Can I draw you a map?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some information can best be understood using a map. At IdahoNews on March 27, 2023 there is an article titled Police: Top traffic crash location in Boise had 59 crashes throughout 2022. It lists the following eleven intersections (with the east-west street shown first):

 

W. Overland Rd./S. Cole Rd.– 59

W. Franklin Rd./N. Milwaukee St./– 54

8300 W. Overland Rd. [Walmart Supercenter] – 51

W. State St./N. Gary Ln./ -51

W. Fairview Ave./N. Milwaukee St./– 51

W. Fairview Ave./S. Five Mile Rd./– 51

N. Eagle Rd./Chinden Blvd./ - 49

W. Overland Rd./S. Maple Grove Rd./ - 47

W. Overland Rd./S. Five Mile Rd./– 45

W. Overland Rd./S. Orchard St./– 45

W. Fairview Ave./N. Maple Grove Rd./– 45

 

At these locations there were a total of 548 crashes. Five of the 11 top locations are intersections on one three-and-a-half mile stretch of four-lane West Overland Road in Southwest Boise. They account for 247 crashes. Why is that?

 

As shown above via a map created using PowerPoint, Interstate 84 runs parallel to Overland Road, then turns southeast and goes right under the intersection with Cole Road. Also, a mile west (at Maple Grove Road) is where the Interstate 184 spur known as The Connector heads off northeast to downtown.

 

The busy mile of Overland between Maple Grove and Cole with 157 crashes also has a Walmart Supercenter. And the northwest corner of Cole and Overland has the Boise LDS Temple. A mile further north is West Franklin Road, and northwest of Cole and Franklin is the large Boise Towne Square Mall, surrounded by lots of other stores.

 

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a brief proverb (from back in 1840) by Thomas H. Palmer that:

 

“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again”

 

I was looking at Annie Duke’s 2022 book, Quit: the power of knowing when to walk away, and found she quoted a newer and profane parody of it (attributed to the comedian W. C. Fields):

 

“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

 Then quit. There’s no use being a damn fool about it.”

 

Annie referenced the Quote Investigator web site by Garson O’Toole, which has an article on August 12, 2013 titled If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There’s no use being a damn fool about it. Mr. O’Toole found that it did not come from Fields, but was attributed to him after he had died. There are other versions with ‘silly’ rather than ‘a damn fool.’

 

There are two other variations by Barry Popik at The Big Apple. The first one from August 30, 2012 is:

 

“If at first you don’t succeed, redefine success.”

 

The second one from January 3, 2017 is:

 

“If at first you don’t succeed, try two more times so your failure is statistically significant.”

 

There is a third variation at an article in the 2015, Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs (by Jennifer Speake and J. A. Simpson):

 

“If at first you don’t succeed, try reading the instructions.”

 

Thomas H. Palmer’s original proverb had appeared on page 223 of his 1840 book titled The Teacher’s Manual. It is the third and fourth lines from a longer poem:

 

“TRY, TRY AGAIN

 

‘Tis a lesson you should heed,

Try, try again;

If at first you don’t succeed,

Try, try again;

Then your courage should appear,

For, if you will persevere,

You will conquer, never fear;

Try, try again;

 

Once or twice, though you should fail,

Try, try again;

If you would, at last prevail,

Try, try again;

If we strive, ‘tis no disgrace,

Though we may not win the race;

What should you do in the case?

Try, try again;

 

If you find your task is hard,

Try, try again;

Time will bring you your reward,

Try, try again;

All that other folks can do,

Why, with patience, should not you?

Only keep this rule in view,

TRY, TRY AGAIN”

 

Deceptive web designs (also known as dark patterns)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sometimes the jargon phrase applied to a concept is not obvious. The Wikipedia page for Dark Pattern says:

 

“A dark pattern (also known as a ‘deceptive design pattern’) is a user interface that has been carefully crafted to trick users into doing things, such as buying overpriced insurance with their purchase or signing up for recurring bills. User experience designer Harry Brignull coined the neologism on July 28, 2010 with the registration of darkpatterns dot org, a ‘pattern library with the specific goal of naming and shaming deceptive user interfaces.’ “

 

Mr. Brignull later renamed his web site Deceptive Design.

