SearchResearch Challenge (9/31/17): Nautical mysteries?

Every so often you hear a few stories that just seem to go together.  

This week, even though I'm teaching in Switzerland (maybe because I'm in Switzerland), I hear three stories that seem a bit too odd to be true.  Can you help me figure out if these are real stories or not?  

Here they are.  In each case, what's going on?  True.... or not? 

1.  I keep reading about people going whale watching in Lake Superior.  Can I really see whales in Superior??  (It is, after all, a great lake.  Could whales possibly live there?) 

2.  I was reading a bit o' Irish history and happened to read about a place called Clonmacnoise, where, once upon a time, a few of the monks apparently saw a sailing ship fly past in the air.  How would such a thing be possible?  Can you figure out any plausible way that people could see ships in mid-air?   

3.  Since I'm in landlocked Switzerland, someone happen to mention that Switzerland has a navy.  I've only ever heard that term used perjoratively, so I wonder: Really?  Does Switzerland really have a navy?  If so, where is it?  

I don't think these are really hard, but they're questions that all came up for me this week.  What's your advice?  Should I trust these statements? Or are they... fake stories?   

Search on! 

Answer: Finding tweets from a particular place

Geolocating Tweets... 

People tweet about darn near everything.  That's handy for you, if you're a SearchResearcher.   

I figured out that my friend's house was NOT on fire with geolocated tweets.

 

This week's Challenges:  

1.  When the Google I/O event happened last week, I wanted to see what kinds of things were being tweeted about.  Unfortunately, not everyone adds the #GoogleIO hash tag to their tweet, and sometimes people add the hashtag when they weren't really there.  Can you find tweets that were posted from INSIDE of Google I/O 2017?  

We want to search for tweets that are geo-located to a particular place.  In this case, the location of Google I/O 2017.  

And where was that? 

     [ Google I/O 2017 ] 

quickly tells you that it was held at the Shoreline Amphitheatre, right by the Googleplex.  (lat/long: 37.4263042,-122.080828)   

You can search for Twitter's Advanced Search UI (by doing this search): 

      [ Twitter advanced search ] 

but you'll find that you can search for towns, but not specific geolocations.  

I next did a search for: 

     [ Twitter geocode search ] 

and quickly learned from a number of sources (e.g., ResearchGate and ThoughtFaucet) that you could use the regular Twitter search box and drop a geocode in there following the pattern:  geocode:LAT,LONG,RADIUS -- where you enter the latitude, longitude, and radius with a units (e.g., 10km) appended.  ... and no spaces!  That is, the modified query is now: 

But note also that Twitter returns tweets within your given radius by using their own internal methods to geolocate tweets. They use a combination of device/gps coordinates (but ONLY if the user has opted into providing their location) and the user provided profile location.  Usually, "user-provided profile location" will be a city, and not often an amphitheatre location.  

2.  Obviously, you'd like to be able to restrict your tweet lookup by time and date.  Can you find those INSIDE tweets from Google I/O that were posted only during the days of the event?  (May 17 - 19, 2017)  

Let's go back to Twitter's advanced search page.   Here they have the ability to search for Tweets by date range.  When we fill out that date range, we see that it creates a query to Twitter with this in the middle of the URL: 

      %20since%3A2017-05-17%20until%3A2017-05-19

That's the date-range specification for a Twitter query.  (For the curious: %3A is the URL encoding for the character ":" (colon) while %20 means " " (space).)  

This means the whole query really is: 

         geocode:37.4220041,-122.0862515,5km since:2017-05-17 until:2017-05-19

This is generally a good trick to know:  Many search engines pass through arguments through the URL.  If you decode the URL into its parts, you can often replace it with your own value and get exactly the results you want; in this case, we limit the results of the lat/long geocode: query to ALSO include the date limits.

If you edit the URL for the geocoded query (see above), and add to the end of the URL the date-range limiter shown above, you'll get a result like this (I put the dashed oval around the date-range restricted part of it).  

