Daniel M. Russell's Blog, page 13
August 23, 2023
SearchResearch Challenge (8/23/23): What's that in the belly of the Redondasaurus?
I looked at the Phytosaur in real shock...
Because there, in the dinosaur hall of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in central Pittsburgh, was what looked to be a massive crocodile.
This is Redondasaurus bermani. It was huge and utterly evil looking, clearly a watery death machine that was 6.4 m (21 feet) long, and lived in the rivers and swamps of Triassic North America some 252-201 million years ago.
Impressive.
I've seen lots of assembled skeletons before. It was big and carnivorous, but as I stood in front of the skeleton, I noticed something that I don't think I'd seen before.
See that collection of what look like ribs in its belly?
Here's a close-up shot:
See what I mean? There is the backbone above, with a lot of ribs hanging off the vertebrae. You can easily see the massive leg bones and feet.
But there, hanging below the backbone and ribs is something else--a kind of basket of upward pointing ribs that seems attached to the sternum.
I don't know that I've seen that on any other animal. Or have I just not been paying attention?
Naturally, this led me on a merry SRS quest, which condensed into these two Challenges for you:
1. What do you call that thing in the chest and belly of the Redondosaurus bermani?
2. Do other animals have this thing now, or was it just an Age of the Dinosaurs skeletal feature?
I've found the answer now after a bit of quick searching on my phone while standing in front of the beast. I have to say, I was pretty surprised by the answer to Challenge 2.
Another surprise was learning that the Redondosaurus is actually NOT related to any living crocodiles or alligators? It was, as they say, a "Late Triassic clade of crocodylian-like predators." That is, there were other kinds of Redondosaurus (collectively called the Phytosaurs) that filled the ecological niche that crocs and alligators fill in todays swamps. They had short legs, wide, heavy bodies with rows of armored scales, long tails, and long toothy snouts. The only obvious difference between crocodiles and phytosaurs is that crocodiles have their nostrils at the ends of their snouts, and phytosaurs had them on raised hump in front of their eyes. Despite the strong similarities between phytosaurs and crocodiles, the two groups are not closely related.
Let us know what answers you found to this week's Challenge. Of course, tell us HOW you found them. We all want to learn from your search strategy.
Hope you find this as interesting and entertaining as I did.
Keep searching!
August 18, 2023
Answer: Animal? Plant? How do you know?
Elysia chlorotica
, a sea slug that incorporates chloroplasts into its body.P/C Patrick J. Krug, Creative Commons CC BY-NC 3.0 license, via Wikimedia Commons
Remember the Elysia cholorotica (the big green slug above, aka "Emerald green sea slug")?
It's technically a mixotroph, but it's pretty big (up to 60 mm in length, but typically between 20 mm to 30 mm). As you know, they feed on algae, extracting chloroplasts and then merging them into its body, making it able to both eat food AND use sunlight to photosynthesize for energy.
We also know about other slugs (also called nudibranchs) that will steal the nematocysts of cnidarians (such as sea anemones, hydroids, jellyfish, corals, siphonophores, etc.). The slugs use them for defense, with the nematocysts stinging anything that tries to eat the nudibranch. The nematocysts are stored in protruding cerata (those spine-looking things) on their backs. And at the tip of each branch of the cerata, the nematocysts are stored in a small sac, the cnidosac.
Here's a spectacular photo of an aeolid nudibranch taken by SRS friend Randall Spangler.
The cerata on the back of this Aeolidia papillosa end with cnidosacs. Like Elysia, they incorporate dinoflagellates that provides some photosynthesis capability. P/C Randall Spangler. But the term mixotroph usually refers to really small critters--plankton--that are microscopic--much smaller than slugs. The size table from the Wikipedia article about plankton gives this as the breakdown for different kinds of small plankton.
We're primarily interested in the smallish single-celled plankton--and only those that are carnivorous... if that means anything at the single-cell level.
This led to a couple of questions about the microscopic mixotrophic plankton. To wit,
1. Do mixotrophic plankton ONLY steal chloroplasts, or are their other kinds of organelles that they rip out of the prey? If so, what else gets stolen?
Started my search with a "fill in the blank" style search:
[ mixotrophs “steal the *”]
And find this article on mixotrophs in Science Daily.
“Traditionally mixotrophs are considered as curiosities or irrelevant. ... for the first time, [they have] mapped the presence of these "body-snatching" mixotrophs which shows that they are present in oceans all over the world.
These "body-snatchers" come in two forms. One type steal the photosynthetic factories from their prey during digestion and use these chloroplasts to make food as do plants. Other mixotrophs enslave whole photosynthetic prey communities within their body, drifting in the oceans like microscopic green houses. Marine researchers have been mislabelling 50% of these organisms as "animals" when they are actually eating and photosynthesizing within the one cell. The good body-snatchers support fisheries, while the bad ones can be highly toxic.”
Fascinating. Clearly, some mixotrophs steal the chloroplasts and incorporate them into their own bodies. That's not too much of a surprise. Unlike the Elysia, it's happening at the microscopic level, but it's the same idea. Steal a chlorplast and live a microscopic life of luxury.
In addition, some single cell mixotrophs ingest the whole prey organism and keep them intact, but within their body. Plankton using this "swallow them whole" strategy are called endosymbiotic specialist nonconstitutive mixotrophs. (You can use that phrase at your next party as you devour your very tasty living oyster.)
Example: Noctiluca scintillans eats Pedinomonas notilucae, harboring them like a little garden of plants to generate important nutrients.
But in my reading, I seem to remember some mixotrophs that ingested more than just the chloroplasts.
On a lark, I turned to both Bard and ChatGPT for their opinions, asking both
[ do some mixotrophs steal organelles
other than chloroplasts? ]
Bing's version of ChatGPT told me that:
"Yes, some mixotrophs can steal organelles other than chloroplasts. According to a Wikipedia article on mixotrophs, there are two types of eukaryotic mixotrophs: those with their own chloroplasts, and those with endosymbionts—and those that acquire them through kleptoplasty or through symbiotic associations with prey or enslavement of their organelles."
That's fine, but it's basically what we already knew.
Bard told me that:
"Yes, some mixotrophs steal organelles other than chloroplasts. For example, the green hydra (Hydra viridissima) is a freshwater polyp that can steal chloroplasts from the algae it consumes. The chloroplasts are incorporated into the hydra's cells and allow it to photosynthesize. The hydra can also steal other organelles from algae, such as mitochondria and nuclei.
Another example of a mixotroph that steals organelles is the coral Pocillopora damicornis. This coral can steal chloroplasts from the algae that live in its tissues. The chloroplasts provide the coral with energy, which it uses to grow and reproduce.
