Daniel M. Russell's Blog, page 17

Answer: How can I find latest updates on topics of interest?

 

Staying on top of an emerging topic...  
P/C MidJourney. Prompt: "unanticipated consequences, realistic"

... is a continual issue for professional researchers. 

Often, your work can't be answered and "solved" in a single search session, or even a single day, but must be compiled over a longer period.  This is one of the defining characteristics of complex and sophisticated research problems--they take time.  (See some nice work from Microsoft Research on this: Slow search: Information retrieval without time constraints.)   

But for us, the Challenge is having some way to track emerging results and new insights in a field.  How do we do that?  

As I mentioned, the obvious way is to subscribe to blogs and newsletters that monitor the topic for you.  That's good, but suppose you'd like to get a bit more from the news directly?  

Let me frame this as an SRS Challenge for you: 

1. Can you find a way to limited search over a small number (say, 3 - 7) of high quality periodical sources of information for a particular topic for the past year?  (In my case, I want to search for articles on "unanticipated consequences" during 2022. Your topic of interest might be something different.)  How can I do that? 

I quite liked SRS Regular Reader Krossbow's post, so I'm going to borrow much of his response here.  In particular, he focused on setting up multiple and different kinds of regular alerts from alert services...  

My initial thoughts went to Google Alerts as that's my normal tool when I want get updates on a subject. As you know, it runs your query of choice repeatedly and emails you the results.  Here's the official source for how to set up a repeating alert:  Google Alerts

I also thought about searching social media feeds. Feedly is an RSS reader I've used since Google Reader was shut down. They allow you to set up regular feeds based on search terms, but that capability is in the paid tier.  {Dan: I haven't tried this. If anyone does let us know how well it works out.}

My thinking then went to my old favorite standbys of library research: EBSCO and ProQuest. My library gives access to current periodical corpora as well as ProQuest.com. Login through your university (or public library access point), and you too can create Proquest alerts. 

 {Interesting side-note: Clarivate acquired ProQuest in 2021--they also run Web of Science and services like EndNote, so things might change in the future. General SRS point: Things change. Stay up-to-date.}  

Another set of resources your library might have access to is EBSCO Search which also allows you to set up alerts.   Creating a Search Alert in EBSCOhost - Tutorial

I searched for [gale books alerts] to find Gale Alerts and RSS Feeds for Gale Books and Authors.  {Looks like paid subscription is required, but this alert stream notifies you when a book with a title matching your query is added.}  

My library uses Libby for some periodicals. If your interest is broad enough, you can set alerts when a new issue of a magazine becomes available.  Set a Libby alert when new magazine issues are available.  

Same for JSTOR (another aggregator indexing service like Proquest).  See JSTOR alerts.  (Again, you need to login here--check our your library for access.)  
I went to SimilarSites (an easy way to find other web sites that are similar to one that you specify) and searched for sites similar to Proquest.com.  This led me to several sites, the most useful of which is probably ScienceDirect has open access papers, journal articles with this tutorial for setting up alerts. ScienceDirect alerts tutorial.

As I read through Krossbow's post, it reminded me that the SemanticScholar website also has an alerts system.  Here is SemanticScholar's alert service.  In practice, it seems very similar to Google Scholar's alert service; both index the scholarly literature, but they have somewhat different feeds and indexing times, so you'll see somewhat different results.  

When setting up alerts with these services, it's important to get your queries right.  For my original topic of interest, "unanticipated consequences" the trick is to find other expressions that will get you the insights you're looking for.  
When I just brainstorm a bit, I came up with these other expressions: 
Original: unanticipated consequences 
Next ideas, search for these phrases as well:  

unexpected consequences

boomerang effect

didn't expect

unanticipated effect

And then I ran out of good ideas.  Is there some guide to help me broaden the search?
Sure!  I did a search for each of these phrases and read a bit in the hits on each search. For example, the search for [boomerang effect] took me to the Wikipedia article on that topic.  A quick scan of this article told me that the phrases "backfire effect" and "Barbara Streisand effect" might be useful as synonyms.  Setting up an alert for each of these (rather than using an OR in a long query) lets me figure out which of these will be productive.  I'll let them run for a few days and turn off the alerts for phrases that don't work out well.  
When I step back to think about what I just did, I realize that I could mine Wikipedia for other phrases just by searching like this: 
     [ site:en.wikipedia.org "unexpected" ] 
(Or, do the same thing with "boomerang effect" "Streisand effect" etc.)  
When I did that query, I ALSO found that the query terms "paradox" "unexpected discovery" or "paradoxical effect" could also be useful synonyms.  You can play this synonym expansion game forever, but don't.  I suggest you get a few, run a test search to see if the results are what you need, and then set up an alert with them, one at a time.  After a week, keep those alerts that are useful; prune the rest.  
One other idea... When I'm doing research like this, I often find it useful to search for the opposite of what I seek.   What would that mean in this context?  I might try setting up alerts for: 
     [ unanticipated benefits ] or     [ unexpected good outcome ]
It's a trick, but one that's immensely useful.  