Obviously, if you were NOT doing a geocode query, you could just do this with the advanced search UI.  

OR if limiting the search results by city was okay, then you could do both the city and the date restriction by the advanced UI.  That's actually not a bad way to do it.  Yes, you get MORE than just Tweets from Shoreline Amphitheatre, but they're all pretty good. 

3.  Since you can find the location of a tweet, is it possible to make a map of tweets that are posted from the city of San Francisco during a single day? How would you do this?  (I'll post the best maps in the blog next week.)  

There are many ways to do this, but let's start with the simplest:  Find an already existing solution. 

My first query was: 

     [ tweet map ] 

This led me to Mapd's Tweetmap demo.  Here's an image of the map for tweets with the hashtag #GoogleIO, zoomed into San Francisco.  

Here you can see (on the very bottom) the tweet volume by day.  The big peak on the right hand side is May 17, 18, and 19.  


But I was hoping for a way to search for tweets (where I could guide the tweet selection), and then put them onto a map that I could then edit as I wanted.  

To do that, I knew I'd need a tool that could collect the tweets (given my query), and extract the geocode, and then put them onto a map in some way.  

In truth, I poked around for quite a while, trying out different options, finally settling on this.  

I figured that someone probably built a Google Spreadsheets add-on that would grab the tweets.  So my search was: 

     [ Google spreadsheets tweet collection ] 

There are several.  After testing a few, I found that Twitter Archiver seems to fill the bill.  It's an add-on to Google Spreadsheets that lets you write a Twitter query (including using geocode:) and then it runs every hour and updates the sheet.  But as I found out (after a couple hours of debugging), it won't let you search for tweets from a specific place OR a specific location.  

But it will search for recent tweets and drop them into your spreadsheet... from which you can then do your own processing.  Here's what I did with it.   

You add the Twitter Archiver to your spreadsheet, and then create a "Search Rule" to specify what you want to download into the spreadsheet.  

The add-on then runs this query every hour and adds new tweets into the spreadsheet.  It then looks like this (notice that the dates on the far left are from today, NOT from the dates of the conference--if I'd run this last Wednesday, I'd have all of those tweets!) I've blurred out people's names and IDs. 

Don't be mistaken: this is NOT a regionally restricted search (no matter what it says).  But the results are coming from all over.   

This is pretty good, but we now need one more step to put these out onto a map.  Luckily, I remember that Google's My Maps lets me import a CSV, including lat/longs and content.  

I created a map and then imported the spreadsheet into my map, selecting the "place" column for the pin to drop.  

Interestingly, here's that map: 

This is close, but not quite what we had in mind.  FWIW, I tried out a few other scraping tools and found that none of them (at least of the ones I tried) quite have the ability to search by specific geocode.  Clearly Twitter has the ability--but the results aren't making it into the scrapers.  

This probably means that I'll need to go write some real code in order to make this work.  I'll try this later this week and report back to you. 

And we now know how to make a map with pins for all of the tweets... once we get them.  

But at least we found a commercial tool that nearly there!    

4.  For completeness, it's useful to know how many tweets come with a geocode. Can you estimate the fraction of tweets that are geocoded?  (I ask because you need to know what fraction of tweets you're NOT seeing when you do a search for tweets posted from a particular location.  If you're only picking up 5%, then that's a very different story than if you're seeing 95% of all tweets.)  

If you search for: 

     [ fraction geocoded tweets ] 

lead me to a Quora article by Ryan Gomba claiming that around 1% of tweets are geocoded. Other sources give similar number:  "less than 2% of tweets are geotagged" (Laylavi et alii, 2016), and it's clear that the number is growing over time, but is still quite small.  In an Arxiv.org paper, from 2014, 3 researchers from IBM give the percentage as 0.7%, but also note that they have developed an algorithm that can tweeters' home location fairly accurately by looking for other contextual information (e.g., explicit references to locations over time, noting time of day, and correlating posts with other, similar posts, in other social media).  

So it's not a large fraction of all the posts.  Still potentially useful, but it's not going to be anything like a statistically useful sample for most purposes.  

Search Lessons 

Well this was a tough one--I spent WAY too many hours on this trying to get various Twitter scraping tools to work.  

1.  Remember that many web services have their own advanced search capabilities.  This is a really useful thing to know: you can often do a lot by using a company's search tool, rather than counting on Google to figure out all of their internals (like geocoding or time/date filtering).  Search for it! 

2.  If you real the URLs carefully, you can often modify them to suit your own needs.  As we see above, with a little sleuthing (and URL surgery), you can get their search tool to do what you want (such as combining a geocode: search with a until: and before: search time restriction. 

3. Sometimes tools don't do quite what you want--test them!  The big moral of my multi-hour scraper testing is that you have to test your tools very, very carefully to make sure that you're getting what you THINK you should be getting.  (I spent a couple of hours trying to figure out why the maps weren't correct... only later did I realize that although I gave the scraper my geocode query, it wasn't actually returning those results.  Moral:  Debug your system with data you can easily validate!)  

Okay... Onward to the next Challenge later this week.  (It will be much easier, I assure you.)  

Thanks to everyone who wrote it.  This was tricky!  

Search on! 

SearchResearch Challenge (5/24/17): Finding tweets from a particular place

When big events happen, people tweet about it.  

Big events can be pure fun (like Red Bull's Flugtag "flying" event), they can be tragic (such as the recent terrorist bombing in Manchester, England), and they be technological (Google's I/O developer conference last week).  

But when big events happen, people share on social media--Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, etc.  

Often the real-time event is tracked on Twitter.  So it's occasionally useful to use Twitter to figure out what's going on.  


For example:  Is that my friend's house on fire??? 

Luckily, not my friend's house.

I recently used my ability to search the tweet-stream to find out why there was a huge plume of smoke from a house fire near my home.  In just about 1 minute, I went from finding the tweets in my area, searching them for mentions of "fire" and then discovering that a local television station was showing real-time video.  That was a fantastic search experience because I learned from the live-stream that it was next door to my friend's house, and not actually their house that was ablaze!  (They did suffer a little heat damage, but the fire department did a great job.)  

This makes me think that this is a great SearchResearch skill to know.  So it prompted today's Challenge.  See if you can figure them out!  

1.  When the Google I/O event happened last week, I wanted to see what kinds of things were being tweeted about.  Unfortunately, not everyone adds the #GoogleIO hash tag to their tweet, and sometimes people add the hashtag when they weren't really there.  Can you find tweets that were posted from INSIDE of Google I/O 2017?  

2.  Obviously, you'd like to be able to restrict your tweet lookup by time and date.  Can you find those INSIDE tweets from Google I/O that were posted only during the days of the event?  (May 17 - 19, 2017)  

3.  Since you can find the location of a tweet, is it possible to make a map of tweets that are posted from the city of San Francisco during a single day? How would you do this?  (I'll post the best maps in the blog next week.)  

4.  For completeness, it's useful to know how many tweets come with a geocode. Can you estimate the fraction of tweets that are geocoded?  (I ask because you need to know what fraction of tweets you're NOT seeing when you do a search for tweets posted from a particular location.  If you're only picking up 5%, then that's a very different story than if you're seeing 95% of all tweets.)  

Be sure to let us know how you did this!  

Search on!  

Answer: Finding cartoons despite their descriptions

This is a common problem. 

In fact, we've talked about the problem of mis-remembered names of books and songs before.    

The problem is that our human memories are chock full of errors.  Even memories that seem absolutely true and correct can be really, really wrong.  (See this Guardian article for a short simple test of how bad your memory is.)  

The big problem with remembering cartoons (or movies, or books, or short stories) is that we often get the details all wrong.  

