A blog about search, search skills, teaching search, learning how to search, learning how to use Google effectively, learning how to do research. It also covers a good deal of sensemaking and information foraging.
We just finished running... ... the updated version of the PowerSearchingWithGoogle.com course. As you might guess, it's a lot of work to pull all of this content together, making the videos, writing the content, and so on. I'd like to make it as available as possible to the most people.
So, below I've put all of the videos from that course into an easy-to-use table.
This is the master list of videos along with a short description of the topic for each. They’re all around 5 minutes long, so any of them are easy to work into your program.
And best of all, they’re all labeled as Creative Commons CC BY-NC, so go wild!
(The BY-NC label that means you can remix, tweak, and build upon these videos non-commercially; note that your new works must acknowledge my original work (a link is fine), and be non-commercial).
The texts and slides will are still in-process, but I'll post a link to them in the blog as well (just as soon as I finish them up).
Fog is a thick cloud of tiny water droplets... ... suspended in the air near the ground, reducing visibility to less than 1km. That's the technical definition.
But, as many SearchResearchers found out, sometimes it's something more than just water droplets. Our challenges this week were:
1. What's the story with the fog in London? IS London foggy? Or was it only foggy in literature? Why does London have this reputation?
2. As a kid, I lived near Long Beach, California and I remember great fogs. But I don't see them much anymore when I visit these days. Have the fogs of my youth (the 1960s) vanished? Is my memory wrong? Do they still have fog as often as we did when I was a kid?
Like most SearchResearchers, I fairly quickly learned that the great historic fogs of London weren't really fog per se. My first search query was: [ london fog ] I was hoping to find some useful history about the fog, but I found that the results were completely swamped by commercial results about the London Fog clothing company. Ah well. This happens all the time--usually, you just add another term (that's NOT clothing related) and the kinds of results you want will emerge. My second query:
[ london fog history ] worked perfectly well. And that's when I learned that the famous "pea soup" fog of London is only partly true fog. It really was a combination of smoke and other obnoxious particulate aerosols pumped into the air, making breathing (and life itself) difficult. As the Wikipedia entry about The Great Smog of '52 described it:
....it was a severe air-pollution event that affected London during December 1952. A period of cold weather, combined with an anticyclone and windless conditions, collected airborne pollutants mostly from the use of coal to form a thick layer of smog over the city. It lasted from Friday 5 December to Tuesday 9 December 1952, and then dispersed quickly after a change of weather.
Although it caused major disruption due to the effect on visibility, and even penetrated indoor areas, it was not thought to be a significant event at the time, with London having experienced many smog events in the past, so-called "pea soupers". Government medical reports in the following weeks estimated that until 8 December 4,000 people had died prematurely and 100,000 more were made ill because of the smog's effects on the human respiratory tract. More recent research suggests that the total number of fatalities was considerably greater, at about 12,000...
While this article is about the Fog/Smog of 1952, it suggests that the pea-soup fogs of earlier times were just as bad, possibly worse, and due to the same causes.
An article from the Daily Mail (UK) described it like this:
The city [London] had been paralysed by swirling fogs since the Napoleonic era, 150 years earlier. By the time Dickens came to write about them, he imagined dinosaurs stalking out of the mists. Readers of Sherlock Holmes cannot imagine the great detective without seeing him striding up Baker Street shrouded in eerie tendrils of fog.
Americans may think smog was invented in Los Angeles. Not so. In fact, a Londoner coined the term "smog" in 1905 to describe the city's insidious combination of natural fog and coal smoke. By then, the phenomenon was part of London history, and dirty, acrid smoke-filled "pea-soupers" were as familiar to Londoners as Big Ben and Westminster Abbey.
The smog even invaded the world of Shakespeare, whose witches in Macbeth chant, "fair is foul, and foul is fair: Hover through the fog and filthy air."
Smog in London predates Shakespeare by four centuries. Until the 12th century, most Londoners burned wood for fuel. But as the city grew and the forests shrank, wood became scarce and increasingly expensive. Large deposits of "sea-coal" off the northeast coast provided a cheap alternative. Soon, Londoners were burning the soft, bituminous coal to heat their homes and fuel their factories. Sea-coal was plentiful, but it didn't burn efficiently. A lot of its energy was spent making smoke, not heat. Coal smoke drifting through thousands of London chimneys combined with clean natural fog to make smog. If the weather conditions were right, it would last for days.
Early on, no one had the scientific tools to correlate smog with adverse health effects, but complaints about the smoky air as an annoyance date back to at least 1272, when King Edward I, on the urging of important noblemen and clerics, banned the burning of sea-coal. Anyone caught burning or selling the stuff was to be tortured or executed. The first offender caught was summarily put to death. This deterred nobody. Of necessity, citizens continued to burn sea-coal in violation of the law, which required the burning of wood few could afford.