2. (Extra credit) Can you figure out a way to have this limited search run once / month?  (In this case, you'd probably want to have the search extend over the past month, not the entire year.)  

I'm going to save this part of the answer (it was extra credit!) for next week.  Look for my comments then.  Hint: this will center on Google's Programmable Search Engine (formerly the Custom Search Engine, CSE.) Programmable Search Engine and will show how to search for those small number of quality sources.  

SearchResearch Lessons 

1. There are a number of services that provide regular alert services.  Try them all!  You'll find that they cover very different information feeds and will give a broader coverage of ongoing news reports and research in your topic area.  

2. Once you've set up your alert feeds, prune them as necessary.  If you need to, set up a reminder to yourself to cut back on the alert feeds that aren't high quality.  Be sure to do this, or you'll end up polluting your personal information feed! 

3. To search for synonym phrases, look at other articles containing the phrases you use.  Often, these articles will have synonyms for the concept you seek. (Writer typically hate reusing a stock phrase over and over, so they look for other ways to say the same thing.)  

4. Another way to find synonymous phrases is to search on Wikipedia for the phrase you know, then read around finding other expressions.  That's the point of using the SITE: search. 

Search on! 

SearchResearch Challenge (1/4/23): How can I find latest updates on topics of interest?

 As you might remember... 

P/C MidJourney. Prompt: "unanticipated consequences, realistic"

... I'm also working on another book about Unanticipated Consequences.  In particular, you might remember that 18  months ago, I asked about how to do "slow research" on that topic.  

I'm happy to tell you that my research has been going well, although slowly.  The good news is that I'm getting close to the finish.  

But that brings up a different problem: I'd like my research to be as up-to-date as possible.  In particular, I'd like to be sure that I haven't missed anything in the past year.

This makes me think--how can people stay up-to-date on a particular topic?  The obvious way is to subscribe to blogs and newsletters that monitor the topic for you.  That's good, but suppose you'd like to get a bit more from the news directly?  

We've talked about using Google Alerts before, so that's not what I mean.  Let me frame this as an SRS Challenge for you: 

1. Can you find a way to limited search over a small number (say, 3 - 7) of high quality periodical sources of information for a particular topic for the past year?  (In my case, I want to search for articles on "unanticipated consequences" during 2022. Your topic of interest might be something different.)  How can I do that? 

2. (Extra credit) Can you figure out a way to have this limited search run once / month?  (In this case, you'd probably want to have the search extend over the past month, not the entire year.)  

This is the kind of tool that pro researchers use, or would like to, if they could figure it out.  Can you show them how to do this? 

Let us know how you found the answer to this! 

Search on! 

2023 New Year's Thought: What does it mean to be curious?

In the pre-dawn quiet, somewhere on the north coast of California, I looked up into the soft, cold, gentle mist… 

Rainy day on the Northern California coast

... letting it play over my face.  It’s a reflective gesture, especially on New Year’s Eve when all of the year is worth rethinking.  Rain has fallen since the dawn of the Earth, and I’m just feeling the latest cycling of water from sea to sky to land back to sea.  But it puts me in a deeply contemplative state of mind.  What happened this year that was different from the year before?  How can I make next year even better?  What have I learned?

You might wonder about all of those questions, but as I lifted my face to the sky, I could feel each tiny raindrop strike my cheeks—a kind of constant spray where each pinpoint of rain registered—dot.. dot.. dot.. dot..—quietly making every point of my skin register a tiny scintilla of cold and wet.  You might think of this as a kind of celestial scanning of your inner self, the rain gods probing every square millimeter of your face and your life.  It felt a bit like video static on my skin.  

It felt like that image of William Gibson in Neuromancer, “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”  I realize that there are people who have never seen the black and white video static of a dead television channel.  For you, here’s a YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubFq-wV3Eic (It’s a handy concept to have—the rapidly alternating pixels of black and white, rapidly flipping in a random order, flickering chaos. I don’t quite know how to convey that sense in words—video static as a phrase will have to do.)  

But the thing that popped into my mind was this: I feel as though the droplets are tiny and rapid and random and dense, but I also know the spatial resolution of touch on the skin of my face is pretty low. So how can I feel as though I’m in a shower of tiny video static droplets?  And while I’m thinking about that, I also start wondering how I can feel the cold of each droplet as it splashes down.  How fast are my cold receptors?  Can I actually FEEL each of those tiny droplets as a touch and as a chill, or is my perception a kind of synthesis of all the drops over a short period of time?  How much of my perception is accurate and how much is just made up by my sensory system?  

