Friday, June 28, 2019

A little hiccup before the answer to... How much DO we know about history / math / geography?


It's been a busy week... 

... for me, and I just couldn't quite get the time to write up the answer to this week's Challenge.  

On the other hand, it's been a very fun week.  I was at a small conference (the Human Computer Interaction Consortium) near Watsonville, CA.  (You could look it up!) But I had to suffer with a conference venue that looked largely like this:  



I know, it's a tough life... but someone has to do the research!  And, in truth, these small conferences are the best possible venue for professional communication. 


But between attending the conference (not on the beach, but in ordinary-looking conference rooms), holding down my "regular" job, and even more traveling for family reasons, there just wasn't the time.  

I've been thinking about SRS and exploring how to best answer the Challenge... and early next week I'll do a couple of posts on this large and interesting question of "how do we research the level of knowledge of different people" on a given topic!  This is not one of the easier SRS Challenges we've had.  

Keep searching... and I'll be back early next week with my answers and reflections on what makes this kind of question so tricky.  

Search on! 


Monday, June 24, 2019

A free chapter of my new book, "The Joy of Search"


My new book "The Joy of Search" now has a free chapter available!  

(Thanks, MIT Press.) 

If you'd like to try before you buy, you can read a sample chapter and get a great sense for what the rest of the book is like.  

Click here for the free sample chapter of "The Joy of Search."  

Enjoy!  

(And if you've got comments, please leave them below.)  




Wednesday, June 19, 2019

SearchResearch Challenge (6/19/19): How much DO we know about history / math / geography?


It's common to point out that people don't know much about much... 

And it always makes me wonder:  How much DO people know about history, about math, or about geography?  

More importantly, how would you assess "our" level of knowledge?  What does the "public" really know? 

This came up for me the other day when I was chatting with someone who (we discovered) didn't really know where Syria was. Is it near Iraq?  How close is it Turkey? 

That struck me as odd because Syria has been in the news for the past several years as it struggles with an ongoing civil war. Surely they must have seen a map of the country and its position in the Middle East!  And yet, the location somehow didn't stick in their brain.  

How many Americans can describe the Declaration of Independence and what role it played in the US Revolutionary war?
Does it matter if you know what year this document was signed?  (Painting by John Trumbull, 1817-1819) 


Last year, in 2018, I heard a brilliant talk by Roddy Roediger about what our collective memory is for historical events.  Who won World War II?  If you have an interest in education (especially history), it's worth an hour of your time. 

This brings me to this week's SearchResearch Challenge.  What DO we know, and how to we know what we know? 

1.  Can you find a high-quality (that is, very credible) study of how well the citizens of the United States (or your country, if you're from somewhere else) understand (A) history, (B) geography, (C) mathematics?  

In this Challenge I'm hoping to learn some methods for finding reputable resources for assessing broad public knowledge.  Next week we'll discuss some of the SRS methods I use when I try to answer questions like this.   

And more importantly, for our SRS purposes, how does one frame a question like this to a search engine in order to find those resources?  AND... how do you assess the quality of the resources that you find?  

Obviously, asking a few friends a couple of calculus questions isn't a great way to measure the public's knowledge of math.  Doing a man-in-the-street interview of geography questions also probably doesn't work well either--so what would work well?  

In other words, what can one do to make a measurement like this?  How can you tell how much the citizens of your country know?  

Obviously, this kind of Challenge can take an arbitrary amount of time.  But if I can motivate you to spent a few minutes searching for this kind of information, I think you'll get a good sense of the issues involved.  

As always, please let us know how you discovered the sources that you find credible.  

Search on! 




Tuesday, June 18, 2019

A talk in DC at the American Library Association conference (Saturday, June 22, 2019)


For folks in the DC area... 


My "Joy of Search" book tour continues with a stop at the American Library Association (ALA) this coming Saturday, June 22, 2019. 

If you happen to be attending the conference in DC, I'm talking at 10:30AM in room 145A at the DC convention center. (You need to register for the conference...)  

Come find me there! 

(The books are still in production, so I won't have any to sign.  That will be coming soon!) 






(Note that if you can't make this event, don't panic, there will be more. I'll post events as they happen, and even try to organize a Meet-Up or two in the process.  I'll even come back to DC in September.)  


Thursday, June 13, 2019

Answer: Unusual sports?


The odd and unusual are fun to search for!  


As we noticed last week, there are lots of fascinating sporting 
(if you use that term loosely) events in the world, many of which deserve a bit of background research.  

I love these kinds of SearchResearch Challenges because I always learn a few fascinating things along the way.  These slightly whacky events are perfect for a quick SRS lesson.

Let's dive into this Challenge... 



1. As Europe grows increasingly warmer with the passing years, will the long distance ice-skating race that passes through 11 Dutch towns still be able to be held?  What's that event called?  When was it last held (and who won)?  

Like many of you, I did the obvious search: 

     [ ice skating race 11 Dutch towns ] 

and found a number of sources that told me this is the Elfstedentocht a nearly 200 km ice skating tour of 11 towns in the Netherlands.  The race goes on canals, rivers, and lakes that are frozen over.  The problem, of course, is that the canals don't freeze sufficiently every year.   (I found the official site in Holland by doing [ elfstedentocht site:.nl ] limiting the search to just websites in the Netherlands.)

It was last held on January 4, 1997, [1]  and the prospects for future events is fairly grim. An article in the Washington Post comments that "... the Netherlands is no longer a romantic wintry wonderland, and there hasn’t been an Elfstedentocht since 1997, marking the longest drought ever between races. Climate change has endangered the race and is slowly dousing hopes across the province.  ...A lot of people really think that there will never be another one.” [2]    "In the past century, the average annual temperature in the Netherlands has increased by about 3 1/2 degrees, according to Peter Kuipers Munneke, a researcher and polar meteorologist at Utrecht University. He says in recent decades winters have warmed more than the other seasons, thanks in part to westerly winds coming over the North Sea."  [2]  

Yeah.  Here's a chart from that article that makes the point clearly. 



Sigh.  Don't hold your breath waiting for the next elfstedentocht



2.  Several of us in the discussion were former collegiate volleyball players, but since it was a very international evening, other folks started to tell us about different versions of volleyball that are played with feet alone.  Is this for real?  How could you bump/set/spike a ball with just your feet?  If so, what is this sport, and where is it played?  (Participants insist there are at least 2 different versions of this sport.) 

To answer this, I did:

     [ volleyball with feet ] 

And saw this as the results...


Clicking on a few of these results show me that Sepak takraw is a version of volleyball that's played with the feet and a rattan ball.  It's certainly impressive if you watch a video or two.  (Example video of Sepak takraw.)  Those guys are wild!  They serve, bump, set, and SPIKE the ball with incredibly athletic leaps (and incredibly graceful recoveries).  

I was thinking, though, that I had heard of a South American version of this sport.  Why didn't it show up here?  All I can see are the results about the Malaysian version of the sport.  

So my next query was intended to find results that are NOT about Malaysian sports: 

     [ volleyball with feet -Malaysia ] 

That is, I want to see this query without all of the Malaysian results, so I used the MINUS operator to exclude all results with the term "Malaysia." I wasn't terribly surprised when I found many results from Brazil for their sport of footvolley.  




It is also a beautiful sport that is often played on the sand at famous Brazilian beaches (like Ipanema), which looks to be crazy hard.  Imagine trying to jump high enough to kick the ball over the net... while starting on the sand!  (Another video worth a watch of footvolley played on sand.

3.  Although the next summer Olympics are still a year away, we started talking about former Olympic events that aren't held any more.  Tug of war at the summer Olympics (1900-1920) is a famous example of a now discontinued sport.  While there seems to be an endless number of swimming events, was there ever a swimming event that was held underwater?  If so, what was it?  When was it last held?  Is there an Olympic champion?  
A query like: 

     [ Olympic underwater swimming ] 

quickly leads you to several sites that tell us that underwater swimming WAS a thing at the 1900 Olympics.  [Olympic official site, SportsReference]  This somewhat odd event was in the Olympic Games only in 1900. Two Frenchman, Charles Devendeville and Andrés Six], won first and second place. However, the French publication, Journal des Sports, noted that the third-place finisher, Peder Lykkeberg, was the best overall. However,  Lykkeberg swam in a circle, swimming much more than 60 meters, but the official distance was measured only in a straight line from the starting point with two points for each meter swum and one point was awarded for each second swum underwater.  (He swam for 90 seconds!  Who knows what happened there?!?)  

