Answer (part 1): Can you find the reference for...

Jewal [sic] Mazique cataloging in the Library of Congress. 1942 Winter. 

Prints and Photographs Division.  LC-USW3-000381-C 

 

As I mentioned... 
these are sometimes quite difficult Challenges to answer.  Luckily, the second one was pretty straightforward, while the first was (and remains) quite hard.  

Here are the Challenges for this week: 

1.  Can you find the reference for.... A paper I once read that claimed "the probability of a reader reading a book in the library was a function of the distance of that book from the library catalog."   

As you can tell, this research was done a while ago (back when library science papers were measuring book access in terms of card catalog distances).  I haven't had any luck finding the original paper that made this claim.  Can you?  What's the citation?  

2.  Can you find the reference for....  A paper I read, I believe it was by Alan Newell, about the "three time bands of human cognition."  The idea in that paper was that Newell claimed that there are 3 different time scales at which cognition can be studied.  One was millisecond-by-millisecond, another was minute-by-minute, and the other was day-by-day.  Can you find this reference? 

Answering the second Challenge was relatively straightforward.  Here, the big helping clue is the author's name, Alan Newell.  He left a broad and easily discoverable body of work during his years at CMU.  A relatively straightforward search such as: 

     [ Alan Newell different time scales cognition ]  

brings up a SERP with lots of hits, including the diagram shown below from page 122 of his book Unified Theories of Cognition (1994). 

Fig 3-3, pg 122 of the Newell book. This is the diagram I was seeking.  

Note here that my memory of the reference was that it was "three time scales," whereas the actual reference has four distinct bands of behavior.  The "millisecond by millisecond" is the "biological band," while the "day by day" is up at the "social band."  This is great--exactly what I was looking for.  


Search lesson:  When crafting a query, don't overlimit your query by including details that might be wrong.  My query was just for [ ... different time scales cognition ] (I assumed that the name was correct--but if I didn't have any good hits here, I would have started searching for variations on the name as well).  I did NOT do [ ... 3 different time scale cognition ] because I didn't know if that "3" would overlimit the results.  


Now, about Challenge number 1:  If you read the comments, we've been making good progress on the search problem.  We don't have exactly the right solution yet, but we're getting better.  

What does "better" or "progress" mean in this context?  

It means that we've started to explore the vocabulary of the problem, and we now have a few hits that are nearly there.  These are really valuable because you can grow outwards from the "near hit," and use the names of journals or fields of interest to help limit the discovery process.  

Regular Reader Rosemary has shared a doc with us that tells the story of her search so far.  She correctly points out that we're looking for the "magic combination of keywords" that will get us to the target.  

This is a genuinely hard problem (and I don't yet have the answer myself), so I'm going to leave this Challenge open over the weekend.  I'll summarize what we've got on Monday.

We're not quite there yet... So Search On! 

Search Challenge (4/8/15): Can you find the reference for...

Card catalog at the Library of Congress, 1942

One of the things... 
I find myself doing as I do my real, daily, research work can be loosely thought of as "tracking down the citation for something I remember imperfectly..."  

You know how it is--you read something once, and then later you need to find that thing again.  Typically, it's a result I read somewhere / sometime... and the Challenge is to work from What-I-Remember towards the original paper or article that I read.  

But here's the problem: As we know, human memory is pretty leaky.  Things are often incorrectly remembered or only dimly recalled.  So we're faced with the problem of searching the real world for the original work that is only faintly remembered.  

This is exactly what research librarians are faced with all the time.  A researcher comes into the library and asks "Can you find the reference for..."  They then proceed to describe what they remember about the result, leaving you to figure out the rest.  

I'm guessing that I spend at least 10% of my week doing this kind of thing.  It's a really handy skill to have if you're a professional researcher, writer, or someone who's interested in getting the details right.  

This week's Challenge is two of my recent "Research questions of the hard kind..."  Can you figure out the citations for each? 

1.  Can you find the reference for.... A paper I once read that claimed "the probability of a reader reading a book in the library was a function of the distance of that book from the library catalog."   

As you can tell, this research was done a while ago (back when library science papers were measuring book access in terms of card catalog distances).  I haven't had any luck finding the original paper that made this claim.  Can you?  What's the citation?  

2.  Can you find the reference for....  A paper I read, I believe it was by Alan Newell, about the "three time bands of human cognition."  The idea in that paper was that Newell claimed that there are 3 different time scales at which cognition can be studied.  One was millisecond-by-millisecond, another was minute-by-minute, and the other was day-by-day.  Can you find this reference? 

