Libby’s Bank Holiday weekend
I think that Libby enjoyed her Bank Holiday weekend. A trip to Southend and mushrooms at the farm shop!
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Computing Work: Semantic Web True Knowledge Web Wolfram Alpha Work
by Rob
2 comments
Wolfram Alpha
A while ago wolfram research announced that they were developing Wolfram Alpha, a computational knowledge engine that could answer questions on the internet. As this is exactly what we do at True Knowledge we were quite interested in how this all worked and how well it worked. Wolframs knowledge engine is written in mathmatica, a language that was developed at wolfram research whereas True Knowledge are using more standard languages, our core knowledge engine is written in C++ and runs on reletively tame comodity hardware whereas wolfram uses some serious kit - as can be seen on YouTube.
Wolfram Alpha has been getting a lot of publicity recently - helped in part due to its founder Stephen Wolfram - and most of it has been encouraging for them and the space in general. Their lauch on Friday was hit with a few snags but they seem to have got the system up and running - well I’ve been able to give it a try anyway. From my experience it seems to be pretty good at factual based questions such as how old/what is but it hasn’t been able to ask any questions that involve an extra step of reasoning over working out what was in the question - apart from obvious cases. That happens to be one of the very things that the True Knowledge system is very good at for example try the ‘Who was prime minister when micheal schumacher was a teenager’ question that I had in my True Knowledge API lauch post, the wolfram page for that is still spinning three minutes later. When they do give a response it does tend to have lots of information about the answer rather than a simple answer though. For example try ‘Halstead uk’, you get the population, weather information etc…
One of the main differences is the fact that you can’t add information or knowledge to Wolfram, True Knowledge builds on user generated content, much like wikipedia, this means that when it can’t answer but does understand, it can let you add the required information and then the question can be answered, whoever asks.
Give them both a try and see what you think!
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Budget Cap vs. Bernie
Ferrari announced today that they won’t enter their cars into the 2010 F1 championship if the FIA pushes through the two tier budget system. Redbull and Toyota have also voiced concerns over these new rules and have threatened the same course of action, though they drew little attention for these statements. Ferrari are at the heart of F1 and it would be a very different sport without them, Bernie has even come out and said that he won’t let it happen.
The crux of the matter is the idea to allow teams to subscribe to a £40m budget cap in exchange for less stringent rules for development of the cars. I can’t see how this is a way to cut the costs in F1, make the teams with the money leave in exchange for letting a few unknown teams join the championship. It seems that this will drive down the revenues and make it an even harder sport to compete in. The alternative is to have the tiered system and effectively two championships in one, much like classes in other formulas. This will do nothing to make the sport easier to understand and I’m not sure anyone would be able to convince Ferrari that the budget cap would limit the effectiveness of these teams with Brawn currently beating everyone.
The precedent for these types of disagreements is that the teams form a collalition and threaten to form a break away series, the FIA says that this is the way it is and then Bernie calls a meeting and it all gets sorted out. I can’t see these measures being implemented as per the current proposals because of the statements from an increasing number of the teams, there is no F1 without the teams, and in my view there is no real F1 without Ferrari. I guess we’ll find out in the near future as registration for the 2010 season is due in May I believe.
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Libby at the beach…
After spending a small fortune on the camper, again, we thought we’d put it to good use and took Libby to the seaside!
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Norwich hosts Libby for a night
With us feeling slightly more adventurous after four months we took Libby to Norwich for a night! She seemed to enjoy the trip and the train!
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