By Alan
The latest hot technology news surrounds the launch of the "knowledge calculation engine" called WolframAlpha. 
This is the invention of one of a true problem solving genius who has spent nearly 15 years working in the middle of the night (to avoid interruptions) trying to determine a new way of figuring out the universe with simple equations. See the Wired article by Steven Levy called, The Man Who Cracked The Code to Everything."
Wolfram Alpha differs from regular search engines like Google or Yahoo, which attempt to return web pages that contain the words you are searching for. Wikipedia attempts to have summarized sentences surrounding some topic. WolframAlpha tries to interpret and answer questions with facts and answers. You can do specific things like, "Where is Washington, DC" and you will get a map of North America with a spot showing the location of that city. However, if you go more general, like "Washington, DC", and you'll be given a rich set of facts showing the population, location, local time, current weather, elevation above sea level, and it's location related to other cities.
You can do equation solving: "2+2" yields the expected result of "4", but it also expresses it as the word "four" and shows 4 spots as a visual indicator. You can do series solving "1, 2, 3, 5, 8, ..." and it will plot out the answers and give possible functions that generate the series. Calculus, Trigonometry , Algebra, Geometry, (too much to list!). Math Homework will never be the same! You can do statistics, social numbers, astronomy, music. Type in a chemical formula C_9H_13_NO_3, and you will get the name and 3d structure of adrenaline. Type in a DNA sequence "ggaaccttatcaccac" and you get the human chromosome that contains the sequence and the amino acids surrounding it.
However, the excitement is really about the ways that the engine tries to give you information that it thinks you might need. When you type in banana, you don't get pictures of a banana tree plant, you get the nutrition information by default. You can then jump to pages about banana species, banana color, or a banana language in Chad that has about 200,000 people that speak it.
Compare the salary of a school bus driver versus a journalist and you probably won't be surprised. Compare salary of school bus drivers to city bus drives, and you might learn something.
What does this mean for the family? Well, just in the way that Google, and Wikipedia changed the landscape of research and homework, WolframAlpha has the possibility to change how problems get solved. Parents might jump to the conclusion that WolframAlpha should be forbidden during homework. However, in the same ways that good elementary math teachers forbid calculators in early math classes, and college math teachers allow calculators in advanced classes, this should be considered a tool to aid in learning once it has been mastered, rather than to replace learning.
Too many students also forget that good teachers have access to all of these tools, too. This means there are more tools for figuring out plagiarism, alternate solutions, and availability of test answers.
We shouldn't underestimate the impact of this launch. While it has it's limitations (the day after launching, it was swamped with requests), it is quite impressive. We're entering a new age, when the web becomes a problem solver, not just a display of lists.