The ability to steal organelles is a rare adaptation, but it is found in a variety of organisms. This ability allows these organisms to get the best of both worlds: they can photosynthesize and produce their own food, but they can also consume other organisms for nutrients.
Here are some other examples of mixotrophs that steal organelles:
The dinoflagellate Gonyaulax tamarensis can steal mitochondria from other dinoflagellates.
The ciliate Paramecium bursaria can steal chloroplasts from the green algae Euglena gracilis.
The fungus Pythium insidiosum can steal mitochondria from the plant cells it infects."
Again, we knew most of this. But Bard also told me that some mixotrophs also steal mitochondria. And that's a different organelle than the chloroplasts. Interesting. Are there others beyond mitochondria?
So I changed my prompt to be:
[ do mixotrophic plankton only steal chloroplasts or are there other organelles that get ripped out of their prey? If so, what else gets stolen? ]
Bing/ChatGPT told me that:
According to an article in Scientific American, Mesodinium is a mixotroph that sucks photosynthesizing organs from another organism called Dinophysis. Mesodinium takes in the organelles responsible for photosynthesis whole. Within minutes the pale Mesodinium starts to turn darker red as it fills its body with the stolen parts—chloroplasts and nucleosomes—which remain intact and functional. Mesodinium is not able to take in and use carbon dioxide as true photosynthesizers are, so it relies on its victims’ chloroplasts to accomplish that task
Bing also gave me a link to the Scientific American article with the information. Nice job.
The same prompt to Bard told me basically the same information, but without the details and certainly with the link to a useful article. It did, however, mention that some mixotrophs also steal vacuoles.
That doesn't make a lot of sense, so I checked it by reading a few papers on mixotrophs with vacuoles, and found that the mixotrophs often ingest their prey into THEIR vacuoles, not that they ingest the vacuole from the prey. That's an important distinction that Bard got just slightly wrong. The vacuoles are where the stolen organisms are kept in the klepto-organism!
Curious about the role of nucleosome theft in Mesodinium, I did a search for:
[ mesodinium mixotrophy nucleosomes ]
and found a number of articles about how Mesodinium DOES in fact steal nucleosomes. But why?
In their Nature (2007) paper "Retention of transcriptionally active cryptophyte nuclei", Johnson, et al. show that the nucleosomes are "transcriptionally active," (that is, they're busy working within the body of the mixotroph) making substances that the chloroplasts that were also stolen just happen to need.
Isn't that handy? The mixotroph steals the chloroplasts AND the nucleosomes that also contain the instructions for the care and feeding of the chloroplasts.
Alas, the nuclei only seem to last for about a month in the body of mixotroph, so they need keep eating in order to keep things running.
So we've figured out that mixotrophs not only steal chloroplasts, but also mitochondria and nucleosomes.
The dual presence of mitochondria and functional chloroplasts within these mixotrophic cells that have been stolen from another species of plankton suggests a high degree of biochemical similarity. I didn't expect that degree of interoperability. This is likely the key to their functional presence and essential endosymbiotic activity for over 2.5 billion years.
Totally amazing.
2. How long has the concept of mixotrophic plankton been around? Is it possible that this is relatively new understanding of planktonic ecology?
The obvious approach here is to check out Google Ngrams for a brief history of the use of the terms that start with "mixotroph-."
Here's that chart:
Of course, this is only from the Books corpus, so to get a better sense of the use of the word in the scientific literature, I turn to Scholar.Google.com and filter by date, here I'm filtering for papers published up to 1940.
Note that there are about 34 results pre-1940.
But ALSO note that several of those (results 3, 4, 5) are all actually from the 2000s. (I checked: they actually are from the 2000s and are not pre-1940. Metadata problems.)
Luckily, those date errors don't change the overall story. Mixotroph-* came into common usage around 1950, with the other forms of the word (mixotrophy, mixotrophic) really becoming common after 1990. Since I had completed my graduate training by 1984, it's very likely I never heard the word before running across it in that Scientific American article. In the grand sweep of scientific history, it's a relatively recent word.
1. Remember the fill-in-the-blank search method. (That is, the * search.) It can come in handy when you're looking for possible completions.
2. LLMs can be handy tools for finding concepts and terms to further your own searching. In all of the LLM examples here, there were problems with the text they generated. HOWEVER, they also gave me some great ideas about what to search for next. Be sure to check out their claims--don't just accept what an LLM tells you at face value. (Example: Bard was deeply confused about the role of vacuoles in mixotrophy.)
3. Bing shows citations for claims made--that's a really nice feature. I sure wish that Bard would do the same. (Oddly enough, for a few short weeks, Bard included citations. It has since stopped doing that. Don't know why, but I can guess that it was hallucinating too many references. Pity.)
P.S. A couple of people pointed out that they're not biologists and found reading the papers about this fairly esoteric topic to be heavy going. One nice feature of the LLMs is that they are pretty decent at summarization. Here's one such summary of an abstract from the Johnson paper of above. Here's the prompt, and Bard's nice summary...
Dan: I need a simplified summary of this article. Can you give this to me at a 9th grade level? It is well documented that organelles can be retained and used by predatory organisms, but in most cases such sequestrations are limited to plastids of algal prey. Furthermore, sequestrations of prey organelles are typically highly ephemeral as a result of the inability of the organelle to remain functional in the absence of numerous nuclear-encoded genes involved in its regulation, division and function. The marine photosynthetic ciliate Myrionecta rubra (Lohmann 1908) Jankowski 1976 (the same as Mesodinium rubrum) is known to possess organelles of cryptophyte origin, which has led to debate concerning their status as permanent symbiotic or temporary sequestered fixtures. Recently, M. rubra has been shown to steal plastids (that is, chloroplasts) from the cryptomonad, Geminigera cryophila, and prey nuclei were observed to accumulate after feeding. Here we show that cryptophyte nuclei in M. rubra are retained for up to 30 days, are transcriptionally active and service plastids derived from multiple cryptophyte cells. Expression of a cryptophyte nuclear-encoded gene involved in plastid function declined in M. rubra as the sequestered nuclei disappeared from the population. Cytokinesis, plastid performance and their replication are dependent on recurrent stealing of cryptophyte nuclei. Karyoklepty (from Greek karydi, kernel; kleftis, thief) represents a previously unknown evolutionary strategy for acquiring biochemical potential.
Bard:
Sure, here is a simplified summary of the article at a 9th grade level:
* Some organisms can steal organelles from other organisms and use them for their own benefit. This is called organelle sequestration.
* In most cases, organelle sequestration is short-lived because the organelles can't function without the genes from the organism that they were stolen from.
