And the answer was... or should have been...

John J Williams, last US Civil War
casualty. A victim of slow
information updates.
(From Wikimedia)

John J Williams is widely regarded as the last casualty of the US Civil War.  He was killed at the Battle of Palmito Ranch (Texas) on May 13, 1865.  Civil War buffs will recognize that this was a full month after the sides reached an accord at the Appomattox courthouse in mid-April.  

It's clear that news about the end of the war spread slowly.  Even though telegraphy was widely used, there were still many places that weren't "wired" to receive the news.  Those gaps in coverage cost time (at least 1 month here), and ultimately, lives.  

This same thing still happens, though perhaps with lesser consequences these days.  

In my earlier post about the Capitoline Wolf, several people asked "So what did your daughter put on her test?"  

I finally got the answer:  She put down that it was of Etruscan origin, even though she knows it's not.  

"Why did you put down something you know is wrong?" I asked.  "Because I need the point on the test..." was her reply. 

That's a pragmatic answer, and I can't give her a hard time for wanting to do well on the test.  

Naturally, I think I would have objected and fought for the point. 

This is personally important because a similar thing happened to me when I was a high school sophomore, and it pretty directly led to my career as a research scientist.  

In my high school biology class, my teacher kept talking about the various causes of diseases--"there are millions of diseases caused by bacteria and viruses... and thousands of diseases caused by protozoa..."  

I heard that and thought about all the diseases I could think of that were protozoan-caused.  I thought of malaria, elephantiasis, sleeping sickness... and I couldn't think of any more.  "Thousands?"  Really?  

Malaria infected cells.
(From CDC.gov)

So I raised my hand and objected to the "thousands" characterization.  In response, my teacher picked up a fat book (I believe it was the Merck Manual) and tossed it to me saying "Look it up!"  

I did.  And discovered a few more diseases that I hadn't known about.  But that took the number up to 12, not thousands.  

But it was that inspirational moment for  a kid in school, and I worked for a few weeks on the question, visiting libraries, and ultimately writing to the head of the Microbiology department at UCLA.  

Graciously, and to my everlasting debt, a faculty member wrote back to me with a few photocopied pages from a textbook (I believe it was Human Parasitology), with a kind note saying that I was correct, there aren't that many protozoan-caused diseases.  Here's the list: there are (at the time) around 20.  

That was a pivotal moment for me: I developed a life-long habit of probing deeply into the whys and hows of assumed information. 

Of course, since my time in high school (in the 1970s!), it's become much simpler to do this kind of questioning of received knowledge.  

It's a habit I think we ALL need to take on--in both our roles as students (because we're all permanent students now), and as teachers (because we're also all teachers now).  

Which takes me back to the Capitoline Wolf problem.  It's been known for a long time that the Capitoline Wolf isn't of Etruscan origin--but the books haven't been updated to reflect that.  

I would think that responsible teachers would WANT to be as up-to-date as possible, and maintain an errata or updates file on all of the materials they're using.  It's a pity that textbook publishers don't do this.  (Or if they do, I want to know about it!) 

There's a long list of things we used to teach that are no longer considered to be true.  Junk DNA is no longer "junk,"  Pluto is no longer a major planet, but now a "minor planet," the largest known prime number (currently 2^57885161-1, but certain to change soon), etc. 

I'm not expecting the textbook publishers to step up here, so it's really all of our jobs.

Although it might be really useful to create a socially-generated site that updates "facts that have changed in your field" wiki. Anyone up for the challenge?

And most of all I would love it if teachers would be actively modeling this for their students.  Kids shouldn't have to give the "expected answer" when they know it's wrong.  They should get extra credit for discovering an update to the course.

I got an extra point in my biology class in the '70s for fixing a misconception on the part of my biology teacher.  (But I wonder if he fixed it in the class materials for the next year...)  

And then we could feed this back into the publishers and help keep our students' materials up-to-date.  

Just a thought.  

What would you do?  What knowledge do we teach that's woefully out of date? 

Search on! 

Answer: What does this character mean?

束

The question for this week was: 

1.  What does this Chinese character mean? 

Solution:  The simplest way to solve this is to use the Google Translate "Handwriting Recognition" tool for Chinese.  To do this, visit:  Translate.Google.com and select Chinese as the input language. 

