Wednesday, June 1, 2016

Search Challenge (6/1/16): How much background knowledge should you have?

There are some things you just have to know... 

... or should be able to just figure out off the top of your head.  A great question to think about is this: What should those basic pieces of background knowledge be?  

This week's Challenge might not be the ultimate Challenge, but it IS a test of things I think everyone should know, or more importantly, to be able to reason about quickly and easily. 

The Pre-Challenge:  

To get things going, here's a LINK to a Pre-Challenge test.  If you would, please take this BEFORE you work on the Challenges below.  (You won't get a grade--this is just for us to get a sense of what people know as part of their background knowledge.)  I'll report back next week with the (anonymized!) results.  

-- pause while you go off to do the quiz -- 


Now that you're back from the Pre-Challenge test, let's restate the Challenge questions.  You can now go ahead and do your SearchResearch for the Challenges that you didn't know off the top of your head...   

1.  Based on what you know about the Earth and its movement around the Sun, approximately how far does the Earth travel around the Sun in one day?  (In miles or kilometers.) 

For extra credit: About what angle does it traverse?  (In degrees.)  You should be able to figure the angle without looking up anything!





2.  At home I have a Wifi system that's running at 10 Mbps in the upload direction. Ignoring all other sources of delays, how long should it take for me to upload a 2 Gigabyte file?  

3.  Consider these former colonial countries:  Brazil, Canada, Mexico.  Which country got its independence first?  Which was second?  Which was third? 

4.  Could George Washington (the first President of the United States, and a great music lover) have heard the music of Joseph Haydn?  


With a quick search you can answer these questions fairly easily.  The Challenge for this week is how much do you know without Google?  In my answer next week, I'll explain the rationale behind each of these questions, and why I believe that part of what makes a SearchResearcher great is that you already have a big background base of knowledge.  

I'm looking forward to your answers! 

Search on! 


12 comments:

  1. Google Search the following

    1. [ distance traveled by earth in one day ] Didn't necessarily get it but got enough information to then search [ 67,000*24 ]

    2. [ file upload calculator ] Several tools came up. Used a few with 0% overhead to get an average time.

    3. Search each one and look at the date [ brazil independence ] [ Canada independence ] [ mexico independence ]

    4. [ "joseph haydn" "George Washington" ] more searching necessary to see if Haydn's music traveled over hear during Washington's lifetime.

    The beginning of the challenge had me a little confused thinking I needed background knowledge on the topics of the questions. In actuality, I needed a background knowledge of search to ask questions about the subjects to get me to the answers.

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    Replies
    1. Fred, Haydn's music would have to travel over to 'hear' as you cleverly put it. haha jon Tu

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    2. Whoops! Might be a freudian slip. Thanks for catching that jon.

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  2. The first one is 2Pir^2/365. I remembered that the distance to the Sun is 150,000,000 km. You just have to do the math.

    For the second I also remembered that a byte is 8 bits. I simplified a Gigabyte into a billion bytes, which it is not, it is more.

    Haydn was a an 18th century composer and GW could have heard of him.

    From the Eastern horizon to the West horizon is 180 degrees. The sun has longer and shorter paths throughout the year but the vernal equinox is good enough.

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  3. Oh, I think that I put in 2Pir^2 in my previous answer. It's obviously just 2Pir for the circumference of a circular orbit. I did do it right on the quiz, Don't know why I put in the square in my previous message.

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  4. Good day, Dr. Russell and everyone.

    Super interesting and I have to say that for Q1 and Q4 have no idea. In Q3 had no idea about Canada. So that row was my last.

    Now SearchReSearching:

    Q1. [Earth travels around the Sun per day]

    EARTH’S ORBIT AROUND THE SUN

    Sun: By the Numbers

    For Q1.1 about degrees.

    [earth sun angle degrees]

    Questions about the path of the Sun across the sky

    Earth-Sun Geometry

    SunEarthTools

    For Q2 Searched for a tool [upload time 2Gb at Mbps]
    File Transfer Time - Data Transfer Speed Calculator

    For Q 3

    [mexico canada brazil independence] in Wolframalpha as Dr. Russell taught us.

