1
The 2012 Academy Awards will be broadcast this Sunday, and once again Wolfram|Alpha can help you settle all sorts of Oscar-related arguments, generate some cool trivia questions for your Oscar-night party, and do a few fun new tricks you probably didn’t know about.
Consider the list of 2012 best picture nominations, for example. Even among the front-runners for this year’s statuette, there’s a pretty big spread in general popularity and box office performance. How big? Ask Wolfram|Alpha to compare box office for Moneyball, Hugo, The Artist, and The Help, and you can see that The Help has earned more than twice as much as Moneyball and more than 6 times as much as The Artist (which has 10 nominations this year, versus 4 for The Help). More »
3
Over the past few weeks, we’ve highlighted a ton of different ways that Wolfram|Alpha can help you explore and analyze NFL statistics. Neither team has a perfect record at stake in this weekend’s Giants-Patriots Super Bowl, but it still promises to be a tough contest and a typically over-the-top cultural experience—so in our final blog post of the 2011 NFL season, we’d like to suggest a few more useful stat queries, as well as some more unusual ways to use Wolfram|Alpha on Super Bowl Sunday.
First, the stats. The Giants won their regular season clash with the Patriots this year, and with the new game-level history plots we just added to team and player results, you can clearly see that the Giants’ defense put the pressure on Tom Brady that week, holding his passer rating to its lowest point of the season:
3
Since Wolfram|Alpha launched in 2009, we’ve often said that its knowledge base covers what you’d find in a pretty good reference library—and many of the new features we’ve highlighted over the past two and a half years have indeed been very reference-y: global agriculture data, public school statistics, species information, and tons of other socioeconomic, scientific, and mathematical content. Of course, Wolfram|Alpha has always been much more than a mere repository of reference data: we’ve made it possible for people to explore, compare, compute, and interact with all that data in unprecedented ways. More »
25
At one time or another, we’ve all looked at a jet flying high overhead and thought “I wonder where they’re headed?” Actually answering that question probably seemed impossible before—but if you’re a user in the United States, Wolfram|Alpha can now help you answer that question and many more interesting queries about commercial and other flights.
Try the simple query “flights overhead” and you’ll get information on aircraft that should be visible to you, assuming a clear sky and unobstructed view. If you’re on a location-aware mobile device, the results should be based on your precise latitude and longitude—otherwise, Wolfram|Alpha will use the best available location information from your browser. Also note that hovering over an individual plane in the sky map will produce a tooltip with the airline and flight number:
3
We’ve blogged before about Wolfram|Alpha’s powerful relocation calculator, which has turned out to be one of our more popular—and practical—features. Our last round of enhancements added information about broad topics like population, home sale prices, unemployment rates, and more; now we’ve added more detail to the core cost-of-living categories, so you can see how prices of specific retail goods and services differ among US cities and metropolitan areas. More »
3
We’ve blogged before about international food consumption data in Wolfram|Alpha, and queries about this data have proved to be a favorite among our users, with good reason: it’s fascinating to explore the world’s food supply and to visualize trends in consumption. In an attempt to fill in a more complete picture of global agricultural trends, we’ve added more data from the FAO—this time covering food production, harvest, and crop yields around the world. More »
3
Earlier this year, we added data on all 18,000+ US public school districts to Wolfram|Alpha, allowing you to analyze student and teacher populations and detailed revenue and expenditure data for individual districts or across all the districts in a given city or county. We had a terrific response to this—lots of people wrote in to tell us they learned some useful information about their own districts and others across the country. And virtually all of those people ended their messages with “But when will you have information about individual schools?”
We’re happy to announce that Wolfram|Alpha now has data on nearly 108,000 public schools in the United States, which is based on 2009-10 school year data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). So if you go back and try the first input from our earlier post on school districts, you’ll notice that the result looks quite different—the result for “Seattle public schools” now defaults to a summary of data on individual schools rather than the district itself (which is still available by clicking “Use the input as a US school district instead”).
4
We’ve highlighted data from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators (WDI) database in previous blog posts about employment and business statistics. As many of our users head back to school, it seems like the right time to show off some additional World Bank statistics about education. Wolfram|Alpha can now answer a broad range of simple questions about student and teacher populations in various countries, such as:
- How many high school students are there in Djibouti? »
- How many grade school teachers are there in Africa? »
- High school student/teacher ratio in Japan vs. South Korea »
You can also ask questions about student performance and progression in a given country or between multiple countries:
1
A few weeks ago, we pointed out some new additions to Wolfram|Alpha from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators database, primarily focused on labor and employment around the world. We’ve also incorporated data about doing business in most countries, collected by a World Bank project called, appropriately, “Doing Business”.
This data covers a wide range of issues, including import/export costs, business tax rates, and the time required to complete various business-related activities. Try the following examples to get a better sense of the breadth of this dataset:
- Export costs in Brazil vs. Argentina »
- New businesses registered in Japan vs. India »
- Credit bureau coverage in Asia »
- Europe total business tax rate »
- How much does it cost to start a business in India, Mexico, Singapore »
- Time required to start a business »
Wolfram|Alpha can also rank countries according to a number of business-related indices. Ask about the ease of doing business in Eurozone countries, for example, and you’ll see that Ireland and Greece occupy the ends of this spectrum. In this case, a higher index score indicates a regulatory environment that is generally unfriendly to business operation; in light of Greece’s recent economic woes, it should come as no surprise to see that country at the bottom of the list. (Note that for all the properties in this dataset, you can click the “Definition” button in the input interpretation or in other pods to get more details on each property.)
2
New York City. Los Angeles. Chicago. Each of these cities is renowned for a diverse array of cultural, entertainment, culinary, and other experiences—as well as for legendary traffic delays. But just how bad do native commuters have it? And if you drive to work in a different city, how does your commute stack up? Wolfram|Alpha can’t yet guide you through the traffic, but it can visualize and compare statistics about traffic and urban transportation in more than 100 US urban areas, with data from the Texas Transportation Institute’s Urban Mobility Report.
Ask Wolfram|Alpha about traffic in NYC, LA, and Chicago, for example, to see how they compare:
