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.
I've been informally asking people why they haven't taken the PowerSearchingWithGoogle.com MOOC. There are a million answers, but mostly it boils down to this: I don't think I have the time. That's also the answer I get when I ask people why they don't take most classes. But one person had a great idea: "Why don't you send out 1-minute long YouTube videos that show key ideas?" On the surface, that sounds ridiculous. But as I thought about it more, I started to come around. Maybe there IS something in this idea. Lots of tips and insights CAN be captured in 60 seconds or less. You won't learn the broad outlines of world history this way, but you might pick up a few tips that could really help you out. From my research, I know that a LOT of informal instruction happens "over the shoulder," that is, by me looking over your shoulder and seeing you do something cool. If I'm bold enough, I'll ask "how did you do that?" But many people find that hard to do, or intimidating for one reason or another. So... I'd like to ask you a simple question: What's the one tip / insight / trick / observation that you wish someone had shown you? I'd like for you to leave a comment below with a short description of what YOU wish you'd seen over someone's shoulder. For me, it was the discovery that you can Control-click on a word in a text field that's misspelled and see a list of corrections. See how the word gets a red dotted underline?
If you Control-click on the word, it will pop-up a set of options for you like this:
So... What do YOU wish someone would have shown you? Here's my favorite example of a 1-minute explanation.
The short answer: the Order is Caudata. As I mentioned, this challenge wasn't that difficult--but it IS surprising to find a complex animal that has two closely related forms with features not normally associated with vertebrates. I was certainly surprised to find that there are salamanders without lungs and salamanders that are photosynthetic during a part of their lives. From a search perspective, this wasn't that hard. I started with:
[ lungless vertebrate ]
and quickly found the lungless salamander link on Wikipedia. I was, I have to admit, slightly skeptical, so I did a second search by picking up the scientific name of one of the lungless salamanders (Batrachoseps) and doing a search for it:
[ Batrachoseps ]
and finding all kinds of authoritative resources (mostly herpetology departments at universities), all of which describe it as lungless.
These relatively slender salamanders absorb oxygen directly from the air through their skin and the tissue lining their mouth, a remarkable development that provides an interesting thought about how lungs might have evolved. They also have a "naso-labial groove" that is lined with glands to help the animal with "chemoreception"--that is, with its sense of smell. We normally think about the ability to smell and the ability to breathe as inextricably linked, but for these salamanders, they're two very different systems. Now that I had a lungless salamander, I did the next obvious search:
[ photosynthetic salamander ]
and found that the embryos of the spotted salamander (Ambystoma maculatum) incorporate an algae (Oophila amblystomatis). The remarkable insight was to discover that they don't just live together, but that the embryo relies on the oxygen and carbohydrates that are generated by the algal cells. The salamander embryos rely on the green algae cells to make it through their first few weeks of life.
This is particularly interesting since many people have suspected that mitochrondria were originally bacteria that somehow became incorporated into animal cells. This looks very much like this same process is going on here. You could imagine an evolutionary story for salamanders that has a truly photosynthetic salamander in the distant future. One reader (with the unusual username "Me") pointed out that there are also some lungless frogs found in Borneo and that some frogs have algae in their egg masses as well. So it's possible that some frogs might ALSO come in both lungless and photosynthetic forms. (But I wasn't able to find a study that confirmed the frog embryos were dependent on the oxygen produced by the algae... so we don't know if they're photosynthetic or not!) But it was a nice find, Me. And of course, it's easy to find the Order name for frogs: Anura. And for all the readers who asked about why the picture of the sun rising over the water was a clue... it was simply a reminder than most salamanders and frogs need to spend some part of their life cycle in water (or at least very damp conditions). Search on!
