Pollen and geology leads to SearchResearch

Just about now, 

in early spring, pollen starts to show up in the gutters.  

In between the bursts of rain, early flowering trees—where I live it’s the plums, almonds, and acacia—all start producing pollen in abundance. It all washes down from the stamens, over petals and into the drains, leaving long strands of cadmium yellow along the rainwater’s edge.   Fecundity’s promise, denied and discarded, but leaving brilliant streaky color along the way to sea. 

In the San Francisco Bay area, those rains visit only between November and March, just five months of the year.  Maybe because they’re so rare, they seem to bring wonderful moments of pure delight.

As I walked down the street just after a long rain, the sun emerged for a moment drenching the wet surfaces in warmth and light; a momentary pause in the rain that filled with brilliant sunlight.  I turned around, looking away from the sun, hoping to catch a rainbow in the droplets reflections, but missed seeing anything.  I kept walking.  As I passed a tall pine tree, one drop fell off the tree limb into the sunlight, an aerial jewel.  Then another, and another… until an entire shimmering cascade came off the long needles and into the shaft of light with a hush of quiet velvet sound.  No rainbows in the moment, but there’s a curtain of falling crystals to see. 

It was just an avalanche of raindrops; it happens constantly, nothing special in particular.  But in that moment, in that quintessence of a fragment of time, I missed the rainbow, but saw diamonds in mid-flight, surging to the ground.  

Earlier that morning I’d gone for a run at the Stanford Dish, it’s an open area featuring a gigantic radio-telescope, a landmark in Silicon Valley.  But for locals, this is one of those standard runs you do often, just because you know exactly how far it is, what the trail is and what to expect.  It’s not an exploration so much as it is a familiar ritual. 

In rainy weather, though, it can be surprising.  The Dish is in a hilly region of Palo Alto, with spectacular, open views in all directions.  When it’s clear, you can see from San Francisco to San Jose (thirty miles to the north, thirty miles to the south) up and down the bay.  To the west, the Santa Cruz mountains form a woodsy barrier wall.  And when it rains, the clouds seem to always be especially dramatic from this hilltop.

Naturally, being a curious guy, I was thinking about that as I ran on the crestline trail.  It’s where the views are best, and where the view of rain, clouds and sky are always most impressive.  Why is it so consistently impressive?  Is it just the openness of the viewshed?

On this run, this time, I noticed two patches of rain off in the distance.  One was to the north, roughly over San Mateo, where there’s a gap in the western coastal mountains that lets the fog through in the summertime.  The other rainy patch was to the south, roughly over Los Gatos, where there’s another gap in the mountains.  An insight begins to dawn… Those two patches of rain are coming from the sea to the west, and are coming through the gaps in the mountains.  

Of course!  The reason the clouds are always so spectacular is that the Dish happens to sit between two major mixing points between the marine layer of air (coming through the gaps) and the air that sits in the bay (or in the summertime, that’s coming from the east, off the Central Valley).  

In essence, this is the eddy between the mixers. Swirls, bumps, and lumps in the clouds happen preferentially here.  Shafts of light that come through the breaks happen here as well, for just that reason—it’s an accident of geology.  

The San Mateo gap is well-known.  It’s what lets the summer fog over the mountains, often causing SFO to shut down.  The gap at Los Gatos is also well-known—it’s where Highway 17 takes the low pass over the mountains to reach Santa Cruz.  

When I get home I do the obvious thing and search for a rainfall density map of the Bay area, looking for confirmation that my gap theory is actually true.  And after searching for a while (the key insight was to realize I needed a “precipitation” map, not a “rainfall” map), I found just the diagram I sought.  And it’s true.  Extending eastward from both mountain gaps are regions of increased rainfall.  Los Gatos averages about 33% higher rainfall than the Dish, with similar numbers for San Mateo.  Even better, the map shows a plume-like structure to the rain distribution: it’s the gaps causing the focusing of precipitation.  

And now, naturally, being a curious guy, I wonder if there is a difference in the types of pollen you’d find in the gutters and waterways of Los Altos (to the south) and San Mateo (in the north) as compared to the location of the Dish.  I suspect so.