The Challenge this week was to figure out the cartoons from just the descriptions below. Some people are chronologically gifted enough to just recognize them from their own experience.  But most people actually had to search them out.  

Given these descriptions, can you figure out what these two cartoons are?  How would you seek out such things?   

1. This cartoon features a character that's playing with (or fighting with) the frame of the cartoon.  It collapses, and he’s given a stick to prop it up.  Then the frame has a vertical hold problem, and keeps slipping down.  Of course, the end title (“The End”) comes in too soon and he ends up pushing it out of the frame.  Very funny—very meta-cartoonish.  Who is the main character in the cartoon, and what is the title of the cartoon? 

When faced with something like this, I'll often try a quick search with the description as the query, like this: 

      [ cartoon where character pushed "the end" out of the frame ] 

Frankly, I was impressed with how well this worked. 

The first result is the Wikipedia entry for the cartoon "Duck Amuck."  This surreal cartoon was directed by Chuck Jones and released in early 1953 by The Vitaphone Corporation as part of the Merrie Melodies series. In the cartoon, Daffy Duck is tormented by the unseen animator.  Daffy's locations, clothing, voice, and shape keep shifting during the cartoon. Of course, this outrages Daffy who attempts to steer the action back to some kind of normality, only for the animator to ignore him or, more frequently, to over-literally interpret his demands. At the very end, the big reveal is that the master animator is none other than Bugs Bunny.  (Of course.)  

I wasn't able to find a full-length version of the cartoon online, but here's a clip with the essential "pushing The End out of the frame" segment.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLcqUyMTM6Q

2.  This cartoon series is set in International Falls, Minnesota, with two animal characters who talk (naturally).  There are also two Russian characters whose names are puns.  What is the name of this cartoon series?   (And, for extra credit, what university did these two characters attend?) 

Since the method of just describing the result worked so well last time, I thought I'd try it again using the information I have at hand. 

     [ cartoon International Falls ] 

This time, unsurprisingly, it shows lots of results for the actual town of International Falls, Minnesota. 

But notice that snippet (I've highlighted the interesting bits in yellow below): 

Ah ha!  

Clearly, we misremembered the town of "Frostbite Falls" as the actual town name of International Falls.  (This is an obvious kind of memory mistake, substituting the actual name for the intentionally similar true name.)  

If we now do the obvious search for:

     [ Rocky Bullwinkle ] 

We'll find a lot of information about these two animated characters, including that the cartoon series had multiple names.  

     The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show 
    Rocky & His Friends (ABC)
    The Bullwinkle Show (NBC)
    The Rocky Show (Syndication)
    The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle & Friends (DVDs, international broadcast)
    Bullwinkle's Moose-A-Rama (Nickelodeon)

Rocky and Bullwinkle near Moosylvania

Their adversaries in most episodes are the two Russian spies Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale.  (As you might have picked up, the series was rife with puns.)  

For the extra credit, I did searches for: 

     [ Rocky Squirrel university ] 

and 

     [ Bullwinkle university ] 

Both of these led me to learn that they attended Wottsamatta U?  (A clever mondegreen of "What's the matter with you?")  This was revealed in the ninth story arc from the fifth season (1963 - 1964).  

The episode with Wottsamatta U in it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSVq7X7OPeQ  

Search Lessons 

There are two big takeaways this week... 

1.  Memory is fallible, but search can help out.  In the case of "remembering" that the characters were from International Falls, I made an understandable error, replacing the name of "Frostbite Falls" with the actual name of the city.  This kind of substitution happens more than you'd think.  When you get stuck like this, remember that there's a subreddit just for you:  https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/  (It crowdsources answers to questions like "I remember a book that was something like Travels With Charles... I think it was by Hemingway..." which is actually "Travels with Charley," by Steinbeck.) 