 

There is a detailed discussion of this nasty marketing topic in an article by Arvind Narayanan et al on pages 42 to 47 of the September 2020 issue of the Communications of the ACM titled Dark patterns: past, present and future. There is another description in an article by Sara Morrison at Vox on April 1, 2021 titled Dark patterns, the tricks websites use to make you say yes, explained. And on September 15, 2022 the U. S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has a press release titled FTC Report Shows Rise in Sophisticated Dark Patterns Designed to Trick and Trap Consumers, and a link to their 48-page staff report titled Bringing Dark Patterns to Light.

 

You also can find a pair of excellent brief articles by Kelly Leblanc at Information Today. One on November 16, 2021 is titled The Magic of Dark Patterns: Can We Evade Their Trickery? Another with a summary on December 1, 2022 is titled Dark Patterns Deep Dive. The latter article actually comes from a series of four others which unfortunately are not out on the web. I found them at EBSCOhost. Those article titles and dates are:

 

Dark Patterns Deep Dive: The Roach Motel - April 2022

 

Dark Patterns Deep Dive: Misdirection and Forced Continuity – July/August 2022

 

Dark Patterns Deep Dive: Confirshaming – October 2022

 

Dark Patterns Deep Dive: Bait and Switch – November 2022

 

Dark Patterns Deep Dive: with a section on Bait and Switch and Disguised Ads – December 2022

 

My graphic is modified from this cartoon at Wikimedia Commons and a devil at Openclipart.

 

Cooking food without adding any more heat

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What do you picture when cooking food is mentioned? Is it stir-frying over a flame, with continuous attention to keeping the food moving? But there also is different style of cooking without adding more heat or attention.

 

One example is a recipe at Food.com for Nif’s perfect poached egg. Water is boiled in a frying pan, and eggs are added. Then heat is turned off and the lid goes on (similar to the saucepan shown above). After about five minutes of waiting the eggs are ready. Another recipe by Alton Brown at FoodNETWORK is titled Perfect Poached Eggs. He also has a recipe for The Final Fried Eggs, which involves preheating a carbon steel frying pan in a 450 F oven to store heat. The the pan gets taken out and set down, a pat of butter and then two eggs are added. Then the pan gets covered, and after a four-minute wait the eggs are done.

 

Preparing polenta or grits sometimes is described with lots of details. An Italian grandma stirs polenta clockwise continuously, with a wooden spoon in a copper pan. I found a simpler recipe from Abra Berens on page 255 in her 2021 book Grist: A practical guide to cooking grains, beans, seeds, and legumes:

 

“For the longest time, cooking polenta or grits was my least favorite kitchen task. Inevitably throughout the process I was burned by molten hot porridge spilling from the pan. Said porridge, flung from the pot, would adhere to the kitchen wall (sometimes the ceiling). More often than I like to admit, the bottom of the pot would scorch, rendering the whole process futile.

 

To avoid all this, I devised a way to cook corn porridge with very minimal active heat, minimizing the potential for burning ourselves or the grits. Bring a pot of salted water four times the volume of grits you want to cook to a rolling boil, whisk in the ground corn, turn off the heat, and let the hot water hydrate the grits over the course of an hour or so. It worked perfectly and continues to be my preferred method to this day.”

 

Steel-cut oats typically take from a quarter to a half-hour to cook. At Food.com there is an alternative simple recipe for Steel cut oatmeal in a thermos overnight.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

These recipes depend on the stored heat from boiling water. They are analogous to a cyclist coasting downhill using stored potential energy (as shown above).

 

Other traditional recipes for group cooking call for using a fire to preheat rocks. Then they are  placed in a pit along with the food and covered.  Three examples are a clambake, bean hole beans, or a Kālua.

 

An image of a covered pan came from Wikimedia Commons. The cartoon cyclist came from Openclipart.

  

A misleading blog post titled Public Speaking Statistics: Recent Data from 2023

 

At Gitnux on March 20, 2023 there is a blog post by Oness Skander (originally from February 17, 2023) with a misleading title of

Public Speaking Statistics: Recent Data from 2023. But some are not from 2023, others are not recent, and some not even statistics. A box near the top is titled Public Speaking: The Most Important Statistics, and those three are:

 

The percentage of people who fear public speaking increased significantly from 73% in 2010 to 85% in 2019.

