Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Video Mashup - Autotune the news

This is a very hilarious mashup of the news and music along with the performers who created it. They have a channel on YouTube and about 10 or more episodes. It is quite original and creative and I find myself laughing every time I watch one. I haven't watched them all yet but I plan on doing so very soon. Enjoy!

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Google and Wofram|Alpha

Using google.com and wolfram|alpha.com to find answers to the following queries:

1. All english words containing the letters "eue"
I found that wolfram|alpha provided the best results using the following search query:
  • words with eue
answer: queue queues queued

2. How much potassium in 4.7 oz of banana?
wolfram|alpha provided the best results using this query:
  • potassium banana 4.7 oz.
answer: 477 mg.

3. How old was Barack Obama on the day you were born?
wolfram|alpha provided the best and fastest result using this query:
  • barack obama age october 30 1974
answer: 13 years 2 months 26 days

4. Date and time of the next total solar eclipse in Eugene?
Though google did provide a link to the answer as the first result the results from wolfram|alpha were more detailed and easy to read as there was more information in the result. The query I used was:
  • total solar eclipse eugene oregon
answer: 11:25 am PDT | Monday, August 21, 2017

7. How many vertices does an icosahedron have?
This query is more difficult to say which is the best or fastest. wolfram|alpha was definitely fastest finding the result but google provided a link to Wikipedia which I found to have more information on an icosahedron. I used the following query:
  • icosahedron
answer: 12 vertices

8. Distance from Eugene to Tokyo?
wolfram|alpha was more useful for this query. It gave the distance as well as other statistical information and was quite fast. I used the following query:
  • eugene oregon tokyo japan
answer: 4886 miles

9. Average Oregon income per capita?
google provided the best results once again with a link to Wikipedia. The information they provided was on all the counties in Oregon as well as rankings. wolfram|alpha was faster in the sense that the answer was not in a link but there wasn't as much information with this query. i used this query:
  • average income per capita oregon
answer: $20,940

10. What is the Morse code for your first name?
The fastest result was most definitely from wolfram|alpha on this one. Google's results were nowhere near as good for this. I used the following query:
  • morse code forrest
answer:
*  *  --  *  F 
| -- -- -- O
| * -- * R
| * -- * R
| * E
| * * * S
| -- T

This assignment has shown me the wonderful capabilities of wofram|alpha. Before this I had not used the site and was unaware that a site existed that provided these kinds of results for searching. It is very useful for many applications and types of information and I will most definitely use it a lot more.

Search Engines

Entering search terms provided slightly different results on the following sights:
term: uss yorktown nt
The first 3 results were:
google.com - 1. wired.com 2. wikipedia.org 3. abtacles.com
bing.com - 1. wired.com 2. wikipedia.org 3. greenspun.com
baidu.com - 1. tvtrip.tw 2. wikipedia.org 3. wired.com
google.cn - 1. wired.com 2. wikipedia.org 3. coneslayer.org
For this search term the results were more or less the same seeing as the first 3 all had both wikipedia.org and wired.com.

term: google china censorship
This search term was more interesting in terms of the variance. On baidu.com the results were all from sources other than what appeared on google.com, bing.com and google.cn. Interestingly on google.cn the first result was just www.google.cn whereas on google.com the first 3 results were news articles talking about google stopping it's censorship on it's chinese site.

term: Tiananmen Square
This search term shows the obvious censorship by the Chinese. On both google.com and bing.com the first results are about the 1989 protests and massacre at Tiananmen Square as well as images and videos. There are also a few informational links about the square and to images and a virtual tour. However on both baidu.com and google.cn there are no informational results about the 1989 protests, only some images of it on google.cn and the links are to information, events or things of that nature.

term: Taiwan independence
Though I thought this term would also provide different results on the search engines it surprisingly did no bring a lot of variance. Both baidu.com and google.cn seemed to provide more links to Taiwanese sites whereas google.com and bing.com provided more links to U.S. sites. The articles in all the links though were informational about the Taiwanese movement for independence from China. The difference seems to be in the source of the information with this search term.