A psychologist would call this a question of veridical perception—that is, the direct perception of stimuli as they exist in the world.  Am I actually feeling what my perception actually indicates, or does my nervous system do a kind of quick extrapolation from the perceived reality to create the sense of video static on my skin?  

Naturally, I then spent a couple of hours doing a bit of research into the spatial resolution of touch. Doing the obvious queries on Google and reading widely in neuroscience and perception. I learned about the “two-point discrimination test” [1], and that we have different receptor neurons for heat and cold, yet again different receptors for touch and different ones for touch, different ones for stretching, and different ones for sensing vibrations.  Fascinating stuff, but in the end, I had to do my own two-point discrimination test on my face to determine what the spatial resolution is on MY face.  After using an incredibly sophisticated two-point testing device (that is, a paperclip I bent into parallel arms whose distance I could vary) I found that my cheek can tell touchpoints that are around 6 mm apart—around 0.25 inches.  This means that my face can only register drops that are 6 mm apart from each other.  Since my face is around 254 mm wide (assuming a circular face), I can really only feel around 42 different droplets from one side to the other. On the other hand, my lips can determine one- versus two-points with only a 1mm separation, so my face is at different spatial resolutions!  

But that’s not the way it feels.  I can't feel the difference in resolution--it's all of one piece.  I would have naively guessed that I could uniformly detect 100 drops of rain from cheek-to-cheek. The pattern of rain certainly feels that way as the rain washes across—it feels like a fairly dense spray of droplets—I would have thought I should feel at least 1000 droplets as the morning rain falls from heaven.  

And what about the cold? A little more research tells me that cold receptors are even farther apart, and much slower to react than touch. So, the sense I have of small cold drops hitting my face in a dense, random pattern can’t possibly be accurate. The rain is cold, certainly, but when the drop hits my skin, I register the drop’s strike, and the cold perception comes much later, probably right around the time another drop hits the same point.  

Once you start thinking about this, you also have to wonder—what is the composition of rain?  Are all drops the same size?  I noticed in the heavier rain that came later that there were also lots of little drops as well.  Are they shards from collisions of large raindrops, or did they never get merged into a big drop?  

Questions, always questions. 

This year I’ve spent a lot of time writing my SearchResearch posts—more time than I’d care to admit, but it’s worth it.  The process satisfies this deep inner itch I have--I want to understand the world.  

The nature of my curiosity is to constantly ask “Why?”  It’s an everpresent question that’s always on the periphery of my lived experience.  This year I walked through a park and thought “why is there an odd, flat space in the middle of the park?”  Or, seeing gnats swarming on the beach I wonder “Why do they do that?”  Seeing a horse in a nearby meadow leads me to recall from an adjacent memory about horses that while there are horse fossils in North America, and yet there were no horses here when the Europeans arrived:  Why?  

Curiosity is more than just asking random Why questions—it often builds off of something else you know.  In the park, there were no other flat places like that one—it just looked wrong: Why?  In the case of the beach gnats, I saw them all over the beach, but it wasn’t one giant beachball of swarming gnats, but several gnatty swarms in different places.  To ask the Why question about horses, I had to know that in 1492, there were no native horses in North America, and that there were horse fossils littering museums all over.  Why?  

Horse fossil from the La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles; Miocene.

Asking curious questions means noticing something about the world; it means knowing something is out of place, doesn’t fit, or doesn’t agree with another thing you know, or recognizing that you really don’t know how something works.  Then, ask that question, follow-up with a bit of looking.    

Fortunately, we live in a time where online resources let us do a bit of desk research and find the answers to these curious questions.  

What questions will you ask in the year ahead?  What role does innate curiosity play in your life?

-- Curiously yours 

-- Dan 

== 

1. That is, how far apart do two points have to be on your skin before you feel them as two points rather than one? Answer: it varies widely, from 1 mm at the fingertip to 40 mm on the skin of your thigh).  I also learned that a “receptive field” is the region that’s sensed by a touch receptor.  For more details:  http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Receptive_field  

 

2022 in Review: A year of SearchResearch

 Once again we're at the close of the year... 

Sunset over the Pacific with a tiny green flash
... and I'm trying to summarize all that happened in SRS as a way of looking back over the year.  It's a bit of a complicated story--we certainly covered a number of topics (see the list below), and touched on a number of SearchResearch topics, methods, and means.  We talked about whether a parakeet is really a kind of parrot, where the oldest solar observatory is in the Americas (A: Peru), and how to read in language and scripts that you don't recognize.  

This was also the year where I taught the Human-Computer Interaction & AI class at Stanford (with Peter Norvig) which was a tremendous amount of fun, but I'd forgotten how much time standing up a full class takes, even if it's in a domain that you know well.  

Despite the class and a few trips here and there, we managed to keep SRS rolling along.  We had 55 posts this year, just over 1 per week and just a few less than last year. 

I hope you found these entertaining and educational--that's certainly my intent in writing them.  I want to encourage your curiosity, and give you some of the tools I've found that help me with my curiosity addiction.  

I'm looking forward to next year's crop of SRS Challenges.  Where in the world will we go next?  

If you would, leave a comment about what you found most interesting in SRS during 2022, and if you have ideas, what would you like us to cover in the year ahead?  The comment line is always open. 

As always, 

Search on!  

JanSearchResearch Challenge (1/5/21): A new year, a n...Carolina parakeets... or parrot?Image identification is great, when it works.Google Lens cautionAnswer: A new year, a new Challenge about parakeets!How to find downloadable books in Google BooksHow to find open access booksSearchResearch Challenge (1/19/21): Time and tides...Are tides different in different places?Answer: Time and tides in different places?How to find anything #4 (part 2/3): News and Late ...How to find current newsFebSearchResearch Challenge (2/2/22): Search in a wo...Dealing with constantly changing namesHow to find anything #5: (part 3/3) Assessing Cre...How assess credibility of sourcesSearchResearch Challenge (2/16/22): How can I sear...Searching for soundsAnswer: How can I search over audio?MarSearchResearch Challenge (3/2/22): What are some g...How to find near real-time satellite imagesAnswer: What are some good (almost) real-time sat...SearchResearch Challenge (3/16/22): Finding the c...Finding special connections and terms (krumholz)Answer: Finding the connections?SearchResearch Challenge (3/30/22): Where is the o...Oldest solar observatory in the Americas (Chankillo)AprAnswer: Where is the oldest solar observatory in t...SearchResearch Challenge (4/13/22): Why water the...Why would you water Astroturf?Answer: Why water the astroturf?MaySearchResearch Challenge (5/11/22): Why... in New ...Symbols of New OrleansSuperb example of SearchResearch... in AlgeriaA great SRS tale from Algeria--tracking down mysterious holesAnswer: Why... in New Orleans?SearchResearch Challenge (5/25/22): Finding origin...Using patents to find dates of old machines (apple parer and stapleless stapler)JunAnswer: Finding original patents?SearchResearch Challenge (6/8/22): Why do gnats D...Gnats swarm, but why?Answer: Why do gnats DO that?SearchResearch Challenge (6/22/22): Why is there a...Elephant statues in WisconsinWhere's Dan? A slight SRS delay this week...JulAnswer: Why is there an elephant statue in this Wi...SearchResearch Challenge (7/13/22): What is this ...Identifying abandoned oil rigs in the PA woodsSearchResearch Bonus Challenge (July 20, 2022): Wh...US city population densityAugAnswer: What's a large US city with very low popu...Answer: What's this rusty thing I found in the woods?SearchResearch Challenge (8/17/22): Horses are nat...Where did horses come from?Answer: Horses are native to... where?How to find anything #7: How to Find News and Late...More about how to find current newsSearchResearch Challenge (8/31/22): How can you fi...Finding those hard-to-find termsSepAnswer: How can you find answers to those mysterio...Extra: Napa Soda Springs to return to life?Update on Napa SpringsSearchResearch Challenge (9/14/22): Can you find t...Finding Starbuck and QueequegHint 1: Can you find the characters from Moby Dick...Hint 2: Can you find characters from Moby Dick in ...OctAnswer 1: Can you find characters from Moby Dick i...Answer 2: Can you find characters from Moby Dick i...SearchResearch Challenge (10/26/22): A missing bui...Exploring the hole in Conordices ParkNovAnswer: A missing building in the park?SearchResearch Challenge (11/9/22): Questions abou...Bats: why sleep upside down?Answer: Questions about bats--How many? Why do th...More surprising insights about bat predationSearchResearch Challenge (11/23/22): How to read o...How to read text in languages you don't recognizeDecAnswer: How to read other scripts and languages?AI writing systems, a poetic prompt, and The CyberiadThoughts about AI-generated textSearchResearch Challenge (12/14/22): Does animal c...Does bird coloration change by latitude?Answer: Does animal color and weight change by lat...

Answer: Does animal color and weight change by latitude?

 Colorful tropical birds... 

Keel-billed Toucan in Belize, Arctic tern in Alaska.  
P/C William Walker © 2016, 2010 see: BirdWalker.com
Lead us to a mystery--don't tropical birds seem much more colorful than the birds that live closer to the poles? 
Likewise, isn't there a tendency for animals to be different sizes if they're in the north vs. equatorial places?  
Even more generally, are animals whose normal ranges are near the poles generally bigger than those whose normal ranges are more equatorial?  

