Getting your SearchResearch posts by email… IF you want to get these SearchResearch posts by email (rather than by checking in every few days), here’s how to do this. (1) Log in with your email account (your-name@gmail.com …or…
Our goal is to plot data by region.. .. an immensely handy thing to be able to do if you want to do basic analysis of geo-localized data. For instance, here’s a map of all the counties in the US, with color mapping out the median income fo…
It’s time for a Challenging Challenge! As you know, every so often I like to mix up the SRS Challenge with something that’s a bit more in-depth. (And if this is overwhelming, just take the week off–I’ll be back next week with an easie…
What’s the original / natural range? The basic question from last week’s Challenge was “What was the original or natural range of these three animals?” (Lion, Ground Sloth, Camel) It’s a natural enough question, but the ans…
Going beyond avocados and onto animals! As you recall, one of important ways that avocado seeds were dispersed was through the gullet of large animals (like the gomphothere). Many of those animals are long gone–extinct. But they left …
Avocados… … that fruit beloved of millennials on their toasts, that mainstay of guacamole, that luscious green ambrosial centerpiece of tortilla chips… our lives would be poorer without it. But as you know, it’s a food …
Last week we had a survey. It asked the SRS community about what they thought were the most important search skills. (Take it by clicking here, if you want to see what the original survey was all about.) Since I do surveys p…
I’m back! Welcome to the new post-book SearchResearch. Just so you’ll know, it’s provisionally called The Joy of Finding Out. A quick book update: I finished the first draft of the manuscript. Now comes the c…
I’m almost done! Well… that is, the writing of the first draft is nearly complete. Only another 2 or 3 thousand words to go. (That sounds like a lot, but it’s an afternoon’s worth of writing. The problem is that a lot of those …
Normally… … we’d have a SearchResearch Challenge this week. BUT… as you know, I’m working on a book about the SearchResearch experience. It’s not about SearchResearch per se, but about what we learn here–how to frame questions a…
This was supposed to be a fun Challenge… … but perhaps it was more complex than I’d thought it would be. Let’s go through each, one at a time… 1. When in Switzerland, one naturally eats a lot of chocolate. (I cer…
How can we know our world in the face of efforts to undermine traditional sources of information … and in a time when citizens raise serious concerns about what and whom they can trust? That question was explored on May 15, 2018, in a program organized by the Future of Information Alliance at The Phillips Collection as part of the University of Maryland’s partnership with the museum.
I’ve spent a fair bit of time in Switzerland… … over the past couple of years. Partly it’s because I go there for work, but part of my work last year was teaching a semester-long class in Social Computing at the University of Zürich.&nbs…
Symbols are SUPPOSED to be easy… But as we found out this week, if you don’t already know what a symbol means, it’s sometimes difficult to figure it out. For instance, this symbol means biohazard. And thi…
Symbols are supposed to be easy. The idea, after all, is that a symbol works across languages and let you glance at it, immediately understand what it means, in order to rapidly understand what’s going on. In general, it’s good to…