the JOHN LAUDUN experiment

I decided to play a bit with Wolfram Alpha. If I day traded, it would be a terrific resource. So far, that’s the only thing I have tried that has given me results that I knew what to do with. Now, it could very well be that WA is giving me results that are smarter than I am…

Here’s a trial search

Clicking on the link is just like visiting WA and typing in:

caterpillar cummins john deere

(Searching for makers of heavy equipment was the first thing that came to my mind.)

My friend Jason Jackson passes on the news that at the annual meeting of the Linguistics Society of America, the following resolution was passed:

Whereas modern computing technology has the potential of advancing linguistic science by enabling linguists to work with datasets at a scale previously unimaginable; and

Whereas this will only be possible if such data are made available and standards ensuring interoperability are followed; and

Whereas data collected, curated, and annotated by linguists forms the empirical base of our field; …

Therefore, be it resolved at the annual business meeting on 8 January 2010 that the Linguistic Society of America encourages members and other working linguists to:

• make the full data sets behind publications available, subject to all relevant ethical and legal concerns; …
• work towards assigning academic credit for the creation and maintenance of linguistic databases and computational tools; and
• when serving as reviewers, expect full data sets to be published (again subject to legal and ethical considerations) and expect claims to be tested against relevant publicly available datasets.

The National Academies Press has just released a 180-page book on Ensuring the Integrity, Accessibility, and Stewardship of Research Data in the Digital Age. The link will take you to the book’s page on the press’s website. It’s available as a paperback for $31.46, as a PDF for $27, or as a combo for $41. You can also follow a link on the page to read it on-line for free.

Whytootackay Island by Lieutenant G Tobin aboard HMS Providence in 1792

Slashdot brought this BBC story to my attention:

The BBC reports that researchers are digitizing the captains’ logs from the voyages of Charles Darwin on HMS Beagle, Captain Cook from HMS Discovery, Captain Bligh from The Bounty, and 300 other 18th and 19th century ships’ logbooks to provide historical climate records for modern-day climate researchers who will use the meteorological data to build up a picture of weather patterns in the world at the beginning of the industrial era. The researchers are cross-referencing the data with historical records for crop failures, droughts and storms and will compare it with data for the modern era in order to predict similar events in the future.

Andy Kessler in op-ed on the 19 August 2009 Wall Street Journal assumes that AT&T killed the Google Voice app for the iPhone. Apple disagrees, but his essential point that Google Voice is feature-rich while current telephony is feature poor remains. His argument: AT&T is dying and it’s slowing us down as it goes. I’m not one for such grand rhetoric, but what I think is crucial is his argument that we need to do away with regulation of telephony and television, with the national communications policy altogether and focus on a National Data Policy with the following assumptions:

• End phone exclusivity. Any device should work on any network. Data flows freely.
• Transition away from “owning” airwaves. As we’ve seen with license-free bandwidth via Wi-Fi networking, we can share the airwaves without interfering with each other. Let new carriers emerge based on quality of service rather than spectrum owned. Cellphone coverage from huge cell towers will naturally migrate seamlessly into offices and even homes via Wi-Fi networking. No more dropped calls in the bathroom.
• End municipal exclusivity deals for cable companies. TV channels are like voice pipes, part of an era that is about to pass. A little competition for cable will help the transition to paying for shows instead of overpaying for little-watched networks. Competition brings de facto network neutrality and open access (if you don’t like one service blocking apps, use another), thus one less set of artificial rules to be gamed.
• Encourage faster and faster data connections to our homes and phones. It should more than double every two years. To homes, five megabits today should be 10 megabits in 2011, 25 megabits in 2013 and 100 megabits in 2017. These data-connection speeds are technically doable today, with obsolete voice and video policy holding it back.

This looks like a terrific idea but it has a steep entry price. I could see UL putting something interesting together with a university in Canada or France focusing on our strength in Francophone studies, but there’s a lot of writing and negotiating to be done and I just don’t think we have the staff for it. Nevertheless, I am posting the link to the site here to encourage others and in case I change my mind:

The Digging into Data Challenge is an international grant competition sponsored by four leading research agencies, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) from the United Kingdom, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) from the United States, the National Science Foundation (NSF) from the United States, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) from Canada.

What is the “challenge” we speak of? The idea behind the Digging into Data Challenge is to answer the question “what do you do with a million books?” Or a million pages of newspaper? Or a million photographs of artwork? That is, how does the notion of scale affect humanities and social science research? Now that scholars have access to huge repositories of digitized data — far more than they could read in a lifetime — what does that mean for research?

Applicants will form international teams from at least two of the participating countries. Winning teams will receive grants from two or more of the funding agencies and, one year later, will be invited to show off their work at a special conference. Our hope is that these projects will serve as exemplars to the field.

From the Wired article:

NASA is taking the rare step of reaching out to the public for help. The space agency is looking for the best way to analyze and electronically catalog a precious collection of notes that chronicle the early history of the human space flight program.

“We’re looking for creative ways to get it out to the public,” said project manager Jason Crusan. “We don’t always do the best with putting out large sets of data like this.”

The notes are those of rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, the fist director of NASA’s Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, Alabama and are typed with copious hand written notes in the margin. According to the official request for information, NASA needs ideas on what format to use, how to index the notes and how to create a useful database.