Obviously, the Challenge here is to figure out the reference despite mis-rememberings and errors in what I've told you.  For example, the Newell paper might not actually say "three time bands of human cognition," but could actually say something quite different.  

Still, the key idea should be clear; once you find the original citation, it should be obvious that THIS is the original paper that was intended.  

Warning:  I know the answer to Challenge #2.  I do NOT know the answer to Challenge #1, although I'm pretty sure I can find it. 

As always, when you find the answers, please tell us HOW you found the results.  

Hints:  Remember that Scholar.Google.com is probably a good friend to you for searches like this.  But don't limit yourself to that--there are other collections that might also be useful to search.  

Search on! 

Answer: What's this?

Great job, Search Researchers!  

You answered the question before I got around to doing my own searches.  Are we getting better?  Certainly seems so!  

If you've read the comments on the Challenge, you can see the number of approaches people used to figure this one out. 

But let's repeat this week's Challenge from Jill in Alameda: 

It dates to 1912 and is made of some kind of silver metal in a 2 and 5/8 inch circle. It says 'Compliments S.F. Chronicle, San Francisco.'  (The S.F. Chronicle is the local San Francisco newspaper.  It's been around for a while.)  

The number tabs can actually punch out a kind of "dot matrix" number when you slip a piece of paper in the side slots and press down on the tabs. 

On the back it says Page Mfg Co. Pat Oct 1, 1912.

1.  What is this device called?  How is it used?  (And why would the S.F. Chronicle hand them out with their compliments?)  

Quick answer:  It's a "check protector," made by the Page Manufacturing Company from 1912 until around 1915.  It's used to punch the dollar value of the check into the check itself as an anti-fraud measure.  At this time in the early 20th century, various methods were used to attempt to prevent changing of the monetary values and altering the payee on checks and other financial documents.  This device made that kind of alteration very difficult.  


Search Solutions:   

Hans did an Image search on:  ["Page Mfg Co" Pat Oct 1, 1912] and found several very similar items.  (This is a great example of "working with what you've got.")  

Ed realized that it was a kind of "number punch" and thought it might be used for punching tickets or transfers, so his first search was:  [ "page manufacturing" punch antique ] and found the Page Check Protector.  

David B. tried a Patent search, but had no luck, and switched to searching for the Page Manufacturing Co. in 1912.  Both David and Ed found the Early Office Museum web page that's dedicated to "Small Check Protectors," which lists the Page Mfg Co. 

David P. did an image search for:  [ 1800s device punch numbers in paper ], leading him to a similar device made by the Brady company called the "Brady Check Protector."  He revised his Image query to be [ check protector ], and found something rather similar:  

Jon (the Unknown) did a Patent search and was able to spot it quickly.  His Patent search was for [ Page Oct 1 1912 ] -- and I'm amazed at how well it worked.  He found this as his result: 

It wasn't just in the list of patents, it was the number 1 hit!  Luckily, the date format on the patent was the same as that printed on the device ("Oct 1 1912"), and not in some other format (e.g., "October 1st, 1912").  

Ramón, meanwhile, did a series of straightforward searches, modifying his query until he too found the Early Office Museum web page.  Interestingly, he found it with the query:  [ Page Mfg silver 1912 devices], but an Image search with that query gives you this: 

When I did my searches, I didn't include the word "silver" because I thought it would be too distracting.  (I know there are a LOT of silver things in the world, most of them described with that term on the page, so I avoided it.)  But obviously it worked fine here, mostly because "Page Mfg" and 1912 works well to find the gadget. 

Luís did a long search after noting the similarity between the Protector and the Dymo label maker.  (In truth, that was the first thing I thought of as well.  It's just VERY similar.)  He tried variations on that theme, checking out the idea of "perforated number wheel" and even saws!  His stick-to-it=tiveness got him to the Google Patent search page with the query:  [Paper perforator ] which leads to the US Patent 1039789A, the patent given to Mashall A Page on Oct 1, 1912.  

Application filed March 14, 1912. Serial No. 683,723.

To all whom it may concern:

Be it known that I, MARSHALL H. PAGE, a citizen of the United States, residing at San Francisco, in the county of San Francisco and State of California, have invented a new and useful Check-Perforator, of which the following is a specification in such full and clear terms as will enable those skilled in the art to construct and use the same. 

This invention relates to a check perforator and protector and its object is to make a device which is small enough to be carried in the pocket, as Well as to make a device which will be cheaper than the large machine protectors now in use.

Rosemary decided to focus more on the SF Chronicle connection, and after checking the newspaper archives, she found that Marshall H. Page was an advertiser in the San Francisco Chronicle.  As this image from the San Francisco Chronicle of Sunday, 6 Apr 1913 (Page 39) shows:  

Image from Newspapers.com, April 6, 1913.

And then Hans noticed that the Page Mfg. Co is located IN the Chronicle Building!  (Although I can't spot a sign for "Page Mfg" in this picture...)  

Coincidence?  Seems probable that Page made some of these as handouts (what we would now call schwag) for the Chronicle.  

Search Lessons:  

One: Note that there are multiple ways to solve this.  Searching Patents works; searching web results works; search Images works.  But ... 

Two: Use what you've been given.  In this case, the text on the front of the device ("Compliments of the SF Chronicle") didn't do much for us--but the company name and date--those worked.  

Three: As several Searchers noted, just hanging in there and scrolling down the page will sometimes work well.  You have to take note of when the quality of the results you're seeing starts to diminish.  

Again... Great work team!  Keep it up! 

Search on! 

(Thanks again to Jill for such a great Challenge!)  

Search Challenge (5/1/15): What's this?

Although I should have planned....
an April Fool's Challenge, I didn't think about it until this morning, so all I have for you is a real Challenge that was posed to me by Jill, a librarian who works in the Bay Area.  

There's an interesting backstory here... Jill told me this about the device:    

It dates to 1912 and is made of some kind of silver metal in a 2 and 5/8 inch circle. It says 'Compliments S.F. Chronicle, San Francisco.'  (The S.F. Chronicle is the local San Francisco newspaper.  It's been around for a while.)  

The number tabs can actually punch out a kind of "dot matrix" number when you slip a piece of paper in the side slots and press down on the tabs. 

On the back it says Page Mfg Co. Pat Oct 1, 1912.

1.  What is this device called?  How is it used?  (And why would the S.F. Chronicle hand them out with their compliments?)  

As always, please let us know how you figured this one out.  When you write in, be sure to tell us your search path (I suspect there will be a lot of blind alleys here), and what you finally did that worked.  

In full disclosure, I also have no idea what this is.  Neither does Jill.  So we have our work cut out for us!  

Search On, Search Researchers!  


All photo creds to Jill.  2015.  

Answer: Discovering unusual perspectives

This week's Challenges are all about finding information from an unusual perspective.  

One of the biggest problems people have when searching for information is that they get locked into thinking about their search in one particular way.  By asking these questions, I'm trying to make the deeper point that sometimes you have to have a different point-of-view.  

Literally.  

Let's look at the Challenges:  

1.  I was in Los Angeles (CA) the other day, and I happened to notice something unusual attached to the back of each letter on the famous "Hollywood" sign.  Once you see it, of course they'd need to have this on the back of each letter--but I'd never though about it before.  What's on the backside of each of the letters? 

It's an interesting point-of-view problem.  Literally.

Google Earth won't give you this;  neither Streetview nor satellite view in Google Maps will do.  What else can you do?

When I thought about this, I immediately thought about Google Images.  "Surely someone has taken a recent picture of these letters... and almost certainly from the backside as well."

This is a bit of knowing that there's a sub-culture of people who love to take pictures of things they're forbidden from visiting.  (Witness all of the picture of people you love urban exploring.)

My query was simple:

     [ Hollywood sign back ]

And here's what I got:

From this vantage point you can see that there's a support structure (which you'd expect) and a set of ladders to climb up each letter (which I did NOT expect).  I assume they're for maintenance, but the point here is that everything has multiple points-of-view.  It's not hard to search for them, but you have to keep your mind curious and remember this.

2.  The aurora borealis  (or aurora australis) is one of the most amazing sights on the planet.  When you look at it, you see vast sheets of colored, translucent drapes moving across the sky.  In appearance, it's just colored lights--but when seen from above, what shape are the Northern (or Southern) Lights?  Can you find a picture that shows the overall, planet-wide shape of the aurora? 

We've all see these pictures of the aurora--they're gorgeous (and I hope to see them in person one day).  They're generated when the charged particles from the sun strike atoms in Earth's atmosphere, causing electrons in the atoms to move to a higher-energy state. When the electrons drop back to a lower energy state, they create the glowing curtains of light we see as auroras.