 

89.4% of people with social anxiety conditions had a fear of speaking publically.

 

61% claimed that public speaking improved their career opportunities.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Her first misleading and incomplete statement uses some results in a table from an article by Steven Zauderer at Cross River Therapy on January 11, 2023 titled 31 Fear of Public Speaking Statistics (Prevalence). But she omits his final entry of 75% for 2020, which breaks the preceding pattern, including the perfectly linear increase of a percent per year from 2011 to 2017. As shown above via a graph, for both 2011 and 2020 there was the same 75%.

 

And the 85% claimed to be for 2019 really comes from a 1988 article by Michael Motley. I blogged about it in a September 29, 2020 post titled A quantified version of a discredited Mark Twain quotation about fear of public speaking. Also, the 77% for 2013 likely really come from a 1999 article, which I blogged about in a post on October 12, 2020 titled Do 77% of Americans fear public speaking? No! That percentage described stage fright in Swedes who also had social anxiety disorder.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The article by Mr. Zauderer doesn’t identify where he got these percentages. They may come from different surveys asking somewhat different questions, and thus not be comparable. Instead I looked at the detailed results for the annual Chapman Survey of American Fears, and got the less clear pattern of percentages shown above. They are for a grand sum of Very Afraid plus Afraid plus Slightly Afraid. (There was no survey for 2020. One was done in January 2021 and reported as 2020-2021. The Chapman blog posts tabulate the sum for Very Afraid plus Afraid.)  

 

The second claim, of 89.4% is also cited in that article by Mr. Zauderer.  It comes from an article she referenced by Peter Khoury at Magnetic Speaking back in 2016 and titled 7 Unbelievable “Fear of Public Speaking” Statistics. He refers to an article by C. Faravelli et al at European Psychiatry on February 2000 titled Epidemiology of social Phobia: a clinical approach. That 89.4% comes from a survey on residents of Sesto Fiorentino, a suburb of Florence, Italy. I blogged about Mr. Khoury’s article in a post on December 15, 2016 titled Believable and unbelievable statistics about fears and phobias of public speaking.

 

Ms. Skander’s third Most Important Statistic is that:

 

“61% claimed that public speaking improved their career opportunities.”

 

But I could not find that percentage mentioned in any of her references.

 

Later she also claimed:

   

“This statistic is further corroborated by an online survey conducted by the National Speech Anxiety Institute, which found that 95% of those surveyed indicated some level of fear when giving a speech.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wikipedia defines a Googlewhack as a search that returns only one result. That’s what you get if you look up the phrase “National Speech Anxiety Institute” – just the Gitnux blog post. And a Bing search finds no results. But we can imagine their headquarters (shown above).    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Gitnux blog post also states (and shows this bogus pie chart, annotated by me in red):

   

“44% of women and 37% of men reported feeling anxious and afraid about speaking in front of an audience.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Those percentages come from an article by Geoffrey Brewer at Gallup on March 19, 2001 titled Snakes top list of Americans’ fears. How they should look in a horizontal bar chart comparing those two different genders is shown above.

 

The 1920s building came from Openclipart and The Scream came from Wikimedia Commons.

 

How to avoid using a fake quotation

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Research very carefully before you quote someone. The International Churchill Society has an article on January 17, 2023 titled Quotes falsely attributed to Winston Churchill. And Karena Phan at AP on October 7, 2022 has another article titled Conspiracy theory quote is falsely attributed to JFK. There is a third article by Olivia B. Waxman at TIME on September 22, 2017 titled Vice President Pence cited a fake Thomas Jefferson Quote. Here’s how to avoid the same mistake.

 

The Library of Congress Research Guides includes a web page on Finding Quotations. There also is a blog post by Sharon Rickson at the New York Public Library on November 22, 2013 titled How to Research a Quotation.

 

The silliest example I have found is described by Bodhipaksa at Lion’s Roar on November 8, 2017 in an article titled I can’t believe it’s not Buddha! The quote is:

 

“Happiness does not depend on what you have or who you are. It solely relies on what you think.”