There is a kind of animal that is remarkably adaptable. To my amazement, I just found out that this animal--a vertebrate--comes in varieties that stretch the idea of what it means to be an animal with a backbone. There's one species of this kind of animal that somehow manages to live without lungs. It doesn't have gills (as an adult) or some other pseudo-lung thing... just this amazing ability to absorb oxygen directly from the air without all of that unseemly huffing and puffing. Another species of this animal is also photosynthetic during a part of its life cycle. Really? A photosynthetic animal with a backbone? (And I mean photosynthetic in an interesting way: that is, the animal actually gets part of its energy by photosynthesis, not that it has moss growing in its hair as a sloth might.) This week's question isn't terribly hard, but it's amazing: What Order of animal has both lungless and photosynthetic species within it? Note that I'm asking for the Order of the animal. I mean this in the biological sense, following the usual taxonomy of Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Genus, Species. And while it may not seem like it, the photo at the top is actually a clue to the answer. Think you know what it is? Search it out and prove you know the order! Search on!
A few Education hangouts with Google
Certified Educators tomorrow (Tuesday November 13, 2012) on topics that might be of some interest to you.
11am EDT -- join +Rita Zeinstejer on her page for: "Connect, Collaborate" (LINK) From our perspective, a talk about advanced notetaking skills on Google Docs.
The quick answer is this: No.
The rainfall for October 2012 was pretty ordinary—in fact, much less
than just 3 years ago, when the rain fell heaviest in October 2009. (Which goes to show you how imperfect human
memory is: I don’t remember October 2009
as being especially rainy, but when I look back at my journal from that year,
it’s clear it rained a LOT.)
As I showed you in my graphics from
yesterday, I really wanted to get a single, simple chart showing the rainfall
across the past decade of Octobers. It’s
often important to have a clear goal in mind, especially when you start wading
into the sea of data that’s out there. It’s really easy to get sidetracked by
all of the other beautiful charts out there and lose track of what you’re
seeking. (Which is why I hand-sketched
the chart: To make it clear what my goal was.)
Like many readers, I knew about a couple of
sources off the top of my head.
Wunderground is well-known (and is a composite of professional and
amateur weather stations), the data quality is variable, but they often have
data where there’s no other source available.
(For instance, there’s a Wunderground reporting station in my
neighborhood. Awfully handy.) And of course, you could have done the obvious search: [ rainfall SFO data ] or if you've done this kind of thing before, try [ precipitation SFO ]
I also knew that NOAA (the National
Oceanographic and Atmosphere Administration—the official government weather
data collection group) would have data.
The problem with NOAA is usually digging down deep enough through their
reams of data to find the one you want.
Then, someone happen to mention
WeatherSpark.com, which has a wonderful set of weather visualizations and the
ability to drill down and select more-or-less what you want.
So I did what any discerning data junkie
would do… I got data from all three so I could compare them.
Data collection: Getting data from Wunderground is pretty
easy. Click on “Local Weather” and find
the “History Data” tab. That will get
you to data for a given date. Once you
find the “Monthly” button, you can find the cumulative precipitation for that
location (KSFO).
If you then
notice the format of the URL for the monthly data report:
That took me only a couple of minutes. Of course, it helped that I knew about Wunderground to start
with.
Comparison with NOAA: To get “ground truth” data from the
authority, I started my search at NOAA.gov – it didn’t take me too long to
click through their site (which is really the best way to do it—you have to
learn what they call things by reading their pages—they often use very
technical terms that you have to learn along the way).
But it was only a couple more minutes for me
to get to the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) and find that I could ORDER
(for delivery via email) the data set for SFO.
I ended up on their data-set order page ( ) and got an
email from them a few moments later with a link to the SFO data set for 2000 –
2012!
I downloaded the data (which has a ton of
values and cryptic notation), poured it into my spreadsheet, opened in up and…
realized I needed to go read the documentation.
This is professional data, so I really need to understand what things
like “Daily HGCN” meant and what that number in the HPCP column meant. (Turns out they measure rainfall in 1/100ths
of an inch—so a 25 in that column is really 0.25 inches.)
Fine.
