The Wikid GRRLs project began with an article in the New York Times in 2011 on Wikipedia’s gender gap, reporting that less than 15 percent of the contributors to the online encyclopedia are women. The seed that FIA sowed with Wikid GRRLs more than three years ago has blossomed into a fruit that has benefited more than 65 (overwhelmingly minority) girls, nine undergraduate students, three graduate students and three faculty members.
Sometimes searches are tricky… This week we’re looking for animals that are closely linked to certain professions. Dalmatian dogs are often thought of as “firefighter dogs.” Seeing this kind of thing made me writeup last week’s Challenge: Can you f…
It’s time for a bit of fun… … and, in truth, a Challenge that’s both easy… and pretty hard. Here’s the key idea for this week. As you know, some animals seems to be closely linked to certain professions. For example, the dalmatian dog is often…
When you’re searching… … for something that has no obvious connection, and is imprecise as well, you need to leverage every bit of information given. Let’s think about what information we have: Time/Date: February 18th, 2016, in the early afte…
Does it help if I tell you….. that when I saw the smoke plumes, I was on AA 2820, around 1:20PM, Central? Thinking strategically… And searching on!
Every so often… … (well, quite frequently for me!)… you’ll see things that you just don’t understand. Maybe it’s a funny insect, or a interesting flower, or an odd plant growing in a place you don’t expect. I have this curiosity inspiring momen…
The SearchResearch question this week is… … to understand what would make me smile when I saw this plant (below) growing at the base of these columns (above on the left) … I asked the Challenge this way: 1. What about seeing this plant at the …
I’ve been thinking about architecture lately, … and so it was with some bemusement that I saw some columns (specifically, the ones shown above on the left) that made me smile when I saw them. Why? Because this plant was growing at the base of the c…
What we know to be true changes…It’s a big mistake to think that what you know to be true is a constant. Certainly there are eternal verities, but in this post I want to focus in on what we might think of as true, but as we’ll see, turn out to be pr…
Dan Russell — Google’s “director of user happiness” and FIA’s Future-ist in Residence — taught a workshop on how to become a power search user and continue down the path of being a lifelong learner.
Three future-ists discussed the future of virtual reality and innovative imagery: Graham Roberts, Senior Editor at The New York Times; Dan Russell, Google’s Director of User Happiness; and Amitabh Varshney, Director of the University of Maryland’s Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. Leslie Walker, the Visiting Professor in Digital Innovation at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism moderated the discussion.
As you might remember, … the second part of last week’s Challenge was: 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 publi…
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 …
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 …
Sometimes… … when you do a search, you want to look just in certain regions of the document. The LA of dreamsFor instance, a newspaper article usually has a title, a first paragraph, an author, a publication name, and a publication date. (Example:…