    Answer

    For Q4

    [joseph haydn]

    Born: March 31, 1732, Rohrau, Austria
    Died: May 31, 1809, Vienna, Austria

    [george washington]

    Born: February 22, 1732, Westmoreland County, Virginia, United States
    Died: December 14, 1799, Mount Vernon, Virginia, United States

    [george washington around(3) joseph haydn]

    Music from the Eras of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln

    [george washington heard joseph haydn] I know this query is not good because I am answering my question in the question. However, found this The First of Men: A Life of George Washington By John E. Ferling


    Answers

    1. Based on what you know about the Earth and its movement around the Sun, approximately how far does the Earth travel around the Sun in one day? (In miles or kilometers.)
    A: 1.598 million miles per day average


    2. At home I have a Wifi system that's running at 10 Mbps in the upload direction. Ignoring all other sources of delays, how long should it take for me to upload a 2 Gigabyte file?

    A: 28 Minutes 37.99 Seconds

    3. Consider these former colonial countries: Brazil, Canada, Mexico. Which country got its independence first? Which was second? Which was third?
    A: Mexico 1, Brazil 2 and Canada 3

    4. Could George Washington (the first President of the United States, and a great music lover) have heard the music of Joseph Haydn?
    Yes, George Washington heard Joseph Haydn

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  5. Deb and Anne here - Q1 neither of us had any idea so we did a search and found this answer on physlink.com "The first and simple answer is found by calculating the circumference of the Earth's orbit around the sun and dividing by the number of days in a year.
    The average distance from the sun to the Earth is 150 million kilometers or 93.2 million miles.
    Multiplying by 2 Pi gives 585.6 million miles for the circumference. Dividing this by 365.25 days/year gives 1.603 million miles per day. The actual average orbital velocity is closer to 18.5 miles/second, accounting for the fact that the orbit is slightly elliptical. Using this value gives a more accurate 1.598 million miles per day average." We will try to verify this info if we have more time.
    Q3- To find the dates of independence for each of the countries we just put in the name of the country and date of independence in google. The answers are Brazil 9/7/1822; Canada 7/1/1867 and Mexico 9/27/1821 This was a pretty straightforward search.
    Q4. -Anne was a music major in college so I expected she'd know the answer and I took an educated guess. We were both right and turns out that Anne didn't know the exact dates of Haydn's birth and death but had enough of an idea to figure out that Washington must have heard his music. By looking at their birth dates and death dates we were able to confirm that they were contemporaries. So entirely plausible that Washington heard his music. And this site about Mount Vernon indicates that Martha Washington's granddaughter actually practices some of Haydn's music when she played the piano http://www.mountvernon.org/digital-encyclopedia/article/music/ so Washington would have heard her playing.

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  6. Q1. My background knowledge: sunlight takes 8 seconds to reach the Earth; light travels at 300,000 km/s; the Earth completes an orbit around the Sun in 365 days; circumference = 2 pi r. After calculating this in my head, I got the answer to be something like 40 thousand kilometers. This was much shorter than I expected, so I recalculated it twice, always getting the same result. I ended up accepting this as the answer. When, later, I saw two answers claiming it to be close to 1.6 million miles, I suddenly realized that my problem was that sunlight takes minutes, not seconds, to reach us. I had known that, once...
    In order to check this out I tried the sentence [ How long does the Earth travel in a day? ] in DuckDuckGo, WolframAlpha and Google Search. The latter gave by far the most relevant and reliable results. Here's the snippet for the first result:
    "How many miles does the Earth travel in space each day?
    The average distance from the sun to the Earth is 150 million kilometers or 93.2 million miles. Multiplying by 2 Pi gives 585.6 million miles for the circumference. Dividing this by 365.25 days/year gives 1.603 million miles per day."

    Q2. My background knowledge: 1 Mbps = 1 million bits per second; 1 byte = 8 bits; 1 GB = 1 billion bytes (discarding the 1,024 quirk for both Mbps and GB). From then on, I did the calculations in my head and got the answer to be around 30 minutes. This seemed reasonable and in line with my experience.
    In order to check this, I looked for a [ download time calculator ]. The first result is plainly called Download Time and it's fairly simple to use. Answer: 00:28:37

    Q3. History has always been one of the subjects I am unfortunately the most ignorant about. Not very educated guesses I made: Brazil was independent no more than 2 centuries after being "discovered" by Portuguese sailor Cabral around 1500; Mexico and Texas were together until very late in the 19th century. If I remember correctly, my answer was totally wrong. The chance of getting at least one of the countries ranked correctly is 2/3 if I had answered randomly...
    In order to check this, I searched a [ list of countries by independence date ]. Google featured snippet block pointed me to Wikipedia's List of sovereign states by date of formation, which has very detailed and informative answers.

