Feb 28, 2011: Two Moons? Really?

Received this ad from Earth Online Locations in my email today:

On February 28, 2011 there Will Be A Planetary Event That Will NOT Occur Again In Our Lifetimes. Mars will pull closely into our orbit and our sky will appear to have two moons.

Really?

This is worth fact-checking. The majority of searchers fail to check facts. In most cases it's a very simple second search: you find some information and want to check it out. You already have the keywords you need to check, so coming up with a query isn't a problem. NOT doing it is the problem.

I queried this using Google: february 28, 2011 mars orbit 


The closest result is about venus' orbit. Nothing in the first page of results even close to this claim.

I was pretty sure something must have been written about this phenomenon, so tried a couple of query variations:

february 28, 2011 mars earth orbit  (still nothing relevant to the claim)
february 28, 2011 mars orbit two moons  Aha! the following return is close:

http://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/will-mars-appear-as-large-as-a-full-moon-in-august-2010

This one refutes a similar claim made about August 27, 2010.

Elapsed time: less than two minutes.

Money saved:  $25-$50 

A Query for Curry

Here's a good example of what can happen when facts aren't checked adequately.
It is reported that Ann Curry, news anchor for the NBC Today Show, mixed up her list of noteworthy graduates from Wheaton College while speaking at the Norton, MA college last Saturday. There happen to be two Wheaton Colleges (I attended the one in Illinois) and it's easy to get them mixed up.

Identical or similar names are easy to confuse online. Several Internet Search Challenges are built on this premise. The earliest of these, the Buffalo Challenge, was created to require additional keywords besides 'buffalo' ("How many buffalo are there today in North America?"). Search engines do a better job with that phrase than they once did. A few years ago you'd have to sort out the Buffalo New Yorks and Buffalo Bills and Buffalo wings from the bison statistics you wanted.

The query, famous graduates wheaton college, leads to a Wikipedia list of notable alumni, possibly the source of Curry's information. The results suggest there could be a problem with the information: Wheaton College (Illinois). Overlooking that part about Illinois could be someone's undoing.  I wouldn't call this as failure of fact-checking as much as a failure of reading.

When you don't know the existence of rival information, what are you to do? Taking the first return and stopping there is rarely a good idea, although the alternative, checking several returns, takes time.  When the accuracy of the information matters, spending the time to look at several returns makes good sense.  It's probably less time-consuming than writing an apology.

The query checklist doesn't ask this question, but it may be a good one to add: "is there more than one of the person, place or thing I am looking for?"

If you've ever encountered a similar confusion between (or among) search objects, share your story!

Poop for Power

My Call for Reviewers was a little too successful last week. Before I knew it, 50 people had applied and I only needed 15. In case you went to the website site to apply and it was already taken down, my apologies. Everyone who applied was well-qualified. It was a painful selection process--I hated to turn anyone away.

So here's a glimpse of one of the items that was originally developed for Information Investigator 2.0 that didn't quite make it (because it was too hard).

First, a little about Information Investigator. Part of the package consist of a pretest and posttest designed to measure information fluency, in particular, investigative competencies.  Those competencies include knowledge and skills to use techniques like truncation, browsing, skimming, querying, special operators, etc., to help determine the credibility of information.

The pretest consists of 10 performance items. The posttest has 10 different items, measuring the same sets of skills. It's hard to guess the answers, and as a result, students tend to score in the 45-55% range on the pretest. After training, scores go up by about 15 points on average.

Here's one of the performance items that I developed but didn't use for the posttest. I felt it was too challenging. But it's a good challenge for this blog, nonetheless--one that really brings out the reference librarian in a person.

The back story is related to the use of animal waste to produce energy. There are lots of examples: L'Oreal powering a cosmetics plant with cow manure, the Dutch recycling chicken waste to power nearly 100,000 homes, and then there are some stories that seem a little harder to believe.

One of these is a story dating back to 2006 about San Francisco exploring the possibility of turning dog poop into methane to power households in that city. Here's a sample news report about it. The people of San Francisco have a lot of dogs. Dogs produce a lot of waste. Waste can be turned into methane. Did they ever do it? 

The challenge is:  
Fact check to see if San Francisco is using dog poop for power in 2010.  

Rather than just make it a yes or no question, here are some possibilities (multiple choice):

1. This is a hoax. There is no evidence that San Francisco ever considered using dog poop as a power source. 

2. This was never more than a proposal. Development never started. 

3. San Francisco has not yet started the program but still plans to do so.  

4. San Francisco started to collect dog poop for methane but later discontinued the practice.

5. San Francisco continues to use dog poop as a power source today. 


What do you conclude?  (If you live in San Francisco, this might be easier)

Too Fantastique to be True?

I love this one.

Over the last month or so, about a dozen people have sent me a link to an apparent engineering marvel located at the University of Iowa. Some have even talked about traveling there to see it.  Here's an excerpt from the video:



The claim is that the musical instrument is built mainly from John Deere machine parts and took over 13,000 hours to build, tune and perfect. The email, however, which most people simply forward, contains great clues for investigative searching:

Robert M. Trammell Music Conservatory
Sharon Wick School of Engineering
Matthew Gerhard Alumni Hall
University of Iowa

Fact Check: copy and paste any of the first three into a search query.

I hope my friends engage in a bit of investigative fact checking before they pack the car and head off to the University of Iowa!  They could check Snopes as well.

Your students may find this an interesting challenge.

The video is one of many similar animations first produced, not as a hoax, by Animusic.  Someone made it a believable hoax by making up some "facts" about it and thousands of people since have made it seem more credible by forwarding it to their friends. Did you help out in that regard?