That search continues.  I will tell you that in the process of searching for differential pollen patterns in the Bay area, I learned a new word:  palynology—the study of pollen… and its distribution.  The word dates from 1944, and was coined in the Pollen Analysis Circular (a small journal that published from 1943 to 1954 and then merged with the larger publication, Micropaleontologist).

The question is, can I link geological features to pollenfall patterns?  What kind of research would I have to do to get the answer? That’s the joy of finding stuff out—the chance to look at the world, do a bit of deep looking and digging in the literature, pulling together ideas, linking them together to learn something brand new. 

I love doing research both professionally and at a small, personal scale.  And I now know why running the Dish on a rainy day is almost always rewarding—it’s fertile ground for observing the world and launching into small personal research quests. 

The next step is just connecting literatures between geography, meteorology, and palynology—a cross pollenization of academic disciplines, if you will. 

Search Challenge (3/16/16): Finding out about a technical conference...

As you already know... 

... I travel a good deal for my work. In a typical year, I attend 3 or 4 technical conferences, which are largely meetings where researchers in my field get together to deliver papers on their latest research.  We listen, ask questions, argue with each other a bit, and try to figure out how stuff operates.  

The Wilson library at UNC Chapel Hill.

Now, you might think this is incredibly tedious stuff, but it's also the mill that grinds the flour of science from raw kernels of ideas into refined understanding about how the world works.  

I'm in Chapel Hill, North Carolina for a conference that's called Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval.  It's a nice, smallish conference of people who, like me, wonder about how people search for information online.  (Imagine that! There are conferences all about SearchResearch!)  

For SRS purposes, such scientific conferences can be incredibly useful collections of information on topics that might not yet be reflected in common web content, magazines, or books.  In many ways, the list of conference papers tells you a lot about the topic area of the conference.  

Thinking about this prompted the following couple of Search Research Challenges for this week.  

1.  Conferences typically have papers that are classified as "Best Paper."  What was the title of the Best Paper for this year's Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval?  

2. Who was opening keynote speaker at CHIIR 2010?  (No, I'm not crazy--I'm asking this for a specific reason that I'll reveal on Monday.)  BTW, why is this special talk called a "keynote" anyway?  

3. While the conference papers are great to listen to, a great deal of work happens by walking around.  While walking with a colleague, I found this flower growing just outside the conference meeting place on the side of the road.  What is it?  (And, aside from enjoying flowers, do you have any idea why I might be asking this apparently out-of-place question?)  

4. What is the largest scientific conference that's held somewhere in the world each year (annually)?  

I'm here today, and then heading off to DC on Thursday in my role as itinerant scholar.  But I'll answer these Challenges on Monday, and you'll see why I'm asking such funny questions.  
As always, please tell us not just your answers, but also HOW you found the answers to these questions about scholarly conferences.

Search on! 

Answer: Do you know the way...

Last week's "flying northeast" question generated a number of answers... 

Recall that Regular Reader Jon ("The Unknown") asked:  "If I start from my house in Vancouver and fly NE, keeping my plane flying in a straight line, what country do I next enter?"  

As it turns out,  Jon tU lives very near to Vancouver, BC.  So I've modified his question just a bit to make it just a tad simpler.  (And for these Challenges, you can safely ignore all weather issues, magnetic anomalies, and forbidden flying zones... )

Here's the start of Jon's hypothetical flight path: 

And our questions:  
1.  If Jon flies from the Vancouver, BC, airport on a NE heading, and flies in a straight-line, swerving neither to the left or the right, what's the next country he'll fly over?  (And for extra credit, what's the name of airport he should land at?)  

The answer that several people gave was to look at a map (e.g., Google Maps), draw a NE line and look to see the next country that it crosses, like this: 

The problem is that we live on a sphere, and straight lines on the map turn into giant curves in reality.

One way to look at this is to get a globe (yes my friends, a physical device with a map of the planet impressed on the surface), take a piece of string, and try to see where a straight flight NE out of Vancouver would take you. I asked Gary Marchionini (the Dean of the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) if I could borrow one.  Luckily, he happened to have one at home (because they don't seem to exist in libraries any more), and we gave this course calculation a try.  Starting with one end of the string in Vancouver, we stretched it in a due NE direction:   

Here you see me trying to stretch a string NE from Vancouver in a straight line.  As you can see in the left image, the string just barely intersects the bottom end of Greenland. But in the pic on the right, a slight adjustment of the string has it hitting the corner of Spain and Portugal and missing Greenland. 

