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Web Scraping with the Wolfram Language, Part 1: Importing and Interpreting

Do you want to do more with data available on the web? Meaningful data exploration requires computation—and the Wolfram Language is well suited to the tasks of acquiring and organizing data. I'll walk through the process of importing information from a webpage into a Wolfram Notebook and extracting specific parts for basic computation. Throughout this post, I'll be referring to this website hosted by the National Weather Service, which gives 7-day forecasts for locations in the western US:
Brian Wood, Technical Communications & Outreach Manager
Current Events & History

Running the Numbers with the Illinois Marathon Viewer

I love to run. A lot. And many of my coworkers do too. You can find us everywhere, and all the time: on roads, in parks, on hills and mountains, and even running up and down parking decks, a flat lander's version of hills. And if there is a marathon to be run, we'll be there as well. With all of the internal interest in running marathons, Wolfram Research created this Marathon Viewer as a sponsorship project for the Christie Clinic Illinois Marathon. Here are four of us, shown as dots, participating in the 2017 Illinois Marathon: How did the above animation and the in-depth look at our performance come about? Read on to find out.
Eila Stiegler, Quality Analysis Manager, Wolfram|Alpha Quality Analysis Jeff Bryant, Research Programmer, Wolfram|Alpha Scientific Content
Best of Blog

Finding X in Espresso: Adventures in Computational Lexicology

When Does a Word Become a Word?

"A shot of expresso, please." "You mean 'espresso,' don't you?" A baffled customer, a smug barista---media is abuzz with one version or another of this story. But the real question is not whether "expresso" is a correct spelling, but rather how spellings evolve and enter dictionaries. Lexicographers do not directly decide that; the data does. Long and frequent usage may qualify a word for endorsement. Moreover, I believe the emergent proliferation of computational approaches can help to form an even deeper insight into the language. The tale of expresso is a thriller from a computational perspective.
Vitaliy Kaurov, Director of Community Engagement
Best of Blog

Analyzing Social Networks of Colonial Boston Revolutionaries with the Wolfram Language

As the Fourth of July approaches, many in America will celebrate 241 years since the founders of the United States of America signed the Declaration of Independence, their very own disruptive, revolutionary startup. Prior to independence, colonists would celebrate the birth of the king. However, after the Revolutionary War broke out in April of 1775, some colonists began holding mock funerals of King George III. Additionally, bonfires, celebratory cannon and musket fire and parades were common, along with public readings of the Declaration of Independence. There was also rum. Today, we often celebrate with BBQ, fireworks and a host of other festivities. As an aspiring data nerd and a sociologist, I thought I would use the Wolfram Language to explore the Declaration of Independence using some basic natural language processing. Using metadata, I'll also explore a political network of colonists with particular attention paid to Paul Revere, using built-in Wolfram Language functions and network science to uncover some hidden truths about colonial Boston and its key players leading up to the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Swede White, Public Relations Manager
Best of Blog

Create a Tracker to Analyze Gas Mileage Using Wolfram Tech

When I first started driving in high school, I had to pay for my own gas. Since I was also saving for college, I had to be careful about my spending, so I started manually tracking how much I was paying for gas in a spreadsheet and calculating how much gas I was using. Whenever I filled my tank, I kept the receipts and wrote down how many miles I'd traveled and how many gallons I'd used. Every few weeks, I would manually enter all of this information into the spreadsheet and plot out the costs and the amount of fuel I had used. This process helped me both visualize how much money I was spending on fuel and manage my budget. Once I got to college, however, I got a more fuel-efficient car and my schedule got a lot busier, so I didn't have the time to track my fuel consumption like this anymore. Now I work at Wolfram Research and I'm still really busy, but the cool thing is that I can use our company technology to more easily accomplish my automotive assessments.
Andrew Steinacher, Lead Developer, Wolfram|Alpha Scientific Content
Computation & Analysis

Brain, Neurons, Cognition: Computational Neuroscience

As the next phase of Wolfram Research's endeavor to make biology computable, we are happy to announce the recent release of neuroscience-related content. The most central part of the human nervous system is the brain. It contains roughly 100 billion neurons that act together to process information, subdivided functionally and structurally into areas specialized for certain tasks. The brain's anatomy, the characteristics of neurons and cognitive maps are used to represent some key aspects of the functional organization and processing abilities of our nervous system. Our new neuroscience content will give you a sneak peek into the amazing world of neuroscience with some facts about brains, neurons and cognition.
Keiko Hirayama, Wolfram|Alpha Developer, Wolfram|Alpha Scientific Content
Education & Academic

New Books on Applications of the Wolfram Language

We're always excited to see new books that illustrate applications of Wolfram technology in a wide range of fields. Below is another set of recently published books using the Wolfram Language to explore computational thinking. From André Dauphiné's outstanding geographical studies of our planet to Romano and Caveliere's work on the geometric optics that help us study the stars, we find a variety of fields served by Wolfram technology.
Michael Gammon, Blog Administrator, Document & Media Systems
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