So it's clear that the fog of the Victorians (and Holmes) were truly viscious smogs that predate those fine days of yesteryear. And while people might complain about EPA regulations today, nobody can dispute that the smog in LA today is MUCH less than when I was growing up (yes, in Compton) in the 1950s. And the EPA doesn't torture or execute anyone. Moral of that story: Be careful what you burn; it ends up in the air AND your lungs. Another moral: Environmental laws work only if you have enforcement. So what about Long Beach? I immediately started looking around for weather/climate data for the Long Beach airport. My query: [ long beach airport climate data ] led me to many resources, but most of them only had data for the past few weeks, or maybe a year or two. The problem was how to find longitudinal data. Luckily, I found two of them (mostly by just clicking on all of the results until I found good, long-term data). Here's one chart I created from WeatherSpark's data set. Here, I've collected a number of charts over the years, illustrating how many days were foggy.
It certainly looks like there were more fog events in the past than nowadays. But, like Ramón, I also found an excellent weather/climate historical data site: TuTiempo.net, which gives lovely data tables going back many years. Here's the data table for Long Beach airport, which conveniently breaks out "foggy days" into its own column
Data from TuTiempo.net - charted by Dan. Gaps in the line are gaps in the data set.
It certainly seems that the total number of foggy Long Beach days fell precipitously around 1995-1996. (But I have to admit that a sudden drop like that LOOKS like a change in the way one measures the foggy days, rather than as an actual decline. With more time, I'd dig into how they measured the data, and whether or not the method changed in the mid 1990s.) Regardless, the difference in foggy days between my youth (1955 onwards) and today seems fairly impressive. So I too did a more general search for mechanisms that might cause fewer foggy days. My query [ California fog decline ] and I found a number of articles documenting a general decline in the number of foggy days along the California coast. Fog has declined in the past century along the California coast discusses a loss of fog along the northern California coast: “The data support the idea that Northern California coastal fog has decreased in connection with a decline in the coast-inland temperature gradient and weakening of the summer temperature inversion,” Johnstone said. Other scientific papers describe the change in fog further south, down in Long Beach. More urban heat, less summer fog tells me that the urban heat island effect – caused by concrete and asphalt retaining heat during the day and warming up the nights – is pushing up the moist coastal cloud layer. That turns what was once misty fog into a cloud layer that does not touch the ground. So it's pretty clear: My memory is right. It was foggier back then. Search Lessons: As usual, it's always good to get a couple of different KINDS of evidence. Data from multiple sources, as well as articles about the topic (from reputable journals and authors) that are all pointing in the same direction... well, that's convincing. And real data, in the form of data tables, is wonderful. You can confirm the trends yourself! Search on!
If you're likeme... ... you probably think about London as a great metropolitan city--a royal city, a capital, a place of museums, castles, wonderful to visit... and... foggy.
Yet in all of my visits to London over the past 20 years, I don't think I've ever seen fog there. Am I just lucky? Or am I just unlucky, and manage to magically miss all of the atmospherics of the Great City? But then I think of all the books I've read about London, including at least one where Sherlock Holmes complains about "... the day had been a dreary one, and a dense, drizzly fog lay low upon the great city..." Is the legend of great fogs in London really true? What about other places? When I was young, I lived in south central LA, about 10 miles from the beach. And in those days, I remember waking up and walking to school in dense fog. Wonderful if you're walking to elementary school, not so wonderful if you have to drive it it. (After I was driving, I remember driving v.e.r.y slowly on the freeways late at night as I drove to work. A scary time.) This reminiscence about fog makes me wonder this week's Challenge:
1. What's the story with the fog in London? IS London foggy? Or was it only foggy in literature? Why does London have this reputation?
2. As a kid, I lived near Long Beach, California and I remember great fogs. But I don't see them much anymore when I visit these days. Have the fogs of my youth (the 1960s) vanished? Is my memory wrong? Do they still have fog as often as we did when I was a kid?
Let us know what you discover, and HOW you found out! Search on!
When searching for an insect... ... be sure to think about how many insects there are. As we see from the first two butterflies here, insects often seem very similar to each other. And there are milions of insect species, making identification sometimes a bit of a challenge. Luckily, these two butterflies are fairly straightforward to identify using a quick Search-By-Image and reading just a bit. 1. What's this? (Found at the Sunol Regional Wilderness, Alameda County, California.)
To begin, I did the obvious and ran an Image Search for this pic and, oddly enough, I saw this:
Notice that butterfly, 2cnd row, 3rd from the left? That's close, but it's not the one we're looking for... it's butterfly #2 below! That's fine--unexpected, but good enough for me. I'm always happy when serendipity comes to call. When I clicked through to the landing page, I learned that Butterfly #2 is called the California Sister (Adelpha californica). A bit of checking around with that name verifies that AND (helpfully) a few articles point out that this butterfly (#1) is a Lorquin's Admiral.