This is obviously too coarse a measurement, but it shows the point nicely:  A straight line on a Mercator projection map (e.g., the Google Map above) is a serious distortion.  

The path the string follows is... what?  Let's figure this one out.  Obviously, we need to understand a bit about lines-on-a-sphere: 

     [ straight lines on a sphere ] 

tells us that "straight lines on a sphere are Great Circle lines..." Ah, that's right.  Now I remember my high school geometry--if you fly on a straight line across the globe, you're actually on a Great Circle route!  (That is, if you start on a NE heading from Vancouver, and fly long enough, you'll end up back in Vancouver--it's a circle on the globe.)  

So NOW our question is "what Great Circle is at 45 degrees (NE)?"  How do we find that? 

When I asked Jon (the Unknown) this question he wrote back that he needed to first understand waht a "NE heading" really means.  As he found, it means.. 

We first need to define 'azimuth' as a way to define what a 'heading" is.  The azimuth is the angle between the north vector and the perpendicular projection of the star down onto the horizon.  (If you do a query like [ define azimuth ] you'll learn that it's the direction of a celestial object from the observer, and expressed as the angular distance from the north or south point of the horizon to the point at which a vertical circle passing through the object intersects the horizon. 

That is, it's the horizontal angle or direction of a compass bearing from a pooint.  Azimuth is usually measured in degrees. The concept is used in navigation and astronomy. 

This means I need to follow the initial azimuth line from CYVR  (Vancouver airport code) at an heading of 45 degrees; that's NE.  

A search for:

              [how to draw a great circle route]  

finds many tools, including the Great Circle Mapper  which will draw it for you if you have a beginning and end point.  But so far we don't have an end point.  so I used  the Mapping and Distance Tools (at ACSCDG.com)  which allows a starting point, and asks for a route option for which I drew a line in the general direction NE. 

In the box to the left of the map is a table which shows azimuth and distance. I kept shrinking the map to show CYVR and Europe and with a heading (azimuth) of 45, which draws a nice red line showing the Great Circle route: 

The data table from ACDCDG showing the azimuth and distance traveled,
starting at the Vancouver airport and landing in Spain.  

This neatly and easily drew a nice red line which just missed Greenland and then made a solid hit by Porto (OPO) in Portugal.  

When I did this (Dan), I found that the Great Circle route definitely misses Greenland (but just barely), but it actually hits Spain first, just a few miles north of the Portugal border. 

When you zoom in, you'll see the NE azimuth heading from Vancouver airport hits Spain,
near the border with Portugal.  

If you do this same Great Circle Route calculation from his hometown of Courtenay, which is just a bit north of the Vancouver airport, you can see I got slightly different results: 

This was Jon's route calculation starting from Courtenay.

Just to check, if you go back to the other tool (Great Circle Mapper), and put in Vancouver for one end, and Porto (Portugal) at the other end, you'll see this map: 

The initial heading here is 46 degrees (because we're asking for the YVR to OPO (Porto) route--not the route to "first landfall outside of Canada" as I did in my computation from Vancouver airport).  

So the answer is... Spain (if you start from Vancouver Airport) OR Portugal (if you start at Jon's hometown of Courtenay).  

But we also have the mileage... 5,045 miles.  Which will be handy for our next question... 


2.  If Jon is flying an Airbus A340-200, about how long will the flight take? (Again, ignore weather, headwinds, tailwinds, etc.)  

After all of that map stuff, this is easy.  The query: 

     [ A340-200 range airspeed ] 

leads us to the Airbus website, which tells us that "...optimal range of 6,700 nautical miles.." and that the cruising speed is 537 mph (867 kph) at 36,000 feet (11,000 m).  A quick Google query for: 

     [ 5045 /537 ]  = 9.39 (hours) 

tells us that this is about a 9.4 hour flight.  