I’m a data guy, so I opened up THAT spreadsheet, filtered out all of the
non-October values, added up the numbers and got the values for a decade of
Octobers. (The one thing I tripped over
was that one of the months had a HUGE rainfall—well over 10,000 inches! What happened? Turns out they use a number of 9999 to denote
“rainfall not measured,” so I had to go back and clean up the data a bit. Not a
big deal, but lesson learned—when there’s something funny in the graph, go
check it out.)
Note how similar these graphs are. This makes me feel good. Especially
that both graphs have 0 inches of rainfall in 2002 and 2003.
Comparion with WeatherSpark: Using the WeatherSpark UI (check it out if
you’ve never used it) it’s pretty easy to select a decade’s worth of rainfall
data from SFO. I put it into my cart and
then went to checkout. Surprise! This data costs money! Given that I already had 2 data sets (including
one from the government), I was a little reluctant to spend $15 to get the
data, but I figured I’d be willing to do it for the blog.
So, one credit card transaction later I had
the data. Dropped into my spreadsheet
and… guess what… it’s the same.
Not too surprising I guess, but it’s another
lesson learned.
But the good news is that I feel pretty
confident that these graphs represent what has happened over the past ten
years. Including telling me that this
past October was just ordinary.
Lessons learned: There were a lot to learn here.
1.
Triangulation is a best practice.
Get your data from multiple places.
In this case, WeatherSpark just replicated the NOAA data, BUT they also
cleaned it up. In this case, it wasn’t a
big deal—but it could have easily been worth the money for their slicing/dicing
and cleaning of the data.
2.
Check your data. That error code
(9999) might have been easy to miss if the numbers had been larger. Look for obvious errors (in this case, a
giant spike in the data), but also just eyeball it. Sometimes you’ll see things
that would escape plotting.
(Example: Suppose they’d used a
-1 to indicate an error. You’d never
seen that in the plot because it would look just like a 0 at these scales, but
you could visually pick it out of the data.)
3. Some
sources turn out to be less useful.
Several readers suggested sites like Wolfram Alpha and ClimateStations.com Both are great for what they do, but I was
not able to download the data from either site, which left me unable to do my
own analysis. While their plots are
nice, I wanted to do the data checking myself—and for that you need download
ability. (Note that Alpha says they
allow downloads, but it’s only of the chart, not the data.) Addendum (11/9/12): 4. Make sure you're answering the right question. A few of our loyal readers answered the question... kind-of... When I was talking with people about this particular problem, it was clear that often they'd slip slightly off the rails and find data about "San Francisco" and never notice that they'd started by searching for data from SFO. "San Francisco" usually refers to the city (a place that's noted for its very different weather patterns than those at SFO). (Hat tip to reader Goon for reminding me of this.)
Sometimes the simplest questions can lead to relatively
tricky searches. This is usually the
case when the data you’re looking for isn’t just lying around on the floor of
the internet, but is something you might have to assemble yourself.
“Seemed awfully rainy to me,” a friend pointed out. “Is this something new? Or has October always been rainy in Northern
California?”
I’ve lived just south of San Francisco for over 25 years,
and MY opinion was that this October seemed rainier-than-usual as well. But you know how impressions are—they’re
notoriously subject to all kinds of mis-rememberings, and in particular, the
human ability to give accurate summaries of events over the long scale is
really quite poor.
So I thought I’d just look it up—but this bit of weather
data turned out to be a bit tricky, and leads to this week’s Search Challenge…
Can you find OR create a chart like this one I've sketched below showing each year's total October rainfall at SFO to answer the
question:
Did it rain more in October,
2012 than in any October during the past 10 years?
My ideal chart for October rainfall at SFO. (This is made-up data for the purpose of illustration.)
To make it simple, let’s check the rainfall during October at SFO. I know that accurate weather data will be
available at the airport. (Although you
need not limit your searches to only FAA data. Any reasonably reliable rainfall
weather data will do. It just has to be
measured at SFO.) As usual, please let us know HOW and WHERE you found the info, along with an estimate about how long it took you to answer the question (or generate the graph).
If you Control-click on the word, it will pop-up a set of options for you like this:
