Answer: Mysteries at Universities

These three images need different skills... 

Remember that our Challenge this week was to figure out where these pictures came from and what's going on in each of them.  All you know is that they come different universities AND that I took them.  

1.  What IS this strange animal perched on the edge of the building?  And what's the story that led to it being installed on a university campus?  (Yes, you could call it a gargoyle, but can you be more specific than that?)  

If you zoom in a bit, you can see the post in the lower left of the image says "Arizona State University."  A query search for [ Arizona State mascot ] tells as that it's... a Sun Devil!  Interesting, but not quite right.  On the other hand, in reading around a bit in this list of hits, I DID find that the

I then checked the EXIF metadata, and found the lat/long is:  33.450469, -112.066600.  I went to Google Streetview and found a somewhat better image, clarifying that it really IS a cat (and not a dragon, or something similar).  

Since these are ASU (Arizona State University) buildings, I tried the query: 

     [ Arizona state cat statue ] 

 and then checked images.  That's when I saw a beautiful image that was MUCH better than mine.  If you click through and visit the page, you'll find the whole image by Cobalt123.  

What's striking about this closeup is that there are obvious diamonds on the back of the cat.  What's up with this? 

So I did the query: 

     [ Arizona cat diamonds on back ] 

BUT as I was typing the query, this suggestion popped up: 

I can't pass up a suggestion like that (especially when it's so close to our goal).  Lo and behold, I discovered that there is a baseball team in Arizona called the Diamondbacks... and, there are a lot of pictures of cats in Arizona Diamondback uniforms.  That's slightly funny, but why so many?  

When you do the query [ Arizona diamondbacks cat ] you quickly learn that their team mascot is D Baxter, the Bobcat of the Arizona Diamondbacks.  

And that, my friends, is as far as I got.  It's clearly a cat, and it might be a reference to the local baseball team, but I wasn't able to run it down.  (But I suspect a connection here...)  



2.  What's this odd pattern of bricks over the window?  Why is it there?  

Interestingly, Remmij found the answer to this Challenge by using the "crop the image to just the brick pattern" and then doing a Search-by-Image for that.  

I have to admit that when I tried that method, it didn't work for me.  

BUT there's still hope.  You know that I took the photo, and if you use the metadata viewer, you can figure out that this picture was taken on February 28, 2012  at 9:34:09AM.  (Note that there's no lat/long metadata in this image.)  

How can you figure out where I was on that date?  

Since I'm a bit of an academic kind of guy, I have a home page that lists most of the talks I've given over the past several years.  A search for:

     [ Daniel Russell home page ] 

takes you to my page, and a Control-F for 2012 reveals that I was visiting Princeton on February 28th!  

Now the search is much simpler:  

     [ Princeton brick pattern ] 

search in Google Images leads you to another picture of the bricks on the Princeton Computer Science department web site.   If you then modify the query to be much more specific...  

     [ Computer Science brick pattern Princeton ] 

you'll quickly find the page that explains it all.  

This brick pattern is on the west wall of the CS building and was built into the wall in 1989.  The pattern is actually a bit pattern of five 7-bit ASCII values.  The vertical lines to the left and right are "framing bits" (that is, they just outline the pattern).  So the pattern reads (top-down) like this: 

1 0 1 0 0 0 0   P
0 1 1 1 1 0 1   =
1 0 0 1 1 1 0   N
1 0 1 0 0 0 0   P
0 1 1 1 1 1 1   ?

If you look up [ASCII] you'll find a table of values that map from the bit patterns to the five text characters: 

P=NP?  

And if you look THAT up, you'll find that it's one of the great (and as yet unsolved) questions in Computer Science!  




3.  What's this? Where is it? And how long has it been there??   

Here, there's even less metadata--no location, no time stamp.  So I did the simplest possible query based on what I know: 

     [pooh house tree stump university] 

And that leads quickly to a bunch of pictures of this small "House of the Pooh Bear" which is on the Harvard campus near the Science Center.  As this Quora article points out, it's been around for a while, the exact origins are lost in history.  But it IS a little bit of whimsy on the Harvard campus. 

Search Lessons 

1. Not all questions are easy to answer... though you can get close.  When I wrote the "cat" question, I had assumed that it would be straightforward to look it up.  I was counting on the ASU student newspaper to have an article on it... but no.  I spent about 2 hours trying various things, none of which worked.  (You have to stop working on the Challenges sometime!)   