But to figure out the pattern of the aurora on a planetary-scale, we have to find an image that's taken from WAY out in space.  

Here, my query on Google Images was: 

     [ deep space aurora ] 

but I ended up accidentally finding lots of science fiction images (who knew that "Deep Space" is the name of a science fiction television show AND a 1988 horror/science-fiction movie?).  

So I modified my query to pull up only reliable images: 

     [ deep space aurora site:nasa.gov ] 

this is our old friend site: being used to limit my results only to NASA.gov images. Even so, I had to look through a few images before finding this (click on the image to follow it back to NASA's web page): 

But notice that this isn't QUITE a picture of the aurora as it appears on Earth.  If you read the web page carefully, you'll find that this is a picture of the aurora in a composite image:  It wouldn't look like this from space without special filters, etc.  As the web page says:  "The IMAGE satellite captured this view of the aurora australis (southern lights) on September 11, 2005, four days after a record-setting solar flare sent plasma—an ionized gas of protons and electrons—flying towards the Earth. The ring of light that the solar storm generated over Antarctica glows green in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum, shown in this image. The IMAGE observations of the aurora are overlaid onto NASA’s satellite-based Blue Marble image. From the Earth’s surface, the ring would appear as a curtain of light shimmering across the night sky."  

3.  We know that some plants move to follow the sun.  Can you find a video of a sunflower following the sun?  How about some other plant?  What do they do to follow the sun across the sky? 

This was a slightly trickier question.  Since I already knew the word for "sun following" (it's heliotropic) I used that to find a video of a sunflower in motion with the query: 

     [ heliotropic sunflower ] 

It's not hard to find them.  (But be careful--there are at least a couple of animations of sunflowers that look good, but are completely synthetic!  Careful what you accept as evidence.)  

As I looked through the videos, I learned from the Indiana Dept. of Biology website that many people are under the misconception that the flower heads of the sunflower (Helianthus annuus) track the sun. When you see a field of cultivated sunflowers, the flower heads face in more-or-less the same direction. However, if you check out a field of sunflowers in the afternoon, it will be apparent that the flower heads are mostly facing east, where the sun rises each morning.  And if you look at them in the morning, they're still pointing east.  

Immature flower buds of the sunflower do exhibit solar tracking and on sunny days the buds will track the sun across the sky from east to west and by dawn the buds will have returned to face eastward, like the leaves in the movie above. 

So I modified my query to include: 

     [ immature sunflower heliotropic time lapse ] 

and found this video of immature sunflowers sun-tracking during the day. 

However, as the flower bud matures and blossoms, the stem stiffens and the flower becomes fixed facing the eastward direction. Flowers of the wild sunflowers seen on roadsides do not follow the sun and their flowering heads face many directions when mature. However, their leaves exhibit some solar tracking.

But that left me wondering:  What DOES a sunflower do during the day, if not tracking the sun?  

The query: 

     [ sunflower time lapse ] 

brought me the following very satisfying (and beautiful) video of a sunflower making small, fascinating movements during the day, but notably NOT tracking the sun! 

Unlike the sunflower flower, the flowers of some plant species track the sun across the sky from east to west. A good example of this is the alpine plant, the snow buttercup (Ranunculus adoneus).  Searching for a video for this lead me to this completely unexpected video of Arctic poppies following the sun during a full 24-day (when it never sets). 

Lovely. 

Search lessons:  

These weren't hard Challenges, but they're great examples of the deeper point that we searchers sometimes need to take a somewhat different point of view... and that it's often useful to think about what other points of view (from the back, from space, from a time-lapse) would be helpful in answering our Challenge questions.  

Hope you enjoyed this one!  

As always, 

Search on! 

Search Challenge (3/25/15): Discovering unusual perspectives

I'm back from my mini-break, back from diving in the Caribbean, rested and relaxed...

... and immediately heading out on the road again to teach search classes.  I'm traveling to DC to bring a bit of SearchResearch there.  Stay tuned for more Challenges coming from that part of the world.  (And not to worry--we'll have Challenges from Cozumel as well.  In just a bit.)  

First, I wanted to focus in a bit on finding "unusual perspectives," that is, finding answers to questions through images in ways that you might not have thought about.  

Today I have three questions, all of which can be answered, but the usual searches might not quite work, so you'll have to try something a bit different. 

1.  I was in Los Angeles (CA) the other day, and I happened to notice something unusual attached to the back of each letter on the famous "Hollywood" sign.  Once you see it, of course they'd need to have this on the back of each letter--but I'd never though about it before.  What's on the backside of each of the letters? 

