Technology Topics (#8)

A few interesting things....

Digital Sound frontiers: A recent New Yorker article (Aug 17) talks about expanding options for high quality music downloads on the web, including sites like HDtracks and Pristine Classical, as well as websites of music organizations that maintain their own labels (e.g. Boston Symphony). If you want better sound quality than the highly compressed MP3 format, you have your choice of "lossless" files (nothing is lost from the CD) and versions that exceed the CD standard. Both the quality and the wide range of music - including historical recordings which are remastered and offered in a variety of downloadable formats - seem remarkable. I checked several of the download sites out, and they seem easy to use. MP3 format is an option if you want to use an MP3 device, but the sound can be thin, so the higher quality formats are very appealing.

Search Engines that analyze or calculate: Going beyond the hit list, a couple of recent search engines purport to provide answers and summaries.
Google Squared (available in Google labs) creates tables with the info compiled from a search; it analyzes the retrieved pages, identifies common elements, and builds a table on the fly. Go to Google.com/squared and enter a query that will retrieve a number of similar things -- organic farms in Connecticut, e.g., or arctic explorers or women CEOs. Any of these will generate a table with images. You can add or delete rows or columns to the table; save it through your google account, and export to Excel.
While analysis and charting has been available in some subscription scientific databases for some time, this is a nice feature for a more general search engine. (saw this in Mary Ellen Bates's monthly InfoTip; http://www.batesinfo.com/) .
Wolfram is another search tool I've looked at recently. Launched in May, it's billed as the "world's first computational knowledge engine". It uses mathematical algorithms and supposedly supports finding answers in a wide range of areas - socioceconomic data; statistics; health and medicine; places and geography; science and mathematics. It will be interesting to explore.