OCL Tech Challenge Thing #7

First of all, I am not so good at math but I loved experimental design and statistics as taught in the Rutgers Psychology dept. to graduate students. It was a great series of classes and I'd do it again today in a heart beat. When I saw Wolfram-Alpha (http://www.wolframalpha.com), I was in love, especially when I played with all the non-mathematical things you can do with it - like entering a date and finding out who was born on that date (who knew that Joss Whedon, Alan Turing and Clarence Thomas all had the same birthday?) as well as the information that the dat, June 23, 1988 was 7797 days ago or that the daylight information for my current location (actually Brick but identified as Toms River, NJ) was 15 hours and 1 minute of daylight. You get all of this from just entering the date into the input box! If you enter two stocks, you can compare their P/E ratio, latest trades, market capitalization, revenue, employees, volatility compared to the volatility of the market. I love this! Oh, and you can also use it for statistical analysis, etc. the user interface does take a little getting used to and there are way too many different ways of using the statistical packages to discuss here but I think Wolfram/Alpha is better than sliced bread!

I was somewhat less impressed with Carrot2 which splits the screen when it displays search results so that you see the results in what appears to be some kind of order (but it is hard to tell what kind) on one side and a "vizualization" of the results as a tree structure on the other side. The tree structure shows how many hits are in each of several categories. I searched for my younger sister who owns a book store in Durango, CO and writes for newspapers on the Left Coast and I also searched for algae farms, the future of biofuel! It is nice that you can search different tabs (sources) such as PubMed or Yahoo or MSN to get news and other sources.

I liked Worio a lot better than Carrot2. I'm not sure I understand exactly how the results are ordered but I did like searching for algae farms and finding links to the home pages of companies who are in the algae farming business. That saved another search or two!