* The marine organism Myrionecta rubra can steal plastids (chloroplasts) from the cryptomonad Geminigera cryophila.
* M. rubra can keep the cryptophyte nuclei for up to 30 days. These nuclei are still active and help to keep the plastids functioning.
* Without the cryptophyte nuclei, the plastids in M. rubra stop working. This means that M. rubra needs to keep stealing nuclei from cryptomonads in order to stay alive.
* This is a new way for organisms to get the nutrients they need. It's called karyoklepty, which means "nucleus theft."
I hope this summary is helpful! Let me know if you have any other questions.
That was nice, Bard.
For you humans... Keep searching!
August 9, 2023
SearchResearch Challenge (8/9/23): Animal? Plant? How do you know?
I love learning something that radically changes my understanding of the world...
Elysia chlorotica
, a sea slug that incorporates chloroplasts into its body. P/C Patrick J. Krug, Creative Commons CC BY-NC 3.0 license, via Wikimedia Commons
If you're a regular SRS reader you might remember our discussion a while back about how some animals incorporate other animal parts into their body. (SRS "Internal Incorporation" May 5, 2021)
In that post I showed one of the best examples of this, Elysia cholorotica (the big green slug above, aka "Emerald green sea slug") which feeds on algae, and in the process, extracts their chloroplasts (NOT digesting them) and then merging them into its body, making it able to both eat food AND use sunlight to photosynthesize for energy.
That's very cool.
And we know about plants that eat insects (Venus flytrap, sundew, pitcher plants, etc.), so the idea of plants eating animals for nutrients, and the inverse of that--animals eating plants to steal body parts--isn't a huge surprise.
However... I always thought that plants were plants (mostly photosynthesizing) and animals were active eaters of other organisms. That's sort of the classical breakdown--plants sit still in the sunlight, animals move. Sure, some animals (e.g., corals, mussels) sit still and let currents bring food to them, but mostly that's the split. Plants are still, immobile, fixed to a location. Animals move around and get their food.
I also had learned that most plankton in the ocean were either phytoplankton, which are plants, and zooplankton, which are animals. The natural order of things was that zooplankton eat the phytoplankton.
Like other plants, phytoplankton take in CO2 and release oxygen. As a result, phytoplankton account for about half of ALL photosynthesis on Earth, making them one of the world’s most important producers of oxygen.
But then I read something that deeply surprised me: In a Scientific American article ("The Perfect Beast," April 2018) I learned about mixotrophs, single-celled plankton that are neither really animals nor plants, but a weird mix of the two. They're just one cell, but they can attack and feed on other unicellular plankton, including those that have chloroplasts, which they then use just like Elysia chlorotica.
That's a bit of a surprise--that body part incorporation happens at the single-cell level, with some single-cell plankton stealing chloroplasts from other single-cell green algae.
But then the article went on to say that around 50% of ALL single cell organisms in the sea are mixotrophic--that is, half of all the unicellular plankton can attack and eat others, making the ocean a scene of constant, unrelenting warfare.
The big surprise to me was that I'd never heard of the word "mixotrophic" before. It's such an unusual word that I'm pretty sure I would have remembered it. So, how did I miss it?
That's the part I love about my reading--I'm constantly learning new things, including deep ideas that overturn my long-held beliefs. There's that moment of frisson when you realize that what you know needs to be updated--to change in a way that you never thought possible.
Like many of you, I used to think that unicellular plankton were either plants or animals with a clear division between them and that the majority of unicellular plankton were quietly hanging out in the water column, photosynthesizing and making oxygen for the world.
Ah, now... apparently the unicellular world is red in tooth and flagella, with one-celled organisms finding, attacking, and consuming others, and stealing body parts.
These are plants that actively hunt down other mobile plankton. "Plants that hunt," or are they "animals that photosynthesize." Either way, the neat divisions break down, which is kind of reflective of our times. The more you know, the less clear the categories really are.
As I read the article, several research Challenges came immediately to mind. Can you help me answer these?
1. Do mixotrophic plankton ONLY steal chloroplasts, or are their other kinds of organelles that they rip out of the prey? If so, what else gets stolen?
2. How long has the concept of mixotrophic plankton been around? Is it possible that this is relatively new understanding of planktonic ecology?
Of course, I'd love to know the answers to these Challenges, but just as important, be sure to let us know HOW you figured out those answers. What SRS methods did you use? We all want to learn how to do this kind of deep research.
Keep searching!
August 3, 2023
Answer: How do you know what to still believe?
What we believe to be true...
Dall-E. [ digital art young man looking at a skull on the desktop ]... changes over time.
That's good because it generally means that we, as a culture, are figuring things out. It's easy to come up with a list of things that we no longer believe to be true.
But the bigger Challenge for today is this: How can we SearchResearchers come to understand how an idea is changing over time? If we learned something a while ago (say, when you were half the age you are now), should you still believe that this is true?
In the Challenge last week I gave two examples of psychology discoveries that might (or might not) be thought of as true.
A. In 1977, a famous paper by Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson ("Telling more than we can know") argued that people cannot introspect about cognitive processes.
Is that true? Or, more in keeping with this week's Challenge--does the field of psychology still believe this to be true?
B. In 1996, another famous social psychology result is that if you primed people with ideas and words about growing old (such as feeble, worried, Florida, elderly, forgetful) then they will walk more slowly after exposure to such materials. See: "Automaticity of Social Behavior: Direct Effects of Trait Construct and Stereotype Activation on Action" by John A. Bargh, Mark Chen, and Lara Burrows (1996).
Is that true? Or, more in keeping with this week's Challenge--does the field of psychology still believe this to be true?
With all that as background, let me pose the Challenge with this caveat: Our Challenge is not whether or not both of these results are true or not, but really what techniques should you know to be able to determine if something is still widely believed or not?
1. Can you find out how well has these two results have withstood the test of time? Is it still considered to be true? Is it something we should be teaching in our psychology courses today? What SearchResearch process would you use to figure this out?
First off, here I'm going to talk about ideas in the sciences, and not about political or informal knowledge. (That's a whole other ballgame, though some of the ideas here will carry over to that kind of investigation.)
A big issue for much of humanity is that some kinds of knowledge get hardwired into the culture and is difficult to displace with more up-to-date knowledge. (That's kind of the point of Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, new knowledge doesn't just diffuse gently into a culture, but has to go through a kind of revolutionary phase where it's not widely believed, but then a major shift happens.)
For instance, when I was young, a common treatment for burns in the home was to smear butter all over it. That was part of "common knowledge," and widely accepted. (It is NOT the best way to treat a household burn.)
In the case of social psychology results from above, they both seem to defy "common knowledge." Nisbett and Wilson's paper tells us that people seem unable to talk about what they're actually thinking--does that sound right to you? While Bargh's paper tells us that simply priming people with "old words" actually changes their behavior (especially visible in their walking speed).
To verify the current thinking about these two papers, I'd start by doing a few searches for articles about the original papers and claims:
A. Search for the claims made in the original papers. In particular, make sure you’ve got the right search terms (what’s in the popular press may not be what's written about in scholarly articles). Use author names and the terms that they use. For instance, Nisbett uses phrases like "introspection" and "cognitive processes." Bargh uses terms like "automaticity" and "stereotype activation." Start your searches with authors + key phrases that are not likely to have other meanings.
And, of course, when you find a hit, read it carefully. Does the newer article support the findings or contradict them? Does it give new insights or shift in interpretation?
B. Search for follow-up articles with the "in" search pattern. In particular, look for ones that use the title of the original paper (or finding) in THEIR title. For instance, I found this article, What's next for psychology's embattled field of social priming, by searching for [Bargh "social priming"]. Another method is to find articles by searching for an explicit mention of the first paper (For example, a search like this, where I'm searching for the lead-in word "in" [“in Telling more than we can know”] leads to many articles about that original paper.)
C. Try an LLM – you might get some clues. My prompt to Bard (which gave a reasonable answer) was:
[ In Telling More Than We Can Know, Nisbett and Wilson (1977) demonstrated the limits of one's ability to introspect about the nature of cognitive processing. But work has been done since then. How well has this idea lasted over the past 40 years. Is this result widely believed now?]
Bard response: The idea that people are not very good at introspecting about their own cognitive processes has held up well over the past 40 years. There have been many studies since Nisbett and Wilson's (1977) seminal paper that have replicated their findings and extended them to other areas of cognition. For example, one study found that people are not very good at explaining why they made a particular decision, even when they are given all the information that was available to them at the time of the decision (Wilson, Dunn, Kraft, & Lisle, 1989).
This result is widely believed now among cognitive psychologists. It is one of the reasons why so much research in this area is focused on using indirect methods to study cognition, such as reaction time tasks and eye tracking. These methods allow researchers to measure people's cognitive processes without relying on their introspections.
However, it is important to note that the idea that people are not very good at introspecting about their own cognitive processes is not absolute. There are some cases where people are able to provide accurate reports of their thoughts and feelings. For example, people are generally good at reporting the content of their memories (Schacter, 1996).
Overall, the idea that people are not very good at introspecting about their own cognitive processes is a well-supported one. It has been replicated in many studies and is widely believed among cognitive psychologists. However, it is important to note that this is not an absolute rule, and there are some cases where people are able to provide accurate reports of their thoughts and feelings.
It didn't tell me much that I didn't know, but Bard's response DID point me to two additional papers (Wilson et al., 1989; and Schacter, 1996). Unfortunately, the Schacter paper is all about illusory memories, that is, how people THINK they're accurately reporting their memories, but actually are not. (In other words, Bard has it totally backwards.)
But despite getting the claim about people being "generally good at reporting the content of their memories," I read Schacter's paper about how people totally do NOT understand the accuracy of their memories... which is exactly what Nisbett was saying.
My point, though, is that the LLMs can still give you interesting pointers into the literature, even if they don't get the meaning right!
D. Use Scholar’s “cited-by” feature to see subsequent articles that refer to the original. If I look at the Scholar entry for “Nisbett and Wilson Revisited” article, I see this:
Naturally, if you look at the other papers that cite this one, at least a few of them will provide color commentary on how the ideas have withstood the test of time.
E. Check books as a historical record. To use Google Books this way, just search for the authors or the key ideas of the papers and see where that takes you. Here's a search for Nisbett and Wilson. Here you can see some of the collected opinions of how that original research result from 1977 plays out in current texts. (Including a book by T. D. Wilson from 2004).
F. Search for overviews of the field (or authors). Just searching for [overview <key terms>] often gets you what you need. Here's that search in Scholar:
You can get a hint from this that the field of priming research is having a bit of a struggle these days. It's clear that replicating those studies from the 1990s is turning out to be more difficult than people suspected. The results were clearly remarkable and changed the field of social psychology, but with subsequent work, it's turning out to be hard to reproduce the effects originally supported. Upshot: there probably is a real effect of priming, but the behaviors primed are perhaps not as strong and surprising as we once thought.
As I said, my goal wasn't to teach you about these results in particular, but about how to do follow-ups on work that has been previously published. In summary:
SearchResearch LessonsA. Search for claims made in the original papers. Be sure to keep the authors and key concepts in the search.
B. Search for follow-ups using the "in+title" pattern. Works more often than you'd expect.
C. Try an LLM to ask your question. But as always, verify whatever it tells you. It might get something totally wrong...
D. Use Google Scholar's "cited-by" feature. It's a pretty amazing capability to look at other articles that have used those paper in their arguments. It might be worth checking out a few of those citing papers to see what they say about the original.
E. Remember to check books on the topic. It's amazing to me how often I can find a book with commentary on ideas from the past.
F. Search for overviews of the topic. Using the simple search pattern [overview + <key terms>] will often get you an article that overviews / summarizes the entire topic.
Hope you find these search tips useful. Try them on your next topic!
Keep searching!
July 26, 2023
SearchResearch Challenge (7/26/23): How do you know what to still believe?
Our beliefs change over time.
Dall-E. [ digital art young man looking at a skull on the desktop ]Good thing too.
It was once widely believed that California was an island, that "bad air" caused disease, and that there was an Open Polar Sea at the top of the world hidden behind miles of Arctic ice.
(The Open Polar Sea was a hypothesized ice-free ocean surrounding the North Pole. This eventually disproven notion was once so widely believed that many exploring expeditions used it as justification for attempts to reach the North Pole by sea or to find a navigable sea route between Europe and the Pacific across the North Pole. It was a classic mistake for the ages.)
Today, we don’t believe that tooth worms cause dental disease, that we only use 10% of our brain, or that bumps on your head are strong indicators of your intelligence or personality.
That’s obvious in retrospect for “obviously bogus ideas” that people used to believe.
Bogosity only becomes clear with time.
However... It’s harder to see how ideas change when they’re closer to our time and less obviously crazy. For instance, the idea that multitasking lets you be more efficient at getting many things done was widely held to be true. But our understanding is slowly changing to an attitude that multitasking is often NOT very effective, and is a bad idea in general.
Our Challenge for today is this: How can we SearchResearchers come to understand how an idea is changing over time?
Here are two such examples that are much closer to us in time than phrenology:
A. In 1977, a famous paper by Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson ("Telling more than we can know") argued that people cannot introspect about cognitive processes.
That is, "...when people try to report on their cognitive processes, … they do not do so on the basis of any true introspection. Instead, their reports are based on … [pre-existing beliefs] …about the extent to which a particular stimulus is a plausible cause of a given response.”
That's an amazing claim when you think about it. It implies that when you talk about why you made a decision (say, to accept a particular job offer, or to bake a particular dish for dinner), you actually don't know why that decision was made. You can talk about it, and you might feel as though you have a good understanding of why you made that choice, but the reality is that you're actually making up that story.
Is that true? Or, more in keeping with this week's Challenge--does the field of psychology still believe this to be true?
B. Another famous social psychology result is that if you give people ideas and words about growing old (such as feeble, worried, Florida, elderly, forgetful) then they will walk more slowly after exposure to such materials. That's another famous paper, "Automaticity of Social Behavior: Direct Effects of Trait Construct and Stereotype Activation on Action" by John A. Bargh, Mark Chen, and Lara Burrows (1996).
This kind of experiment is called a "priming" study. In other words, a person who is primed with words about the elderly will unconsciously walk more slowly immediately after they read the priming material. This seems wild on the surface of it--would just reading some text about older folks change MY behavior? That's what the paper argues.
With all that as background, let me pose the Challenge with this caveat: Our Challenge is not whether or not both of these results are true or not, but for this week…
1. Can you find out how well has these two results have withstood the test of time? Is it still considered to be true? Is it something we should be teaching in our psychology courses today? What SearchResearch process would you use to figure this out?
The general idea here is to figure out a way to determine if an idea's acceptability has shifted over time. We could ask similar questions about all kinds of socially held beliefs. Is it true that Moore's Law no longer describes the growth of microelectronics? How has our understanding about the role of dietary cholesterol shifted over time?
For our SearchResearcher purposes, what advice would you give to someone who is trying to understand the changes in an idea over time?
This is the kind of research I do all of the time these days. I'm writing a new book about Unanticipated Consequences (link to the Substack that's tracking what I'm doing on the book).
Let us know how YOU would do a bit of SearchResearch to find this out. Imagine that you're telling a junior researcher how to validate a claim that was made a few years ago. What would you tell them to do?
Well?
Keep searching!
July 19, 2023
Answer: How can we use LLMs to search better?
Magic is, by definition...
Precision targeting for SearchResearch. P/C by Mikhail Nilov (Pexels link)... something that you don't understand. That's why magicians wow us in their presentations.
I love magic, but I really don't want magical interfaces to magical systems.
Still, as we saw in our post about Using LLMs to find Amazing Words..., with a little ingenuity, we can do remarkable things. (Definition of LLM)
In that post, I illustrate how to use LLMs to find words that end in -core that describe an aesthetic style. The clever thing that LLMs did in that Challenge was to find related words that do NOT have the -core ending with a similar aesthetic meaning. (Example: "dark academia")
Our Challenge this week came in two parts:
1. Can you find a way to use LLMs (ChatGPT, Bard, Claude, etc.) to answer research questions that would otherwise be difficult to answer? (As with the Using LLMs to find Amazing Words... example. If you find such a research task, be sure to let us know what the task is, the LLM you used, and what you did to make it work.)
As we've seen before, LLMs are currently not great at providing accurate answers. So we're trying to figure out ways to use LLMs in productive ways.
In last week's commentary post (on Friday), I showed a way to search for keywords and phrases to use for regular Google search. I've used that method a few times since then, and it's always worked out well.
Short summary: Don't ask your LLM for specific answers to questions, and REALLY don't ask for citations. At the moment, LLMs are all too happy to make up fake citations.
But you SHOULD ask for other terms and phrases you should be searching for in addition to what you've been searching. The sample prompt pattern I used was:
[what are the N most common subtopics related to TOPIC?]
To use this, just replace the highlighted N with a number (typically 5 - 20), and replace the highlighted TOPIC with a short text description of your topic-to-search-for.
This is a great way to figure out how to expand your range of ideas.
2. Here's an example of this difficult to answer "regular search" task: I wanted to make a list of all the SRS Challenges and Answers (the C&A list) since the beginning of this year. I used an LLM to help me figure out the process. Can you figure out what I did? (I'll tell you now that I learned a bunch in doing this, and it only took me about 10 minutes from start-to-finish. I count that as a major win.)
Big hint from last week was this..
I broke this task down into 3 steps:
1. get the list of C&As from the blog into a text file 2. extract out the Challenges and Answers (getting rid of anything extra) 3. then reverse the order of the C&A list
Let me unpack this.
1. To get a list of ALL the blog posts, I opened the most recent blog post and scrolled to the bottom. (There are other ways to do this.) It looks like this:
Then, I just opened all of the twisty triangles for each of the entries for this year to see each of the blog posts. That listing looks like this:
Then, I just selected all of that text, hit COPY, and then opened a text editor and paste the text (unformatted) into a .TXT document. (I used BBedit, which is a robust and useful editor, but you can use whatever editor you'd like.)
In this pic, I've highlighted a bunch of lines that are neither Challenges or Answers. We don't want those lines in our final C&A answer.
Yes, I could manually delete each line, but what if I want to do 1000 lines? For that process, I asked Bard:
There are a couple more answers below, but I realized that grep was exactly what I wanted. It's a command line action that will find lines that match a pattern and extract them. Perfect!
Except that there's a small problem--the code snippet shown here doesn't quite work. It says that I should do:
grep -E "Answer|SearchResearch" bbedit.txt
After playing around for a while, I figured out that the correct expression should be:
grep 'Answer\|Challenge' bbedit.txt
The double-quotes don't work, one needs to use single quotes. And then you need to use the \ character to tell grep that the | character means OR (in classical Boolean logic).
Then, once you run that, you've got the list of C&As. Excellent. But they're in the wrong order! Dang!
Now I want to reverse the order of the lines in the file. That's a classic programming problem, but I don't want to fool around--I just want to flip the order so that the last line becomes the first line, etc.
Back to Bard:
This is great! I didn't know about the tac command, so I've learned something new.
But when I try to do: tac bbedit.txt
my MacOS terminal application says that it's not part of the terminal commands. (A useful thing to know: the Linux that ships on the MacOS isn't a "full" distribution--a lot of commands, like tac, are missing.)
Time to turn to regular Google and search for:
[ tac in MacOS ]
which points me to a StackExchange page with an even better answer, one that doesn't require tac:
So the right next step was to do:
tail -r bbedit.txt which then gave me the file listing of SRS posts BACKWARDS. That is, only Challenges and Answers from Jan 1, 2023 - July 5, 2023. As you can see, each Challenge is followed by its correct answer:
SearchResearch Challenge (1/4/23): How can I find latest updates on topics of interest?
Answer: How can I find latest updates on topics of interest?
SearchResearch Challenge (1/18/23): Musicians travels--how did they get
Answer: Musicians travels--how did they get from A to B?
SearchResearch Challenge (2/8/23): What do you call this thing?
Answer: What do you call this thing?
SearchResearch Challenge (2/22/23): World's largest waterfall?
Answer: World's largest waterfall?
SearchResearch Challenge (3/8/23): What do these everyday symbols mean?
Answer: What do these everyday symbols mean?
SearchResearch Challenge (3/22/23): What do you call the sediment that
Answer: What do you call the sediment that blocks a river flowing to
SearchResearch Challenge (4/5/23): What's this architecture all about?
Answer: What's this architecture all about?
SearchResearch Challenge (4/19/23): How well do LLMs answer SRS
Answer: How well do LLMs answer SRS questions?
SearchResearch Challenge (5/31/23): Did they really burn ancient Roman
Answer: Did they really burn Roman statues?
SearchResearch Challenge (6/14/23): How to find the best AI-powered
Answer: How to find the best AI-powered search engine of the moment?
SearchResearch Challenge (6/28/23): How can you find a free audio book?
Answer: How can you find a free audio book?
SearchResearch LessonsThere are lessons here, and surely more to come as we learn more about working with LLMs.
1. Ask your LLM to help brainstorm ideas for search terms that you might not have thought about. If you think of the LLM as a reasonably accurate brainstorming partner, you might it generates some good Google you wouldn't have thought about.
2. Ask your LLM about ways to transform your data. I've found that it often will suggest things that I once knew, but forgot about (e.g., using the Linux command tail to reverse the order of lines in a file). Sometime soon I'll write about other ways I've used an LLM to help me clean and restructure data files. In truth, this is my primary use case for LLMs these days--as a research assistant to fix up and analyze data.
3. Be aware that the details of what your LLM tells you might need a little tweaking. In the above example, I had to tweak that grep expression to use single quotes rather than double quotes. Often what the LLM tells you is in the right ballpark, but not precisely correct. (Think of it as a slightly unreliable narrator!)
Keep Searching!
July 14, 2023
Comment: How can we use LLMs to search even better?
An interesting question we should always ask ourselves...
Precision targeting for SearchResearch. P/C by Mikhail Nilov (Pexels link)If you've got a new tool (LLMs, for example), as a skilled researcher, you want to find new ways to use that tool. How can you use that new tool effectively?
That's really what this week's Challenge is about: What new abilities do LLMs give us?
Here's one interesting approach that I found--using LLMs to expand your range of thinking about a topic. Here's an example.
As Regular Readers will have noticed, I'm a fan of tropical fish, especially in their native tropical habitat.
One thing I've noticed is that fish in the shallow tropics seem incredibly vibrant and colorful. At the same time, their more northernly cousins are often brown / gray / drab. Is this true? (We asked something similar back in 2022, Does animal color and weight vary by latitude?)
One of the difficulties of searching for answers to questions like this is that it's difficult to find search terms that are on target and useful.
In researching this topic ("are fish in the topics more colorful than fish in northern latitudes?") any combination of those words finds a LOT of results, most of which you have to sift through for anything of value.
I turned to ChatGPT for help in this quest by asking it an open-ended question, carefully NOT trying to bias the answer:
[ are fish more colorful in the tropics than in northern latitudes ]
The result was pretty good.
Yes, fish in tropical regions are generally more colorful than fish found in northern latitudes. This is primarily due to the differences in environmental conditions and ecological factors between these two regions.
In tropical waters, there is typically a greater diversity of fish species, and many of them have evolved vibrant colors as a result of various factors. These factors include the need for camouflage within colorful coral reef habitats, mating displays to attract mates, and species recognition within highly populated and visually complex environments. The warm and stable conditions in tropical regions also contribute to the proliferation of colorful organisms, including fish.
In contrast, fish in northern latitudes often inhabit colder waters and more temperate environments. The reduced diversity of fish species and the presence of fewer colorful habitats, such as coral reefs, can result in less visually striking fish. Furthermore, the shorter summers and colder temperatures in northern latitudes may limit the availability of resources for colorful displays and breeding.
However, it is important to note that there are exceptions to this general trend, as some species found in northern latitudes exhibit vivid colors for various reasons, such as sexual selection, territorial displays, or mimicry. Overall, while tropical regions tend to showcase a greater variety of colorful fish, it is possible to find colorful fish species in both tropical and northern latitudes.
But without references, I'm not sure how to check the accuracy of this result.
When I asked for citations with the prompt:
[ are fish more colorful in the tropics than in northern latitudes? Give citations to the scientific literature to support your claims ]
ChatGPT begged off saying that "As an AI language model, I don't have direct access to scientific literature or the ability to browse the internet."
I asked Bard the same question and got a mess of an answer. Ugh.
Bard: Yes, fish are more colorful in the tropics than in northern latitudes. This is a well-established finding in the scientific literature.
One study that investigated this phenomenon was published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution in 2022. The study, which was led by Dr. Chris Cooney from the University of Sheffield, found that bird species tend to be 30% more colorful towards the equator. The researchers believe that this is due to a number of factors, including the warmer water temperatures in the tropics, which allow for more complex pigments to develop in the fish's skin.
Another study, which was published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B in 2016, found that the same pattern of increased coloration is also seen in other animals, such as reptiles and amphibians. The researchers believe that this is because the warmer temperatures in the tropics allow for more complex visual signals to be transmitted between individuals.
Here are some of the scientific literature that support the claim that fish are more colorful in the tropics than in northern latitudes:
Cooney, C. J., & West, S. A. (2022). The latitudinal gradient in bird coloration is driven by temperature. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 6(4), 697-704.
Ghalambor, C. K., Seebacher, F., & Martin, A. P. (2016). The latitudinal diversity gradient of animal colour. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 283(1830), 20160425.
Shawkey, M. D., & Endler, J. A. (2009). The latitudinal gradient in color: Integrating mechanisms and function. Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, 40, 211-236.
I hope this helps!
Well.. it doesn't really help. Notice that Bard switched from talking about fish to talking about birds and animals. That's NOT helpful.
What's worse, the citations look like they're totally fabricated. I cannot find those articles anywhere. The authors are real people, but the purported articles look like word salad of the articles they've actually published.
Go home Bard, you're drunk.
However, if you ask Bard or ChatGPT for ideas for search topics and keywords, it works pretty well. Here's what ChatGPT told me:
[what are the 5 most common subtopics related to tropical fish coloration?]
Answer (bolding by Dan):
The study of tropical fish coloration encompasses various subtopics. While it's challenging to definitively list the five most common subtopics, here are five frequently explored areas related to tropical fish coloration:
Camouflage and Cryptic Coloration: Many tropical fish species exhibit coloration that helps them blend into their surroundings, such as coral reefs or rocky substrates. The study of how fish use color patterns to hide from predators or ambush prey falls under this subtopic.
Sexual Selection and Mating Displays: Colorful displays play a significant role in attracting mates and signaling reproductive fitness in many fish species. Researchers often investigate the evolution and function of bright coloration and elaborate patterns related to courtship and mate choice.
Warning and Aposematic Coloration: Certain tropical fish species display bold and vibrant colors as a warning to potential predators that they possess toxic or venomous properties. Understanding the signals and mechanisms behind these warning colors is another common subtopic.
Environmental Influences: The environmental factors that influence tropical fish coloration are of interest to researchers. These may include the impact of light availability, water quality, temperature, and habitat characteristics on the development and maintenance of colors in fish.
Color Change and Adaptive Plasticity: Some tropical fish species have the ability to change their coloration, adapting to different environmental conditions or social situations. Studying the mechanisms and functions of color change, such as camouflage, communication, or physiological regulation, is a prominent subtopic within tropical fish coloration research.
It's worth noting that the study of fish coloration is a diverse and dynamic field, and researchers may delve into various other subtopics depending on their specific interests and goals.
And if you add in the idea of variation by latitude, the subtopics get even better:
The study of fish coloration by latitude encompasses various subtopics. While the specific ranking of the most common subtopics may vary, here are five frequently explored areas related to fish coloration across different latitudes:
Environmental Gradient and Color Variation: Research focuses on understanding how fish coloration varies across latitudinal gradients, considering factors such as temperature, light availability, and habitat characteristics. This subtopic examines how environmental differences influence color patterns and pigmentation in fish populations.
Adaptation to Different Habitats: Fish species in different latitudes often inhabit distinct habitats, such as coral reefs, freshwater streams, or polar regions. Investigating how fish coloration adapts to these specific habitats, including camouflage, disruptive coloration, or habitat-specific visual signals, is a common subtopic.
Seasonal Variation and Color Change: Many fish species exhibit seasonal changes in coloration, especially in higher latitudes where temperature and light conditions vary significantly throughout the year. Research focuses on understanding the mechanisms and functions of seasonal color variation, including breeding displays, temperature regulation, or response to changing environmental cues.
Reproductive Strategies and Mating Displays: Colorful displays and patterns play a vital role in fish reproduction and mate selection. This subtopic explores the evolution, function, and significance of color traits in courtship rituals, mate choice, and sexual selection across different latitudes.
Latitudinal Gradients in Biodiversity and Color Diversity: Research in this subtopic investigates the relationship between fish color diversity and species richness across latitudes. It explores patterns of color variation in diverse ecosystems and seeks to understand the underlying mechanisms driving these patterns.
This prompt trick ("what are the <N> most common subtopics related to <topic>?") works well. You plug in a number for N and plug in a topic for <topic> and you're good to go.
Another variant on this prompt is a way to just get suggested search keywords:
[ list without description the 5 top keywords for searching the topic tropical fish coloration variation by latitude ]
ChatGPT:
1. Tropical fish coloration latitude variation2. Latitudinal gradients in tropical fish color patterns3. Color diversity in tropical fish across latitudes4. Environmental effects on tropical fish coloration by latitude5. Latitude-dependent variation in tropical fish pigmentation
Bard:
1. tropical fish coloration latitude2. tropical fish color variation3. tropical fish coloration latitudinal gradient4. tropical fish coloration temperature5. tropical fish coloration evolution
As you can see, these lists of keyword/phrases to use for "regular search" are very different, but both have really great suggestions about ways you can continue your search. And they teach you great terms to use ("color diversity" or "latitude-dependent" variation.")
Bottom line: LLMs can be used to generate really great IDEAS and keywords for continuing your search.
And, as I've said before, don't trust the LLMs to give you a coherent (or accurate) answer to a complex question.
Idea for this prompt snarfed from the Search Engine Journal article "How to use ChatGPT for Keyword Research." Thanks to Dan Smullen for the inspiration.
July 12, 2023
SearchResearch Challenge (7/12/21): How can we use LLMs to search even better?
Precision targeting for SearchResearch. P/C by Mikhail Nilov (Pexels link)... about the search capability of LLMs. But I realize they're here to stay--no amount of witchcraft will make them go away and we can only wait for them to get better.
In the meantime, how can we use LLMs effectively in our online research? Can we learn to use these new tools in effective ways?
In other words, can we get them to do things that are difficult in "regular search"?
I think the answer is a clear yes, although as I've pointed out, debugging / fact-checking is required.
Still, as we saw in our post about Using LLMs to find Amazing Words..., with a little ingenuity, we can do remarkable things. (In that post, I illustrate how to use LLMs that end in -core.)
Our Challenge this week is in two parts:
1. Can you find a way to use LLMs (ChatGPT, Bard, Claude, etc.) to answer research questions that would otherwise be difficult to answer? (As with the Using LLMs to find Amazing Words... example. If you find such a research task, be sure to let us know what the task is, the LLM you used, and what you did to make it work.)
2. Here's an example of this difficult to answer "regular search" task: I wanted to make a list of all the SRS Challenges and Answers (the C&A list) since the beginning of this year. I used an LLM to help me figure out the process. Can you figure out what I did? (I'll tell you now that I learned a bunch in doing this, and it only took me about 10 minutes from start-to-finish. I count that as a major win.)
I show the answer below. Note that this C&A list is sorted by date.
List of SRS posts, only Challenges and Answers from Jan 1, 2023 - July 5, 2023:
SearchResearch Challenge (1/4/23): How can I find latest updates on topics of interest?
Answer: How can I find latest updates on topics of interest?
SearchResearch Challenge (1/18/23): Musicians travels--how did they get
Answer: Musicians travels--how did they get from A to B?
SearchResearch Challenge (2/8/23): What do you call this thing?
Answer: What do you call this thing?
SearchResearch Challenge (2/22/23): World's largest waterfall?
Answer: World's largest waterfall?
SearchResearch Challenge (3/8/23): What do these everyday symbols mean?
Answer: What do these everyday symbols mean?
SearchResearch Challenge (3/22/23): What do you call the sediment that
Answer: What do you call the sediment that blocks a river flowing to
SearchResearch Challenge (4/5/23): What's this architecture all about?
Answer: What's this architecture all about?
SearchResearch Challenge (4/19/23): How well do LLMs answer SRS
Answer: How well do LLMs answer SRS questions?
SearchResearch Challenge (5/31/23): Did they really burn ancient Roman
Answer: Did they really burn Roman statues?
SearchResearch Challenge (6/14/23): How to find the best AI-powered
Answer: How to find the best AI-powered search engine of the moment?
SearchResearch Challenge (6/28/23): How can you find a free audio book?
Answer: How can you find a free audio book?
Please post your answers here in the comments section. Be sure to tell us the steps you used to get your data into this form.
If you scroll down far enough, I've added a Big Hint.
Best of luck in your SRS-ing this week.
Keep Searching! ................. hint below here... ...............
...
Big hint: I used Bard to figure out how to do this.
I took 3 steps: 1. get the list of C&As from the blog into a text file; 2. extract out the Challenges and Answers; 3. then reverse the order of the C&A list.
July 5, 2023
Answer: How can you find a free audio book?
Listening to a book on the road...
P/C Tomas Anunziata on Pexels.com
... is a very different experience than reading the text as printed on paper, and different yet again than reading it on a screen.
I recently listened to a novel in audio form, and was struck by how engaging it was to hear every word without skipping forward (horrors!) or misreading a line (which has happened before). What a surprise! I highly recommend the experience to you.
To help me with finding more great novel to read, I posed three Challenges for the week. Here they are, with a few answers and comments.
1. Is there a simple way to find free audible versions of classic books? (Such as Treasure Island, Catch-22, or The Return of Sherlock Holmes.) What's your method of finding these?
The simplest way, naturally, is to search for the book title:
[ Treasure Island Stevenson audio ]
You might want to add in the author's name if you get a bunch of alternative hits ("Treasure Island" generates a LOT of non-novel results), and maybe add in "audio" to find the text in audible format. When you do that, you'll find a variety of sources. Here's the list I culled from a few searches for different books.
A. YouTube: You'll usually find the audio on YouTube, but you'll also (often) see an audio book from LibriVox (example: Treasure Island on LibriVox). As they say, they're dedicated to "acoustical liberation of works in the public domain.")
Of course, downloading the YouTube audio is a bit tricky. Legally, if you have a YouTube Premium subscription, downloading audio from YouTube is just fine. Of course, if you download copyrighted audio, you won't have rights to reuse it--just for personal use.
There are a list of ways to download audio from YouTube (see this site for the how-to). I don't like downloading random apps from the internet.
B. LibriVox: I prefer to download novels by using a free site like LibriVox. The downside of LibriVox is that sometimes different chapters are read by different readers, which is sometimes a jarring thing if the first few chapters are read by one distinctive voice, and the last few are read by another, differently distinctive voice. But they've got a lot of titles, and they're free.
C. Internet Archive: Worth knowing that the LibriVox collection is backed up by the Internet Archive. You can access the IA files here.
D. FindAudioBook: A pretty good collection of books, but no apparent way to download the sound files.
E. Your local library: Many (most?) libraries in the US offer a number of audio books for checkout. I'd love to say this is easy, but easy library seems to have a different audio book vendor, and each implements their checkout procedures in a somewhat different way. Here's what I see at my local library. It's available via Overdrive and hoopla. (And naturally, it's a problem for me because I can't download it because my MacOS is too new... they only support 10.4 - 10.16, and I'm on MacOS 13.4. sigh.)
So it's often a hassle. Still, it's the best deal around, and you can often get the latest books (including best-selling novels). You just might have to download a reader app that works with your library's system.
2. Do you know of a public repository of less common books that would also allow you to download the audio files? (Books like The Autobiography of Mother Jones.)
Surprisingly, less common books ("Autobiography") are just as easily discoverable as more common books.
If you've got a REALLY uncommon book, you might consider using one of the new text-to-speech systems. I did a quick test using NaturalReader.com to read a short passage from the intro to The Joy of Search. Take a listen to this text-to-speech sample video I made--it's pretty good! (Of course, it currently doesn't know how to do character voices, which is something that makes human readings so wonderfully vibrant. Maybe in a few years...)
3. My cousin in Stockholm recommended I listen to a book that she really liked: Män som hatar kvinnor. But I can't find an audio version of that title in English. Can you find one?
This was actually pretty straight-forward. Just searching for this title:
[ Män som hatar kvinnor ]
tells me that this book is titled "Men Who Hate Women" in Swedish, but is entitled "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" in English. As we saw above, probably the best way to get this in audio form is to check your local library and work it through them. (But check the other options as well. I note that FindAudioBook has an audio copy available, although LibriVox and Internet Archive do not.)
1. There are multiple sources for free audio books (YouTube, LibriVox, Internet Archive, FindAudioBook, and your local library). Remember these when you go researching. (There are many others as well, e.g., OpenCulture, but mostly they point to LibriVox or Spotify recordings, which are already covered by these sources).
2. TextToSpeech readers are an option, especially if you already have access to the text, and nobody has recorded it. I'm thinking here of articles and books that were born digital, or have an online version. Think about the Story of Paul Boyton or the Letters of Paul Boyton. (This is from an earlier SRS post about Boyton.
Keep Searching... the answer is out there.
June 28, 2023
SearchResearch Challenge (6/28/23): How can you find a free audio book?
Audible books are life-changing.
P/C Tomas Anunziata on Pexels.com
When I go on long road trips, listening to audible books (previously known as "books on tape") are an essential item. They keep me awake and listening, especially when I'm driving those long, straight stretches of highways in the American west that seem to go on endlessly.
Sometimes I don't want a podcast but just a good old-fashioned novel. When I need such a thing I often turn to places like Audible.com for recent books and pay a small amount of money for the right to download the audible file.
But every so often I want to listen to a book that's a classic--Treasure Island, Catch-22, or The Return of Sherlock Holmes. Is there a simple way to do this? That's the Challenge for this week...
1. Is there a simple way to find free audible versions of classic books? (Such as Treasure Island, Catch-22, or The Return of Sherlock Holmes.) What's your method of finding these?
2. Do you know of a public repository of less common books that would also allow you to download the audio files? (Books like The Autobiography of Mother Jones.)
3. My cousin in Stockholm recommended I listen to a book that she really liked: Män som hatar kvinnor. But I can't find an audio version of that title in English. Can you find one?
This week isn't that hard, but it brings up a couple of good points about searching for something that's not just another web page. See what you can do with this!
Keep Searching!
