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How to cook brown rice in a crockpot - Wolfram|Alpha

Back in March, when news of the imminent launch of the Wolfram Alpha "computational knowledge engine" first broke, I blogged, Hot or hype? Wolfram Alpha promises answers, not search results. Few had seen or tried out the new tool, which offers answers vetted by experts, not merely Web pages about the question.

I wondered at the time, since it promised a cooking section, whether it could tell me how to cook brown rice in a crockpot -- the recipes Google turned up contained reader feedback that they didn't work.

Longtime blogger and tech-book author Shelley Powers and I riffed about this a bit back then.

Wolfram Alpha officially launched Monday and, as the screenshot shows, it does not know how to cook brown rice. What it does know about Food is how many calories and carbs are in 10 M&Ms and similar quantifiable data.

Shelley also put Wolfram to the test, asking it "What is rdf" (Resource Description Framework, a way to describe Web data rather than simply format it, as html does.) Shelley literally wrote the book about this technology.

If my query sought knowledge outside Wolfram Alpha's natural sphere, Shelley's should have landed squarely on target. It didn't: Wolfram Alpha: What is RDF?.

It delivered stock prices for RDF Group (RFG), an English computer services company as its single definitive answer. What the...?

Google, of course, delivered many pages containing "What is RDF."

There may be circumstances in which Wolfram Alpha alone has an accessible answer. I haven't played with it enough yet to know when to seek an answer there, what its borders are.

Try it yourself: Wolfram Alpha Computational Knowledge Engine.

Related: More rumble towards the "semantic Web." Yahoo wants to objectify search at CNet.

The company held a "Search Chalk Talk" here Tuesday to discuss the state of Yahoo's search efforts, a renewed priority under new CEO Carol Bartz. There were a few tidbits of news--such as the one-year anniversary of Yahoo's SearchMonkey project--but the talk really served as a further reminder that Yahoo's future vision of search revolves around structured data.

Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Labs and Yahoo Search Strategy, made approximately 489 references (give or take) to Yahoo's desire to see the Web as objects, rather than documents. This is something it has been working on for quite some time with the SearchMonkey project, which aims to get Web publishers to use descriptive tags on their pages in order to let Yahoo Search understand exactly what is meant by the content on those pages....

 Tags  Wolfram Alpha

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2 Comments

joyce said:

You want to cook brown rice in a crockpot? Buy Uncle Ben's Ready Rice. 90 seconds in the microwave, and you're done. Total preparation time, 5 seconds to cut the top off the package.

Link | May 21, 2009 3:26 PM
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Louie said:

At about $2.39 for 8.8 oz., Ready Rice is beyond my budget. Rice is supposed to be cheap!

Bring on the crockpot recipe!

Link | May 22, 2009 9:18 AM
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