 

But The Buddha didn’t say it. The salesman and motivational speaker Zig Ziglar did – about 2500 years later.

 

An image of a librarian at a reference desk was adapted from Openclipart.

 

When life gives you lemons, should you just make lemonade?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is an optimistic proverbial phrase, with its own Wikipedia page, that says: 

 

“When life gives you lemons, make lemonade”

 

But at the Smarter & Harder web site on March 16, 2022 Sam has an article titled When life gives you lemons, DON’T make lemonade, and he lists four things to do instead:

 

1)  Find out if you like lemons

2)  Leave the lemons where they are and bail

3)  Make life take the lemons back

4)  Make an Arnold Palmer [half lemonade & half iced tea]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As shown above, you can buy a premixed, tall can of Arnold Palmer. Further, there are at least two other things you could do.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One is to use those lemons to make a Lemon Battery.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another is to save those lemons for later by preserving them in a jar with salt. There is a recipe by Julia Moskin at Cooking New York Times for making Preserved Lemons. And there is an article by Zaynab Issa at Bon Appetit on February 8, 2023 titled 17 Salty-tangy preserved lemon recipes to use up the whole jar.

 

Last but not least, on March 8, 2023 Dave Kellett published a Sheldon comic strip with the proverbial title and the following text:

 

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade!

 

But to do that, you gotta buy a pound of sugar. Oh, and a pitcher. Get a pitcher while you’re there. And also one of those lemon-squeezy things. And water, of course.

 

When life gives you lemons, your troubles have only begun!

 

Images of lemons and a jar of preserved lemons came from Wikimedia Commons.   

 

Searching for doodads or thingamajigs at the hardware store

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 At a hardware store, searching for an item we don’t know the name of is a common problem. I usually take along an example or a picture of it, and then ask the clerk where it can be found. What Wikipedia calls an acorn nut is shown above. It has a domed end on one side, and an internal thread on the other. When used over the exposed end of an external thread, it covers and protects. That fastener also may be referred to as a crown hex nut, blind nut, cap nut, dome nut, or a domed cap nut (which is how this image is labeled at Wikimedia Commons).   

 

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a doodad as:  

 

“an often small article whose common name is unknown or forgotten”

 

And a thingamajig is:

 

“something that is hard to classify or whose name is unknown or forgotten”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The scaffold nails shown above are another type of fastener thingamajig. The McMaster-Carr hardware catalog helpfully lists them as Raised-Head Removable Nails and describes their use:

 

“Also known as scaffold and duplex nails, drive these nails in up to the first head and the second head remains exposed for easy removal.”

 

In the Wikipedia article on Nails this type is called duplex nails, and also termed double-headed, formwork, shutter, and scaffold.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There also are specialized tools like the basin wrench shown above. At the spruce there is an article about How to Use a Basin Wrench to install or remove a sink faucet. The image is from Wikimedia Commons.  

 

An article by Dan Nosowitz at Atlas Obscura on March 24, 2016 is titled The enduring mystery of ‘jawn,’ Philadelphia’s all-purpose noun. The Wikipedia article on Jawn declares that:

 

“Jawn is a slang term local to Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley that may refer to a thing, place, person, or event, substituting for a specific name. Jawn is a context-dependent substitute noun; a noun that substitutes for other nouns.”  

 

In the public library they didn’t shelve this CD where I had expected

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ken Jenkins was Toastmaster at last Wednesday’s meeting of the Pioneer Toastmasters Club. His theme was Early Rock n Roll Music, and among other things, he played part of an Everly Brothers song. The Wikipedia article says that The Everly Brothers:

 

“were an American rock duo, known for steel-string acoustic guitar playing and close harmony singing.”

 

A few days ago I went looking for an Everly Brothers CD under Rock at the Ada County library on Victory Road. All-Time Original Hits by The Everly Brothers was not there. As shown above, it instead was shelved earlier in the alphabet under Pop & Easy. But the Caldwell library has another CD, The Very Best of the Everly Brothers, shelved under Rock. At Ada on Victory I also found Ladies of the Canyon, the 1970 third album by Joni Mitchell, shelved under Pop & Easy. To me it obviously instead belongs under Folk.

