A blog about search, search skills, teaching search, learning how to search, learning how to use Google effectively, learning how to do research. It also covers a good deal of sensemaking and information foraging.
As endless gender recent reveal parties have shown us...
... these days, in the US at least, the colors of pink and blue have commonly-agreed upon gender meanings. Pink means female, blue means male. But as a friend asked recently, why?
Or, as a way to figure out the why perhaps we can think about it this way: when did pink come to mean female and blue come to mean male? This leads to today's SearchResearch Challenges:
1. Can you figure out the history of pink/blue meaning female/male? Has blue always signified male? Has pink always signified female?
2. And, if I remember correctly, young boys used to wear dresses (or some kind of gown) in their early photos. When did that practice stop? (Or has it?)
As usual, we'd really like to learn HOW you found the history of these gender signals. What was the search process you followed? Let us know.
Last week I posed two Challenges, both of which I thought were fairly tough--but the SRS Regular Readers found it fairly straightforward. Kudos to you! (At the end I'll come back to why I found this difficult, and why I think you found them straightforward.)
Here are the Challenges from last week:
1. In my reading I keep seeing references to a compilation of short stories that was put together by the English playwright, novelist, and short story writer Somerset Maugham. The collection is called Tellers of Tales: One Hundred Short Stories from the United States, England, France, Russia and Germany. (1939) It's easy to find references to it, but I'd really like to read it. Can you find a full-view copy of this book that I can read online (without having to spend a zillion dollars)?
I'm going to quote Regular Reader Arthur Weiss on this (lightly edited):
First I tried Google Books and Project Gutenberg - as the anthology should be out of print. Then I just did a Google search:
["teller of tales" "One Hundred Short Stories from the United States, England, France, Russia and Germany" Maugham ]
Hard copy versions are available to purchase from a few places for around $50 or less at like Biblio.com and other sites.
Maugham's own works are easier to find online - but this was an anthology. You can see his collected stories at FadedPage.com
LESSON: The Internet Archive now includes much much more than archived websites.
That's a good lesson there at the end: The Internet Archive DOES have much more than you might expect. I promise to queue up a post about the Archive in the near future. Stay tuned.
Regular Readers found this pretty straightforward; there are multiple variations on this search that will work. Interestingly, this also leads to Amazon and eBay (you could buy a used copy there), and to Hathi Trust (but it's not in full-view). Like you, the only full-view copy I could find is at the Internet Archive.
2. Also in my reading, I came across a word that seems to describe some kind of very old fastener. The word is "latchet," but it does not have anything to do with shoes (e.g., a string used to fasten a shoe) or any kind of fish. It took me a while to find a good image of what a latchet fastener is--can you find one and tell us what it is? And for extra credit, where and when were latchets primarily used?
The Readers also found this fairly easy to discover. There were two strategies:
A. [ latchet fastener ]
B. [ latchet -shoe -sandal -fish ]
They both work perfectly. The A strategy just includes a description of what a latchet is ("fastener"), while the B strategy removes terms that would lead to false positives (I told you it wasn't a shoe, so -shoe makes a lot of sense).
And what's a latchet? When I did this search [ latchet fastener ] , I ended up looking to Google Books and finding a number of books that talk about latchets. I learned quickly that it was a Celtic fastener that holds two parts of a large cloak or coat together. That led me to The Archaeology of Celtic Britain and Ireland, where I found this illustration on page 151:
Interestingly, this book points out that latchets usually had spirals of wire ("which experiments have found to be highly effective"), but that few of the spirals have survived.
Thus, images of latchets such as the one on the Irish stamp:
are both missing the spiral wires that "latch" the pieces of clothing together. Still, they're beautiful, and capture the desire of people in pre-history to create lovely things.
Why was this hard for Dan?
I was impressed by everyone's skill at finding these "difficult to find" objects. So... why this tough for me?
Not excuses, but background!
When I started searching for the Somerset Maugham book, I also assumed it was out of copyright and would be in free view on Google Books, so I started there, and spent a fair bit of time looking in there trying to find the free view version... which, I discovered, doesn't exist in that collection.
Next I went directly to Hathi Trust... and found the same thing.
Eventually, like you, I looked in the Archive.org site and found it there. I know they have a more liberal interpretation of copyright than the other sites, but I figured everyone else would recap my search... but NO! You went straight to the Archive and found it.
Lesson: Start your search broadly and then narrow; rather than what I did, which was to start narrow and only after a couple of failures, search broadly. In particular, do NOT assume those important properties that undermine your search (such as "it's out of copyright").
Second, when I started looking for the latchet I had two problems. First, I ran across the word while reading a book.. which unfortunately spelled it as "lachet," which is an alternative spelling of the shoe binding. It took me a while to figure out that that's the not the correct spelling for the thing I was searching for. Second, I wasn't 100% sure what a latchet (or lachet) even was. It was mentioned in a text that didn't provide a lot of context--all I knew is that it was Celtic and used to connect a piece of clothing, but not a part of a shoe. Once I figured out that it was spelled LATCHET, I then got sidetracked by all of the meanings of latchet that are about shoe fasteners. This was a bit of a false lead because there's plenty of content around historic latchet shoes (e.g., this page about 17th century Scottish shoes!).
It was only after reading further in the text that I realized that the latchet under discussion significantly pre-dated the 17th century. As I read, I finally learned that the story was about the 6th Century. Big oops on my part.
Lesson: Check your spelling (especially when you're searching for a term that has alternative spellings), and be sure that what you're searching for is... well... exactly what you're searching for!
What does this mean for my estimate of the difficulty level?
I think I gave you a bit too much help! I told you that it was spelled "latchet" and that it didn't have anything to do with shoes. Big tip. You were able to take advantage of the little clues, just as you should.
And I bet you started your book searches broadly (as I always tell you to do), and didn't make my foolish mistake of assuming that I knew more about the book than was true.
Ah well... Live and learn.
I hope you learned as much about searching for "difficult to find" objects as I did! I'm reminded also that what's difficult for me, might not be difficult for you--and vice-versa.
Congrats to all who successfully found the objects. Excellent job!
... in my work I'll search for something that takes a while to find. I save these for you! Here are two objects that I had to work a bit to find. In the process, I learned something about searching that I thought you'd enjoy. Can you find these as well?
1. In my reading I keep seeing references to a compilation of short stories that was put together by the English playwright, novelist, and short story writer Somerset Maugham. The collection is called Tellers of Tales: One Hundred Short Stories from the United States, England, France, Russia and Germany. (1939) It's easy to find references to it, but I'd really like to read it. Can you find a full-view copy of this book that I can read online (without having to spend a zillion dollars)?
2. Also in my reading, I came across a word that seems to describe some kind of very old fastener. The word is "latchet," but it does not have anything to do with shoes (e.g., a string used to fasten a shoe) or any kind of fish. It took me a while to find a good image of what a latchet fastener is--can you find one and tell us what it is? And for extra credit, where and when were latchets primarily used?
I'm curious how hard you find these two Challenges. Both gave me some trouble, maybe because I didn't have much context for either search.
If you locate these two things, let us know HOW you did it. (I'll reveal a couple of my missteps next week in the answer.)
When too many animals group together, it can be a problem.
[ Comment: Sorry this was a delayed by a week. It's been a busy time. ]
This week's Challenge highlights a couple of wrong-place & too-many times when people went to work to fix the problem, but it completely and utterly failed. These aren't hard, but are pretty amazing in their details. Can you figure out what's going on in each of these Challenges?
1. Too many birds really can be a problem. In one famous incident, an entire "War" was declared on a particular kind of bird. Big guns were brought out, the campaign planned, thousands of shots were fired, and it all ended in a dismal failure. Where was this war? What kind of birds were being fought? And in the end, what happened?
This wasn't too hard, but fascinating to learn about. I'd heard about a kind of "war against big birds that ended badly," and so was naturally curious to learn more.
The short version of this: Shortly after World War I, large numbers of discharged veterans were given land by the Australian government to take up farming within Western Australia. Unfortunately, the emus (large flightless birds) were enjoying the farmer's fields as well.
By late 1932, there were 20,000 of them wreaking havoc on the wheat farms of the beleaguered veterans, and even these trained riflemen could not put a dent in their numbers.
The veterans asked for help from the Australian military, which was more than happy to send soldiers, machine guns, and ammunition. The "war" was conducted under the command of Major G. P. W. Meredith of the Seventh Heavy Battery of the Royal Australian Artillery.
Unfortunately, when the soldiers went to shoot the birds, they scattered effectively and evaded much damage. After the first attempt, the total number of emus killed was roughly 50--after several thousands of rounds fired. A couple of weeks later they tried again, with not much better results. Tens of thousands of rounds fired, and only about 1,000 emus killed. In the end, it took around 10 shots per each emu removed. The technology solution did not work well.
However, Meredith's official report noted that his men had suffered no casualties.
After 1929, exclusion barrier fencing became a popular means of keeping emus out of agricultural areas (in addition to other vermin, such as dingoes and rabbits). It proved to be cheaper and much more effective than shooting them.
There were, of course, other battles against birds. As reader anon0750032j pointed out, Mao launched a massive extermination campaign against "The Four Pests," ( 除四害). The four pests to be eliminated were rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows. The extermination of sparrows is also known as Smash Sparrows Campaign ( 打麻雀运动) or Eliminate Sparrows Campaign ( 消灭麻雀运动). This was another kind of disaster--the lack of birds resulted in severe ecological imbalance and became one of the causes of the Great Chinese Famine. In 1960, Mao ended the campaign against sparrows and redirected the fourth focus to bed bugs. (That sounds like a futile campaign.)
Luckily, they didn't bring out the heavy artillery, or I'm sure even more damage would have happened.
2. Too many insects can be a problem as well, especially when then fly around en masse. Can you find the largest grouping of insects that caused enormous problems with the local agriculture? Why do those insects group together? And why do those groupings finally end?
The Desert Locust, Schistocerca gregaria, forms the largest swarms. In early 1954, a swarm that invaded Kenya covered an area of 200km2. The estimated density was 50 million individuals per km2 giving a total number of 10 billion locusts...
On the other hand... I also found a New York Times article documenting the 1875 locust swarm that was the largest recorded in North America. It was estimated to be 1,800 miles long and 110 miles wide (512,817 km2). That's equal to the combined size of Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont!
Of course, it's difficult to compare these estimates without good communications technology (to get a single measure of the swarm size at one point in time), but if the estimates are close to correct, the 1875 swarm in North America was about twice the size of the Kenya swarm.
In both cases, these swarms were immensely devastating, eating all of the crops--seeds, fruits, and even the fence posts.
And yet, in North America, a mere 28 years later, this seemingly indestructible enemy vanished. There hasn't been a sizable locust swarm in for over 100 years (see: Wikipedia article on Rocky Mountain Locusts). In fact, these locusts are now extinct, apparently due to changes in land-use patterns over the past 150 years in central North America which removed their breeding grounds.
My query about "why do these swarms happen" was:
[ locust swarm causes ]
Leads to a plethora of articles about relatively recent discoveries about locust swarming behavior. One source (LiveScience) points out that "[locusts] undergo a dramatic transformation when there are many other locusts of the same species nearby. The locusts shift from what scientists call the solitary phase when the locust is alone, to the gregarious phase when they swarm together.
As it happens, the specific signal that begins the shift from solitary to gregarious varies from species to species. The desert locust (Schistocerca gregaria) can shift into the gregarious phase with a touch on the hind legs, while the sensitive area on the Australian plague locust (Chortoicetes terminifera) is its antennae. These triggers seem to boost levels of serotonin, the same chemical associated with mood in humans. That serotonin boost, in turn, causes locusts to start to move together, ultimately snowballing into ever larger accumulation that become damaging swarms.
NOTE: There's a 17-year cicada brood emerging this spring. It will be tremendous, and look like and sound like a swarm, but they don't typically cause problems. Luckily, aside from making a tremendous din, cicadas typically are harmless and represent a huge windfall food supply for other animals. They don’t eat crops (although they occasionally feed upon tree sap); they just want emerge into the sunshine, find a mate, create the next generation and die (incidentally, delivering a huge amount of food to animals that feast on cicada bodies).
I was in the Washington DC area during the last cicada brood emergence, and it's true--they can be VERY loud and eerie-sounding. But they do not bite. However, they do fly, and love to crawl around... which was surprising when I found a couple crawling up my leg just above my socks!
A 17-year cicada, coming out in North America later this year...in the millions!
SearchResearch Lessons
This wasn't a difficult task, but there's a good tip here..
1. Use the most specific term you can to describe the phenomenon you seek. In this case, the term swarm was the perfect descriptor. Take note of speciality terms like this as you do your initial reading, and then use those terms for your second, third, and fourth queries.