Or am I just hallucinating?    

Last week's Challenge was to test these two hypotheses... 

1.  Is it true that birds have more brilliant colors near the equator, and are less colorful as you go farther north?  If so, why would that be?  

I began this investigation by posing this query: 

     [ are equatorial birds more colorful than polar birds ] 
which took me to an article in the British science journal NewScientist with the helpful title: Songbirds are more colourful the closer they live to the equator.  The subtitle gives us a hint: "Computer analysis has shown that 19th-century naturalists including Charles Darwin were right: birds near the equator are more colourful."  
Game over?  Maybe, but I always recommend digging a little deeper to understand why. The idea that tropical birds are more colorful was first introduced by 19th-century naturalists such as Charles Darwin and Alexander von Humboldt (who we have discussed before in SRS--see Leaping Eels, and the Great Man Theory). 
Until recently, however, it has been hard to prove this hypothesis due to difficulty in quantifying the colors of birds.  Just looking at a few birds and observing "yeah, tropical toucans are colorful, but my local northern sparrows are drab" doesn't cut it.  What we want is some kind of broad-based analysis. We are, after all, trying to see if "birds (generally speaking) have more brilliant colors near the equator."  
Luckily, Chris Cooney (U. Sheffield) tested the idea on songbirds (specifically, the Passeriformes, which are about 60 per cent of all bird species). 
Now, equipped with more advanced color analysis methods, Cooney's group found that, yes indeed, songbirds that live in equatorial climates ARE more colorful than their temperate climate cousins.  
What's more, birds in forests are more colorful than those that don't live in forests. 
You should also know that the journal New Scientist is a kind of digest of science news.  They always provide a link to the original paper that they're summarizing, which in this case leads to Cooney et al.'s paper Latitudinal gradients in avian colourfulness, published in Nature Ecology and Evolution.  In this paper you can read all of the details of HOW they measured color (and why it's harder than you think), along with the killer plot of color by latitude: 
Bird colorfulness by lattitude. Redder is "more diversity in colors" while bluer is less diverse.  Adapted from Figure 2 in Cooney et al.' paper (see above).
Of course, I want to check another source for agreement about the color hypothesis, so I did another search in Google Scholar, using some of the terms I picked up while reading Cooney's work.  My search there was for: 
     [ bird color variation by latitude ] 
Turns out there are lots of paper on this topic!  I skimmed a bunch and found that this color-by-latitude idea has been debated widely over the years, with some papers showing true variations, while others don't.  The key difference in the findings seems to be the sample size and the method researchers used to measure color.  See Cooney's paper again--it's a hard problem! And, generally speaking, small studies (with less latitude variation) tended to NOT find color differences.  You need a big sample to see the effect. 
But as I skimmed, I noticed several references to a "rule" that described color variation by latitude.  So my next query was: 
     [ rule describing bird color change by latitude ] 
Voila!  I discovered Golger's Rule which is 

"...an ecogeographical rule that links animal colouration with climatic variation. This rule is named after C.W.L. Gloger who was one of the first to summarise the associations between climatic variation and animal colouration, noting in particular that birds and mammals seemed more pigmented in tropical regions." (From: Delhey, Kaspar. "Gloger’s rule." Current Biology 27.14 (2017): R689-R691.)  

Fascinating. Golger's rule is really about the total amount of pigmentation, but it extends to color pigments as well.  This color-variation-by-latitude seems to be much more than just birds, although it's pretty clear that birds DO vary by latitude, with brilliant colors being more tropically inclined.  

2.  Is it true that the closer an animal species is to the poles, the larger they are?  Again, if so, why?  

Taking the lessons I learned from the bird/color Challenge, my first query was in Google Scholar: 

     [ latitudinal variation in animal body size ] 

Which produced a wealth of insights, particularly around a rule that's similar to Golger's Rule, but for animal body size rather than pigment or color.  Bergmann's rule (1847)  was originally written as “Within species and amongst closely related species of homeothermic animals a larger size is often achieved in colder climates than in warmer ones, which is linked to the temperature budget of these animals.”  

That is, within a clade ("closely related species"), it's generally true that the closer an animal lives to the equator, the smaller it will be.   

Bergmann's rule can be summarized by this diagram (which just happens to be of a bird): 

Bergmann's rule for penguins--the more equatorial the animal within its clade,
the smaller it is.  P/C Wikimedia.
  