3.  What distance is it from Vancouver to this mysterious destination's biggest airport (that is, where can he safely land his Airbus A340-200 in that country)?  


What about that airport near the place where the Great Circle hits--Porto?  

     [ Porto airport ] 

The Wikipedia entry tells us that the runway there is 11,417 feet long (3,480 m).  Searching for: 

     [ A340-200 landing distance ] 

tells us that the takeoff/landing distance required varies from 2990m - 3100 m (takeoff), 1890m - 2100m (landing), depending on load and conditions.  (Data aggregated from a number of different sites.)  

And so, yes, Jon can land his A340-200 at Porto, Portugal.  

4.  Can he make it there without refueling?  

As we found earlier, the range of the A340-200 is 6,700 nautical miles.  But notice that the distance was given in regular miles.  Are we really okay? 

The Google query to do conversions can be done like this: 

      [ 5,045 miles in nautical miles ] 

We can see that this is easily within the range limit we found above.  

Search Lessons

This Challenge certainly generated a few great search lessons.

1. Be aware of the context of the question.  In this case, the context is literally global.  You might have picked up from the odd phrasing of the question that something was up.  If Jon flies on  a "...NE heading, and flies in a straight-line, swerving neither to the left or the right, what's the next country he'll fly over?"  Pay attention to the details of the question ("... NE heading"), and realize that this is a flight heading on a sphere.  Unless you have incredible spatial reasoning, you probably won't be able to intuit what the answer is, and so you have to do some background searches to learn about azimuth, Great Circle routes, and so on.  

2.  Look for tools to do the work for you.  Since we learned that Great Circle routes are involved here, you should take a minute to check for mapping tools to help with this Challenge.  Luckily, there are several Great Circle mapping tools, and we can use them to our advantage.  

3. Remember the conversion / calculator tools and pay close attention to units that you're finding in the text.  

For Teachers

These kinds of questions can be really challenging for students who might not realize that different map projections have very different properties.  It's one of those cases where a simple question can lead to lots of geography and mapping exercises.  (And, if your students are really advanced, some spherical geometry.  See the Wikipedia page on Spherical Geometry to learn how to compute angles of geodesic lines on a sphere.)  

On the other hand, mapping Challenges can be very compelling for students, especially if you can link it to personal connections (such as where their ancestors came from originally, local sports figures, etc.).  

And, if you want to pursue the Great Circle Challenge, consider this question:  Can your students find the shortest path from Melbourne to Rio de Janeiro?  If they do, what continents does the path cross?  (The answer is pretty surprising!)  

Postscript:  Another solution 

As I was working on this Challenge, I remembered that there was a "geodesic preserving map projection," but I couldn't remember much about it.  The one thing I DID remember was that a Great Circle route would show up as a straight line.  (A "geodesic" is the same as a Great Circle route on a sphere.)  So I did the obvious query: 

      [ geodesic preserving map ] 

and found that this kind of map is always centered on a particular location (say, Vancouver), and that straight lines from the center can be used to figure what the Great Circle route heading off at 45 degrees to the NE.  I also learned it's called an azimuthal stereographic projection.  These are circle-preserving, as any circle upon the sphere (every geodesic, parallel and meridian) is mapped to a circle; and where geodesic lines crossing the central point map to circles with infinite diameter--in other words, straight lines.  

Following my own advice, I searched for a tool to do this: 

     [ azimuthal projection map generator ] 

which led me to a generator.  If you drop in the lat/long for Vancouver airport, you'll create this map: 

Azimuthal map projection centered on Vancouver.
Map generated by NS6T.net  I added the extra red line
at the NE azimuth (45 degrees) 

As you can see, this gives us the same answer as we found earlier--it just misses Greenland and intersects Europe right at the junction of Portugal and Spain.  

Why research skills matter more than ever

I watched in dismay as the young student slowly typed her query into the smartphone.  This was not going to end well…

She was trying to find out which city was the capital of the Belgian Congo in 1923.  She very reasonably searched: 

    [capital Belgian Congo] 

and in less than a second she discovered that the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo was Kinshasa, a port town on the Congo River.  That was a great query, and she happily copied the answer into her worksheet.  Done!  

Keep reading... 

But you’re probably as surprised as I was while watching her.  