2.  The aurora borealis  (or aurora australis) is one of the most amazing sights on the planet.  When you look at it, you see vast sheets of colored, translucent drapes moving across the sky.  In appearance, it's just colored lights--but when seen from above, what shape are the Northern (or Southern) Lights?  Can you find a picture that shows the overall, planet-wide shape of the aurora? 

3.  We know that some plants move to follow the sun.  Can you find a video of a sunflower following the sun?  How about some other plant?  What do they do to follow the sun across the sky? 

As always, be sure to tell us HOW you found the answer to the Challenge questions.  (And what did NOT work out for you?)  

Search on! 

Taking the week off...

As you could probably tell,
I've been a bit busy.  

This past weekend was the Learning At Scale 2015 conference in Vancouver.  I was one of the organizers, and as a consequence, my time was allocated from the moment I posted last week's Search Challenge until now.  (Which is why my answer was so late.  I've been running nonstop for a while.) 

But now, even as I write this, I'm sitting in an airport heading for the Caribbean.  Time to go diving again.  

So THIS is my plan for the week.  

My plan is to kick back, read a bit, and write a Search Challenge for next week.  

But this week?  Nah.  I need a break. I'm hitting the water later today.  

I'll be back.  Don't go away.  Take a mini-vacation yourself!  

-- Dan 

Answer: Is the fruit getting sweeter?

This week's question by Miguel Viterbo asked: 

We've heard rumors that farmers add sugar (or some kind of sweetener) to the irrigation of fruit. 

(1) Is this true? Does this actually work to make fruit sweeter? 

 (2) Should I be concerned?  Sugar is already hiding in so many everyday "non-sugar" foods (way more in the US than in Portugal, granted) that I don't want to take any more added sugar.  If it's really more sugar, how much more is it?  

When I first read this question, I immediately thought this sounds like an "urban legend" that could have some basis in fact.  How can we find out?  

Let's chat about strategy for a minute:  

I'd try a couple of different steps to answering this question.  I sat back for a second and thought about what I'm going to do.  Here's what I came up with... 


A.  First, check-assumptions about the question:  Maybe the presumption that "fruits have been getting sweeter over the past decade isn't true.  Is it?  

B.  Second, try a "first principles" approach:  If it's true that fruit is getting sweeter, then I'm going to do a back-of-the-envelope calculation to see if just adding sugar to an irrigation system makes sense.  How many pounds of sugar would you have to feed to a plant to make the fruit sweeter?  How would you dissolve it into the irrigation supply? 

C.  The simple approach:  Search on things like [ irrigation additives ] and explore how people decide what to add to irrigation systems.  I already know they add certain kinds of fertilizers, could they add something that acts to make fruit sweeter?    (Note here--I'm not assuming they're adding just sugar--it could be some kind of artificial sweetener or chemical that acts to increase total fruit sugars.)   In the process, I'm probably going to check out some agricultural schools to see what they teach farmers to put into irrigation systems, and I'm going to look at both row irrigation (where the water flows freely down channels through the fields) and drip irrigation systems (where a small water line is run directly to the base of each plant).  

Start here:  A.  First, check-assumptions about the question:   Let's begin with our assumptions.  HAS fruit been getting sweeter over the past 10 or 20 years? I started with the simple and obvious query: 

     [ fruit getting sweeter over time ] 

This is a long query--why did I add "over time"?  I added that to see if I could get articles that discuss the changes in fruit sweetness, and I would expect that phrase to appear in the text.  

I explored this for a while, finding a couple of articles, e.g., "Sugar high: Why your food is getting sweeter"  which includes the tidbit that a Cornell apple specialist denies that apples are getting sweeter over time, although a Times of London article (requires subscription) claims that food scientists are breeding fruits and vegetables to be sweeter, so our baseline understanding of what’s “naturally” sweet is changing. 

While I read a lot of articles here, all of them suggested that new, and improved varieties are probably making some fruits sweeter.  But, interestingly, none of the articles mentioned changes in irrigation practices.  

So it seems that some fruits have been getting sweeter, but so far, it seems to be slow changes over time with changes in new fruit varieties.  

Let's try our second approach... 


B. Try a "first principles" approach: Would adding sugar to irrigation water work to make the fruit sweeter?  

Let's consider oranges.  How many pounds of fruit will a single tree generate in a year?  

     [ pounds of fruit can an orange tree produce ] 

Which leads to multiple articles, the best of  which is from Texas A&M agriculture school.  "Home fruit production: Oranges" which has a good table of orange tree production as the tree ages.  At maximum production, a single Navel orange tree can produce around 100 pounds of fruit per year. 

Okay.. how much irrigation water will that tree need during the year?  My query: 

     [ how much water does an orange tree need per year ] 

leads to several articles, the best of which is from the University of Arizona agricultural school.  The article, "Irrigating Citrus Trees" tells us that each tree requires a different amount of water, depending on canopy size and the air temperature.  That makes sense... but what's the average?  There's a giant table in that article, when you boil it down, tells us that an average tree needs around 29 gallons / water / day during the growing season.  

If you produce 100 pounds of fruit and want to add sugar to the irrigation water to get a 1% increase in sugar to the fruit, you'll need around 1 pound of sugar to get into the fruit.  If you assume that 10% of the water delivered to the tree is then directed to the fruit, then the irrigation water needs to have 0.29 gallons of sugar, or 5 cups of sugar, to each tree for each day.  (Assuming drip irrigation.)  If you have 1000 trees, that's 5000 cups of sugar to add to your irrigation system each day to keep it at that level.  

1 cup of sugar weighs in at about 0.5 pounds.  So 5000 cups of sugar is around 2500 pounds of sugar each day.  That's a LOT of sugar to be sending out into the irrigation water.  

(And I can easily imagine the troubles with sugar-loving bugs, and problems that sugar-laden drip irrigation lines would cause.  It's seeming less and less probable.)  


C.  The simple approach:  Let's try the simplest query:  

     [ irrigation additives ]   [ irrigation supplements ]   [ "added to" irrigation ] 

Surprisingly, none of these worked especially well. I found lots of off-topic content, but little that led me directly to useful results.  

Now what?  

I know farmers sometimes add things to their irrigation--the question is, what do they call it?  What special terms do they use? 

To find out, I did a search for: 

     [ irrigation fertilizer ] 

and spent a little time reading around on farmer's web site, when I finally found an article on USDA.gov (the US agricultural department).  A ha!  Now I had an entire agricultural site to check out!  (How could I have forgotten them?)  And by reading the farmer articles, I discovered that additives are put into the irrigation system by means of injectors.  (That's the device that adds and mixes irrigation additives to ensure that the contents are mixed and put in at the right time and place.)  

     [ site:usda.gov irrigation injector ] 

leads to a LOT of articles--many about pest controls and fertilizer agents.  

And although I tried many queries to follow up on sweetening (or additional sugar) via irrigation and/or injectors, I didn't find anything. 

      [ site:usda.gov irrigation sweeten ]    [ site:usda.gov  irrigation sugar ]  

Not much. 

On the other hand, I DID learn that red-colored plastic film seems to make strawberries sweeter, and that there's a good deal of research to make sugar beets have more sugar.  

But I couldn't find anything about anything added to irrigation to make fruit sweeter.  

A few searches on: 

     [ breeding fruit sweet ] 

led to a large number of articles, many of which point out how active breeding programs have led to sweeter pineapples (such as the "Maui Gold" which is twice as sweet as its predecessor, introduced into Europe in 1996), sweeter strawberries, and sweeter apples.  

So while it's tempting to think that irrigation additives are making the fruit sweeter in taste, the more likely story is that farmers are using the fruits of agriculture breeders in their quest to constantly improve the fruit. 

Whether or not a hyper-sweet apple is to your liking is up to you.  (And there ARE regional preferences in what levels of sweetness and flavor make up a "perfect" apple, orange, or strawberry.)  

But I don't think they're adding anything to the water.... 


Search Lessons:  There are two big ones here.  

1.  Disproving something that's not happening is hard.  As you can tell, a lot of searches that do NOT find anything doesn't definitively close the case, but it does give pretty strong evidence.  The best thing to do here would really be to go talk to an orange farmer, or apple farmer and ASK.  But barring that, a complete sweep of all the different ways you can think of to ask the question.... that's about the best we can do.  Proving that something doesn't exist is always hard. 

2.  When your searches aren't working, look for something in the field that you KNOW you can find; go read there, and learn some language that can help.    That's what I did when I searched for [ irrigation fertilizer ].  I knew that was true.  And in the process of reading broadly in the topic I learned all kinds of terms and concepts that I could use to hone my search more effectively.  


Search on! 



____ 
Many thanks again to Miguel Viterbo.  This excellent question comes from him.