2.  Try the most basic description.  As we see, even near misses will often work, primarily because you're probably not the first person to make this slip of memory.  People will often document their near misses, and if you find the near miss, the link back is often simple enough to find.  


What a fun trip down memory lane!  Thanks for all the comments this week. 

Back on Wednesday with another Challenge.  

Search on! 

SearchResearch Challenge (4/17/17): Finding cartoons despite their descriptions

The other day... 

... I was chatting with some friends and we started to talk about the great cartoons from back in the day when we were kids.  

Naturally, the conversation went something like this:  "You remember that cartoon where... the rabbit did that weird thing with the edge of the film?"  Or "I'm sure you recall that one cartoon series with Russian characters... what were their names?"  

The big problem with remembering cartoons (or movies, or books, or short stories) is that we often get the details all wrong.  Doing our SearchResearch thing means that we can figure out the names and titles despite having almost all of the details be incorrect.  It's search in spite of the data... 

Here are two cartoon descriptions that we had a bit of trouble with, but I was able to figure out in the end with just the information provided here.  Until I did the searches, these "facts" were all we could remember.  

Given these descriptions, can you figure out what these two cartoons are?  

1. This cartoon features a character that's playing with (or fighting with) the frame of the cartoon.  It collapses, and he’s given a stick to prop it up.  Then the frame has a vertical hold problem, and keeps slipping down.  Of course, the end title (“The End”) comes in too soon and he ends up pushing it out of the frame.  Very funny—very meta-cartoonish.  Who is the main character in the cartoon, and what is the title of the cartoon? 

2.  This cartoon series is set in International Falls, Minnesota, with two animal characters who talk (naturally).  There are also two Russian characters whose names are puns.  What is the name of this cartoon series?   (And, for extra credit, what university did these two characters attend?) 

This is a bit outside of the normal SearchResearch Challenges, but it's an important category of research skill... finding something where the description is fairly inaccurate... but you've got enough information to find it anyway.  

Let us know how YOU found the answers to this week's Challenge!  

Search on! 

Answer: Things I had to look up this week

Fun time!  

Last week I posted my personal SearchResearch Challenges from the past week as the Challenge for you.  As I mentioned, these have fairly simple answers... but as usual, there's more depth here than you might have expected.  

1.  What's a placket?  (This might be obvious to you, but it's a word I've only ever heard before, so I had to look it up.  In the book I was reading, it seems to refer to both shirts AND petticoats, which doesn't seem to make any sense.  Can you tell me what it is and what the shirt / petticoat connection is?) 

I began by just looking up the definition with: 

     [ define placket ] 

which tells me that a placket is: 

So... it's a slit or opening in a garment covering fastenings (such as buttons or a zipper) OR it's the flap of fabric that's under such an opening.  

That's fine, but what do they look like? 

I clicked on the Images tab to see this: 

Clicking on the first image (upper left) took me to the Wikipedia entry on placket.  Really?  There's an entry on that?  Yes... and it's pretty good.  It told me that: 

 "...In modern usage, the term placket often refers to the double layers of fabric that hold the buttons and buttonholes in a shirt. Plackets can also be found at the neckline of a shirt, the cuff of a sleeve, or at the waist of a skirt or pair of trousers. 

Plackets are almost always made of more than one layer of fabric, and often have interfacing in between the fabric layers. This is done to give support and strength to the placket fabric because the placket and the fasteners on it are often subjected to stress when the garment is worn. The two sides of the placket often overlap. This is done to protect the wearer from fasteners rubbing against their skin and to hide underlying clothing or undergarments..." 

Alright then. Now I know.  

What about the petticoat connection?  Wikipedia to the rescue again.  In the "historical use" section of the article, we find that as placket was also considered to be: 

   1. A decorative panel or "forepart" attached to a woman's petticoat.
   2. An opening or slit in a skirt or petticoat to access a separate hanging pocket.
   3. A petticoat or skirt pocket.