The Democratic Republic of Congo is a completely separate country from the Belgian Congo, and Boma WAS the capital city of the Congo Free State and Belgian Congo from 1886 to 1926.  In that year, the capital was moved to Léopoldville (which was later renamed Kinshasa during the reign of Mobutu in 1966).  Knowing which city was the capital during which time period is complicated in the Congo, so I’m not terribly surprised by the wrong result. 

The deep problem here is that she blindly accepted the answer offered by the first result shown in the search engine as correct.  She didn’t realize that there’s a deeper story here.  

She didn't know that capitals can (and in central Africa, often DO) change frequently.  

We know this is what many students do—they do the first query that pops into their heads and run with it.  Double checking and going-deeper are skills that comes only with a great deal of practice… and perhaps only by having a bunch of answers marked as wrong on important exams.  

Key point:  Students often don’t have a great deal of background knowledge to flag a result as potentially incorrect, so they’re especially susceptible to misguided search results like this.  She hadn't yet learned about the political turmoils of Africa, so she never thought to read more deeply.  

If she had clicked through to the landing page, she probably would have started reading about the history of the Belgian Congo, and realized that it has a few hundred years of wars, corruption, changes in rulers, shifts in governance.  The name of the country changed at least 6 times in a century, but she never realized that because she only read the answer as presented in the first search engine result. 

Teachers see this kind of thing all the time—students will sometimes write learned essays that reflect holocaust-denial versions of the holocaust because the top three hits from their Google query happen to be all revisionist versions of World War II history… and they don’t know they should go a little farther in the results list.  

You can try it: the query [crematorium holocaust review] gives revisionist results in the top 3 positions. If you’re a student, which results do you use?  If you're just now learning about World War II, how do you know these are bogus results? 

This is one of the reasons I teach people how to do research—there’s a lot of work to do here.  And it’s more than just students in school who make basic mistakes.  City councils have banned the use of water because they did poor basic research.  

The bigger problem is that relatively few people go deep enough to check on their basic research, and so we get ridiculous Facebook posts that propagate stupidities of the past that a minute’s worth of checking would reveal as silly.  (Just check Snopes.com for the latest depth of stupid for examples; they do excellent work in debunking the latest round of ridiculosity circulating on the net.)

Basically, when doing research, people keep making mistakes—and there’s no real place for them to learn how to do it correctly.  Very few schools are doing this—there’s just little capacity for teaching these skills, even though they’re critical. 

This is the reason I teach people how to do research—there’s a lot of work to do here.  

It’s obvious that very few students (or adults!) ever get to have a class about how to do research.  With search engines, we can make somewhat convincing research mistakes rapidly.  Speed is important, but with rapidity also comes a kind of carelessness that people often don’t recognize.  (Typical speed-induced errors:  not double checking; looking for confirmation, not contradiction; not knowing what kind of resources are available; not understanding the scope and credibility of a resource.)

Search Lessons 

1.  You have to keep your skills fresh as search changes.  Search engines are constantly creating new capabilities such as Search-By-Image.  Stay on top of these things! 

2. Realize that the underlying content changes.  What we believe to be true is constantly shifting (Example: How many planets are there?  8?  9?)   

  

3. Collections constantly change. The resources available to you changes constantly as well.  The number of books in full-view constantly changes, new image collections come online, new cultural resources spring into existence... 

4. New KINDS of stuff is out there, pay attention. Now you can easily find data sets, satellite images, Vines, podcast series, etc. What's the next newest content type you can search for?  

5. The dark side: new scams and bogus content are constantly arising as well.  You need to learn how to recognize this.  There seems to be a new conspiracy theory of the day, along with scam online pharmacies that can kill you with improperly made drugs, and disinformation sites.  

As I said, this is really why I write the SearchResearch blog, why I teach classes, and why I try to demonstrate how good research really works.  It's deeply non-obvious, and we all need to really understand how this stuff works.  

Search Challenge (3/9/16): Do you know the way to... ?

In 1968 Dionne Warwick famously sang... 

... "Do You Know the Way to San José?" Which asked that question, wondering if she could go back there to "find some peace of mind..."  because she was "born and raised in San José" and there's "lots of space there..."  

