True Knowledge - Blog

Medical and Employment Knowledge

Our excursions into the Dark Web have pulled in some information about medical conditions and occupations.

Jobs data

This information contains details of how much people earn for jobs in different places, and how many of them there are.  Examples of questions now answered are:

• How much does a civil engineer earn in Decatur? 
• Are avionics technicians well paid?
• How many skin care specialists are there in Texas?
• How much money do managers make?
• Does a dental laboratory technician earn more than a parking lot attendant?    
• Does a financial analyst earn more in Ohio or New Mexico?

Medical data

This information covers diseases, symptoms and medicine.  Here's some of the questions that use the data:

Disease questions:

• Can mumps cause optic neuritis? 
• What type of disease is sickle cell trait?
• What are the risk factors for habitual abortion?

Drug questions:

• What is contraindicated with aspirin?
• Does probenecid interact with penicillin?
• What is contraindicated by pregnancy?
• What are the side effects of Diazepam?  

Disclaimer - None of our medical questions should be taken as medical advice.

new VP Engineering at True Knowledge

True Knowledge is delighted to announce that, starting today, Simon Weaver is joining the team as Vice President of Engineering. Simon comes to us by way of Bing in the US where he spent the last three years working on large scale distributed computing problems and most recently was responsible for the design and selection of the infrastructure stack for the Yahoo! traffic acquisition.

Prior to joining Bing, Simon spent three years in Silicon Valley, where he was a member of the launch team for Microsoft’s first foray into cloud storage later becoming part of Windows Azure. He was also a member of the team responsible for Hotmail’s response to Gmail. Earlier in his career he worked for MSN and was also part of the totaljobs.com launch team (which is now the largest recruitment website in the UK).

Simon will take overall ownership of our engineering effort and will be responsible for managing and growing our engineering capability. Simon himself will report directly to William Tunstall-Pedoe and will work with him and the rest of the management team to deliver on the ambitious plans we have for our platform and products.

Simon brings considerable engineering and management experience to True Knowledge and, in his own words, “can’t wait to get started on scaling the system to a trillion facts.”

Outside work, his main attention is his eight month old daughter. When time permits, he enjoys dining out, snowboarding and watching Rugby.

The True Knowledge Profanity Filter

Recently we opened our site to user-added free-text answers.  There's
been a lot of content added - mostly great, but not surprisingly some
has been unsuitable for display.

We experimented with rejecting answers using an off-the-shelf profanity
filter but weren't too impressed with the results.  Some profanities
were being allowed through and the false positives upset our innocent
users.  Answers were being rejected if they were about 'Hellenism',
'assertions' or the answer to Who is Sunday's child?

So we built our own.  It's proved successful to date and having access to our massive ontology has even helped us solve the Scunthorpe Problem.

We'd like to share this service with our API users.  You'll find it useful if your site

• displays comments or adverts from the public
• features messaging between users (particularly minors)
• aggregates third party content
• allows people to choose their own usernames

or anything else involving free text.

You can ask our API to find whether a string is likely to be profane or not simply by running a query like this

query
[string is profane] [applies to] ["assertions about hellenism"]

Sign up to our Query Service API to use this plus all our other query services.  

True Knowledge Search Enhancer now available for Safari

We are excited to announce that the True Knowledge Search Enhancer browser plugin is now available for Safari. This is in addition to our existing plugins for Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer.

The True Knowledge browser plugin automatically inserts a direct answer to your search query above the search results in Google, Bing, Ask.com and Yahoo. If we cannot provide an answer to your question however it will do nothing so as to not distract you from the traditional search results.

Download the Safari search-enhancer plugin here.

You can also download our plugins for Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer.

The screenshots below show the extension in action in Safari:

 

New Questions

True Knowledge's question answering capabilities are continuously expanding and the last few weeks have been no exception. Here are some examples of questions that have recently started to be answered:

Weight control

• What is my BMI if I'm 5 foot 10 inches and 12 stone?
• What is normal weight for someone 5 foot 6 inches tall? 
• What's a normal weight for a 7 year old 4 foot tall girl?

Currency conversion

• What is $36.99 in English money?
• What was 20 GBP in Euros on 25/12/2007?

Personal names

• What is Barack Obama's middle name?
  
• Bono's surname 

Biographies

• How old is Isaac Newton?
• Obituary of Florence Nightingale  

Timezones

• Time difference between South Africa and New York 
• When it's 5pm EDT, what time is it in Delhi?

Weather in large areas

• Weather in Ohio
• 5 day forecast for southern Asia