What I'm trying to figure out is, how to I determine whether a source I'm looking at is telling the truth? For an example, let's take this page from Metamed: http://www.metamed.com/vital-facts-and-statistics
At first glance, I see some obvious things I ought to consider. It often gives numbers for how many die in hospitals/year, but for my purposes I ought to interpret it in light of how many hospitals are in the US, as well as how many patients are in each hospital. I also notice that as they are trying to promote their site, they probably selected the data that would best serve that purpose.
So where do I go from here? Evaluating each source they reference seems like a waste of time. I do not think it would be wrong to trust that they are not actively lying to me. But how do I move from here to an accurate picture of general doctor competence?
But sounds totally awesome. Especially if it can be created once and used over and over for different applications.
Well, my naive first thought was to abuse the opencyc engine for a while so it starts getting good rough guesses of which particular mathematical concepts and quantities and sets are being referred to in a given sentence, and plug it either directly or by mass download and conversion into various data sources like WolframAlpha or international health / crime / population / economics databases or various government services.
But that still means doing math (doing math with linguistics) tons and tons of programming to even get a working prototype that unders... (read more)