Which is a remarkable result!  But, as you'd expect, in the intervening 175 years, some exceptions have been found (including some frogs that show the opposite of Bergmann's rule and howler monkeys that are inverse Bergmann's within a limited range), and the rule has been amended for special conditions (birds, and measurements of size).  However, in general, the rule seems to hold.  For details, see this authoritative article: Geographic gradients in body size: a clarification of Bergmann's rule.   (Blackburn, Tim M., Kevin J. Gaston, and Natasha Loder. "Geographic gradients in body size: a clarification of Bergmann's rule." Diversity and distributions 5.4 (1999): 165-174.)

SearchResearch Lessons 

So, yes, birds ARE more colorful near the equator (in general) AND animals are smaller near the equator (in general).  Which partly explains the plethora of beautiful hummingbirds in the jungle.  But let's talk about what SRS insights we should take away from this Challenge. 

1. Straight-forward questions are often a great starting tactic.  The ability of search engines to understand what you mean with a question like our first query [ are equatorial birds more colorful than polar birds ] is improving all the time. With a good start, we can begin to dive more deeply into the real content.  

2. Double check by doing a different query to get a the same idea. In this case, my second and third queries were restatements of the original query, but using somewhat different language.  Those new terms were learned from what I was reading.  That is... 

3. Learn new terms as you read in the area. This is one of the more important SRS lessons: learn as you read.  In particular, when you see a word or phrase that's new to you, be sure to look it up--you might be able to make your next query much more focused with the language and ideas you pick up along the way.  

4. Notice ideas as you read. More than just language and terminology, you want to also notice ideas as your doing your research.  While I was searching for birds and color, I noticed the use of a "rule" to describe the latitudinal variations.   That was incredibly effective when I went to search for size variability--it turns out that biologists love to express relationships as "rules."  That's an idea I'll carry forward for the next time I have to search for something like this.  

Hope you enjoyed the Challenge!  

Search on!  

SearchResearch Challenge (12/14/22): Does animal color and weight change by latitude?

Colorful tropical birds... 

Keel-billed Toucan in Belize, Arctic tern in Alaska.  
P/C William Walker © 2016, 2010 see: BirdWalker.com
... are one of the glories of the avian world.  And I've noticed something odd--don't tropical birds seem much more colorful than the birds that live closer to the poles? 
When I think of jungle birds, brilliant parrots, toucans, and lorikeets come to mind.  Meanwhile, birds of the north such as Canada geese, finches, terns, and seagulls tend to be more muted.  Is this a real thing, or am I seeing something where nothing is going on?  Sure, there are brilliant red cardinals in the northern parts of the US, but on the whole... 

Similarly, isn't there a tendency for animals to be different sizes if they're in the north vs. equatorial places?  Seems to me that some animals (such as deer or foxes) seem to be bigger "up north" (say, Canada) than "down south" (say, Mexico).  There's a lot of variability, of course, but is there a general trend? 

Or am I just imagining things?  

Pondering this made me want to frame it as a Challenge for you.  Here you go... 

1.  Is it true that birds have more brilliant colors near the equator, and are less colorful as you go farther north?  If so, why would that be?  

2.  Is it true that the closer an animal species is to the poles, the larger they are?  Again, if so, why?  

The REAL question for us is how would you find out such a thing?  Remember that you'll want to not just search for positive examples of these observations, but also counter-examples.  (In truth, you'll probably want to find people who can speak with authority about such things.  Looking at one or two birds (or even a few dozen animals) over different latitudes probably won't tell you what's really going on.  

So.. how can you figure this out?  (Remember that I can be devious: one of these propositions might not be true!)  

Let us know what you discover, and HOW you found out? 

Search on!  

AI writing systems, a poetic prompt, and The Cyberiad

I was reading in the hammock... 

Image by Parti. Prompt: "Robot swimming in a sea of text" 

... in my parents backyard, swinging beneath a guava tree and reading scads of science fiction and old National Geographic magazines.  It was summer in Los Angeles, a perfect time for a 14-year old boy to be reading The Cyberiad by Stanisław Lem.  I knew that I wanted to do science, but at 14, I thought the science for me was going to be biology.  I'm not sure, but it's possible that reading Lem that summer, with all his depictions of robots, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence made me swerve from the biological to the computational.  

I remember that summer with delight.  And I was particularly reminded of The Cyberiad when I read a poem that was created by ChatGPT, the AI prose generator by OpenAI.  In particular, my mind flashed back to a poem that was purportedly created by a robot made by the brilliant master scientist Trurl. In this scene from the book, Trurl's arch-nemesis Klapaucius challenges his robot with a ridiculous task, one intended to show its shortcomings--it was an attempt to make the robot fail foolishly.  Here's the passage:  

“Certainly not! I didn't build a machine to solve ridiculous crossword puzzles! That's hack work, not Great Art! Just give it a topic, any topic, as difficult as you like..."

