Wednesday search challenge (7/10/13): How can you map world literacy rates?

In many sensemaking or analysis tasks, the hardest step is just getting started.  You might have a clear image of what needs to be done, and even what information sources you have at hand... but a huge barrier for many people is making the first move. 

Here's a scenario:  Suppose you're trying to understand the way in which literacy rates vary around the world.  You might find it easy to locate a table of world countries and their literacy rates (say, for people over the age of 15).  But THEN what do you do?  How do you convert this giant table into something that you can actually use to understand what's going on around you?  

You might have in your mind's eye something like this: 

Interactive world literacy map.  2 minutes to generate, including finding data, etc. 

This is an interactive world map I generated in a couple of minutes.  (Obviously, this is just a static image of it--but when you click on any of those dots, you'll get the pop-up with literacy rate by country, male, and female literacy rates as well, if available.)  Note that I'm NOT recommending this as a great visualization method--I'm including it here just to give a suggestion of the things you might do.  I'm sure you can do a better job!  

I know that some of you will find this an easy problem--but in my classes, I find that lots of people don't even begin an analysis like this because they have no idea how long it will take.  So the theme of this week's challenge is How to get started in visual data analysis!   

The challenge is simple:  

     Can you quickly create a visual representation
    of world literacy rates by country?  

And, of course, let us know HOW you did it and what you did to make it work.  Please include an estimate of how long it took you to go through your steps.  This is your chance to share a bit of how-to knowledge with the SearchResearch readers!  

I'll be really interested to see what kind of visual maps and charts you create.  Share them with us as well!  

Search (and visualize) on! 

Answer: When was it signed? (Not when you think!)

The answer isn't quite as obvious as you'd think! 

When I grew up, we were taught that July 4th--Independence Day--was the day of the signing.  As seen in the picture above, the story was that all of the Founding Fathers and Signatories got together on July 4th in Philadelphia, PA and signed this Declaration as a defiant act towards the king of England.  This was the first, wonderful act of the revolution.  

Of course, it wasn't quite like that.  

If you searched for this image, you (Search-by-Image using the image-URL) you know it was painted by John Trumbull.  His Declaration of Independence is a 12-by-18-foot oil-on-canvas painting in the United States Capitol that actually shows the presentation of the draft of the Declaration of Independence to Congress and NOT the signing.   In fact, the painting actually shows the five-man drafting committee presenting their draft of the Declaration to the Congress, an event that took place on June 28, 1776, and not the signing of the document, which took place much later.  


In an age before G+ and Facebook, Trumbull didn't actually know what everyone looked like.  So when he made this painting (much after the tact), he could only show 42 of the 56 signers of the Declaration.  (He also shows several participants in the debate who did not sign the document.)  Interestingly, because the Declaration was debated multiple times and signed over a period of months, the men in the painting had never all been in the same room at the same time.

In fact, the simplest search 

   [ Declaration of Independence signed ] 

In fact, Wikipedia article United States Declaration of Independence is pretty nice.  

(If you look at the Talk page, you'll see it's been through a lot of revisions.  As a side-effect, it's pretty much agreed-upon content.  FWIW, the Talk page is a vast repository of interesting comments and side-stories about the Declaration.  If you're a teacher in the US, I highly recommend the Talk section as a source of endlessly fascinating research topics for your students.)  

In any event, the Wikipedia article notes that the wording of the Declaration was approved on July 4, the date of its actual signing was August 2, although not everyone was about to sign on August 2, and the signing continued on for a while.  

Oddly enough, for something so important, the original July 4 United States Declaration of Independence manuscript was lost.  All other copies have been derived from this original document.  (I'll let you look that story up on your own!)  

But as you know from reading this blog, we always want to second source something like this.  How can we find a source that would be credible and have really good information about the Declaration?  

So looking farther down the SERP, I found a link from the National Archives (at www.Archives.gov).  I'm probably going to believe what they say about the signing date.  It's their job, after all.  

They have an article entitled "Did you know Independence Day should actually be July 2?"  Interesting.  So opened that link to the Archives story. In there I found this quote: 

July 2, 1776 is the day that the Continental Congress actually voted for independence. John Adams, in his writings, even noted that July 2 would be remembered in the annals of American history and would be marked with fireworks and celebrations. The written Declaration of Independence was dated July 4 but wasn't actually signed until August 2. Fifty-six delegates eventually signed the document, although all were not present on that day in August. (National Archives Press Release, June 1, 2005)   

I should have guessed that the story would be more complicated than the simple one I was taught in school.  

Search lesson:  I told you this wouldn't be a hard search task, but I hope you take away the deeper lesson that you should double check even things you think you know.  It seems non-obvious, but even history changes, or at least our understanding of what happened back then gets updated as we learn and understand the nuances more deeply with time.  

Search on!  (And double check those references!)  

Have a great July 4th holiday!  (For those of you reading this in the US... Apologies to readers from other lands.  Send me a good search challenge about your national holiday and I'll put it in!)  

Search challenge (7/3/2013): When was it signed?

This sounds like it should be a simple question: 

On what day was the US Declaration of Independence signed? 

