Searching for words to fit into a crossword

While I work at Google and love what I do, I'm not oblivious to the charms of other search engines and information resources.  Wolfram Alpha is a remarkable resource that's chock full of ways to find out about science and math.  (One of my favorite Wolfram examples is to compare several equations side-by-side, a trick I hadn't known I'd need until I saw it.  Try this one out:  compare the hyperbolic secant, the hyperbolic tangent and an exponential function.  This is a great way to teach math students about different functions.)  


However, I was very surprised to learn that Alpha also has a function to help solve crossword puzzles. 


Examples work best:  


For example if you enter this query  [ w _ _ f _ a _ _ ] into Alpha, it will generate a suggestions list, with wolfband and Wolfgang as shown below.  NOTE that you have to leave spaces between the underscore characters!  

Yes, I know there are a million other crossword puzzle helpers out there, but this is the only one that can also compute hyperbolic secants!   (And, for those of you who do this with your Android phone, here's an app for that.) 


Searching! 

Answer: What's that mysterious building near Geyserville, CA?

Quick answers:  It's the River Rock Casino, run by the Dry Creek Rancheria band of Pomo Indians.  The site is located 260 feet above the valley floor.  


It took me about 2 minutes to figure all this out.  Here's what I did.  


1.  I wanted to be able to spot the building on a Google Maps aerial image.  So, go to Maps and search for

 [ De Lorimier winery near Geyserville, CA ]   

Toggle into satellite image mode and you can quickly spot the bright whitish spot. 

Once you're there, you can zoom in a bit and see that the popup tells you it's the River Rock Casino.
(A quick image search for [ River Rock Casino California ] confirms that this is the same place.)  


2. Now that I knew what it was, I wanted to figure out how high it was above the valley floor.  For this I needed the Terrain layer.  Click on the Maps icon and find the Terrain layer, then select it.   

This topographic map then lets me figure out the altitude of the casino.  In this case, you just find the major contour line below the casino and count up by 40s (the contour lines are 40 feet apart).  

This quickly tells you that the casino is located on the 4th contour line (that is, just 40 feet below the 500 foot contour, which is a bit hard to see at this location) -- so it's 460 feet high. By looking at the map on the valley floor you can immediately see that it's at 200 feet.  Therefore, the casino sits 260 feet above the valley.  


One last thing--how to figure out who owns it?  In this particular case, I turned on the Wikipedia layer (the same way I turned on the Terrain layer) and found that there was, conveniently, a Wikipedia entry on the Dry Creek Rancheria Band of Pomo Indians.
 (And yes, I did a search on [ Dry Creek Rancheria ] which took me to the official tribal site.) 


What's the search lesson here? 


Search lesson:  Maps are often a great coordinating device for layers of information; use them when search for location-based information.  


In this case we were able to go from aerial photo to the map, then from map to the terrain layer.  We picked up clues from the Wikipedia layer (of geo-located articles) and measure altitude by counting contour lines.  

Wednesday Search Challenge (April 6, 2011): What's that odd building near Geyserville?

One of the joys of living in northern California is that we're close to some beautiful grape-raising country.  Gently rolling hills covered in springtime mustard, great wines, fantastic restaurants, wonderful places to go hiking.  

But I saw something that surprised me when traveling north on 101 through the California wine country the other day.  Just past where this picture was taken I noticed a really big set of buildings very near the De Lorimier winery in Geyserville.  It's a group of 4 large buildings, one that's sort of silvery and looks something like a hangar (with rounded ends).  It's in a striking location, perched high above the valley floor with the Mayacamas mountains in the background.   Unfortunately, I don't have a picture of it with me, although someone mentioned to me that it's on Indian reservation land.  


So I have three questions for us: 


   1.  What is this building?  
   2.  How high above the valley floor is it? 
   3.  Is it really associated with an Indian tribe?  If so, which one?  


(I genuinely don't know the answers to these questions and will have to figure it out with the rest of you.)  


Searching!  

How-to / advice about finding short stories / novels from their plot descriptions

Some strategies picked up along the way for locating short stories. 


Peter, a reference librarian at the Library of Congress, wrote a very helpful summary guide for finding short stories and novels.  Well worth checking out:
The LOC Guide to finding stories:    http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/lost/stories.html 

To summarize the LOC guide and add a couple of ideas:  

1.  Try regular web searches for a quote (using double-quotes) IF you have a quotation fragment or element.  (But keep in mind that often the surest memory of what was in the story might be incorrect.)   You can also look for characters
 (e.g., [ "Robin Hood" "Maid Marian" ]  )

2.  Library databases may also be helpful in locating short stories. Some databases let you limit searches by categories such as genre, subject, first and last line, and setting, or search for keywords in plot summaries: Lit Finder, MagillOnLiterature Plus, Short Story Index   Note that you can often connect to these databases through your local public library.  (Usually requires a login with your library card.)