Things have changed a bit since 1968.  But the quest to find your way never ends.  

A while back Regular Reader Jon ("The Unknown") wrote in with a great question.  "If I start from my house and fly NE, keeping my plane flying in a straight line, what country do I next enter?"  

It's a great question, but "Do you know where I land if I fly northeast?" doesn't quite scan in a song form.  (Sorry, Jon. Great question; terrible lyric.)  

As it turns out,  Jon tU lives very near to Vancouver, BC.  So I've modified his question just a bit to make it just a tad simpler.  (And for these Challenges, you can safely ignore all weather issues... it's a perfect flying day all over the planet!)

Here's the start of Jon's hypothetical flight path: 

1.  If Jon flies from the Vancouver, BC, airport on a NE heading, and flies in a straight-line, swerving neither to the left or the right, what's the next country he'll fly over?  (And for extra credit, what's the name of airport he should land at?)  

2.  If Jon is flying an Airbus A340-200, about how long will the flight take? (Again, ignore weather, headwinds, tailwinds, etc.)  

3.  What distance is it from Vancouver to this mysterious destination's biggest airport (that is, where can he safely land his Airbus A340-200 in that country)?  

4.  Can he make it there without refueling?  


If you're up to the Challenge, be sure to let us know HOW you found the answer.  As Jon writes, "This is a matter of thinking about how search it out..."  And he's right--using what you've learned here, you should be able to do this fairly easily.  

Enjoy. 

And Search On!  

Answer: Finding out about a concept (part 2)

Continuing this "new concept" theme…. 

… of how to get to the core concept behind a glob of text.  

Last week we were looking for “compound concept” terms like "beach music," or "summer romance."  

But it often happens that you know a little bit about the concept, but you don't really understand quite enough to understand the concept in that context. 

I gave an example using the word "level."  The actual email I got was from a friend who wrote: 

     "In that game, he really had to level up..." 

And I wasn't 100% sure I knew what he meant.   

As you can imagine, this is an incredibly useful skill as you read.  

Often you’ll see words in your text that you can’t quite figure out from context (especially when you’re reading something in a field in which you’re NOT an expert), so this is a great way to learn how to figure out those complex, hidden, subtle meanings.  

Can you figure out how to pin down the definitions of these terms?  Can you give a succinct definition?  (In this sequence, #1 is easy, but #3 is harder.) 

1.  What is an “object” in computer programming?  

2. What is a “model” when used with a bunch of equations to provide some explanatory structure? 

3. In a book I just read, the author wrote, “Miles really knew how to jam in all those modes…”   What’s a “mode”?  (Don't bother to look for this quote--I've modified it so you can't figure it out that way....)  

Here's what I did.  (And yes, I knew the definitions of all these terms ahead of time, but they're still good examples of the skill & craft of finding out...)  



1.  An "object" in computer programming.  

As several Regular Readers pointed out, the simplest way to get meaning from even a bit of context is to drop the term in with whatever context terms you have, and then skim or read broadly over the results, diving in on occasion to extract out the meaning.  

Notice that there's an inserted quote from Wikipedia at the very top (1) of the SERP.  This is an extract from a highly cited source that's relevant.  In essence, it's a definition of "object" when in the context of programming. 

Looking farther down the SERP, at (2) you can start to scan the snippets describing each of the results pages.  While I don't recommend getting your answer solely from the snippets, they ARE useful as a way to start to scan for surrounding language and context.  Here you can see that some other terms are useful to know--such as "class-based," "instance," "variable," and "data structures."  (You also implicitly learn that many of the terms you're reading--e.g., "instance--have alternate definitions in this world.  

Notice also the "dig deeper" options at (3)--these are collected based on other questions that are asked in this context.  Here you can get a mini-tutorial on "what is object-oriented programming" and start to figure out why the word "class" can mean so many different things!  



Of course, you could always use the define operator in Google, BUT you have to expand the options by clicking on the downward pointing gray chevron (see below) 

Once you do that, you'll find that there's a definition in the context of programming.  