Klapaucius thought, and thought some more. Finally he nodded and said:

"Very well. Let's have a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit."

"Love and tensor algebra?" Have you taken leave of your senses?" Trurl began, but stopped, for his electronic bard was already declaiming:

 

Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,

Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,

Their indices bedecked from one to n,

Commingled in an endless Markov chain!

Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,

And every vector dreams of matrices.

Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:

It whispers of a more ergodic zone.

In Reimann, Hilbert or in Banach space

Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.

Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,

We shall encounter, counting, face to face.

I'll grant thee random access to my heart,

Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;

And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,

And in bound partition never part.

For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,

Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,

Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,

Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?

Cancel me not--for what then shall remain?

Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,

A root or two, a torus and a node:

The inverse of my verse, a null domain.

Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!

The product of our scalars is defined!

Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind

Cuts capers like a happy haversine.

I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,

I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.

Bernoulli would have been content to die,

Had he but known such a^2 cos 2 phi!”

When I read that, I couldn't resist.  I immediately gave ChatGPT the same text, just out of the perverse pleasure of the prompt:  

ChatGPT Prompt:  Let's have a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit.

Response:

of unity and harmony.

In the language of pure mathematics,

my love for you is a tensor,

strong and resilient,

able to withstand the greatest strains,

and to adapt to any shape or form.

In the realm of topology,

our love is a Möbius strip,

infinite and non-orientable,

twisting and turning,

never ending and never repeating.

And in the realm of calculus,

our love is a continuous function,

smooth and differentiable,

always changing and evolving,

but never losing its sense of direction.

Together, we form a cybernetic system,

a perfect union of mind and body,

a fusion of technology and humanity,

a symphony of logic and emotion.

In this world of ones and zeros,

we stand as a beacon of hope,

a reminder that love is the ultimate algorithm,

the ultimate solution to all that ails us,

and the ultimate expression of who we truly are.

Well, well, well.  It doesn't rhyme, and it's not as elegant in imagery or meter, but it's a poem created by an AI after following the same prompt.  

(I also have to report that when I read this poem the first time, in the hammock, I spontaneously clapped my hands in applause for the translator.  The Cyberiad was written in Polish, and yet the poem was somehow miraculously converted to coherent, smooth, silky English. You have to give that translator a standing ovation.)   

And you have to give the folks at OpenAI a lot of credit as well.  Even though I work in the field, I did not see this coming.  I have to think a lot about this in the year ahead.  What a fascinating bit of language... What will all this mean for SearchResearch?  Stay tuned... and... 

Search on! 

 

Answer: How to read other scripts and languages?

It can seem magical... 



... when you realize that you have the ability to read another language, especially one that you don't know and in a script that you can't even identify.  
But that's what this week's Challenge was all about--a moment of magical realism, learning how to do something that seems impossible.  

This is a great chance to talk about how to do exactly that--read in writing systems (what the pros call "orthographies") that you don't recognize.  In some cases (such as Hindi or Arabic), I can't even recognize the letter boundaries.  

You have to know that there are around 300 different writing systems worldwide, and that's counting only the current ones.  There are plenty of languages out there without ANY writing system, and plenty of languages-that-once-were that are literally lost in time.  If you're interested in these other scripts and other languages, check out the Script Encoding Initiative at UC Berkeley which includes some writing systems that we still can't read (e.g., Linear A).  

But in our current world there are still plenty of scripts and languages that you might run across.  Here's this week's Challenge about different scripts and languages.  How do I read these?   

1.  For each of these images below: What is the language?  What is the translation of the text?  

A. 

B. 

C. 
D.


My approach was the same in all cases: use Google Lens.  Notice that there are a couple of ways to do this. 


Method 1: You can use your phone to take a picture with the camera and bring up Lens, which includes the Translate function.  (Here's how to do this on your iPhone.)  
When I take a picture of image A, this is what I see in my Camera application. 

Then I select "Lens" (the circle on the right), which gives me the chance to search for the image, or 

And if you wait a moment, it will translate for you (while trying to preserve the color and layout as much as possible).  Thus, the top characters (in the Cambodian script, Khmer) spell out "Learn English Introduction" while the bottom Hebrew characters spell out "Significant discount for soldiers in uniform."  


Method 2: Of course, if you're on a computer, you can right click (or Control-click a Mac), which leads to the same result:  

And the Amharic text shows up like this: 

Then... a non-obvious translation, but apparently it's a cautionary sign telling the driver to beware of deep holes created by roadwork.  (Something like the "no shoulder" signs you sometimes see on road construction sites.)  

Notice that one of the options is to copy the text in the original orthography.  Clicking on the "Text" button will copy the text for you.  

And that's how you get from the image to the text: አፕ ቱ ዴት ስታይል
To summarize: 

A. Khmer - "English Language Introduction" B. Hebrew - "Significant discount for soldiers in uniform" C. Amharic - "Up to date style" D. Arabic - "Deep excavations"  

So... the simplest way to figure out the writing system and to do translation is by using Google Lens.  Works for me.  Hope it works for you as well.  

SearchResearch Lessons 
One of the big takeaways is that not everyone knows all of the tools!   Just out of curiosity, I asked about 20 people (in Silicon Valley, not exactly a random sample), but even here, in the technological heartland, I found that fewer than half of the people I asked knew that there was an image-to-text translator built into your phone.  
I guess that's one of the reasons I keep doing SRS... there are still truly valuable lessons to learn and to share.  
Keep reading. And Search On! 

P.S. Sorry about the missing week.  It's not as interesting as Agatha Christie's 11-day disappearance just a very ordinary case of too many things to do... 

SearchResearch Challenge (11/23/22): How to read other scripts and languages?

 I'm never one to turn down an SRS opportunity... 

As you can imagine, in the back pocket of my mind I've got 4 or 5 SearchResearch Challenges queued up and ready to go, questing ever onward bringing you the tidbits of knowledge we all need in our searching lives. 

But every so often, a chance comment tilts the universe in a slightly different direction by pointing out an opportunity for a new SRS topic.  

In a comment this week, Mathlady wrote that "I also encountered the problem of needing to translate signage in an unfamiliar language using an alphabet unknown to me. So I started wondering how to use Google Translate with a different alphabet..."  

Excellent question. 

This is a great chance to talk about how to do exactly that--read in writing systems (what the pros call "orthographies") that you don't recognize.  In some cases (such as Arabic), I can't even recognize the letter boundaries.  

Thanks, Mathlady, for the chance to pose a couple of interesting and potentially tricky Challenges: 

1.  For each of these images below: What is the language?  What is the translation of the text?  

A. 

B. 

C. 
D.




As always, be sure to tell us how you did the translation.  (Did you find a friend? Or did you use an app to do this for you?)  And, as Mathlady points out, how did you enter the text to do your search???  
I'll tell you how I did this next week--but in the meantime, have a great American Thanksgiving!    روز شکرگزاری  or  ਧੰਨਵਾਦੀ   or  Þakkargjörð... or... fill in your own orthography here! 
Search on! 

More surprising insights about bat predation

 I ended last week's post with this... 

Once you know that other animals capture and eat bats, you can do a more direct search for them (e.g., [ spider eats bat ]) and get even more articles to expand your range of bat-dining predators, including one article from LiveScience telling us that bat-eating spiders are everywhere!   
So bat predators include hawks, falcons, owls, alligators, weasels, mink, snakes, fish, spiders, and centipedes!  Who knew?

I can't leave well enough alone.  
Over the weekend I was doing Just one more search, and found a remarkable paper, this one by Peter Mikula, Fish and amphibians as bat predators, European Journal of Ecology 1.1 (2015): 71-80.  Now this is a paper I highly recommend.  Here's a sample quote from the abstract: 

...at least 14 species of fishes and 14 species of frogs were observed as feeding on bats. Moreover, 7 and 16 species of bats were recorded as victims of hunting activity of fishes and frogs, respectively.... In some cases, these predators can regularly feed on bats, especially when hunting near roosting places of bats; however, with respect to number of recorded cases (21 for fishes and 37 for amphibians), bat predation .. [has]..  limited influence on bat populations or their behaviour.

We'd learned last week that fish eat bats, but I had no idea that frogs could snag bats on the wing, but apparently that happens enough to be captured multiple times.  Check this out:  Australian green tree frog eating a Bent-winged bat; another Green tree frog eating a bat; and another Green tree frog consuming a bat.  Finally, a cane toad eating a bat somewhere in Peru's Cerros de Amotape national park. 
I also learned more about bat-eating fishes. Not too surprising, most bat-eaters are freshwater fish, mostly because bats tend to favor insects that fly low over fresh or brackish water.  It is noteworthy to say that not all cases of bat predation were completely accidental; some  catfish were seen systematically waiting under maternal colonies of Buffy Flower bats (Erophylla sezekorni) for falling bats near the entrances of caves in the Bahamas.  Biologist have also seen some frogs hanging around  cave entrances in Australia, waiting for bats knocked to the ground by collision when emerging. However, even in these cases where fishes and frogs catch bats relatively often, they usually prey upon only a few bat, mainly bats knocked from the sky.
It's hard to catch a flying bat, although it does happen.  This is especially true if it's in your house at night, or even if you're a very patient frog or fish.  
Search on!