3. Short story index: You should know that there are many short story indexes, including the print editions of Short Story Index, can be identified by searching the Library of Congress online catalog under subject headings such as:,  Short Stories, American - Bibliography   Short Stories, American - Indexes  Short Stories - Bibliography   Short Stories - Indexes.  Unfortunately, almost none of these index books are available for searching online (they're certainly not in Books.Google.com), even though they would be incredibly useful to have.

4.  Other online collections of stories you might want to search (say, by using site: to restrict your search to just one of these sites):    Bartleby.com, Project Gutenberg, The Online Books Page

5.  Social solutions:  Some listservs and message boards might prove useful.  These are collections of people who have broad knowledge about plots, characters, setting and stories in general.  Try posting your question to one or more of these:  

• Book Sleuth  http://forums.abebooks.com/abesleuthcom 
• Fiction_L  http://www.webrary.org/rs/FLmenu.html 
• Project Wombat  http://project-wombat.org/faq.shtml 
• Loganberry Books: Stump the Bookseller  http://www.loganberrybooks.com/stump-form.html 
• (since there is a small fee involved, you may wish to save this resources until you've exhausted all others)

In general, these kinds of searches are difficult (to say the least).  Depending on how much time you can devote to the project, it's a great hunt.  


Search on! 

Einstellung effects while teaching search to students

The einstellung effect is the mind set you have while solving a problem, and is a wonderfully Teutonic word that basically means "a person's predisposition to solve a given problem in a specific manner even though there are better or more appropriate methods of solving the problem." 

In other words, it's what happens when you try to keep solving a problem in a particular way, even though there are probably better ways to do so.  You get stuck in a particular approach.

I taught an advanced search methods class last week, and in that class we saw this repeatedly.  We'd teach the class a particular search technique (say, how to use a reverse dictionary for lookup), and then people would keep using that technique, even though it wasn't appropriate for the task they were working on at the time.

It's a bit of the "if the only tool you have is a hammer..." effect (but it's said in German, so it sounds more impressive, more psychological). 

Since our class was the 3rd class in the search instruction series at RAFT (in San Jose) it was the "Advanced" class.  And you'd think after 6 hours of instruction that everyone would start to get the sense that not all techniques work equally well in all cases.  But einstellung is a natural response to learning something new.  If I show you a spiffy new search technique, the obvious thing to do is to try it out on different problems. 

So it's still a bit of a struggle in the classes to get the students to NOT apply techniques without knowing when they're appropriate.  I TRY to tell them the range of applicability, but I'm starting to believe that just telling isn't enough.  That you have to let them try the technique on a problem for which is doesn't work, letting them get the hands-on experience to learn when a method is appropriate. 

This is all a bit counter-intuitive--prior knowledge is supposed to HELP you with solving a problem (in our case, figuring out how to do a search), not limit you.  But that's the einstellung effect for you. 

Our teaching has to take this into account, particularly for teaching search, when you probably don't have a huge amount of time to practice and get over the exciting new thing you just learned. 

My suggestion:  When you show your class a method, show them a case in which is does NOT work.  Those negative examples are also valuable for learning. 



Keep teaching! 

Answer: Finding the connection between an award and the tallest monument

The question is one of chaining together pieces of the problem.  What IS Eck industries 2010 award link to Washington Monument.  There IS one??

First I figured out what the tallest monument in Washington DC is.  This was easy: 

[ tallest monument in Washington DC ] 

Sure enough, it's the Washington Monument.  I read a bit about the monument in preparation for figuring out the next bit.  (This included the surprising observation that Robert Mills, the architect of the Washington Monument ALSO designed the very first Washington Monument in the US... This one is in Baltimore.  Go look it up yourself.  Who knew?)  In the process I learned where the stone for the monument came from, when it was designed and funny/odd details such as that the topmost tip of the monument is made of aluminum.  Really?  


I'll spare you the details of how I figured out it was Eck Industries.  It wasn't that interesting a process--just a lot of slogging through companies in WI that won awards and looking for a possible connection to monuments in DC.  I finally ran across one that won an award for metallurgy in aluminum (Eck Industries--aha!) and the rest was pretty straightfoward.  

[ Eck industries award 2010 ] – I clicked on the first link to a Highbeam.com report on Eck Industries.  (You should recognize Highbeam--they're an agregator of information about different businesses--sometimes really useful for business-related queries like this.)  

I read the Highbeam report carefully… (Well, I really used Control-F to find all the places in the document that mention the word "award.")  I quickly found out that Philip Eck won the “William Frishmuth Award in 2010."  Interesting. What’s that award for?  So I chain backwards to find out about that....   Do the search: 

[ William Frishmuth award ] 

Click first hit, (the Wikipedia article) and find that William Frishmunt, like Phillip Eck, ran a casting foundry.  What's more, his foundry was the first to cast aluminum AND that's the material used on the cap of the Washington Monument AND his foundry was the place that cast it!  

So the connection is this:  Eck won the Firshmuth award in 2010 for superior aluminum metal casting, which is what William Frishmuth did for the Washington Monument. 

Case closed.  

Keep searching!

Photographer Theodor Horydczak checks the pyramid  of aluminum at the apex of the Washington Monument.  (Picture taken sometime around 1920.)