2. Remember that other information sources can be useful to triangulate on the answer.  In this case, knowing that I was in Princeton on the metadata-derived date of the second photo made the search fairly straightforward.  (Of course, actually figuring out that the brick pattern was an ASCII code required some digging.)  But the bigger point is that information from another source can vastly simplify your primary search challenge. 

3.  Sometimes a simple query can get you what you need.  That's the lesson of the tree-stump house for Pooh Bear.  I was surprised at how simple that was.  I guess I somehow thought that ALL universities have locales out of the Christopher Robin / Pooh Bear books!  



For Teachers

One of the things I always tell my teachers (and try to enact in practice myself) is that even simple questions are sometimes very hard to answer.  Even though I thought the Arizona cat would be simple, it really wasn't.  Surprise!  This will happen to you.  Moral of the story:  Pre-test the search questions you give to students, lest you too be very surprised by what you (or they) find when doing the research! 




Search on! 

Teaching beginners how to search--lessons for teachers

Next time I won’t react with such a blank stare. 

I was surprised when a student in my Internet Search Skills class at the public library asked a question 30 seconds into my class:

 “Umm… when you say that the presentation is linked off your home page… I need to know… What’s a home page?”

Now my home page isn’t exactly hard to find. It’s the first Google result for  [ Dan Russell ].  A click takes you right there.  

But in the context of a “how to use Google better” class, it was surprising to find a student that didn’t have any idea what a personal home page was. How was it possible to live in the heart of Silicon Valley and NEVER hear about a “home page”? 

Things were about to get more complicated. 

I found 4 students who didn’t know you needed to have spaces between the query terms (e.g., [ DanRussellGoogle ] vs. [ Dan Russell Google] ). I found students who couldn’t accurately click on a query box and enter the search.. and I simultaneously found students who have been using advanced operators in their searches.  

Hmmm.  This was going to be a challenge.  

I was teaching a class of twenty students how to do basic internet search.  My class is offered regularly at the Santa Clara public library, and attracts students with a wide range of search skills.  I’ve taught this class about 25 times, each time with a broad cross-section of students.  I’ve had classes of kids (ages 7 to 17), classes of older adults (ages 55 to infinity), and mixed classes with both kids, parents and older learners.  In other settings, I’ve also taught advanced search skills classes to school teachers, librarians and even rocket scientists at NASA Ames. 

But this class of real beginners crystallized my thoughts about teaching search skills.  Here are some things to keep in mind as you think about teaching search and basic information skills for the average student / user.

Screen layout and behavior is really complicated to someone just learning.  To searchers without a lot of practice looking at web screen layouts, even something as simple as the default Google home page STILL has too many places to look.  When you’re teaching beginners, you really have to show them where everything is and what those things are called.  They won’t remember the names, but for the duration of the class, you can direct attention to specific places on the screen. 

As one example of complexity, a student was wondering why there are three places to enter a query (toolbar, chrome search and address bar).  I pointed out that they’re really different.  “But they’re not,” he protested, “when I type my search into any of them, they all do a search!”  And he’s right.  Except when it doesn’t work.  An entry like [ sofa ] in the address bar does a perfectly fine search.  But an entry like [ whitehouse ] might not—it can take you to whitehouse.gov landing page if it autocompletes. 

My favorite example is when a student entered “blackberry” into the Address bar (in IE) and was taken to Blackberry.com, the makers of a particular brand of smartphone.  “Why did it do that?” she cried, “I just wanted more information about pies!”

Her previous query had been [ blueberry pie ] (also in the address bar, which works just fine in IE).  When she entered “blackberry” into the Address field, the behavior was utterly different, and she didn’t know why. 

Yes, she didn’t understand the difference between the Address bar and the chrome search box.  Question is, should she have to? 

As you teach, take the time to give orientation.  

Even managing the typing is hard for some.  We don’t think about this much, but older folks and people who haven’t used computers much find entering text to be incredibly tricky.  They don’t know about the subtleties of where to click, when to press-and-hold the mouse, or even how to select a whole word.  And once an input zone is selected, they’ll accidentally click the mouse one more time, or move the input focus without even knowing they did something wrong. 

For my true beginner classes, just teaching the mechanics of how to enter search terms is a major challenge.  As a teacher, it takes a huge amount of patience to slow down enough to guide the hand, coordinating the arm, wrist and finger motions—but it’s absolutely necessary.  If the student can’t select and enter their search, they can’t do anything.  

For students having these problems, you need to slow down and manually show them how to move, how to click. 