2. What is a “model” when used with a bunch of equations to provide some explanatory structure? 

To understand this, I did more-or-less the same thing.  My prompt for this question came from a message another friend sent to me which said: 

        "... as is obvious from the structural equation modeling of the situation..."  

But it wasn't really obvious.  Somehow I'd missed that class at university, so I had to do a little backfilling in my knowledge of mathematics.  And I did the query: 


     [ model equations structure ] 

Note that I left "explain" out of the query.  (If you include it, you end up with somewhat different results.)  

My query led me to the results: 

... which, handily, includes an entire "Introduction in Structural Equation Modeling."  


Structural equation modeling (SEM) an entire collection of mathematical models, algorithms, and statistical methods that match networks of constructs to data.  (In other words, it's a way to create simple network diagrams that explain what's important in an underying math model of some situation.)  

SEM includes confirmatory factor analysis, path analysis, partial least squares path analysis, LISREL and latent growth modeling. 

Importantly, note that  "The term should not be confused with Structural Modeling in economics..."  




3. In a book I just read, the author wrote, “Miles really knew how to jam in all those modes…”   What’s a “mode”?  (Don't bother to look for this quote--I've modified it so you can't figure it out that way....)  

I admit that I gave you a big hint with the photo at the top of the post.  I realize this is a bit complicated, but here's what I would have done.  

Of the terms in that sentence, the ones that are the most "contextful" are "Miles," "jam," and "modes."  

Putting those into a query:  

     [ Miles jam mode ] 

Gives us a result that looks like this: 

As you scan this, you can ignore the second and third results (the words occur there, but don't have anything to do with music, as the clue suggests). 

Pay attention instead to the words that are associated with your search terms.  In this case, I've highlighted the more salient bits.  "Dorian Mode" or "Miles Davis" or "Myxolydian Mode"

If you don't know Miles Davis, a quick search for [ Miles Davis ] gives a LOT of results, but if you scan (Control-F, of course) through any of the articles about Miles Davis, you'll quickly learn that (A) he was a jazz musician who liked to "jam" (that is, improvise) and play in "modes."  

Okay, so what's a mode in music? 

Again, our friend define helps out here.  

     [ define mode ] 

tells us that a "mode" is "a set of musical notes forming a scale and from which melodies and harmonies are constructed."  

Ah ha!  It's a specific kind of scale!  And taking a clue from above, if you look up 

     [ Mixolydian mode ] 

you'll find out that it's a regular major scale with a flattened 7th note.  (See the Wikipedia article for details about Myxolyidan.)  

More generally, a "mode" is a  particular kind of scale that's used to play a tune, or (often in the music of Miles Davis) to improvise (jam) during the solos.  

But what does it sound like?  Let's do a search for: 

     [ Miles Davis dorian mode ] 

on YouTube, and you'll find his masterwork, "So What?" which gives a great sense for what "jamming in the Dorian mode" sounds like.  

Search Lessons

1.  When searching for contextual definitions, you often need to include "context terms" to refine your search.  And then, you'll still sometimes need to scan the results to get a sense for what the idea is.  

2.  Use define.  It's often really useful, but be sure to open up the hidden options beneath the down arrow.  

3. Dig deeper!  Sometimes you really do need to look a bit farther by doing an additional query or two.  

4.  Pay attention to other words / concepts that you see in association with your target.  Those terms will often give you hints about where to search next.  (e.g., "Myxolydian" or "Dorian" above) 

Teachers 

This is absolutely a skill you should be teaching your students!  Especially when they're in the younger grades, this ability to seek out the deeper meaning of ideas is a powerful tool.  But be sure to work closely with them to verify that they've gotten to the correct meaning.  (Not infrequently, I see students who are doing more-or-less the right thing, but get side-tracked by something interesting and shiny.  You can help keep them on track by showing them a better way to stay on-topic.)  

It's pretty easy to come up with more examples of things like this--just look at almost any news article that's just a bit above your students' reading level and try to spot the terms and concepts that they haven't yet experienced.  From a quick scan of a New York Times front page I found several concepts that students in 6th grade might not know about:  ABM treaty, immigration policy, Sharia law, electoral college, Iditarod, and Hansen's disease.  (Just as a quick check:  Can you give good definitions for all of these concepts??)  

Search on... as always!