Search Challenge (4/13/16): How well do medical results stand the test of time?

What we know changes over time...

... and in particular, some areas of knowledge change significantly over time.  This is a good thing--it tells us that we're learning more about how the world works.

Medical knowledge, in particular, is often subject to a dizzying shift in perspective with time.  What's recognized as true in one era might easily be overturned just a few years later.  

To get a sense of this, let's take a look at a few pieces of medical knowledge that were once-upon-a-time widely accepted.   

(I should say that I'm not picking on Medicine as a field--it's just a nice illustration of how much our knowledge of the world shifts over time.  You could ask these same questions of physics, or chemistry, or biology.  Medicine is a bit simpler to study for SearchResearch purposes.) 

As you know, the Nobel Prize is awarded annually for outstanding contributions in a number of areas, including Medicine.

So I'm curious:  how many of the results that have been rewarded with a Nobel Prize in Medicine can withstand the test of time?  

Your Challenge for this week:  

1.  If we look at the Nobel Prizes awarded in the field of Medicine in the 1920s, how many of those highly acclaimed results from the 20s are still believed to be true?   

This sounds like a crazy hard Challenge, but it's simpler (and more surprising!) than you think.  

As often happens with these Challenges, the subject matter may seem intimidating, but when you look at it in a little detail, it's fascinating.  

I hope you have as much fun with this Challenge as I did.  There's great joy to be had in just looking this stuff up! 

Stay curious, my friends.  

Search on. 

P.S.  I'm on a plane again today; will try to get to the second part of
last week's Challenge somewhere over Kansas... 

Answer: When you want just the headlines...

This was harder than most... 

... but everything is a bit harder in the City of Angels, as much hard-boiled detective fiction will bear out.  

But there are multiple solutions.  Today I'll just write about the simple Google News solution, and then later this week, I'll get around to showing you some other methods.  (It's slightly complicated because I'm traveling this week, which is why this Challenge answer is delayed.)  

Suppose I'm a reporter trying to understand how the Los Angeles City Council deals with gun-related issues.  Can you (expert SearchResearchers) tell me how to do the following? 

1. Can you search the major news outlets in the Los Angeles (LA) region for news articles over the past year that report on the City Council considering any kind of gun-related actions?  (Be generous here--if the council heard a report about the use of guns, that would count.)  

2. (Harder) Can you find the top 100 LA City Council headlines on guns, and then extract the publication dates to create a week-by-week histogram of when these articles were published?  (This is a two-step challenge: (a) find and extract the dates, (b) put the dates into a spreadsheet and create a histogram showing the number of publications on this topic by week.)  

As I mentioned last week, the problem here is to search JUST on the headlines.  How can you do that on Google? 

First of all, remember that there IS a Google News service.  So what happens if we search for: 

     [ Los Angeles City Council gun ] 

 You'll get a fairly unfiltered set of news articles with these words... which aren't very specific.  I'd say this isn't a great way to go--it's too open-ended, and the search terms aren't always in the headlines.  This is because default News search searches both the headlines and the body text.  

The big trick about searching Google News is to realize that there's a hidden dropdown widget in the News search box.  See below:  

It's only when you roll-over that downward pointing triangle that you realize what it's for: 

Ah ha!  It's the apparently-missing-and-well-hidden Advanced News Search UI! 

If you click on that, you'll get lots of options that would be handy for a Challenge like this: 

I've filled out the form to search for city and council  and gun within the headlines of the article between the specified dates.  

Note that I also added a Location at the bottom--here I put in Los Angeles.  

And the results come back: 






You might wonder why the 4th article is considered "in" the Los Angeles area.  It's because that's where the website, OpposingViews.com is headquarted.   The Los Angeles Times and KABC-TV are obviously correct, but the "Location" filter works off of the location of the organization that's writing, rather than the location that's being written about.  

(Note that this is one of those things what will get better over time as entity identification improves.  For for the moment, we have to live with this as it is.) 

Now, if you do this same kind of "headline search" with a different query that returns fewer results, it means you might consider what OTHER papers not-in-the-area might well write about, but be headquartered somewhere else. 

So let's run a query for [ county courthouse ].  If you search only in Los Angeles, there are only 5 results.  But change the location to "California," and you'll get a superset of all the headlines written about the county courthouse from news organizations within California.  

Now we see a LOT more results (around 60): 

As you'd expect, there are more slightly off near-hits here.  The "Knox County Courthouse..." article is from SFGate (in San Francisco), but it's not about California.  We'd have to filter through these results as well, in order to get to the kinds of news stories that we really want.  
But at least you've learned a new way to search JUST the headlines of News stories.  

However, I have to zoom to the airport just now... I'll answer the question about how to extract the dates and create the histogram tomorrow, along with the Search Lesson. 

Stay tuned, and search on! 

Search Challenge (4/6/16): When you want just the headlines...

Sometimes... 

... when you do a search, you want to look just in certain regions of the document. 

The LA of dreams

For instance, a newspaper article usually has a title, a first paragraph, an author, a publication name, and a publication date.  (Example: headline:"LA City Council wise gun-safety action,"  published-by: Los Angeles Times, date: Aug 10, 2015.)  Being able to search just within one of those kinds of fields would be a boon to searchers.  

In other words, news articles (and document in general) have some kinds of metadata that you can search on, all of which gives you a very fine grain search ability.  

This week, a reporter wrote to me to ask if there was some way to search through newspapers in his home town for any headlines about a particular topic.  

What he wanted to do was to get a sense for how much news coverage a particular topic received over time.  Did the news in his town really cover the topic?  Or did they just let it slide?  How could you tell?  His idea was to look at the headlines, and count up how often the topic had been written about.  

I realized today that knowing how to do this is a valuable skill for SearchResearchers, and hence, it makes a great Challenge.  Here's this week's Challenge, modified slightly to protect the person who suggested the idea.

Can you figure out how to do this? 

As you know, I'm originally from Southern California, Los Angeles to be exact, so I'm always curious about what's going on there.  

Suppose I'm a reporter trying to understand how the Los Angeles City Council deals with gun-related issues.  Can you (expert SearchResearchers) tell me how to do the following? 

1. Can you search the major news outlets in the Los Angeles (LA) region for news articles over the past year that report on the City Council considering any kind of gun-related actions?  (Be generous here--if the council heard a report about the use of guns, that would count.)  

2. (Harder) Can you find the top 100 LA City Council headlines on guns, and then extract the publication dates to create a week-by-week histogram of when these articles were published?  (This is a two-step challenge: (a) find and extract the dates, (b) put the dates into a spreadsheet and create a histogram showing the number of publications on this topic by week.)  

Can you figure this one out?  Don't worry if you can't figure out how to do part 2--I'll show you how I did it next week.  

I can think of at least two ways to do the headline-search, but I'm curious HOW you figured out how to do it.  Would you please let us know as you write up your answer in the comments below?  

Search on! 

Answer: Body modifications?

There are many ways... 

... to change your body, some you want, some you might not care to have. 

Working out to grow stronger and more muscled is one conscious way to modify your body, but last week's Challenge was to find a few answers to questions about bone & teeth modification!   

In particular, I asked:  

1.  I've heard that people who habitually smoke a pipe have a distinctive pattern of wear on their teeth.  Does that particular pattern of wear have a specific name?  What is it?  

2.  Same question, except for people who are habitual sewers (that is, people who make clothes often).  Do they have a particular pattern of wear in their teeth?  What's that called? 

3.  Despite the difficult of bone modification, there is one bone that is (was) commonly modified by certain groups of people.  What bone is that?  How was it usually modified?  

Let's take them one at a time: 

1.  Pipe smokers distinctive wear pattern?  To begin this search, I started with:

     [ pipe smoker teeth wear pattern ]

which quickly led me to find that yes, constantly clenching a pipe between teeth does lead to a distinctive "dental modification" pattern.  By reading a bit of the text around the images, I learned that this is called a "pipe facet," which is the particular pattern of tooth wear from long-term pipe use.  

Lest you think this is only from the olden days, here's a side-by-side comparison: 

Older pipe facets (such as that on the right) are more circular since early clay pipes had circular stem (and were made of relatively abrasive clay).  

2.  Habitual sewers distinctive wear pattern?  For this, I did the search:

     [ tailor AROUND(5) tooth ]

This was just about the only way I could find the answer I was seeking.  I had to try many different combinations of search terms before I found this.  

Why did I use "tailor" as a search term? Because it seemed to me that professional sewers--that is, "tailors"--would be more likely to have this than just regular hobbyist "sewers."  

I used the AROUND(x) operator to find every document with the word "tailor" within 5 words of the term "tooth" -- this led to two web pages (BonesDontLie and a Washington Post article) that both used the phrase tailor's notch to describe a chip (or groove). 

To validate this, I did a search for:

     [ "tailor's notch" ] 

(quoting it because I wanted exactly that phrase)... and found several descriptions of the particular tooth wear pattern of tailors, including a monograph from the Smithsonian, Human Remains from Voegtly Cemetery, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (Ubelaker and Jones, eds.), which documents an archaeological survey of a cemetery that was used between 1833 and 1861, with several tailor's notches noted in teeth. Here's one such image of a tooth with a clear tailor's notch on a front tooth: 

3. There is one bone that is (was) commonly modified by certain groups of people.  What bone is that?  How was it usually modified?  

 To answer this question, I did a bunch of guesses and found that all KINDS of bones that have modified by people over time--feet, neck, arms, heads... but my question is really a question about which bone was the most common, both in terms of numbers of individuals who modified this bone, and how many cultures modified these bones.  

I initially did a query for: 

     [ bone modification ] 

and quickly learned that this covers a variety of modifications--both during life (antemortem) and after life (postmortem), as when bones are modified for ritual or tool-making purposes, or just plain altered by other effects (e.g., hyenas gnawing on bones).  

But in reading through these search results, I found that the term "body modification" covers all kinds of alterations to the human body, including the ones that we care about here--intentional modifications to bone structure by different groups of people. 

This lead me to the Wikipedia article on body modification (careful--it's pretty graphic and NSFW at the bottom of the page).  But the article did highlight several bone modifications that are fairly widespread: footbinding, cranial deformation, neck elongation, and waist modification.  

While waist modification (usually by the use of corsets) has been fairly common, it's been limited to the European migration (that is, any culture heavily influenced by Western fashion).  Corsets and similar methods would change the shape of ribs and the waist overall. 

Neck elongation is dramatic, but it's a fairly limited practice--primarily just to the Kayan people (a Tibeto-Burman ethnic minority of Myanmar, aka Burma). 

Footbinding is also amazing (and tragic), but again, it's a practice that's fairly limited to China.  

However, changing the shape of the skull seems to have been practiced widely around the world.  Certainly in Europe, Asia, North and South America, and the Pacific Islands.  

The earliest written record of cranial deformation was by Hippocrates, who wrote about the Macrocephali (big-heads), who were named for their practice of cranial modification.  

Until the early 1900s, a form of artificial cranial deformation was still taking place in Western France, in Deux-Sevres. 

Earlier, in the Americas, the Maya, Inca, the Chinookan tribes of the Northwest and the Choctaw of the Southeast.  While there are many ways to modify the skull, most methods, like that of the Choctaw, the Chehalis, and Nooksack Indians, were based on strapping the infant's head to a cradleboard to create a flattened head in front and in back.

P/C Wikimedia Adult Choctaw with flattened head shape.
(from Montreal Museum of Art; 1848)

This skull shape transformation was done by basically binding a child's head in with something that would change its shape as the child grew.

Diagram of Mayan methods for skull shape-changing.
P/C Wikimedia
(original from Museo Regional de Antropología in Mérida, Mexico)

So while body modification practices of many kinds are widespread, the skull seems to be the bone (or, to be precise, several bones that interlock) that's most commonly modified--it certainly was a common practice among many different cultures.  

Search Lessons

1. Remember the AROUND operator.  In my search for the "tailor's notch," I had to search for web pages that had the word "tailor" (as a synonym for "habitual sewer") that was near the word "tooth."  This is the kind of search that AROUND is good for--finding co-locations of terms that describe a concept, but aren't necessarily next to each other.  (Also really useful for finding names of people who appear in the same article e.g., [ "Marie Curie" AROUND(5) "Albert Einstein" ], which nicely locates the letter Einstein wrote to Marie Curie telling her to ignore the haters who were harassing her at the time.)  

2.  Consider using your own synonyms.  While "habitual sewer" nicely describes what a tailor does, Google does quite know enough to use the term "tailor" as a substitute.  This is why we had to use our own synonym, which captures the semantics quite nicely.  

For Teachers 

While I found this topic really very interesting, it's probably NOT a great topic for your K-12 classroom (unless you live in a very open and permissive scholastic environment).  

When researching questions like this, you'll inevitably end up somewhere in body modification territory, and there's a lot of things that aren't really safe for work (NSFW), and, implicitly, NSFS either.  

This reminds me that my general maxim for handing out research tasks is that you (the teacher) should really try to solve the problem BEFORE handing it out to your students.  

OR (and I prefer this approach), teach your students how to handle questionable / salacious / gory materials.  They're going to find them anyway--I feel that it's probably a better idea to give them some skills for dealing with the reality of content on the web than to just avoid the topic altogether.  Give them a heads-up and let them know what to do once they find it!  

And, as always.... Search on! 

Search Challenge (3/30/16): Body modifications?

People modify themselves... 

... sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally.  As you probably know, the vertebrae in your backbone can be modified if you carry heavy loads for a long time, and you'll develop Schmorl’s node (a kind of notch in the bone where the nucleus pulposus is pushed into the vertebrae body). 

Schmorl's node (aka "notch" or "depression")
P/C: Wikimedia.

And of course, modifying your teeth has been popular for some time.  These are pictures of two Zapotec skulls I saw in the museum at Monte Alban, near Oaxaca, Mexico.  

(And you thought wearing jewelry in your teeth was a modern thing... These dental inlays date from circa 200 AD.)  

With jade inlays... 

Without the inlays... 

Whether from work (as in Schmorl's notch), or intentionally for beautification reasons, people have modified themselves in many ways over the years.  Tattoos and scarification have been done forever, but modifications involving underlying bones or teeth are much less common, probably because of the possibility of things going badly.  

But, bone and teeth modifications do happen.  (Note that I'm excluding surgical operations, like trephination, from this discussion.)  

As usual, if you know the exact term to describe what you're looking for, the search process becomes MUCH simpler.  Seeing these "dental inlays" reminded me that they were common among the Maya, Zapotec, and Aztecs. Of course, knowing the term "dental inlay" makes your search much simpler, and a search for [ Maya dental inlay ] is really interesting.

So today's Challenge is to find a few specific terms to help target your searches in today's topic area.... bone & teeth modification!   

1.  I've heard that people who habitually smoke a pipe have a distinctive pattern of wear on their teeth.  Does that particular pattern of wear have a specific name?  What is it?  

2.  Same question, except for people who are habitual sewers (that is, people who make clothes often).  Do they have a particular pattern of wear in their teeth?  What's that called? 

3.  Despite the difficult of bone modification, there is one bone that is (was) commonly modified by certain groups of people.  What bone is that?  How was it usually modified?  

In our usual way, please let us know the answers in the comment section below.  Be sure to tell us HOW to found it!  What queries did you do to discover the answer?  (Or did you just know it off the top of your head?)  

My answers (and answer paths) on Monday of next week. 


Search on! 

Answer: What's the unexpected connection between these two?

Unexpected connections

You never know what you'll find when you go for a run (or walk) at different places.  In particular, there are often fun and unexpected connections between different places and people.  

This Challenge is about finding the connections between the two men depicted below. 

In my clues I said...  that these two gentlemen had dinner together once upon a time, while they were sworn enemies at the time.  
Excuse me?  What's up with this?  

1.  Who are these two gentlemen? 

Just zooming in on the gravestone images you can read that this is the gravestone of Major General Robert Ross.  "After having distinguished himself in all ranks as an Officer in ..Italy, Portugal, Spain, France & America... was killed during the commencement of an action..."   

A quick search brings up many articles on him, including an interesting observation that he is best known for the Burning of Washington, which included the destruction of the White House, The Capitol, and the Library of Congress on August 24, 1814.  If you read carefully, you'll see that he was buried here on September 20, 1814... but that he was killed-in-action on September 12, 1814.  (And, the story goes, he was transported from near Baltimore, where he was killed, to Halifax, Nova Scotia, in a barrel of rum. It was a busy summer for him...)  

By looking at the EXIF metadata on the second image, you can pull out the lat/long (where I was standing when I took the picture):  38.904853, -77.068136.  Putting that into Google Maps tells you that I was at Francis Scott Key park in Georgetown, just up the Potomac River from the White House.

Francis Scott Key is the gentleman who penned the poem that became the lyrics for the US National Anthem.  (You remember from an earlier Challenge that the tune for the anthem is an old drinking song, To Anacreon in Heaven.)  

2.  When / where / why did they have dinner together?  

To search for this, I did the obvious query: 

     [ "Francis Scott Key"  "Robert Ross" ] 

... and found several pages that tell us that they had dinner together aboard HMS Tonnant, 

".. It was aboard the Tonnant that the Americans Colonel John Stuart Skinner and Francis Scott Key dined with Vice Admiral Cochrane, Rear Admiral Sir George Cockburn, and Major General Robert Ross, where they negotiated the release of a prisoner, Dr. William Beanes.  After his release, Skinner, Key, and Beanes were allowed to return to their own sloop but were not allowed to return to Baltimore because they had become familiar with the strength and position of the British units and knew of the British intent to attack Baltimore.  As a result, Key witnessed the bombarding of Fort McHenry called "The Defense of Fort McHenry," later named "The Star-Bangled Banner." 
 - Searching for the Forgotten War - 1812:  United State of America.

3.  And why is the night of their dinner such a memorable event?  

This is a bit tricky.  What evening was their dinner?  

If you read the preceding paragraph, you'd (naturally) assume that these gentlemen had dinner, then Skinner, Key, and Beanes went back to their sloop to watch the bombardment of Fort McHenry.

But that would be wrong! 

If you look up: 

     [ Battle of Fort McHenry ] 

you'll find that the battle (that is, the all-day-all-night bombardment from the British ships) happened on September 13-14 starting at 6AM.  

But wait a second!  Wasn't Robert Ross killed on September 12?  (That's what his gravestone says, and that's what all of his biographies say!)  

To answer this question, I looked in Google Books for that same query we used before, looking for books on that would tell the story. (I was hoping for a book that would give a detailed chronology of the last few days of Ross' life.) 

And I found it:  In What So Proudly We Hailed: Francis Scott Key, A Life, by Marc Leepson (and a few others), I found that this fabled dinner took place on September 7th, at the mouth of the Potomac River, which isn't exactly near Fort McHenry.  

In Leepson's book, "... the three Americans were first escorted to the British frigate Surprize, under the command of Admiral Cochrane's son, Sir Thomas Cochrane.  On September 10, Key, Skinner, and Beanes were allowed to return to the President, accompanied by British marine guards. The Surprize towed them into Baltimore Harbor, about eight miles from Fort McHenry, behind the fifty-ship British fleet, where they dropped anchor.  They spent the next four days there..."  

And in the meantime, Robert Ross led his expeditionary force onshore at North Point, trying to run around the flank of the Americans in Baltimore.  

As this map shows, Key was anchored a few miles offshore with a great view of Fort McHenry, but Major General Robert Ross was slogging to the north with his ground forces, ultimately being killed by a sniper 

Map of Fort McHenry and the location of the British fleet.
Note that Ross was killed well to the east of the Fort on September 12, 1814. 

So... why was their dinner such a memorable event?  

Well, it really wasn't... other than that Francis Scott Key and John Stuart Skinner managed to get Dr. Beanes free by negotiation.  

But in the process of hanging out aboard the British ships, they knew too much, so they couldn't just be sent back to spill the beans (so the speak), but had to be kept on board for 4 more days while the British paid attention to Fort McHenry while trying to take Baltimore.  

The Brits really wanted to take Baltimore, which they referred to as a "nest of pirates" for the Baltimore Clippers (a kind of fast ship) tendency to raid, size, and sink British ships while on the high seas.  

But it didn't work out... the dinner lead to a successful prisoner negotiation,  and the US has a national anthem as a side-effect.  

Search Lessons 

1.  I've said this before, but it constantly bears repeating:  READ CAREFULLY!  
I have to admit that I misread these passages when I was first writing up the Challenge method. I (like several Regular Readers) jumped to the inference that the dinner was the same night as the famous attack.  It was only when I was writing up the answer that I noticed that Ross died the day before the bombardment, and Key's writing of the poem.  

2. A useful trick to get to a deeper understanding is to write up a mini-essay that presents all of your information.  I'm 90% convinced that having to write something down (and have that writeup make sense) is a great method to making sure that all of your ducks are in a row.  If you're being honest with yourself, you'll pick up all KINDS of mistakes in your reasoning and data (such as when it seemed that Robert Ross was killed before the date I'd assumed was the day of their dinner!).  

For Teachers

I'll just repeat my two Search Lessons from above. 

But more generally, there are lots of historical events that can stand a bit of closer inspection.  In particular, looking for the sequence of events over time can be really illustrative.  One trick to making compelling lessons is to find something that links to a REALLY important (at least to your students) event.  

Where ever you're a teacher, look for the local connection.  In Albuquerque, for instance, what were the big political issues for Spain (which owned much of the American southwest) in the year the city was founded (1706)?  What connections can be made between the political situation in Spain and in New Mexico at the time?  

History is fascinating, but it's also worth close study because it's easy to jump to an inadequately supported conclusion!  

Search Challenge (3/23/16): What's the unexpected connection between these two?

Unexpected connections

I love finding the unexpected connections that link things together.  I loved that book Connections by James Burke (still highly recommended, both as a book and for the videos), and the ways in which connections can be found between animals, plants, ecosystems, and people. 

We've talked about these kinds of discovered connections before (example: about a femme fatale and an executive chef), so you know how I feel.  

I really enjoy finding these unexpected discoveries about people. 

So you can imagine my delight when I accidentally discovered the connection between the two people depicted in the images below.  The pictures themselves were wonderful moments when I literally ran across these sites at two very disparate locations (yes, I took these images while running through these two locations on different dates).  

It turns out that these two gentlemen had dinner together once upon a time.  

But the remarkable thing is that they were sworn enemies at the time.  

And that delightfully discovered connection leads to today's Challenge:  

1.  Who are these two gentlemen? 

2.  When / where / why did they have dinner together?  

3.  And why is the night of their dinner such a memorable event?  

Can you figure this one out?  

I certainly had no idea that they'd dined together, let alone on date that would go down in history.  What was it about that one evening that left such an impression?

Let us know how you figured it out!  

Search on! 

(Note that I've given you two images of the gravestone.  It was difficult to get a clear shot of the writing, especially while running, so I'm giving you two different views of the same thing to help out in the decoding.)  

Be sure to click on the images to get the full resolution versions.