Wednesday search challenge (4/10/13): When did the windmills arrive?

While driving back from a visit to Merced (on the same visit that launched the challenge about the obelisk), I happened to drive past another sight that grabbed my attention.  (Yes, indeed, as I drive I always have a notepad to scribble down questions like this.) 

Just as I drove westward past San Luis Reservoir, (lat/long: 37.0564, -121.1294) I spotted a big row of windmills on a ridge to the south, apparently just to the southwest of the Reservoir.

I don’t recall seeing those windmills there before.  Which leads me to today’s search challenge:

When were those windmills put in place?  Who owns them? 

And… since I enjoy California history (see the following fragment of a diseño that is of a rancho nearby).

As you know, much of California was parceled out into large ranchos via land grants.  Originally these grants were made by Spain, and then later by Mexico after independence.    

What was the name of the rancho that would have contained the windmills? 

Let us know HOW you found the answers, and about how LONG it took you to find them!

Search on.

Answer: How to find the conference proceedings?

The simplest way to start this quest is by just looking around a bit to see where the canonical version of the proceedings resides.  So I started with the easiest possible query:

     [ “user interface software and technology” ]

I put it in double quotes because these are all very common words that will often appear in nearly this sequence.  But I wanted EXACTLY this sequence of words--hence the double quotes. 

This is what I found. 

shows us quickly that this is an ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) conference, and that the website for this organization is ACM.org in the /UIST directory.  

If you then click on the “More results from ACM.org >>” button:

Note that what this does it to add the site:acm.org filter to the query.  Handy. 

What’s great about this set of results, though, is that since they use words like "archive" in their URLs, it’s pretty clear they’ll have a collection of the proceedings.  So I added the term proceedings to my original query:

     [ “user interface software and technology” proceedings ]

This is pretty darn close to what I was looking for—a complete listing of the all the proceedings. 

Pay attention to what happens if you click through on one of those "Proceedings" link, you'll see: 

This is the top-level entry at the ACM Digital Library page for the UIST conference.  As you'll see, there's a wealth of information here.  Excellent work. 

But first, let's check to see what we can find at Google Scholar.  Can we get to the papers via open access?  

If we go to Scholar and do the query:

     [site:acm.org "user interface software and technology” proceedings ]

what we get are the papers from the conference (not the master collection of papers for each conference).  Why?  Because each paper has in its citation list a mention of "proceedings of the User Interface Software and Technology conference."  

However, notice the [PDF] from foo.edu on the right column?  That’s a link to an openly accessible copy of the paper.  That is, if you find that link there, you don’t need to be a member of the ACM to be able to read the paper.  (This is a very useful trick to remember:  authors frequently put out pre-publication versions of their articles for just this reason.  They’re not the copyrighted version, but usually an earlier version for colleagues and students to refer to.)  This might not get you 100% of all the papers published in a proceedings, but in some communities (e.g., the UIST community), they're mostly out there.  

To pop back to our task for a second, if we’re still looking for an easy way to find ALL the proceedings, we can just click through to the proceedings page at the ACM Digital Library (DL), then click on the “Table of Contents” tab, and find that they’ve handily linked the preceding and next proceedings to each of the adjoining conferences! 

For the extra credit problem, the one extra trick to employ is to figure out what THEY call themselves on the web.  In this case, doing a search for “American Society for Information Science and Technology” shows you that they’re called ASIS and their content resides at the ASIS.org site.  The same procedure illustrated above will get you to their contents as well. 

Search lessons:  When you're looking for a collection of proceedings (say, an archival collection), it's often useful to figure out what organization is hosting the conference.  In this case, it was the ACM.  So, looking in the ACM Digital Library is awfully handy.  In this case, they provide a previous/next way to walk through the collection from beginning to end.  

On the other hand, if you want the master list of all the links to all the proceedings, then a conference specific title search (with double quotes) and a context term like "proceedings" will get you want you need.  

Search on! 

Wednesday search challenge (4/3/13): How to find the conference proceedings?

When you’re tackling a new field for the first time, a great way to get an overview of an area is to survey the collected works in that area.  In many scientific and technical fields, people hold conferences and workshops to meet, talk over what’s happening, and swap stories about what’s working (and who has funding). 

And so an excellent way to get a quick overview of a field (or even a deep understanding, depending on how much time you have) is to read through a collection of conference papers from a recent meeting.   Yes, you can read through a journal in the area, but journal articles are often long, written to excess, and usually deeply embedded in the scientific culture—difficult to read without a ton of background. 

By contrast, conference proceedings are often more accessible, with a broader range of topics and writing styles. 

But how do you find such a collection? 

It used to be that conferences would publish  hardcopy proceedings—a collection of all the papers accepted to the conference that year.  A largish conference (say, 3,000 – 5,000 attendees) would produce a 600 – 1000 page book big enough to stun an ox if you swung it at the head end.  You can still find these proceedings at university libraries where they take up a huge amount of shelf space. 

But for the past several years, conferences have been publishing mostly online.  Conference attendees frequently get a CD or DVD with all of the papers (and videos!) so they can read them while at the conference.   (This is incredibly handy, by the way.  It’s changed the way I attend conferences.) 

This past week I had a colleague at a well-known university asked me a question about how to find these collections. This is a natural SearchResearch question that I’ll pose to you:

(1)  I’m looking for all of the papers published in the User Interface and Software Technology Conference from 2012.  How can I get a complete listing of all the papers AND access to the papers for reading?

For extra credit: 

(2) How can I get a complete listing of all the papers from this conference for the past 4 years?  (Is there any clean way to do that?) 

As usual, please tell us HOW you found the answer (so we can all learn from your search insights) and HOW LONG it took you to figure this out. 

Search on! 

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For triple credit by the truly committed:  

(3) Same question (past 4 years of papers) from the American Society for Information Science and Technology annual conference.

Ceanothus Saga (continued)

After Gary's noble foray into the wilds of Montaña De Oro, the least I could do was to go looking for my own Ceanothus thyrsiflorus.  

As luck would have it, this week I'm actually on a mini-vacation near the small coastal town of Gaulala in northern California.  I know there's a lot of ceanothus growing here, so I went for a walk-about to find whatever varieties of Ceanothus I could locate.  

Luckily, about 50 steps from my rental house there's a glorious Ceanothus--about 2 meters high and full of bumblebees.  This is located about 100 yards from the ocean at 38.74881, -123.51695  

Ceanothus "Dark Star"

This is a nice shot, as you can see the details of the flowers and the leaves (needed to positively identify it).  I wish I could say I worked my way through the Jepson's manual (the authoritative guide to California native plants), but without a hardcopy of that work, I did the best I could by searching for collections of Ceanothus until I found a native plants nursery that had a nearly identical photo.  That's not 100%, but the best I can do until I get to a library. It turns out that this is the variety known as "Dark Star," developed in the 1940s by the nurseryman Ken Taylor.  

While this plant is beautiful, it's not a native Ceanothus thyrsiflorus.  So I kept hunting. 

Finally, I found one in the local library's garden (at Sea Ranch, CA).  As lucky would have it, there was a very nice label, so there's no ambiguity here:  

And here's the closeup and distance shots, just for good measure. 

Ceanothus thyrsiflorus at the Sea Ranch, CA library

Ceanothus thyrsiflorus at the Sea Ranch, CA library

As I wander around this week, I'll take a few more pictures, just to increase my repertory of Ceanothus knowledge.  

For what it's worth, the book Ceanothus, by David Fross and Dieter Wilken, is a comprehensive reference on the plant and contains the following fascinating information:  

“Ceanothus thyrisflorus, blueblossom, was the first California species to receive both botanical and horticultural recognition . . . . when it was collected by botanist Adelbert von Chamisso on the Russian ship Rurik’s  expedition to California in 1816. The Royal Horticultural Society received seeds of Ceanothus thyrisflorus from Richard Brinsley Hinds from the 1837 expedition of HMS Sulphur, making it the first California species introduced into European gardens." 

“The intriguing material reaching England from California early in the 19th century persuaded the Royal Horticultural Society to send a young Scotsman, David Douglas to the West Coast in search of ‘any interesting plants or seeds’ he found." 

“Douglas’s collections on the west coast included several Ceanothus species, and the Douglas Fir, which he introduced into cultivation in Britain in 1827, and which is perhaps the most famous plant named after him of the total of 240 species of plants which he brought back to England."

(Unfortunately, although the book was scanned by Google, is available in partial-view only at Amazon.com -- for many more details of thyrsiflorus, you can "see in side the book" there.)  

There ARE other blogs about search out there -- here's a new one

And now, out of the Pacific Northwest... 

My friend Jaime Teevan (a fellow researcher in the world of how-people-search) has just started up a new blog:  http://slowsearching.blogspot.com/  



Jaime has done some great research on how people search (including her fantastic papers about how often people redo searches for things they've previously searched for).  We've worked together a bit on a couple of things--most notably teaching a "logs analysis" tutorial at the Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) conference and then turning this into a book chapter (forthcoming).  

If you read this blog, I suspect you'll enjoy hers as well! 