Oddly, this doesn't sound like much of a spectator event.  All you'd see is a blurry image of someone swimming underwater for 1.5 minutes or less.  I can see why they didn't repeat the event.  (It's about as exciting as plunge for distance held in the 1904 summer Olympics, which is the same event, except you can only glide to the end, you can't kick or paddle so there's even less to watch.  Talk about dull!)  

Search Lessons



This week's Challenge wasn't that hard, although as always, there are sometimes nuances that require a bit more search skill than usual.  In this case, just choosing good search terms is (mostly) enough.  But in the case of foot-volleyball... 

1.  Expanding your search results by removing consistent terms can sometimes lead to surprising results.  In this case, the first query [ volleyball with feet ] gave us good results, but because Malaysia was SUCH a big part of those results, I thought about trying the query WITHOUT Malaysia.  That's how I found the  Brazilian version of the game.  (And yes, I did another query that was [ volleyball with feet -Malaysia -Brazil ], but it was clear that I'd fallen off the "good results" list at that point.  



Search on! 



Book update 


Sorry about being a day late with this week's SRS answer, but I have a good excuse... 

I spent yesterday in the lovely town of Victoria, British Columbia, giving my first book talk about The Joy of Search.  I was the keynote speaker at a small conference in the Computer Science department where I was able to hand out some of my postcards with the book information.  It's odd to have a book talk sans book, but the marketing collateral helps!  More talks to come, including one at the American Library Association conference next week.  If you're at the ALA meeting, come by and say hi!  (My talk is at 10:30AM on Saturday, June 22, 2019.)  




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Wednesday, June 5, 2019

SearchResearch Challenge (6/5/19): Unusual sports?


There are plenty of amazing sports... 


... many of which strike me as pretty unusual.  There's the annual wife-carrying competition (multiple locations), an international "worm charming" championship in Chesire (UK), and the locally well-known "kinetic sculpture race" in which contestants race their home-made (and wonderfully whacky) all-terrain human-powered vehicles over a 50 mile course of land, sand, water, and mud.  And then there was the "plunge for distance" where the competitor would do a racing dive into a pool, then glide as far as possible in 60 seconds.  



And as with all sporting events, questions inevitably arise.  Questions come up about the biggest, fastest, heaviest, most difficult, or tallest events, all of which drive many a discussion in the pub or over the dinner table.  It was questions like these that led to the creation of the Guinness World Book of Records.  

In recent ale- and stout-powered discussions, three sporting questions arose.  Can you use your SearchResearch skills to answer them? 

1. As Europe grows increasingly warmer with the passing years, will the long distance ice-skating race that passes through 11 Dutch towns still be able to be held?  What's that event called?  When was it last held (and who won)?  
2.  Several of us in the discussion were former collegiate volleyball players, but since it was a very international evening, other folks started to tell us about different versions of volleyball that are played with feet alone.  Is this for real?  How could you bump/set/spike a ball with just your feet?  If so, what is this sport, and where is it played?  (Participants insist there are at least 2 different versions of this sport.) 
3.  Although the next summer Olympics are still a year away, we started talking about former Olympic events that aren't held any more.  Tug of war at the summer Olympics (1900-1920) is a famous example of a now discontinued sport.  While there seems to be an endless number of swimming events, was there ever a swimming event that was held underwater?  If so, what was it?  When was it last held?  Is there an Olympic champion?  

This week's Challenge isn't that hard, although as always, there are sometimes nuances that require a bit more search skill than usual.  

What can you find out?  When you suss out the answer, let us know in the comment thread. 

Search on!