All of which make sense--they're all slits in the garment intended to give access (or to allow buttons to connect two parts of the garment to connect).  

2.  Speaking of clothing, what's that little loop on the back of a man's shirts called? And WHY is it there?  

The obvious query works pretty well: 

Although the results are all from hobbyist or somewhat informal sources.  

The first result (from LifeBuzz) claims that they're called "locker loops," and are intended to hangup shirts on a hook in a locker, thereby NOT requiring lockers to have shirt hangers.  

Could be, but I wanted to be sure, so I kept checking around.  I checked the next three results, and they all provide the same answer, but with slightly different sources, which is good--they're not all just copying each other. 

The consensus is that a Locker Loop is an extra fabric ring located on the high center back of men's shirts, often associated with a particular brand (such as Gant, or Brooks Brothers).   

Most sources point to this little loop originally being used by East Coast sailors, who would hang their shirts on ship hooks when changing in a locker room. These loops became part of the Ivy league clothing style of the 1950s and 60s.  By the early 1960s, then had become known as ‘Fruit loops’ within some school settings (especially the Ivy League and many high schools).

Locker loops were still being used to hang shirts in locker rooms but were now also used to denote your relationship status or to show your interest. Young ladies would rip the locker/fruit loops on the shirts of boys they took a liking to. More than one male student removed his loop completely to show that he was taken, well before Tinder and Facebook's relationship status .  

3.  At the local pond, red-winged blackbirds  (Agelaius phoeniceus) are out in force. But this year, their songs seem slightly different.  Can you find out if their songs change from year-to-year? 

When I looked up this topic, I did almost exactly what Ramon did: 

     [ Agelaius phoeniceus song change ]

I started with the scientific name because I didn't want any confusion between different kinds of blackbirds (there are several).  

One of the first hits I found was a large collection of Agelaius phoencius songs.  If you listen to the different songs, you'll see they vary from place to place. The red-winged blackbirds in Florida don't sound exactly the same as the same species in California. (I hadn't thought about this.  I might have been noticing a regional variation, rather than a variation from year-to-year!)  

The second article in the SERP ("Song-related brain regions in the red-winged blackbird are affected by sex and season but not repertoire size") reminded me that bird songs also change seasonally (calls during mating are not the same as during other times of the year).  

So that's another possible explanation: seasonality effects could be causing the difference.  

On the All About Birds website, there's a nice page about the Red-winged Blackbird songs and call with a recording of 5 different calls.  (They're all very different, and perform different functions.  Territory identification, mating, alarm, etc.)  

In this same vein, the EarBirding page about red-wing blackbird calls mentions regional variations as well.  (Interestingly, they also cite a 1986 paper "Communication by Changing Signals: Call Switching in Red-Winged Blackbirds" that points out that signaling alarm, such as when a predator hawk appears, would cause a switch in the call they made.  But, "...which call type they switched to didn’t matter. That’s because it was not the call itself but the change in calls that sent the alarm signal.  

This is fascinating stuff, but what about changes over time?  

Ramón's query was:

     [red-winged blackbirds song OR call changes over years]

while mine was: 

     [ Agelaius phoeniceus song changes over time ]

These queries led both of us to the paper, Eastern Bluebirds Alter their Song in Response to Anthropogenic Changes in the Acoustic Environment (Integr Comp Biol (2015) 55 (3): 418-431) 

Doing a text search (CTL+F) for  “red-wing” shows that this behavior (that is, changing the song based on what man-made sounds are in the area and in response to other acoustic environment changes) also happens for red-winged blackbirds.  

What a result!  

This means that not only do red-winged blackbirds have regional variation, and time-of-year variation, and changes in calls by function... but they ALSO change in response to the local sounds!  

So, in the end, I don't know if the change I hear is actually year-to-year, or the result of time-of-year or changes in the local acoustic environment.  

