SearchResearch Challenge (7/27/16): Mind the gap!

The biggest surprises... 

... are sometimes the ones you don't see at first.  They're the kind of little things that slowly creep into your consciousness and make you wonder... why is it that this is so??  

Long-time readers will remember the one of the harder Challenges of the past ("How much death at the roadside?") when we tried to figure out why there are gaps in the plant cover next to many roads in California. We discovered in that Challenge that the state Dept. of Transportation (CalTrans) regularly sprays herbicide on the edge of the road to prevent weeds from taking over the road.  

This week we have another "gap in the weeds" Challenge.  

Not long ago, I went for a run up on Black Mountain, one of the local peaks in the Santa Cruz mountain range.  If you look carefully on the right side, you can see the typical summer-time wave of fog coming in from the Pacific Ocean.  On typical summer evenings, that fog (aka "Karl") comes in from the sea to cover San Francisco.  Luckily, Black Mountain is usually high enough that the fog comes around, not over, the peak.  

Selfie of me running in the early morning at the peak of Black Mountain

It was on this run that I noticed something that was pretty small, but very odd.  Here are 3 pictures I took on that run of a strange phenomenon.  (Remember that you can click on the images to see larger versions.)  

What struck me about each of these pictures is that there's a noticable gap between the green plant and the grassland next to it.  Oddly, this doesn't happen ALL the time, but it does happen a lot.  

The plants here are chamise (Adenostoma fasciculatum), but I'm pretty sure I saw gaps like this around coyote brush (Baccharis pilularis) in the same area.  

This strange plant-free boundary around most (but not all!) of the plants on Black Mountain led me to this week's Challenge:  

1.  What causes the odd, plant-free gap around the plants in these photos?  

If it helps (and it might, or might not), these photos were taken on August 13, 2013, at 37.3195203,-122.1630756  Which looks like this in the Google Earth photo:  

Looking carefully at this clump of chamise and coyote brush, you'll see this kind of gap all around these plants.  (The light color perimeter is where you can see the soil 

What's going on here?  I looked very carefully, and this gap at the periphery aren't trails of people or deer.  (You can see deer trails weaving between the clusters of bushes, especially to the west of the drop pin.)  

So... What's causing this?  Any ideas?  Let's do some of that SearchResearch and figure it out! 

Once you've figured it out, be sure to let us know HOW you figured it out.  What sources did you refer to?  And best of all, how did you know to search for that?  We all want to learn from your crazy SearchResearch skills!  

Search on!  

Answer: Finding a story... FAIL!

I knew this day would come, and it's finally arrived.  We've been stumped.  


Lots of people worked on this, and several regular readers (Mark, gnetiq, Fred, Ahniwa) all left good comments and leads.  But nothing's worked out.  


To tell you what I've been doing... I posted this problem on a few social answering sites (Yahoo Answers, Answerland) and on a listserv that's devoted to answering exactly this kind of problem--that is, identifying stories and books from the merest of clues.  As it turns out, there's an entire community of librarians that face this problem every day--someone walks into the library and asks for "Poor and Wease" -- you have to know that what they meant is "War and Peace."  


So I signed up for the Fiction_L listserv and posted my question there.  (Side note:  It's been really interesting to see the kinds of questions people ask librarians.  "Can you find me novels set in Montana?"  I recommend it as a source of ideas about how people think about their difficult search problems.)  


SUSPENDED!  But nothing has worked so far.  So I'm going to declare this question SUSPENDED pending additional information or sudden discovery.  If (when!) we finally figure this one out, I'll be sure to do an analysis of HOW we could have found it (assuming we could).  


At this point, though, if I were a librarian, I'd be suspicious of the recollection.  As we've discussed before, recall of movies / books / short stories is very error prone.  It's not that individuals just have weak memories, it turns out we all recode what we experience, and then those recollections evolve over time.  Memory for an incident (or book or ...) isn't fixed into memory like an etching into glass, but it's lightly written and subject to weathering--more like water colors on rice paper that's left in the sun and elements of subsequent experience.  

by Peter Pirolli

As my friend Peter Pirolli points out in his work on Information Foraging Theory, you work on a problem until the expected utility of the next action (more searching, in our case) exceeds the total expected value of the work.  That's when you give up--when it just doesn't seem as though more work is going to yield anything.  


Pete's work was informed by some great studies of hummingbird's feeding in Alpine environments, where they have to choose when to move to another patch of flowers.  They move when the next search isn't likely to be successful.  


That's the situation we're in at the moment:  this information hummingbird needs to move onto the next food source, the next item on the dinner menu.  




But we'll remember this, and come back if the flowers re-open.  


Keep searching!