 

How things should be classified may not be obvious. Before I go to either the Lake Hazel or Victory Road library I usually check in the Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC) and write down where to find a book, CD, or DVD of interest. Wikipedia defines taxonomy as:

 

“the practice and science of categorization or classification”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A book or otherr item may be classified in more than one category, as shown above. A primary one gets chosen. Public Speaking books are shelved under 808.51, while Business Presentations are under 658.45.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As shown above, hose washers are rubber seal rings which sit in the female end fitting on a garden hose. Where would I find them shelved at a home improvement and hardware store like Lowe’s? Are they inside, in the aisle with plumbing supplies, near the other faucet washers? No,  they are outside in the Garden and Lawn department, next to the garden hoses.

 

A YouGov survey on ten things that Britons fear or have a phobia of

 

There is an interesting article by Peter Raven at YouGov UK on February 27, 2023 titled What do Britons say they have a phobia of? It describes results from a survey of about 2000 adults done on January 19 and 20 which asked about the following ten things (in alphabetical order):

 

Clowns

Dogs

Enclosed spaces

Flying

Going to the Dentist

Heights

Needles

Public speaking

Snakes

Spiders

 

One set of questions was about phobias:

 

“For the following question by phobia we mean an overwhelming and debilitating fear of an object, place, situation, feeling or animal … Which, if any, of the following would you say you have a phobia of?”

 

Another set was about fears, and asked about four levels: Very scared, Somewhat scared, Not really scared, and Not scared at all (plus Don’t know). All the detailed results are listed in tables that can be downloaded via a .pdf file.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Results for phobias are shown above in a horizontal bar chart. The five most common are heights (23%), spiders (21%), public speaking (15%), snakes (14%), and enclosed spaces (13%).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Results for phobias by gender are shown in a second horizontal bar chart. There are some large differences. Spiders are feared by 26% of females, but only 16% of males. Heights are feared by 24% of females and a similar 22% of males. Enclosed spaces are feared by 17% of females, but only 10% of males. Public speaking also is feared by 17% of females but only 13% of males. And snakes also are feared by 17% of females but only 11% of males.

 

In the YouGov article they showed a single graphic with three horizontal bar charts for phobias – the usual blue for Males, but red for all Britons (instead of Females) and purple for Females. On March 10, 2023 I blogged about their Comically poor color coding of bar charts in a survey of ten fears and phobias.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Results for fears (the sum for Very Scared and Somewhat Scared) are shown in a third bar chart. The five most common are public speaking (39%) heights (37%), snakes (33%), spiders (24%), and enclosed spaces (22%).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Results by gender for fears (the sum for Very Scared and Somewhat Scared) are shown in a fourth bar chart. There are some large differences again. Public speaking is feared by 48% of females but only 30% of males. Heights are feared by 44% of females and again 30% of males. Snakes are feared by 40% of females, but only 28% of males. Spiders are feared by 33% of females, but just 15% of males. Enclosed spaces are feared by 30% of females, but again only 15% of males.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The second graphic in the YouGov article (with a set of stacked bar charts) is shown above. As I discussed previously, it has a confusing color shift from red to purple.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But worse yet, it is quite misleading. It presents overstuffed and then rescaled numbers. As shown above, for Heights, the real data is for Very scared, Somewhat scared, Not really scared, Not scared at all, and Don’t know – which should add to almost a hundred percent. The 23% for Phobia does not belong in that stacked chart – it is from a different question. When included and rescaled it alters and falsifies the data from what is in the tables. For example, the percentage for Very scared drops from 32 to 25, and that for Somewhat scared from 35 to 27.

 

The article text claims:

 

“Including the aforementioned 23% who say they have a phobia of heights, half of Britons (52%) say they have some form of fear of being up high, with the further 29% being either ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ scared of heights.”

 

That fear of being up high really isn’t 29%, it is 37% (5% plus 32%).