My very last query was a generalization of this specific query.  This one was: 

     [ bird song changes over time ] 

and I found that indeed, several studies have show how a single species bird song in one location can change over the years.  Researchers at the University of Guelph published a paper showing how the Savannah sparrow (Passerculus sandwichiensis) song had changed over 30 years of recordings in their paper, "Three decades of cultural evolution in Savannah sparrow songs." (PDF) Since they "know the identity of every single sparrow in the study," it's pretty clear that this is a long-term change.  

We know bird song can change by season, by reason, and by location, sometimes due to external factors such as man-made sounds or changes in the acoustical environment.  Now we see that there can be a cultural, long-term change as well.  

So... it's possible that I am hearing long-term change in my local pond's red-wing blackbird songs.  I just need to start recording for the next 30 years to find out!  

Search Lessons

1. When searching for fairly common items (that you don't know), be sure to check multiple sources--especially when the top hits are of popular blogs.  If you see a consensus, then it's probably correct.  (But remember to always double check!) 

2. Try a generalization of your query--you might find really useful information there.  As you saw above, when I tried searching for the more general "bird" rather than "red-winged blackbird" or Agelaius phoeniceus, I found some results that gave me insight into the song behavior that I would have otherwise been able to find.  This is a great strategy to remember when you're doing your research. 

Search on! 

SearchResearch Challenge (5/10/17): Things I had to look up this week

After that last Challenge, it's time for some fun.  

As I read and write and wander about, I often come across things that I have to look up.  This week's Challenge questions aren't especially hard, but as always, be sure to verify that you found the correct answer.  (You'll almost always want to do at least two searches to make sure.)  

Here are my personal SearchResearch Challenges from the past week.  

1.  What's placket?  (This might be obvious to you, but it's a word I've only ever heard before, so I had to look it up.  In the book I was reading, it seems to refer to both shirts AND petticoats, which doesn't seem to make any sense.  Can you tell me what it is and what the shirt / petticoat connection is?) 

2.  Speaking of clothing, what's that little loop on the back of a man's shirts called? And WHY is it there?  

3.  At the local pond, red-winged blackbirds  (Agelaius phoeniceus) are out in force. But this year, their songs seem slightly different.  Can you find out if their songs change from year-to-year? 

Let us know what you find out!  Be sure to show your work.  HOW did you figure out the answers?  

I'll be back on Monday with what I found.  

Search on! 

An update to the "Island Viewing Challenge"!

Many thanks to Remmij...

... who in a comment earlier this week correctly pointed out that GeoGebras ARE embeddable in regular web pages.  

The links Remmij gave in the comments to Wednesday's post were exactly what we need to let us embed a GeoGebra interactive animation widget in your web page.  

UNFORTUNATELY, because Blogger won't let me edit the header of this post, I can't embed it here in the regular SearchResearch post.  

HOWEVER... I can embed it in an Interactive Distance to the Horizon page  I'm hosting on my own website!  Bummer that I can't put it into a blog post (but perhaps someone will show me how to do that as well).  

When you click on that link, it will take you to this web page (illustration below) that's on my server, showing that you can in fact download the HTML and then edit it for whatever purposes you'd like.  

Full credit where it's due: This interactive GeoGebra animation was created by Paul and is almost exactly what I was looking for.  (He also did two more, including this Distance to Horizon, new and improved version which is really beautifully done.)  

One of the nice things about GeoGebra is that you can see exactly how the animation was built, and can then change things to suit your own problem.  

If you're a teacher (or just someone interested in understanding how things like this work), it might well be worth your time to built a simulation or two.   

Back to our regularly schedule program next week.  

Search on! 

Answer: Can you build an interactive widget for the island viewing problem?

Okay... it's NOT May 1!


Sorry about not posting on Monday, but it's been a hectic week. Besides, I've enjoyed reading everyone's comments on the Challenge.   Not only is work busy (and I have a strange cold), but this Challenge is proving to be waaay to much fun.  

