Ever worry that a student’s idea of research amounts to looking up an obviously relevant Wikipedia article without digging any deeper? If so, Alexander Wissner-Gross has some software for you.
Mr. Wissner-Gross, a doctoral student in physics at Harvard University, has developed a program with which professors can scan a Wikipedia article and automatically generate a list of other entries from the encyclopedia that might be worth checking out. The tool uses an algorithm similar to the one employed by Google: It determines the usefulness of articles by measuring the number of other articles linking to it and the popularity of those “neighbor” entries, according to New Scientist. —Brock Read