Basic find (control-F) isn’t widely known.  I ask every class I teach if they know how to locate (or find) a specific word on the page.  I illustrate with an example.  I’ll go to a random page (say, whitehouse.gov) and then spot a word that appears on the page (but not in caps).  Suppose it’s the word “energy.”  Then I’ll ask  “can anyone find if the word ‘energy’ appears on this page?”  I go through this elaborate process to avoid cuing them with words like “find.”  It usually take a minute or so before someone finds the word.  I then ask that person how they did it—usually they say “I used control-F.”  That’s when I ask how many people know this trick?  (Or using the edit menu to do a find.) 

Consistently, I’ve been finding that right around 25% of the class knows this basic skill.   More generally, when I ask this question in larger groups, it drops to 10%.  Somewhat to my surprise, I also find that even when I teach technically advanced audiences, not everyone knows this.  Almost all librarians (skilled searchers) know this—but surprisingly, it seems to be around 85% know this, which continually baffles me. 

For the love of Pete, teach EVERY class about Control-F / CMD-F!  

Scoping a search to focus on the topic of interest isn’t a common skill.  I always ask my class to do some searches of their own—things that they really want to look up.  As the class works away on this, I go from person-to-person and talk with them about what they’re trying to do.  I want to understand their intent (in their own words) and see what they’re doing. 

Some times a student will say “I want to learn about the Civil War.”  And then do a query like [ Gettysburg ].  That’s a great search to find out about that particular battle or the famous oration, but not a good search for general Civil War information.  For beginners, this isn’t a crazy approach—it’s a way to get a start on a topic when they don't know what else to ask. The problem is that they’ll get stuck in the corner of the topic they already know, and not learn about the rest of the topic.  

Contrariwise, a student might start that same search with [ Civil War ], which is a good beginning, but then they need to figure out how to reduce the scope of the search.  That’s a problem with such a huge topic—how to focus in on the part (or parts) you really want.

When you think about it, a good part of expertise in learning about a topic is coming to understand what the scale and scope really is.  And doing a search on a topic, especially for a beginner, a wildly divergent thing to do. 

Talk about scoping a search explicitly.  Not everyone knows... 

Choosing query terms is not an obvious skill.   It’s striking to talk with a student about what they’re trying to discover and hear the mismatch between what they’re thinking about, and what they actually type in for search.  For those of us who have used search engines for years, it’s so obvious as to be transparent.  But for someone who’s new to using a search engine the question is often “how do I start my search?” 

“I just want to find a cheap hotel for my vacation.”  He’d entered [ cheap hotel ] as the search query, and was puzzled to not see any mentions of hotels in Chicago, where he was planning on travelling.  I suggested he add the name of his destination, and all was well. Although he was still surprised why Google didn’t understand that  he was interested in Chicago.  “I’ve been looking for all kinds of things to do in Chicago—didn’t it see me doing all of that?” 

This kind of dropping of terms implies that some beginning users see the search process as a kind of conversation rather than as a stateless transaction. 

Have a unit just on "query term selection."  

 “Google” as a concept is often confused with “the internet” or with “the browser.”  We see this kind of misconception all the time in the complaints Google gets in the mail.   (“Why can’t you fix my phone bill?” a dissatisfied user will ask, not realizing that we’re not AT&T, we’re just the search engine that got you there.) 

But people often confuse the tool with the embedding ideas.  When I worked at IBM we’d constantly get complaints from people about why they kept getting viruses on their laptops.  Of course, that’s not IBM’s issue—but to the end-user it doesn’t matter—IBM is the logo they see on the laptop and hence who they know to contact (of course, it’s not Lenovo, but that was then).  When you think about it, who SHOULD own the virus problem? 

In a similar vein, Google is the home page for many people—it’s the first logo they see and recognize on a web page, so the conflation of “the internet” or “the browser” with Google is natural. 

Of course this raises Cain with a user’s idea of how things work when they learn that you don’t need a Google email account to use Google services, or when they get an instruction to close their browser, but the browser isn’t on a Google page.  (“How can I close the browser?  It’s not showing me a Google logo because I’m looking at another website.”  It sounds incoherent, I know—but this is the way I hear many people reasoning.) 

It’s difficult to learn a coherent model of how a search engine works.  When you use something, it’s good if you can have a coherent model of what it is and what it does when given certain inputs.  Unfortunately, Google behaves wildly differently when you give it slightly different, sometimes imperceptibly different queries. [ hunt ] vs. [ hunting ] are pretty different; but something like [ Ron ] vs. [ Ronnie ] are sometimes bafflingly different to beginners.  For users with some experience, the difference is clear.  But when a beginning user does a search and then doesn’t  find one of the terms on the page, it’s a mystifying moment. 

I don’t mean to paint a dire picture here.  For the most part, students are incredibly happy with Google—they find things they could only imagine in their dreams. 

At the same time, for a portion of the population (probably the vast non-technical majority), using a search engine isn’t like falling off a log; it’s a highly technical skill that’s full of mysteries and not a small amount of worry. 

What’s perhaps most worrisome is that there’s no good way for beginners to climb up the learning curve.  Of course, they could look for online materials and tutorials, but these people are beginners at search, it’s not the first (or last) thing they’d consider. 

Of course, they could take my class.  And while I always have a full class (and always with a waiting list), just my teaching doesn’t scale.  (Which is why I offer the scalable version of my classes at PowerSearchingWithGoogle.com -- that's always open and available for free.) 

We really need to figure a way to get people over the hump of first time use to become reasonably good, reasonably proactive searchers.  Once they can search for their own help materials, we’ll have a self-sustaining population of new users.  We just need to figure out a good way to get them over the initial hurdle of not-knowing. 

Search Challenge (2/3/16): Mysteries at universities

As I travel around... 

... I often visit different universities to give talks (often about SearchResearch), to visit with faculty members, or to teach classes.  It's a part of my job that I really enjoy--I love teaching, and I'm lucky to have a job that lets me do this fairly often. 

However, as I travel around, I often spot various mysteries at these universities that beg for an explanation.  Often I find these things while on my run through campus, so I'm usually alone, without a local guide to tell me what these strange things might be.  

Can you help me identify these mysteries? 

The Challenges this week are pretty straightforward, but might require a bit of sleuthing: 


1.  What IS this strange animal perched on the edge of the building?  And what's the story that led to it being installed on a university campus?  (Yes, you could call it a gargoyle, but can you be more specific than that?)  

2.  What's this odd pattern of bricks over the window?  Why is it there?  

3.  What's this? Where is it? And how long has it been there??   

The Challenge here is to go from the image to the answer.  Can you do it?  Everything you need is out there on the web. 

Tell us HOW you found the answers! 

Search on! 

PowerSearchingWithGoogle MOOC restarting on Feb 8th, 2016!

I'm happy to say... 

.... that we're re-opening the PowerSearchingWithGoogle.com MOOC.  As you know, this is the online course that covers a lot of basic search skills (such as advanced operators) and a bit of intermediate skills (such as how to evaluate the quality / credibility of a resource you find online).  

The newest incarnation of the course starts on Feb 8th and runs for two weeks.  

After that, I'll be running it every two weeks until the middle of June.  (Between you and me, my hope is to get at least 100K people to register for the course.  I'd really like to change the way people search online!) 

In any case, please let your friends (especially teacher and librarian friends) know about the course. 

The course is free to anyone who wants to take it.  

And, as I mentioned in an earlier blog post, all of the content is free for you to use in your own teaching.

Register now and be a better SearchResearcher in just two short weeks!  

I'll look for you in the course.  

Promo Video 

Sample Video from the course. 

Answer: Questions you should know the answer to

None of these are especially tough... 

... but they're all small things that you'd think you would have learned along the way.  But somehow, there's no course to take in this.    

1.  You're driving a rental car and driving into the gas station. How can you tell (without getting out of the car) on which side the gas cap is on?  Is it on the left or the right?  (It's really annoying to have to get out of the car, walk around, and discover it.)  

The answer is obvious, once you know.  But I had to look it up.  Here was my query. 

Interestingly, this also led me to a Snopes.com article asking if the gas cap side was indicated by which side the pump handle on the ICON was on.  I hadn't thought of that.  But no, it's the triangle that points to the correct side.  

(BTW, what's the correct term for that part of the car where the gas cap is located?  What's it called?  By doing the query [ gas cap diagram ] I ended up finding out that the gas cap is on the "fuel filler hose" that leads to the fuel tank. Another term I didn't know!)  

2. What was the original design for Mount Rushmore?  Was it what we see today? How different is the original design?  

 My query:  [ Mount Rushmore original design ] led to a number of sites, all of which pointed out that the original design was as shown in the photograph below.  Of course, it was also going to be at a different location (at the "Needles," not far away), and Jefferson was originally supposed to be at Washington's left, until they found that the rock there wasn't suited for sculpting.  

The original design had presidents shown to their waist. But you stop when you run out of funding, as the project did in 1939. Photo from Library of Congress. 

3. How do you know which is the "right" side of a towel? (Yes, there's a right side and a wrong side.  Have you been doing it wrong all these years?)  

Yeah, who knew?  But my query was [ towel right wrong side ], which found many articles telling me that side with the long loops (and therefore more surface area) is the side meant for drying.  The side with the short loops is meant for everything else (maybe sitting on the beach).  As with many things like this--use the side you like...  Enjoy.  

4. People keep saying things, but I don't know what they mean!  What does “one fell swoop mean”? 

 Again, the search is easy, but finding the answer at PhraseFinder tells me that it means "a sudden action" and comes from Shakespeare's play Macbeth.  The original use was in this big of dialog: 

MACDUFF: (on hearing that his family and servants have all been killed)

     All my pretty ones?
     Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?
     What, all my pretty chickens and their dam
    At one fell swoop?

The "swoop" is when a raptor (such as the "kite" mentioned in line 2) makes a sudden, rapid descent from on high, usually called a "stoop" today, the stoop is the way raptors stun and kill their prey.  "Fell" as an adjective here just means "evil" or "fierce."  Today, this phrase has come to mean "a sudden stroke, action, or attack."  

5. While we're on this topic, what does "heavens to murgatroyd" mean?  And who says this anyway?  

 Our friends at PhraseFinder have a story for this too.  They claim it was first said by Bert Lahr (an actor best known as the Cowardly Lion in the Wizard of Oz movie) in the 1944 film Meet the People. Dick Powell and Lucille Ball star in this WWII-era movie. Ball plays a popular but stuck-up Broadway star who leaves the bright lights to become a welder in a shipyard. Here she meets and falls in love with coworker Powell. This being a wartime musical, the plotline is periodically abandoned for the guest-star turns of the likes of Virginia O'Brien, Bert Lahr, Spike Jones and His City Slickers, Vaughn Monroe, and Mata and Hari.

I tried, but wasn't able to find the script.  So we'll keep looking for that in the background.  But it seems plausible.  

It was, as Regular Reader Jon points out, popularized by the 1959 cartoon character Snagglepuss, a pink mountain lion with grand aspirations to be an actor. 

6. In the story of David and Goliath, David kills the giant with a single stone from his sling.  Is this really possible?  What kind of a slingshot could do that? 

A simple query:  [ David sling ] or [ David slingshot ] leads to a wealth of information about the "traditional sling" (as opposed to the surgical tube version shown in the illustration last week).  A traditional sling is just a length of twine (or leather) with a small pocket into which you can place a stone or small projectile.  

The sling is simple to make and yet much more powerful than you'd think.  When I was in high school I read a very interesting article in Scientific American on "The Sling as a Weapon"(1973).  Being a teen, I made one and proceeded to test it out.  I chose a smooth stone about 1 inch (2 cm) in diameter, whirled it around my head a couple of times and let it fly.  The stone hit the side of our wood-sided garage, and went THROUGH the wall! 

Fascinated, I quickly found that I could easily put such a stone through 1/4 inch plywood at 20 paces.  (I quickly stopped testing in my backyard because I realized a missed shot could easily break windows and potentially really hurt someone.) I ended up flinging stone out into the ocean, and got them going fast and far enough that I'd often lose sight of them before they hit the water.  

One of the best sources I found is Slinging.org, which has an extensive list of publications about slings and their use.  

While there is a great debate about whether or not the stone actually killed Goliath by striking him in the forehead (wasn't he wearing a helmet?),  there's no doubt that sling could seriously injure, and quite possibly kill someone.  As found in Eric Skov's article on slinging, a lead bullet flung by a sling could easily penetrate the skull.  

Search Lessons

The real lesson here is obvious: 

1.  Look up stuff that's interesting / unknown / unclear.  Learn to recognize the small annoyance that you can re-frame as a small research question. In my case, the hassle of getting out and looking for the darn gas cap was annoying enough to make me wonder "Has anyone else had this problem?"  Hence my query above.  And hence all of these queries today.  None of them are difficult, so it really shows how much great content is available, if only you go and look for it! 

Teachers: 

This should be obvious, but making a sling is NOT something you want your classes to do.  It could very quickly get out of hand!  Literally.  

On the other hand, this topic of "looking up things that seem obvious" is a great activity to get students introduced to the idea of doing SearchResearch.  

Some rewarding things to do are (a) look up the definitions for words that you're not really certain of; for instance peruse or tangential or affect vs. effect.  You can also do a few other things to check out the commonplace and everyday:  Why are footballs sometimes called "pig skins"? Or how are baseballs really made?  

Search on!