs first postulated the existence of the particle in 1964, attempts to capture the particle have failed, and often for unexpected, seemingly inexplicable reasons.
In 1993, the multibillion-dollar United States Superconducting Supercollider, which was designed to search for the Higgs, was abruptly canceled by Congress. In 2000, scientists at a previous CERN accelerator, LEP, said they were on the verge of discovering the particle when, again, funding dried up. And now there’s the LHC. Originally scheduled to start operating in 2006, it has been hit with a series of delays and setbacks, including a sudden explosion between two magnets nine days after the accelerator was first turned on, the arrest of one of its contributing physicists on suspicion of terrorist activity and, most recently, the aerial bread bombardment from a bird. (A CERN spokesman said power cuts such as the one caused by the errant baguette are common for a device that requires as much electricity as the nearby city of Geneva, and that physicists are confident they will begin circulating atoms by the end of the year).
In a series of audacious papers, Nielsen and Ninomiya have suggested that setbacks to the LHC occur because of “reverse chronological causation,” which is to say, sabotage from the future. The papers suggest that the Higgs boson may be “abhorrent to nature” and the LHC’s creation of the Higgs sometime in the future sends ripples backward through time to scupper its own creation. Each time scientists are on the verge of capturing the Higgs, the theory holds, the future intercedes. The theory as to why the universe rejects the creation of Higgs bosons is based on complex mathematics, but, Nielsen tells TIME, “you could explain it [simply] by saying that God, in inverted commas, or nature, hates the Higgs and tries to avoid them.”
Many physicists say that Nielsen and Ninomiya’s theory, while intellectually interesting, cannot be accurate because the event that the LHC is trying to recreate already happens in nature. Particle collisions of an energy equivalent to those planned in the LHC occur when high-energy cosmic rays collide with the earth’s atmosphere. What’s more, some scientists believe that the Tevatron accelerator at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (or Fermilab) near Chicago has already created Higgs bosons without incident; the Fermilab scientists are now refining data from their collisions to prove the Higgs’ existence.
Nielsen counters that nature might allow a small number of Higgs to be produced by the Tevatron, but would prevent the production of the large number of particles the LHC is anticipated to produce. He also acknowledges that Higgs particles are probably produced in cosmic collisions, but says it’s impossible to know whether nature has stopped a great deal of these collisions from happening. “It’s possible that God avoids Higgs [particles] only when there are very many of them, but if there are a few, maybe He let’s them go,” he says.
Nielsen and Ninomiya’s theory represents one side of an intellectual divide between particle physicists today. Contemporary physicists tend to fall into one of two camps: the theorists, who posit ideas about the origins and workings of the universe; and experimentalists, who design telescopes and particle accelerators to test these theories, or provide new data from which novel theories can emerge. Most experimentalists believe that the theorists, due to a lack of new data in recent years, have reached a roadblock – the Standard Model, which is the closest thing the theorists have to an evidence-backed “theory of everything,” provides only an incomplete explanation of the universe. Until theorists get further data and evidence to move forward, the experimentalists believe, they end up simply making wild guesses – like those concerning time-traveling saboteurs – about how the universe works. “Nielsen and Ninomiya’s theories are clearly crazy theories,” says Dmitri Denisov, a physicist and Higgs-hunter at the DZero experiment at Fermilab. “In recent years theorists have been starving for experimental input and as a result, theories of second type are propagating widely. The majority of them have nothing to do with world we live in.”
Nielsen concedes, “We have very little data, so theorists are going their own ways and making a lot of theories that may not be very plausible. We need guidance from experimentalists to make the theories more healthy.”
“But,” he adds, “in terms of our theory, we are submitting to a form of experiment. We are saying the LHC won’t be allowed to produce a large number of Higgs. If it does, it would be very damaging to our theory.”
Particle physics has a long history of zany theories that turned out to be true. Niels Bohr, the doyen of modern physicists, often told a story about a horseshoe he kept over his country home in Tisvilde, Denmark. When asked whether he really thought it would bring good luck, he replied, “Of course not, but I’m told it works even if you don’t believe in it.” In other words: if preposterous theories are mathematically sound and can be confirmed by observation, they are true, even if seemingly impossible to believe. To scientists in the early 20th century, for example, quantum mechanics may have seemed outrageous. “The concept that you could have a wave-particle duality – that an object could take on either wave-like properties or point-like properties, depending on how you observe it – takes a huge leap of imagination,” says Roberto Roser, a scientist at Fermilab. “Sometimes outlandish papers turn out to be the laws of physics.”
So what would Peter Higgs himself make of the intellectual controversy surrounding his eponymous particle? Speaking on behalf of his friend, Professor Richard Kenway, who holds Higgs’ former position at the University of Edinburgh, says that the 78-year-old emeritus professor remains quietly confident that the LHC will discover the Higgs boson when it is eventually running at full strength. For his part, Kenway says the LHC’s delays are to be expected given the size and intricacy of the $9 billion experiment. And he says if he ever needs further proof that the Higgs boson is not abhorrent to nature, he need only spend time with his friend and mentor. “If nature truly did not want us to discover the Higgs, a cosmic ray would have zapped the embryo that became Peter, preventing its development into a physicist,” he says.
2 comments November 11th, 2009
Three years ago I referred to a Wall Street Journal piece on possible geologic effects — volcanoes and earthquakes — of global warming. This drove the right wing crazy. Numerous global warming denial sites linked to it as an indication of how silly those concerned about global warming can get. Today I post a Reuters piece about a conference of geologists and earth scientists concerned about the same issue, now with three years more data:
Global warming may bring tsunami and quakes-scientists
By Richard Meares
LONDON — Quakes, volcanic eruptions, giant landslides and tsunamis may become more frequent as global warming changes the earth’s crust, scientists said on Wednesday.
Climate-linked geological changes may also trigger “methane burps,” the release of a potent greenhouse gas, currently stored in solid form under melting permafrost and the seabed, in quantities greater than all the carbon dioxide (CO2) in our air today.
“Climate change doesn’t just affect the atmosphere and the oceans but the earth’s crust as well. The whole earth is an interactive system,” Professor Bill McGuire of University College London told Reuters, at the first major conference of scientists researching the changing climate’s effects on geological hazards.
“In the political community people are almost completely unaware of any geological aspects to climate change.”
The vulcanologists, seismologists, glaciologists, climatologists and landslide experts at the meeting have looked to the past to try to predict future changes, particularly to climate upheaval at the end of the last ice age, some 12,000 years ago.
“When the ice is lost, the earth’s crust bounces back up again and that triggers earthquakes, which trigger submarine landslides, which cause tsunamis,” said McGuire, who organized the three-day conference.
David Pyle of Oxford University said small changes in the mass of the earth’s surface seems to affect volcanic activity in general, not just in places where ice receded after a cold spell. Weather patterns also seem to affect volcanic activity – not just the other way round, he told the conference.
Behind him was a slide of a dazzlingly bright orange painting, “London sunset after Krakatau, 1883″ – referring to a huge Asian volcanic eruption whose effects were seen and felt around the world.
Volcanoes can spew vast amounts of ash, sulphur, carbon dioxide and water into the upper atmosphere, reflecting sunlight and sometimes cooling the earth for a couple of years. But too many eruptions, too close together, may have the opposite effect and quicken global warming, said U.S. vulcanologist Peter Ward.
“Prior to man, the most abrupt climate change was initiated by volcanoes, but now man has taken over. Understanding why and how volcanoes did it will help man figure out what to do,” he said.
Speakers were careful to point out that many findings still amounted only to hypotheses, but said evidence appeared to be mounting that the world could be in for shocks on a vast scale.
Tony Song of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California warned of the vast power of recently discovered “glacial earthquakes” — in which glacial ice mass crashes downwards like an enormous landslide.
In the West Antarctic, ice piled about 1.5 km above sea level is being undermined in places by water seeping in underneath.
“Our experiments show that glacial earthquakes can generate far more powerful tsunamis than undersea earthquakes with similar magnitude,” said Song.
“Several high-latitude regions, such as Chile, New Zealand and Canadian Newfoundland are particularly at risk.”
He said ice sheets appeared to be disintegrating much more rapidly than thought and said glacial earthquake tsunamis were “low-probability but high-risk.”
McGuire said the possible geological hazards were alarming enough, but just one small part of a scary picture if man-made CO2 emissions were not stabilized within around the next five years.
“Added to all the rest of the mayhem and chaos, these things would just be the icing on the cake,” he said. “Things would be so bad that the odd tsunami or eruption won’t make much difference.”
1 comment September 30th, 2009
A new paper — Torturing the Brain: On the folk psychology and folk neurobiology motivating ‘enhanced and coercive interrogation techniques’ – in the journal Trends in Cognitive Science: Science and Society makes the case that torture or “enhanced interrogation” techniques are a very poor way to obtain intelligence as stress interferes with memory. To a psychologist, this is a no-brainer. The fragility of memory is one of the fundamental findings of cognitive psychology. Memory is reconstructive, combining what happened with current thoughts and concerns.
An Associated Press story on the study quotes me on this:
Report: CIA interrogations informed by bad science
By Pamela Hess
WASHINGTON — Prolonged stress from the CIA’s harsh interrogations could have impaired the memories of terrorist suspects, diminishing their ability to recall and provide the detailed information the spy agency sought, according to a scientific paper published Monday.
The methods could even have caused the suspects to create — and believe — false memories, contends the paper, which scrutinizes the techniques used by the CIA under the Bush administration through the lens of neurobiology. It suggests the methods are actually counterproductive, no matter how much suspects might eventually say.
“Solid scientific evidence on how repeated and extreme stress and pain affect memory and executive functions (such as planning or forming intentions) suggests these techniques are unlikely to do anything other than the opposite of that intended by coercive or enhanced interrogation,” according to the paper in the scientific journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
In the paper, Shane O’Mara, a professor at Ireland’s Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience, wrote that the severe interrogation techniques appear based on “folk psychology” — a layman’s idea of how the brain works as opposed to science-based understanding of memory and cognitive function.
O’Mara told The Associated Press on Monday he reviewed the scientific literature about the effect of stress on memory and brain function after reading descriptions of the CIA’s Bush-era interrogation methods. The methods were detailed in previously classified legal memos released in April.
O’Mara did not examine or interview any of those interrogated by the CIA, a fact noted by the agency in commenting on his work.
“The CIA’s former interrogation program was conducted pursuant to legal guidance from the Department of Justice. It produced intelligence on which our government acted to disrupt terrorist operations. Those are facts. The author of this study did not, to my knowledge, have direct contact with individuals who had been part of the agency’s high-value detainee program,” said CIA spokesman George Little.
O’Mara said that in general, “The assumption is that the (methods) are without effect on memory, or indeed facilitate the retrieval of information from memory.”
But overwhelmingly, scientific literature shows the opposite: Chronic stress and trauma — the likely result of the CIA’s methods, particularly for long-term prisoners, according to O’Mara — can damage the hippocampus, the part of the brain that integrates memory.
O’Mara’s findings reflect the review of scientific and medical literature on the effect of acute stress on memory and cognitive function.
“We’ve known for quite a while that stress radically impairs cognition. We know memory is very fragile to begin with,” said Stephen Soldz, president-elect of Psychologists for Social Responsibility and a professor at Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. “It’s just amazing that this has not been taken into account.”
Dr. Scott Allen, an internist and Brown University associate professor, is reviewing literature for the advocacy group Physicians for Human Rights and told the AP he has yet to find studies that would support the efficacy of harsh interrogation techniques.
“In fact what I’ve found is it seems like it would be a poor strategy,” Allen said.
The list of techniques the CIA used included prolonged sleep deprivation — six days in at least one instance — being chained in painful positions, exploitation of prisoners’ phobias, and waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning that President Barack Obama has called torture. Three CIA prisoners were waterboarded, two of them extensively.
Those methods cause the brain to release stress hormones that, if their release is repeated and prolonged, may result in compromised brain function and even tissue loss, O’Mara wrote.
He warned that this could lead to brain lobe disorders, making the prisoners vulnerable to confabulation — in this case, the pathological production of false memories based on suggestions from an interrogator. Those false memories mix with true information in the interrogation, making it difficult to distinguish between what is real and what is fabricated.
Waterboarding is especially stressful “with the potential to cause widespread stress-induced changes in the brain, especially when these are repeated frequently and intensively,” O’Mara wrote.
“The fact that the detrimental effects of these techniques on the brain are not visible to the naked eye makes them no less real,” he wrote.
The paper also asserted that forcibly exposing prisoners to what they are afraid of — the CIA got approval to use a suspect’s fear of insects against him — is actually a method used to cure phobias. The insects were never used, according to the government.
A 2006 Intelligence Science Board report on interrogation also noted possible negative effects of certain methods. For example, isolating suspects can be beneficial to interrogation because it shakes prisoners’ confidence and expectations, but extended isolation can significantly and negatively affect the ability of the source to recall information accurately, according to the report.
The board, created in 2002, provides independent advice to senior intelligence officials on emerging scientific and technical issues of special importance to intelligence work.
1 comment September 21st, 2009
Earlier today I posted an article on changes in publication patterns in response to new rules by the Journal of the American Medical Association requiring independent analysis of drug company data before publication in JAMA. That article also referred to problems with the national registry of clinical trials. A friend sent me the following article on these problems, which cast serious doubt on the quality of our knowledge on drug efficacy:
Quality and completeness of medical literature questioned in two new studies
By Michael O’Riordan
New York, NY – Two recently published studies cast some unfavorable light on the current quality and completeness of medical literature, with one showing that less than half of registered studies are published in medical journals [1], and the other showing questionable discrepancies between the registered and reported clinical outcomes [2].
Dr Joseph Ross (Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York), the lead investigator of the study showing that just 46% of studies registered on the National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded website ClinicalTrials.gov ever make it as a published paper, told heartwire that the findings are very alarming.
“The research should send shockwaves through the research community, as it shows us that while it’s all well and good to practice evidence-based medicine, we don’t have all the evidence,” said Ross. “In terms of following guidelines and understanding the right treatment approach, we actually don’t have all the evidence at hand to make those decisions. This is a really shaky foundation. On top of that, the stuff that is being published might not even reflect the studies as they were designed.”
Dr Harlan Krumholz (Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT), the senior author of the paper with Ross, commented to heartwire that the studies, in tandem, reveal significant shortcomings of the data available in the national registry of randomized trials, with the implication being that drug assessment is “hampered, even undermined” by the incomplete picture.
The study by Ross, Krumholz, and colleagues is published in the September 9, 2009 issue of PLoS Medicine, while the second study comparing the registered and published outcomes in clinical trials, which is led by Dr Sylvain Mathieu (Hôpital Bichat-Claude Bernard, Paris, France), is published in the September 2, 2009 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
What’s required and optional with ClinicalTrials.gov?
In 2005, the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) began a policy stating that information about a clinical trial needed to be registered before patient enrollment as a precondition for publication. ClinicalTrials.gov, a registry that has seen an average of 220 trials registered each week since 2005, requires mandatory information from investigators, with other information considered optional.
Mandatory reporting includes study title, summary, design, phase, type, conditions or focus of study, intervention, eligibility criteria, gender, minimum/maximum age, recruitment status, sponsor, facility, study official or facility contact, central contact, oversight authorities, and institutional review board approval, as well as other administrative details.
Optional information includes the primary purpose for the study, start date, completion data, enrollment target number, primary and secondary outcomes, whether the trial accepts healthy volunteers, and FDA product status.
Trial completed but never published
In the study by Ross et al, the researchers examined the reporting of registration information among a cross-section of clinical trials registered at ClinicalTrials.gov after December 31, 1999 and updated as completed by June 2007. The study looked at the trials registered and the completeness of the mandatory and optional reporting fields on the NIH website and the extent to which these registered trials were published.Excluding phase 1 trials, the group identified 7515 completed trials over the seven-year period, and of these, nearly 100% reported information mandated by ClinicalTrials.gov, including the study intervention and sponsorship. Ross noted, however, that some trials were more complete than others, with some providing only vague or nondescript information. Optional data, however, fared worse. Just 53% of studies reported the study’s end date, only 66% reported the primary outcome, and 87% reported the trial start date.
“About half to two-thirds of the time, the information that was supposed to be there was there, or could have been there,” said Ross. “What we discovered as we looked through the second step at publication was this optional information is really important when you’re trying to figure out what’s been published and what hasn’t.”
To assess how many of the registered trials were published, the group examined 10% of the completed trials as a subsample. Of these trials, just 46% of studies were published, and of these, only 31% provided a citation in ClinicalTrials.gov of that publication. Trials sponsored by industry fared the worst, with just 40% of registered trials published, which was significantly less than the 56% of published trials not sponsored by government or industry, such as a university or foundation. Of studies sponsored by government, 47% were published.
“For the most part, everybody’s publication rates were disappointingly low,” said Ross. “It’s really hard to know why. On the one hand, it seems like zillions of papers are published every day, and it should be easy to get something published. But once a paper has been rejected a few times, it’s sort of easy to lose steam. Investigators and companies are often chasing the next grant for the next study by the time the push comes to get something published.”
Ross said the results are in line with literature showing that studies sponsored by industry are more likely to be positive. Because their publication rates are low, it is likely that many negative trials aren’t being published. He noted that it is also possible that they are conducting trials for purposes other than research, such as trying to get people to adhere to their medication, and while it is registered as a trial, it is not considered for publication.
Differing clinical end points
In the second study, by Mathieu and colleagues, the group compared the primary outcomes specified in ClinicalTrials.gov with the primary outcomes reported in 10 high-impact medical journals, including Circulation and the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.They obtained information on 323 randomized, controlled, clinical trials in cardiology, gastroenterology, and rheumatology. Of these trials, just 45.5% were adequately registered, meaning they were registered before the end of the trial and the primary outcome was clearly specified. Among these trials registered adequately, investigators say that there were discrepancies between outcomes registered and outcomes reported in 31% of the published papers. Almost 83% of the differences in the primary outcomes favored reporting statistically significant results, according to Mathieu and colleagues.
Overall, more than one-quarter of the published studies were unregistered, 14% were registered after the study was finished, and 11% were registered with no description or an unclear description of the primary outcome.
“A main goal of trial registration is to enhance transparency of research and accountability in the planning, conduct, and reporting of clinical trials, an objective achieved by making available details about the trial,” write Mathieu and colleagues. “Therefore, adequate registration should be a safeguard against publication bias. A major step has been achieved with the ICJME initiative for trial registration, and the existence of all trials is now publicly available. However, after this first step, the quality and timing of registration still needs improvement.”
Speaking with heartwire, Ross said that he believes registries like ClinicalTrials.gov are excellent ideas and that the research profession is headed in the right direction by making the medical field more transparent. However, some changes are needed to make it more effective, including making more information mandatory, including specific details about primary and secondary end points, and better oversight.
“There aren’t a lot of resources being devoted to oversight right now,” he said. “Who’s going to be responsible for catching up with companies and investigators who are registering trials and not reporting or not filling in all the needed fields?”
************
Ross and Krumholz were previously consultants for the plaintiffs in litigation against Merck related to rofecoxib. Krumholz has research contracts with the American College of Cardiology and the Colorado Foundation for Medical Care, has served on the advisory boards of Amgen and UnitedHealthCare, and is the academic editor-in-chief of Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes, and Journal Watch Cardiology.
September 14th, 2009
Since early childhood in St. Louis, I’ve wanted to actually witness a tornado. So far, that’s one wish unfulfilled. But here’s the closest I’ve come, and it’s a whole lot safer.
A reporter from the Weather Channel filmed the entire lifecycle of a tornado, including first-ever film inside the funnel. The Today Show interviewed the reporter and shows some of the footage:
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
More from the Weather Channel itself:
June 8th, 2009
The computer news site Det brings news of a fascinating and apparently important development in computerized information provision. Stephen Wolfram, the physicist and developer of the Mathematica symbolic mathemtics software is announcing the release in May of Mathematica Alpha, a web site/program that will be able to actually answer real-world questions posed to it. What is Alfred Hitchok’s birthday? What was the coldest day in Syracuse in 1927? Or what is the ten thousandth digit of pi? This program should be able to parse and answer the question, and many more as well
According to several articles I’ve read, this is really cool. Here is a brief article. For more detailed accounts, go here, here, or here.
Another week another Google killer. Last week, it was Twitter as Google killer. This week it’s Wolfam Alpha. The difference with Wolfram Alpha is that it has the pedigree, engineering heft and perhaps a better mousetrap to actually live up to the billing.
Techmeme is a flutter with talk of Wolfram Alpha. Dan Farber notes that Stephen Wolfram is a scientist who has recorded a few breakthroughs and a little controversy. In a nutshell, Wolfram Alpha blends natural language, a new search model and an algorithm that takes all the data on the Web and makes it “computable.” Wolfram just recently outlined his latest creation and added:
I think it’s going to be pretty exciting. A new paradigm for using computers and the web.
Dan writes about Wolfram:
He received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Caltech in 1979 when he was 20 and has focused most of his career on probing complex systems. In 1988 he launched Mathematica, powerful computational software that has become the gold standard in its field. In 2002, Wolfram produced a 1,280-page tome, A New Kind of Science, based on a decade of exploration in cellular automata and complex systems.
In May, Wolfram will launch Wolfram Alpha, which is dubbed a computational knowledge engine. It’s pretty clear, what Web giant Wolfram Alpha is targeting. [Google-like picture]
Look familiar?
For the brainiacs in the house, Nova Spivak has a long post outlining Wolfram Alpha (it’s a must read). Simply put, if Spivak’s outline is only half on target Wolfram Alpha could be big.
Spivak writes:
In a nutshell, Wolfram and his team have built what he calls a “computational knowledge engine” for the Web. OK, so what does that really mean? Basically it means that you can ask it factual questions and it computes answers for you.
It doesn’t simply return documents that (might) contain the answers, like Google does, and it isn’t just a giant database of knowledge, like the Wikipedia. It doesn’t simply parse natural language and then use that to retrieve documents, like Powerset, for example.
Instead, Wolfram Alpha actually computes the answers to a wide range of questions — like questions that have factual answers such as “What country is Timbuktu in?” or “How many protons are in a hydrogen atom?” or “What is the average rainfall in Seattle this month?,” “What is the 300th digit of Pi?,” “where is the ISS?” or “When was GOOG worth more than $300?”
Think about that for a minute. It computes the answers. Wolfram Alpha doesn’t simply contain huge amounts of manually entered pairs of questions and answers, nor does it search for answers in a database of facts. Instead, it understands and then computes answers to certain kinds of questions.
Spivak later mentions that Wolfram Alpha isn’t designed to be HAL 9000. That’s refreshing. Wolfram Alpha sounds impressive, but it would be premature to call it a Google killer though. In fact, if Wolfram Alpha lives up to its billing it will be acquired at some ridiculous price either by Google or some company—Microsoft—looking to kill Google.
March 27th, 2009
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