Then, using your best approximation to the character, draw it in the pop-up text input region.   Here's the place where you'd write in the text you're seeking:  

Then, select the correct character (the second one from the left): 

... and see the answer on the right.  In this case,  the English word, bundle.  

Notice that below (and to the right) Google provides a bit of usage information: 

The bars indicate roughly how common that usage is ("bundle" is much more common than "sheaf" and slightly more than "bunch").  

NOW... since you have the character, you can drop it back into Google (copy/paste) and see what other kinds of context information you can learn.

Here I see the Wikitionary entry about this character.  Click through to that resource to find that it also has a meaning of "to bundle together" or "to bale up."  

Fascinating:  It is also a character used in Japanese to mean "large bundles" or it can act as a counter for bundles of things.  (Along the lines of "1 carton of eggs, "2 cartons of eggs..." etc. Japanese adds in additional "counter" terms to indicate the kind of thing being counted.  For more information on this fascinating linguistic concept, see the Wikipedia article on counters in Japanese.)  

2.  What does this <unknown language> character mean?   

To figure this out, I did Search-by-Image to identify it as a Korean language (Hangul) character.  Don't be fooled by all the appearances of Japanese in the result set.  If you click through, you'll see they all connect to Korean!  

Then, I did the same "draw the character" trick from above, but used Korean as the search language.  

(Chinese and Korean writers, please forgive my terrible calligraphy.  I'm writing this with my finger on my Mac's trackpad in the write-in region provided, while sitting on the floor at the EduCause conference.  Not the best of tools and circumstances!)  

As Remmij and Ramon pointed out, this Handwriting input method is covered in a Help Center article.  

And yes, it does mean "End."  (And no, there's no implication to draw from this.  It's just a handy example of a character I happened to see in real life...)  

Search lesson:  This is another form of the "I bet there's a tool that does this..." heuristic.   This one has been around for a while now. You might have even seen it in the Translate UI before, but never had the chance to explore.  Now you do!  

So... when is this REALLY applicable?  It's not a super-common use case, I admit.  But there are times when you'll see something like this and a recognition tool is the only way to go.  

Question for everyone to think about:  While this is a reco-tool for handwriting in various languages.  What OTHER kinds of recognition tools do you know about and/or use?    

I can think of a couple off the top of my head:  SoundHound or Shazam for recognizing music.  What else is out there? 

Let us know by posting into the comments!  

Search on! 

Wednesday search challenge (10/16/13): What does this character mean?

For some readers, this is too trivial a challenge to spend more than 1 second on.... but for the rest of us... this is a real challenge. 

Here's the challenge.  

While out and about in the world, I found this Chinese character posted all by itself.  

Not reading Chinese, I was naturally curious.  What does it mean?  

Today's search challenge is obviously trivial (if you read Chinese), but illustrates a really interesting search challenge if you don't.  

1.  What does this Chinese character mean? 

Perhaps most importantly--be sure to tell us HOW you found this one out.  I used a rather clever trick that I just learned about a few days ago, although it's been around for some time.  I hope you'll discover it as well.  

Because once you figure out the method for figuring out the above character, you'll also be able to tell me what this character means: 

2.  What does this <unknown language> character mean?   

Have fun! 

Search on.  

Answer: Why is she wearing that kind of hat?

Sorry about the delay--as I mentioned, I'm traveling, and it's tough being on the road, teaching, moving from point A to point B and finding both a decent internet connection and time to write.  Especially in places where my cell provider doesn't have service.  (Yes, I'm deep in the backwoods of New Hampshire...)  

Back our regularly scheduled program... 

Our challenge was to figure out the hat.  The woman on the right in the above image is wearing a fairly peculiar kind of hat.  I mentioned that I recognized that hat from a totally different context, and was curious why the artist would portray her as wearing this particular kind of hat.

First, quick answers for insatiably curious.  

1.  What's the name of that style of hat?  

     A:  A Phyrgian cap.  

2.  Who is she?  (Or, more precisely, what does she represent?)  

A:  She is Columbia (aka Pallas Columbia), the female personification of the United States.  

3.  Can you find another artistic portrayal of someone else wearing a hat like this?  

     A:  Yes, see below.  

First, kudos to everyone who solved this challenge.  It's a fairly good problem that starts with a vaguely defined information goal, but one that's recognizably correct (when you find it).  I try to set up all of our challenges that way--intrinsically interesting, but clearly correct when you solve it.  (Not always, but mostly.) 

I solved this challenge (as did Fred and many others) by using "Search by Image."  I dragged the image into the Image search bar and found that it appeared on many sites.  I first looked at the Smithsonian site, thinking that they most likely would have a good attribution and some context for the picture.  Sure enough, from the Smithsonian page I found it was called, "The Teddyssey" and it was by "Otto Cushing."  The next query is obvious: 

     [ Teddyssey Otto Cushing ] 

Knowing that it was a book, I went to Google Books and searched for "Teddyssey," which took me to the book. 

If you scroll through the book, you'll find it came from the Harvard library (ah, the Massachusetts connection mentioned earlier), and you'll quickly find that the woman is named "Pallas Athena," and that she's seated next to the male personification of the US, "Uncle Sam."  

Now, how about that hat?  How can we find that?  

A search like: 

     [ Columbia hat ] 

gives a lot of commercial, obviously incorrect results.  (Turns out that Columbia is a sportswear brand name.)  Now what? 

Well, I knew that Columbia was personifying the United States, so I tried that as a query to find out more--who is she?  What's the background story?  (I need to know a bit more to focus my next query.) 

     [ Columbia personification ] 

The first result here was for the Columbia (name) entry on Wikipedia, which not only told me that the name "Columbia" is a recent word coinage (combining a stem Columb- based on the surname of the explorer Christopher Columbus combined with the ending -ia, common in Latin names of countries (e.g. Britannia "Britain", Gallia "Gaul").

BUT on that same page, there's a picture with a caption saying "Personified Columbia in American flag gown and Phrygian cap."  If you do the obvious checks, you'll find that Phrygian caps come from (surprise!) the Phrygian region of Turkey, and have been worn since antiquity.  It's a little unclear HOW they came to signify freedom and liberty, but by the time of the Roman empire, they came to be worn by freed slaves, and the association was made. 

It's then been worn by revolutionaries throughout time and around the world.  Popular in the French Revolution, it was adopted by the US as a symbol of freedom and liberty.  

Finding other artistic representations of the Phrygian cap is easy.  Just search for it in Images: 

     [ Phrygian cap artwork ] 

Here're a few images I grabbed (from Wikipedia's commons area).  

Phrygian Caps: US, Attic Greece, French Revolution, US Department of the Army

And the Seal of the US Senate, the herald of Haiti, etc etc.  

Now you know. 

Search on! 

Wednesday search challenge (10/9/13): Why is she wearing THAT kind of hat?

I'm still traveling, and so this week's challenge is indirectly related to my travels in Massachusetts.  (I leave it to you to figure that connection out...)

But in my travels over the past couple of days, I saw this image and realized an interesting and odd thing:  The woman on the right in the above image is wearing a fairly peculiar kind of hat.  I recognized that hat from a totally different context, and was curious why the artist would portray her as wearing this particular kind of hat.

The answer is pretty interesting, and once you figure it out, you'll start seeing this kind of hat used EVERYWHERE... and maybe you'll start wondering what other common things we see everyday that are rich with meaning.

1.  What's the name of that style of hat?  

2.  Who is she?  (Or, more precisely, what does she represent?)  

3.  Can you find another artistic portrayal of someone else wearing a hat like this?  

Be sure to tell us your search path--I'll be curious to see (a) how many people recognize this hat without searching for it, and (b) what path you follow to answer the challenges.

Search on!

Answer: What's the name of that song?

I'm running kind of late today... spent all day on the plane to Detroit.  Giving two talks tomorrow, Oct 4, in Ann Arbor, MI.  Talk at 10AM:  "Mindtools:  What does it mean to be literate in the Age of Google?" (details) and another at 12 noon "The PowerSearchingWithGoogle.com story: Teaching 150K+ students." (details)   If you're in Ann Arbor, Michigan tomorrow, come on by! 

Q1:  What's the name of the song with this line...? 

When searching for the lyrics fragment I gave, if you do the obvious search for

     [ “the invisible power of the hidden hand of fate” ]

will get you… Nothing.

One thing to realize about quoted phrases like this is that the longer they are, the more likely they are to have errors.  

In particular, since I’d only HEARD the lyrics (and then wrote them down a little later), the chance of having an error in the remembered line is pretty high. 

So when this query didn’t get me much of anything useful, I started trimming to see if I could use a fragment of the lyric I'd heard.  My next query was:

     [ “the invisible power of the hidden hand” ]

and as everyone found, that is clearly a line from Johnny Clegg’s song “Asilazi” from the album, “Human.”  (Although I note that an earlier version appeared on the album “One Life.)

Album cover artwork for "Human"

Q2 –  What language is it?  And what does the non-English lyric mean?  

I found the lyrics translated on the JohnnyClegg.com website.  To see if I could find a better translation, I did a search for:

     [ Asilazi lyrics translate ]

to find… http://lyricstranslate.com/en/Johnny-Clegg-Asilazi-lyrics.html  -- which tells you it’s in Zulu.  The translation (quoted here):  

(Choir)
Asilazi, asilazi thina ilanga lethu lizofika nini
Silindile ngenhliziyo, yonke kodwa senzeni na?
Asilazi, asilazi thina ilanga lethu lizofika nini
Silindile ngenhliziyo, yonke kodwa senzeni na? 

in Zulu language:
2x
(We don't know when our day of freedom will come)
(We have been, waiting for it with all our hearts,)
(What have we done to deserve this?)

Unfortunately, Google Translate (which will also do language identification of a random bit of text droped into the translate box) doesn’t work to identify this language as ZULU.  That works for many indo-European languages, but not a major language like Zulu.  And when it fails to identify a language, it really fails.  

Q3 – Is this band is playing nearby? 

     [ Johnny Clegg band California 2014 ] 

– to find on the SeatGeek website that they’re playing in Berkeley…  AND Saratoga, both near my house.  

Why did I search for California (rather than Bay Area)?  To cast a wide—but not too wide—net as possible.  From what I know about bands, I know they’ll tour in an area for a bit.  So searching through all of the hits in California (in the year 2014) is a good strategy.  It’s quick to filter out any hits that are far from the Bay Area.

(And yes, we now have tickets to see them perform in Saratoga…) 

Search lessons: 

1.  Long double-quoted queries have to be pretty accurate to be useful. When you use double-quote, you’re telling Google “this is what I really want!”  So be sure it’s right. 

2. Explore other possibilities:  Since long lyrics can be misheard (see previous posting on modegreens) and/or mistranscribed, you have to explore other possibilities.  Here, the switch between “fate” and “hate” is pretty easy to do, so it’s an understandable error.  The good news is that the structure of English makes it relatively simple to find what you want with only 4 or 5 words in a row.  If you’ve got 5 (correct) words in a row, it’s usually pretty distinctive. 

3.  Limit your search to a well-defined area. When searching for an event, it’s often useful to search for events within a well-known (and clearly delineated) area, especially when the number of hits will be relatively small. 

Search on! 

Wednesday search challenge (October 2, 2013): What's the name of that song?

[ Note:  The search challenge I had planned for today has been sidetracked by the government shutdown.  While you wouldn't think that web server data sets would require human attention, it seems they do.  In any case, I have to postpone our planned Challenge and we'll do the one I'd planned for next week... ] 

While driving on Highway 101 in San Francisco on a beautiful blue day, I turned the radio on and heard a fantastic song that I wanted to get.  Love it.  Now, get it.  

The problem: I was driving alone, so I couldn’t use anything like Shazam or Soudhound to recognize it!  Even worse, by the time I exited the freeway, the song was done.  Now what?

All I remembered of the song was the lyric: 

            “...the invisible power of the hidden hand of fate.”  

Even more puzzlingly, part of the song was in a language I don’t understand. It wasn’t Spanish, German, French, Italian, or any of the “obvious” languages.

Can you help me figure this out?  (This really is enough information for you to do a search for it.)  In particular….

1.  What’s the name of the song? 

2.  What language are they singing in?  (And what does the lyric mean?)   

3.  I’d really like to see this band perform.  Will they play somewhere near me sometime in 2014?  If so, where?  (For this purpose, any venue in the San Francisco bay area will do.)   

Tell us HOW you found the song!  (And how long it took you...) 

Search on!