 

The third misleading graphic in the article claims to show the effect of gender on the sum of a phobia and very plus somewhat scared. It also is peculiarly color coded with pink for males (labeled as men) and purple for females (labeled as women).  Let’s again look at results for heights. The graphic shows 46% for men and 57% for women. Subtracting the phobia results of 22% for men and 24% for women leaves a claimed sum of 24% for men and 33% for women. But for men the table instead shows 3% for Very scared and 27% for Somewhat scared – a sum of 30% (not 24%!). And for women the table instead shows 6% for Very scared and 38% for Somewhat scared – a sum of 44% (not 33%!). Putting it another way, while the graphic shows 46% for men and 57% for women those silly sums should be 52% for men and 68% for women.  Like the second graphic, the third graphic presents overstuffed and then rescaled numbers.  

 

 

Comically poor color coding of bar charts in a survey on ten fears and phobias

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is an interesting article by Peter Raven at YouGov on February 27, 2023 titled What do Britons say they have a phobia of? The first graphic he showed (see above for my comical version) had me laughing. The usual stereotyped way to show gender is to use pink for Female, blue for Male, and purple (their sum) for Everyone. But he used pink for Britons and purple for Females!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That stereotype is shown above, as is a typical monochrome color coding for intensity in stacked bar charts. Don’t Know should be gray and come last.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But, as shown above (in another comical version), on a stacked bar chart he instead put Don’t Know in the middle, and shifted colors from red to purple. And for Not Scared At All he reused the same shade of purple that had represented Female in the first chart! That stacked bar chart has other issues which I will discuss later in another post.  

 

The cartoon man was borrowed from here at Wikimedia Commons.

 

An excellent article by writer Clive Thompson on how he researches a new subject

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At Dan Russell’s SearchResearch blog on March 3, 2023 there is a post titled PSA: Read Clive Thompson’s article about how he does research. That article is at Medium on February 27, 2023 and is titled How I Research a New Subject. Clive discusses seven topics:

 

1]  Start by getting a 50,000-foot-in-the-air view

2]  Go deeper with scholarly and industry material

3]  Take tons of notes

4]  Look for experts and people with authority

5]  Follow up on ‘everything’

6]  Persist, persist, persist

7]  Seek ‘saturation’

 

His third paragraph under #1 says:

 

“So I start by doing what I think of as ‘50,000-foot-in-the-air’ reading. I’ll hunt down a couple dozen good articles on the subject from newspapers, magazines or white papers that are aimed at laypeople, and read them all. This stuff isn’t deep, but it’s broad. It orients me to the major concepts, jargon, controversies, and personalities in a field. Wikipedia can often be surprisingly good for this purpose.”

 

Clive doesn’t say where he finds those good newspaper and magazine articles. It might just be out in the open on the web. On February 23, 2020 I blogged about Finding speech topics and doing research. In that post I discussed an example of an obscure but useful magazine called Vital Speeches of the Day, and described how it could be read on the EBSCOhost database that can be accessed from the web site for my friendly, local public library.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a 2019 book by Clive titled Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World. That title points out a problem with getting started on a new subject - terminology can shift over time. When you look at Google's Ngram Viewer, as shown above, you will see that coders is a newer term. I learned about programming computers back in the 1960s at an Explorer post in Pittsburgh. Back then we called ourselves programmers, not coders.

 

In my 2020 blog post I referred to another post from February 4, 2019 titled Reliable places to find information for your speeches. In that post I suggested starting by interviewing a reference librarian at your friendly local public library. Ask him or her both about books, and which of their databases you can best use. You might get referred to a book in the For Dummies or Complete Idiot’s Guide to series. If you asked a librarian about Clive’s book, then they might look up Coders as a keyword in their Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC). They could tell you to find Coders and similar books indexed by subject under Computer Programmers.  

 

Under #4 he mentions that since he’s a reporter he will keep track of the experts (and their categories), since they will be people he’ll call to interview. An older blog post of mine on July 8, 2010 is titled Web search: 10 strategies for various occasions. Number 8 is to Find Someone Who Cares. Look for an Expert on the topic, and then contact him or her by email, phone, or in person. When I looked at PubMed Central, I found an article by Megan Hienicke et al in the March 2022 issue of Behavior Analysis in Practice titled Improving behavior analysts’ public speaking: recommendations from expert interviews.

 

On April 25, 2021 I blogged about The Joy of Search, a 2019 book by Daniel M. Russell, is an extremely useful guide about how to do research both online and offline.

 

The silhouette of a man’s head came from Openclipart.