(Written for Wikinews)
Wolfram Research Inc., makers of Mathematica and New Kind of Science, have released a limited alpha of their new web service Wolfram Alpha. Wolfram Alpha is described by Stephen Wolfram (CEO of Wolfram Research Inc.) as a “computational knowledge engine”. Unlike Google, Yahoo and other traditional web search engines that rely on statistical methods for retrieving online documents, Wolfram Alpha answers factual questions in the way that Wikipedia does, except it relies on analytical methods instead of human-generated documents.
Although the product is still in a limited release some details about its operation and design have been revealed by Wolfram on his blog, and by Nova Spivack who recently interviewed Wolfram about Wolfram Alpha. The product is available on the Web as a single search box reminiscent of Google’s main search page. The search queries can be entered in natural language and the natural language system will parse the query and use models of knowledge (ontologies) and human-curated data to return an answer including graphs and other representations. The ontologies and data are managed by Wolfram employees who must input new ontologies and data by hand or, occasionally, with the assistance of programmatic tools. It is expected that an Application Programming Interface (API) will eventually be available, although it is not known what the API will be used for.
Unlike traditional search engines Wolfram Alpha does not search online documents, and thus does not return answers to “fuzzy” questions, such as opinion or advice. Instead, the scope of answers is limited to the knowledge that has already been modeled and encoded in the ontologies and the associated data. In this way the system can generate knowledge that was previously unknown. It is thought that while Wolfram will concentrate on scientific and technical information the system may eventually be able to answer questions in other domains, such as stock information, geography and history. In theory, any question with a factual answer can be answered by Wolfram Alpha.
Stephen Wolfram’s ambitious project builds on his previous work with Mathematica and A New Kind of Science. Wolfram Alpha is related to Wolfram’s research on cellular automata, although Wolfram points out that Wolfram Alpha is not a cellular automata.
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Tuesday, May 12, 2009 at 05:08PM 
The ethics of the postmodern rhetoric: the retrospective on Sokal’s hoax
Alan Sokal’s long-ago famous hoax is said to have exposed the lack of rigour in “postmodern” scholarship. With the recent publication of Sokal’s retrospective Beyond the Hoax, the Sokal Affair is back in the limelight. James Ladyman of Bristol University writes in The Philosopher’s Magazine (42), “I think contemporary academia is at least, if not more, afflicted by the lack of rigour, deference to the undeservedly celebrated, and pseudo-political posturing that set Sokal off”. On the face of it Ladyman’s comment seems out of touch with reality; since the frivolous (some would say playful) research of the late 1990s and early 2000s the political and economic realities have changed, altering the direction and permissibility of research with it. Indeed, the turning point comes with Jacques Derrida’s death in 2004, not because Derrida is a poor philosopher or even a good example of what Sokal attempted to expose by publishing his rouse in the journal Social Text. Rather, by 2004 the universities (in North America at least, although to some degree globally) had fully succumbed to the pressures of corporatism and the new realities of budgets, accountability, and bottom-lines. Since Derrida’s death there has been little space for research that has thin utility—if not utility for society (that is, actually producing marketable goods), at least utility for the individual academic and associated institution (through publication notoriety).
Ladyman’s point, however, is somewhat different, and more subtle. Sokal’s hoax exposes sloppy journal admission standards, and possibly, a general lack of rigour in cross-disciplinary and postmodern research, but it also speaks to the so-called “science wars”. The science wars are where the rubber really hits the road for Sokal’s hoax, since government and public policy instantiate the rhetoric (if not the logic and information) of academics and their research. Ladyman later points out that “without a culture that defends the importance of rigour, reason and evidence, there is little to stand in the way of the naked exercise of power. This has been realized by the true inheritors of postmodernism, namely the Republican right and religious fundamentalists.” Indeed, the production of research is often more vital than its content. Both the rhetoric of the research and the volume produced (in yearly counts) contribute materially to how science gets instantiated in political arguments and trends. The point of rigourous scholarship is not just to keep the academy on an even keel but to ensure that socially detrimental notions don’t infect the populous.