    Q4. My background knowledge: George Washington was one of the founders of the USA, or at least one of its first Presidents - maybe the first; the USA's independence was around 1775; Haydn was a contemporary of Mozart but lived much longer (both before and after); Mozart died near the end of the 18th century and lived for 33 years or so; Thomas Jefferson was a contemporary of Washington; Jefferson traveled extensively to Europe and was knowledgeable of everything about European culture, including music; classical musicians traveled to the European colonies. My guess was then that Haydn's music was composed and performed both before and during Washington's life. Without a search, I can't be certain that Washington actually heard Haydn but I guess it as very likely.
    In order to check this, I searched [ did george washington like music ]. The first result is the definitive positive answer: the page Music at George Washington's Mount Vernon website.

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  7. I think the only one I got right in the pretest was the upload speed question. all the others were easy to find with a quick search.

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  8. 1 distance in a day == nailed it [I think] Used piD/365.24
    2 gmPBS == got lost
    3 Interdependence == nailed it
    4 Last one == guessed and missed

    This is a very clever set up. jon tU

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  9. maybe you are interested in a "German view" of your question: Could George Washington (the first President of the United States, and a great music lover) have heard the music of Joseph Haydn?
    Haydn is the composer of our national anthem, he is famous in Germany. I had a picture of him in my mind and he looked like George Washington (the white wig!). Same fashion = same time!?
    But this seems to be too easy.

    I know that the text of our anthem was written by Hoffmann von Fallersleben in the middle of the 19. century - at around the same time as the March Revolution of 1948/49. In fact: it was 1841. I believed, that melody and text are composed simultaneously.
    The only year I associate with George Washington is 1776. So 1841 is too late for George Washington.

    But I was wrong. The melody is older. It is the Emperor's Hymn from 1799.
    Haydn: 1732 - 1809
    Washington: 1732 - 1799
    Washington could have heard Haydn's music.

    Too much information... I read about that effect in a book of Rolf Dobell: The Art of Thinking Clearly
    Chapter: If You Have an Enemy, Give Him Information: Information Bias

    s. http://meaningring.com/2016/04/30/information-bias-by-rolf-dobelli/

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  10. Q1: easy enough to Google the question, and find out from the Astro Society that that the path of Earth's orbit is about 970m km, so a quick bit of calculation shows the Earth travels about 2.6m km a day https://astrosociety.org/edu/publications/tnl/71/howfast.html
    This was one I had NO IDEA on when answering the pre-test.
    Interesting that Wikipedia seems to give a significantly different figure: 940m km

    I'm assuming it travels a little less that 1 degree a day (360 degrees for a full revolution, 365 days in a year)

    Q2: I could do this one on background knowledge (the only tricky bit is just knowing the bits/bytes aspect). I googled "online transfer time" and found this http://techinternets.com/copy_calc?do which yielded a time of 30min 2sec, which is roughly what I back of enveloped.

    Q3: I guessed Brazil, Mexico, Canada for independence order in the pre-test. Googling "brazil independence" etc. I got 1822/25, 1821, and 1867, so it should be Mexico, Brazil, Canada.

    Q4: Background knowledge - I knew that Haydn was roughly contemporary with Washington. But it's actually a tricky and interesting question - just because they were contemporaries and Haydn's work was written and performed during Washington's lifetime doesn't mean it was performed where Washington could hear it. Bach's cello suites were composed before Washington was born - 1717-23 - but it's almost inconceivable that Washington could have heard them, given their performance history. But reviewing the Wikipedia entry for Hayden it appears that he was very popular and widely performed in London during the 1790s, and it seems exceedingly unlikely that scores wouldn't have made it across the Atlantic and been performed where Washington could hear them.

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