But, like all of our search challenges, there's more to this than meets the eye.   Even though this seems dead obvious, finding the actual answer requires a bit more sleuthing... and--more to the point--a deep, abiding willingness to check out things you're just SURE you know already off the top of your head.  

Since this is a holiday edition of the challenge, this won't take you long.  But it will provide you something to chat about over the July 4th barbecue.  

Just give us a quick answer (and, of course, say how you came to that conclusion)!  

Search on! 

What happened to the tilde ( ~ ) operator?

So…you might have heard by now, and have been asking: 

    Why did Google turn-down the ~ (synonym) operator?

As regular readers recall, up until this past week, Google used to have a single-term synonym operator.  That is, you could do a query like this:  

   [ ~beginner class ]       

-- and get an automatic expansion of synonyms for beginner (novice, freshman, inexperienced...)  

or you could write a query like... 

   [ homicide investigation ~officer  “San Antonio” ~report ]

You can see why users might like this--they want to get Google's synonym expansion for "officer" and "report" but not homicide, investigation or San Antonio.  That is, sophisticated searchers KNOW those terms (homicide, investigation, "San Antonio") will be in the articles they seek, but they don't know which synonym was used for "officer" or "report" or “account” or… whatever the synonym might be.

But the way to do this now is to quote the parts you don't want to change, and let Google's automatic synonym code do its work.  To wit: 

   [ "homicide" "investigation" officer "San Antonio" report ] 

Of course, in truth, I wouldn't use the quotes here for anything except "San Antonio."  

I agree it's a useful operator in a very small number of cases, but the usage was minuscule bordering on nonexistent, and the feature took up a disproportionately large amount of index space given the low usage. So Google made the call to turn it off.  (Or to think about it in personal terms, I used ~ twice in all of 2011, and I write about this stuff.)  

Changes in how synonyms work at Google really mean that ~ isn't needed any much more. When it launched ~, Google didn't have synonyms and for the first few years after launch synonyms, Google was pretty conservative about how they were used in modifying the query. That's really not true any more. In particular, in almost every multi-word query today, Google adds synonyms to any unquoted term, but as the result of the past few years of analysis, Google does a better job of holding the query's meaning close to the original than ~ ever did.  (There's a lot of clever bigram analysis underlying this, so it's clear that

By contrast, the way ~ operator used to work, it would add synonyms irrespective of context, so they might radically change the meaning of queries.  For instance, you probably don't really want search for: 

[ ~dog star ] 

as any high-frequency synonym would probably be in an incorrect context.  

After a fairly extensive measurements of this effect, it became clear that in most real use cases, the net interpretation with the ~ included in the query was not really what the searcher thought they were getting.  In fact, it was actually damaging most queries with ~ in it.  (How do we know this?  A: By running experiments... lots and lots of experiments asking people to rate the quality of the results from searches with the tilde, and without the tilde.  It wasn't even close.)  

What’s more,  ~ appeared in the logs so rarely that it wasn't worth the costs of maintaining the operator.  In reality, although it seems “free,” the truth is that the index costs Google real money in terms of storage, software complexity, and associated maintenance costs. (In addition, >90% of the times we saw searchers using ~ in the logs were clearly spurious and not intended to trigger synonyms.  They were mostly just errors or bots.)

Tech-savvy users (e.g., librarians, reporters, professional researchers, you know… readers of this blog) can always do manual synonyms using OR – e.g.,

   [ antidepressant OR SSRI OR flouextine  side-effects ]  

and get much tighter control over what they REALLY want to see as an expansion of the synonym.   

So while it’s true—Google has removed the manual ~ forced-synonyms operator, this frees up resources for us to do something even better and more globally useful while also making the vast majority of ~ queries be much better.  

A world without clouds...

In case you missed it, Google Earth now has a "clouds free" view of our planet.  

The satellite imagery is usually created like a quilt; it's made by stitching together imagery of different parts of the world.  In this case, Google has used USGS's and NASA’s Landsat 7 satellite—sometimes dozens of photos of a single spot in the world—and pulled together the images to prduce a clear view of every place, even in tropical regions that are always at least partly cloudy.

The result is a single, beautiful 800,000 megapixel image of the world, which can be seen in both Google Earth and Maps when you're zoomed out to the global view. This image is so big, if you wanted to print it at a standard resolution of 300 dots per inch you’d need a piece of paper the size of a city block! 

Awfully pretty, and I thought you might enjoy seeing it.  Note that we haven't removed clouds from ALL images at ALL scales--just at the largest one (and little by little, we're improving the other views as well).  

To get your own, go to Google Earth and zoom out.  

Papua New Guinea, with and without clouds.

Answer: What are the names and styles of those buildings?

I solved the problem of building #1 by using the “fill in the blank method” using the * operator. 

I had a sneaking suspicion that I had the second name wrong, so I did a query of:

[ “Adam *” building San Francisco ]

and that quickly told me it was the “Adam Grant” building at 114 Sansome Street, downtown SF.  (I admit I got lucky on this.  I could have also had the first name wrong, but I found this quickly with just one search.) 