"The Lorquin's Admiral (Limenitis lorquini), lives along coastal areas and stream sides in Western North America. The often thin, mustard color patch on the end of the wing differentiated it from the California Sister." link
2. What's this? (Note that it's very similar, but not quite the same as butterfly #1. This one was found in Santa Clara County.)
Now we know that THIS is the California Sister (Adelpha california). Since these two are easily confusable, I thought I'd look for BOTH in a single query: [ "adelpha californica" "limentis lorquini" ] and found an image of all the Sisters (both Arizona Sister and California Sister), as well as additional information about range, location, etc.
That wasn't too hard. Maybe two minutes. However... this next one is a little tricker... 3. What insect is making this sound? Can you figure out not just the kind, but also the genus and species names? (This was recorded around 6PM on a warm summer's day at the Pearson-Arastradero Space Preserve.)
I've already told you it's an insect... but now what? How would we figure out what kind of insect is making this sound? I know that crickets can generate sounds, and that cicadas can as well. But let's begin as though we really don't know what's going on: [ insect sounds summer day ] From this we learn that there are at least 3 different insects to consider: cicadas, crickets, and katydids. Each of them has a distinctive song. Okay. NOW what? I don't know of any app that will identify insect songs (unlike, say, Warblr, which DOES identify bird songs by a Shazzam-like reco app). So I did a quick search: [ cricket song recogntion app insect ] (not that I had to add "insect" into the query to avoid all of the references to the game of cricket). Lo and behold, there IS such an app! Cicada Hunt will identify different species of cicadas... but only in the New Forest in Britain. In any case, after hunting for a while I didn't find any possibly working apps. Back to the drawing board. My next query was: [ insect song recognition ] which led me to the wonderful site, SongsOfInsects.com which has a few really great pages to help us out in our quest. First, their Identification Page teaches many of the basics of insect song identification. This page tells us the difference between a trill, a chirp, a lisp, a zit, and so on. This page also has some great basic identification advice: "When listening to the songs of singing insects, determine whether the song is pure-toned, as sung by crickets, or harsh, as sung by katydids. This will immediately place you in one “family” or the other and allow you to narrow down the identification much more quickly. Listen for the timing of the sounds, do they come as a short series, a long continuous trill, is there any pattern to the sounds, are the sounds harsh or mellow. With a little practice you'll be amazed at how many species you can identify by ear." That's great advice, so I spent a happy hour or so listening to a LOT of different insect sounds. The query: [ cricket cicada katydid song samples ] I clicked around through LOTS of cicada, cricket, and katydid songs to teach myself the differences (including this library from the Entomology Department at the University of Florida, and this one from MusicOfNature with 20 common crickets, cicadas and katydids, or, if you're really into this, here's a CD you can buy with even more cricket recordings). It turns out that after listening to a lot of recordings, you CAN learn to tell cicadas from katydids from crickets. To my ear, cicadas are buzzy, while katydids have lots of high frequency white noise, and crickets tend to have more pure, often trilling, tones. (Check out the 20 different examples from MusicOfNature--it's easy to compare them side-by-side.) So, I'm pretty sure it's some kind of cricket. My recording is pretty clearly a trilling sound, possibly produced by many different insects all overlapping with one another to produce a constant sound. After looking through lots of videos (YouTube has a ton of cricket songs) and listening to a lot of audio files, I'm pretty sure this is not just some kind of cricket, but specifically a tree cricket. Returning to the site SongsOfInsects.com, I quickly found their summary Thumbnail-Guide-To-Species which lets you listen to another entire set of sample songs. From this page, it seems that of the songs listed there, the best match is one of: * Black-horned tree cricket (but it only sings at night, so that doesn't work) * Broad-winged tree cricket (but also nocturnal, and lives in the eastern US) * Fast-calling tree cricket (sings during the day, but lives in the southeast) * Four-spotted tree cricket(sings in the day, lives everywhere in the US, and despite the name, it lives in fields of weeds) Ideally, I should either find a live insect in the act of singing (and then capture it and subject it to a detailed examination) OR do a spectrogram analysis. As you probably noticed, the recording really wasn't good enough to do that... So, I'll try to get back there later this week and get another sound sample. We'll see if I can succeed. In the meantime, I think we found our insect: The Four-Spotted tree cricket (Oecanthus quadripunctatus). For the best images I've seen, check out Sylvain Trembeley's SmugMug collection. Search Lessons The butterflies were pretty easy, but in truth, we got lucky; it could have been really difficult, requiring insect identification keys, close examination with hand lenses, and all that. But as we saw, identifying the insects by sound might have been possible by app (and it might be some day), but at the moment, you just have to invest the time to learn the lingo (trill, buzz, zit, lisp) and what kinds of insects sing at all. Then, it's just a matter of listening to a LOT of bugs. Lesson learned: Sometimes you just have to put in the time. Google is great for many things, but being a detective or investigative reporter sometimes takes a little work. Hope you enjoyed this natural history / entomologically inclined Challenge! (I certainly did!) Search on!