The SearchResearch Challenge this past week was to figure out how to make an interactive widget that can interactively show the relationship between height and visible distance in the "island viewing" problem.  That is:  

1.  Can you make an interactive widget that illustrates "how far out to sea can you see" without going into full-developer mode and writing a bunch of HTML, CSS, and Javascript?  

Interestingly, and oddly, before the world-wide web, modern browsers, and Google, this USED to be fairly straightforward.  

There were a number of simple animation tools that would let you (the teacher) create an interactive animation to demonstrate basic physics principles.  In particular, Hypercard (the simple scripting system) was perfect for people who wanted to build such a thing.  (Here's a nice article with the history of Hypercard and Hypertalk, the programming language.)  

But that was back in the 1980s and 1990s.  Yes, it was a LONG time ago.  

Now let me tell you what I found:  Not a lot.  I was looking for a Hypercard-level (i.e., simple) animation tool that would let me do a simple graph + interactive slider + animation.  It's not that hard... But after trying about 15 different charting and animation packages, I didn't find much of anything, despite lots of time wasting explorations. 

I DID find several very nice interactive charting packages: I know how to make interactive bar charts and the like, but not a slightly different chart like the one we wanted to make.  

Luckily... SearchResearchers rose to the Challenge and found some wonderful packages that come really close to our goal.  

Ramón was the first to find systems that are really close to the original statement of the problem.  

Waltis Blog has a great article about Finding the Curvature of the Earth.  This page has all the right concepts, but not quite the interaction we're looking for. 

On the other hand, Cactus2000 has a nice "Distance of the horizon" calculator, which is really close. You can type in the numbers and it calculates the distance.

   And another one at Rechneronline.de, which ALSO includes atmospheric refraction (which is more than I was looking for, but nice to see--notice how it gives a slightly different answer when you account for refraction).  

Fred found a collection of tools for making interactive widgets, but I wasn't able to get any of them to do exactly what I was looking for.  This collection is called "Exploreable Explanations," a term I really like, but didn't quite get me the diagram I was seeking.

Leia was the first to find GeoGebra and the tools you can create there, including this "Height Obscured by the Horizon" example.  (See below.)  Note that the camera elevation is baked into this interactive animation.  (Bravo to everyone else who found GeoGebra as well.  Nicely done.)  

But this other GeoGebra animation has even more stuff built-in.  This is just about right:  You can grab the camera (the blue diamond) or the target (the blue X) and move it up and down to figure out exactly what you need.  This is beautifully done.  

 GeoGebra interactive animation by Rocketman, Mick West (you can click on their links to see their portfolios)

So for this category of interactive widgets, this looks like the right solution.  

GeoGebra bills themselves as the "The Graphing Calculator for Functions, Geometry, Algebra, Calculus, Statistics and 3D math."  

They certainly seem to have solved this problem nicely.  

Dolphin explained that they found the GeoGebra site by realizing that this was a math/trig problem, and then searching for graphing calculators.  After trying a few, GeoGebra was clearly the best in the class.  

Another solution was also found by Ramón: the Horizon Finder,  which gives a circle of the visible horizon from a spot on the map.  Here I dropped the pin on the beach on the western edge of San Francisco, and found with a camera height of 0.5 meters, the visible horizon is about what you'd expect.  The Farallons are well outside of the visible circle.  

But if you drop the pin on the top of Twin Peaks (that is, near the Radio Tower, at 282 meters), you'll see that from that altitude, the Farallons are easily visible.  

Bottom line:  Although it took some time, by using a search method of looking for the tools we were able to solve this SearchResearch Challenge.  

The one part that's missing, though, is the ability to export the interactive widget to your own web pages.  I wish they had a nice "export widget" function, as that would make all of our lives as teachers / students / developers much simpler.  

Thanks for hanging in there over the past couple of weeks.  

I'll post a new (and easier!) Challenge tomorrow. 

Search on!