Search on... for more great search/research blogs! 







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Sample of some papers by Jaime 

 Susan Dumais, Robin Jeffries, Daniel M. Russell, Diane Tang and Jaime Teevan. "Understanding User Behavior through Log Data and Analysis." In Judith S. Olson and Wendy Kellogg (Eds.), Human Computer Interaction Ways of Knowing. New York: Springer, 2013. (in pre-press production)  

How People Recall, Recognize and Reuse Search Results. ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS) special issue on Keeping, Refinding, and Sharing Personal Information, 26(4), September 2008. [(official) pdf, (local) pdf]

Jaime Teevan, Amy Karlson, Shahriyar Amini, A.J. Bernheim Brush and John Krumm. Understanding the Importance of Location, Time, and People in Mobile Local Search Behavior. In Proceedings of 13th Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI 2011), Stockholm, Sweden, August 2011. [pdf]

Answer: Where can I find a blueblossom in Montaña De Oro?

This was a legitimately tough problem.  It’s not hard to KNOW that blueblossoms grow in Montaña De Oro, but it’s very difficult to know how to locate a specific one somewhere in the park.

To start this problem, it’s often really useful to convert the informal name of the plant (“blueblossom”) to its formal name (Ceanothus thyrsiflorus).  Yes, I know that many varieties of ceanothus are also called “blueblossoms,” but all of the credible resources say that “blueblossom” refers only to the thyrsilorus variety.  From this we learn it’s also called “California lilac,” “ceanothus” and/or “blue blossom ceanothus.”  (And, luckily for us, there aren’t 10 common names… just a couple.) 

In this case, after searching for a while for maps of Montaña De Oro with plant locations indicated (I was hoping for a trail map with a trailer marker than said “blueblossom here”  or something something thyrsiflorus.  But after 20 minutes of looking, I wasn’t finding much.  A few pictures here and there in Panoramio, but nothing with a  good location marker. 

So I changed my strategy. 

Here’s a big, important lesson about this kind of problem:

When you can’t solve the problem directly with search, search for a tool that can do it for you!   

What would such a tool be like?  I stepped back for a second to think about this.  What kind of person or organization would be interested in tracking the location of flowers, their habitat and where the grow?

This led me to make my next search:

[ California wildflower finder tool ]

As you can see, the first and third results seem linked to the Santa Monica Mountains in southern California.  I know that Montaña De Oro State Park is really in central California along the coast, and nowhere near Santa Monica (which is in LA). 

I checked out the CalFlora site (number 2 in the above list). 

And with this, I think I’ve struck paydirt at the www.calflora.org website  When you visit the site, you’ll see the following search interface:

It’s not hard to figure out that Montaña De Oro is in San Luis Obispo county.  So if you then just drop the Latin name into the search box, then select San Luis Obispo in the county field (on the right side) and click search, you find:

I clicked on the entry in the first row, and found this page. 

Now… Note the “Distribution Grid” link in the center of the page.  

That looks promising as a way to locate a specific bush of our desired flowers.  Click on that to find:

This is fantastic!  Now, I just zoom in to our State Park location on the Central California coast, and click on "Show individual observations."  

Which, when you drill down, leads you to this… which has the lat/long in the center of the page:  35.26393,  -120.84469  

That places this individual shrub of our desired flower on the banks of the Islay Creek, just inside the eastern boundary of Montaña De Oro State Park. 

So you can see what we’ve done…  Mission accomplished. Found the plant and the location.  

Search lessons:  

(1) When searching for a particular plant (or flower, or anything, really), be sure you know all the ways it can be named.  “Blueblossom” is really a fairly generic term.  It’s also a common name for a common plant.  But the Latin binomial name (Ceanothus thyrsiflorus) really is unique.  Be aware that searches can show the result in many different names.
 (2)  When you’re not having much luck using regular web search (and in particular when the results just aren’t showing much of anything), think about searching for a tool that can do the same thing.  In this example, we found the CalFlora geographic distribution search tool, which fit our need precisely. 

Search on!

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Postscript: 

After poking around in the CalFlora site, I found an even more wonderful tool:  The CalFlora map-search tool “What Grows Here?”  It’s at http://www.calflora.org/app/wgh?page=entry and looks like this:

If you fill out the location, you can then jump to an interface that lets you draw a polygon.  (In this case, I drew one to outline the State Park.)  Then selected the Scientific Name and hit search. 

 The beautiful thing about this web page is that you can filter on all KINDS of metadata--status (endangered, etc.); the month it blooms; whether it's a monocot or dicot (yes.. really!).  

A marvelous resource!  And I'm still exploring it.  Highly recommended.