"Adam Grant" Building.  Google Streetview.

I then switched to Google Street View to look at the building next to it.

Now the problem is that there are two directions to go looking for the second building. Since the Adam Grant building is on the corner, you could go down Bush Street, or down Sansome Street. 

But the building at 140 / 142 Sansome is pretty plain; certainly not “more beautiful” than the Adam Grant building at 100 Bush.  So let’s Streetview down Bush Street in the other direction. 

Heineman Building.  Google Streetview

If you move down Bush street you’ll see that there’s a building front at 130 Bush.  But look carefully—it’s definitely white and beautiful (with a distinctive outward thrusting “oriel” style), and it’s also VERY narrow.  Look carefully at this picture and you’ll see what I mean.  

Truthfully, when I was driving, I thought that it was all part of the much larger building next to it on the right as you look at this picture... the well-decorated Shell building at 100 Bush.  That’s actually the one I meant, but maps are useful for illustrating the truth of the situation.  And once I looked at the Maps view (with 3D outline of parcels), you can clearly see the outline of the building at 130 Bush AND the building at 100 Bush (the Shell Building).

This tall, but narrow building is fairly remarkable.  It's technically the "building next door," but I completely missed it in real life!  

So.. what’s the building at 130 Bush? 

A quick search for:

     [ “130 Bush” San Francisco ]

..told me that this was the Heineman Building.  This “elegantly slim, 10-story building” was once the tallest of its neighbors, and decorated in a “gothic façade” with terra cotta tiles and copper panels.  It was originally a necktie, belt and suspender factory.  (This is from the SFGate article on theHeineman Building, quoting the book “130 Bush: An Illustrated Story About FourBuildings and a Monument in San Francisco” by L. G. Segedin. 

(Unfortunately, I could find this only on Amazon.  It doesn’t seem to be in Google Books.)

But then, next door to the Heineman building is the Shell building, which was the one I was originally looking for… It’s described as a 1930’s masterpiece of Art Deco styling (from the buliding’s own web site:  http://www.shellbuildingsf.com/index.html)  

The Wikipedia article on the Shell Building points to the architectural website Emporis, which describes it as a combination of Moderne, and Art Deco. 

(And, as reader Remijj points out,  George William Kelham was the architect of the Shell building, the Federal Reserve Bank of SF, the design of the 1915 SF Worlds Fair, the Mount Davidson Cross, and the Hill Bros. Coffee plant... locally famous landmarks, all!)  

The Adam Grant building, the one that started us off on this search, is described by Emporis as a Beaux-Arts building that was completed in 1908, but then extended upward by 8 floors in 1926. 

Emporis is a nice collection of architectural data.  It’s entry on the Heineman Building describes it as neo-gothic and completed in 1910.  So it must have been the tallest building around for around 16 years until the Adam Grant overshadowed it… which in turn was surpassed by the Shell building just a few years later. 

They’re all beautiful buildings—1908 (then 1926), 1910, 1930—a time of grand skyscrapers.

For my money, the Shell Building is the nicest one… gotta love those Art Deco touches.  It’s quite a sight when you walk into the lobby.  As they say, “worth a detour!” 

Search Lessons:  I note that, strictly speaking, the * operator for the “fill in the blank” wasn’t necessary, but it worked beautifully in this case.  When you only have part of the puzzle, the * will match 1 or more words to fill in the pattern in a quoted phrase.  Good tool to remember.

WRT “authoritative” resources—I would have accepted entries from almost any book on the architecture of downtown SF.  There’s a great wealth of them, all the ones I’ve seen are nicely researched. 

Likewise, Emporis is a strong website with a large collection of data about buildings.  They’re widely known for the breadth and quality of their architectural data.  I hadn’t know about them ahead of time, but I know them now and will recognize their name in future searches.  (And as I’ve said before, sometimes you just gotta know this kind of thing.  Recognizing authoritative sources is a good skill to have.)

Search on!

Wednesday Search Challenge (6/26/13): What are the names & styles of those buildings?

The buildings of downtown SF.  (Google Maps 3D view)

I was driving through downtown San Francisco on a beautiful, sunny day.  As I drove, I passed a pair of beautiful buildings that I wanted to learn about. 

As I passed the first building, I saw the name and quickly jotted it down on a pad of paper I keep in my car for just such moments.  Looking at my pad later, I saw that I wrote down the name as the “Adam Green” building in SF.

As I drove down the block, there was an even more beautiful building next door.  I didn’t get the name of this second building, all I know is that it’s a light, almost white color.

When I got home and tried to look up these two buildings, I started with the “Adam Green” building, but was surprised to learn that there *isn’t* any such named building in San Francisco!  Obviously, I made an error in transcription. 

Today’s challenges: 

1.  Can you figure out what the name of the two buildings are?
 2.  Can you identify the architectural styles of the two buildings?   (Note: Don’t give me your attempt to identify the style, please find an authoritative source that identifies their styles.) 

As we always do, please tell us HOW you solved this search challenge, and let us know how long you took to solve the challenge!

Search on!