Wednesday Search Challenge (March 30, 2011): What's the connection?

Another friend gave me this amusing puzzle today.

Apparently there is a company based in Wisconsin that won an award in 2010 that has some connection to the tallest monument located in Washington DC!  This one stumped me for a while, so I'll give you a little hint to speed you on your way to solving this particular problem:  the Wisconsin company is named Eck Industries.

There.  Does that help?

Can you figure out the connection between the award Eck Industries won in 2010 and the tallest  DC monument? 


Search on! 

Checking up on a claim, in this case, that doodling improves your memory

A friend attended the most recent TED conference and came back with an exciting comment about doodling   ("People who doodle can retain nearly 30% more information than those who don't!").  Being a skeptical kind of guy and knowing a bit about the psychology of multitasking, I looked up the original reference for a little background and found out that's not quite right.

Question is, how do you approach such an open-ended task? I'm not sure who the author of the study is or where the original work is from.  Because it's a quote from the 2011 TED conference, I'm willing to bet it's pretty recent.  So I start with the obvious search: 
[ information retention doodling ] 


I chose these words carefully.  I included "retention" because of the use of the word "retain" in the original post.  


Key hint here:  People usually preserve special words from the original article when writing about ideas like this.  It's a bit like archaeology, looking for features that are preserved from the original.  (That's not always true, but it works more often than you'd expect.)  


I included "doodling" for the same reason.  I was hopeful that this would work, but not positive.  They might have called it "sketching" or "scribbling" or something else.  But I gave this a shot and... Voilà!  

A quick clickthrough to the paper, and it's pretty clear that this is the one that generated the comment.  (See the abstract, citation and link below.)  


As with many such cog-psych results, you have to be a little careful in the interpretation of the study.  The "doodling" task was just shading in areas on a pre-printed page (that's VERY low cognitive overhead, in particular, it's less demanding than even normal doodling).  


In the study, the primary task (listening for names) was VERY simple, and the "recall" of information was really just noting names as they were mentioned in real-time.  The primary task was also designed to be boring, so people who didn't have the doodling secondary task suffered from vigilance problems. 

In particular, as Andrade's paper says, "their doodling would not have the spontaneous, automatic quality of naturalistic doodling."  The participants were doing "name spotting" (that is, listening for names of people) and NOT doing any memory task but rather, a recognition task.

So it's far from a ringing endorsement of normal doodling as a constructive/focusing secondary task! 

If anything, it's a recognition that very simple, non-conflicting  tasks help maintain vigilance on the primary task (that is, the secondary task "reduces daydreaming").... especially when the primary task is very dull.  Chewing gum would probably accomplish the same effect.  (I wish they would have tested that!!)  


When checking on the credibility / authority of such a comment, you don't always get quite as lucky as I did with this search.  But it's well worth doing.  Check your sources, you never know quite what you'll learn in the process!  


Search on!  


Here's the original paper that was being slightly misquoted.

Jackie Andrade

APPLIED COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

Appl. Cognit. Psychol. (2009)Published online in Wiley InterScience

Title:   What does doodling do?

Abstract:

Doodling is a way of passing the time when bored by a lecture or telephone call. Does it improve or hinder attention to the primary task? To answer this question, 40 participants monitored a monotonous mock  telephone message for the names of people coming to a party. Half of the group was randomly assigned to a  doodling’ condition where they shaded printed shapes while listening to the telephone call. The doodling group performed better on the monitoring task and recalled 29% more information on a surprise memory test. Unlike many dual task situations, doodling while working can be beneficial. Future research could test whether doodling aids cognitive performance by reducing daydreaming.  

Answer: Winged heart? Search for the category!

I'm going to have to up my game!  Three folks solved this one quickly and with a certain amount of search aplomb, which is nice.  

Fred tried the obvious searches of [winged heart symbol] [religious heart wings] and found that the Sufi Movement symbol http://www.sufimovement.org/mes_symb.htm was close but not exactly the symbol.

After re-reading, his next search: [tombstone veteran symbols] was exactly right, leading quickly to  http://www.cem.va.gov/hm/hmemb.asp

EMLD and David both did the same thing, quickly moving from a description of the thing [ winged heart symbol ] to the general category.  

In my case, I did [ tombstone veteran symbol ], which also led me to that same VA page with the answer:  Sufism Reoriented.  

Search lesson:  After quickly trying the obvious description, giving a description of the category can often lead to a table or compendium of the category elements.  (That's a complicated way of saying "a catalog is often a good thing to scan...")  

Search on! 

Wednesday Search Challenge (March 23, 2011): Winged heart?

While walking through the vets section of a cemetery recently, I walked past a marker that had the following unusual symbol: 

I was curious about it (as I am about most things) and couldn't wait until I could look it up to figure this out.  


It's clearly a religious symbol of some kind (nearby were markers with crosses, stars of David, eastern Christian crosses, and even the occasional wheel of Buddhism.  But this one baffled me. 


I figured it out in about 1 minute.  How long will it take you? 


What religion does this symbol denote? 


Search on!