Posts from — June 2007

Educators routinely discuss how students have trouble evaluating and using the results of their Google searches. There are really two parts to this problem, though, and while it’s true that students may struggle to identify reliable sources, before we can address that, we need to teach them how to write good queries.

It’s that old computer science maxim: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

I like to teach students how to write interesting queries by playing games. This games force students to think about the queries they are writing, and not the results. I have no scientific proof of the results, but I do know that it keeps them entertained and thinking for a while!

My favorite games:

• Google Whack – The classic! Find a two-word query, with no punctuation, that return one and only one result. The Google Whacks on the site would make great spam subect lines.
• Google Image Labeler – A game that Google created. You are matched up with a random partner, and together, presented with images. You guess labels for the image, and when you and your partner match, you get points and move onto the next image. Each round lasts two minutes.In addition to providing a tool for procrastination, this is one way for Google to automatically provide appropriate text labels to images. It gets the group thinking about how the search engines work!
• What’s more popular? With Google Trends! – Create small teams. They each get to pick a term, and compare the popularity using Google Trends. Teams pick words at the same time, and the team with the best two of three wins. You can optionally restrict the domain; for example, all guesses must be vegetables.
• Finally, Googlenope – Proposed by Gene Weingarten in today’s Washington Post, a Googlenope is a search term or phrase that does not exist on the web. Until you find it and write about it, that is!

If anyone has a favorite that I’ve missed, please comment!

It’s common knowledge that academic job announcements are seasonal. In general, hiring committees are formed in the fall; they announce positions, wait a month or two for applications, then spend weeks interviewing candidates before making a decision in March or April for positions that will begin the following September. I found some data to prove it, and to possibly guide those engaged in an academic job search.

I was playing with Indeed.com’s job trends feature, when I realized that you could search not only for particular skills and specializations, but for job categories. A search for “professor” reveals some nice peaks right around mid-October.

While a search for “postdoc” isn’t quite so periodic.

I can only guess that this can possibly be attributed to trends in funding for postdoctoral positions. It would be interesting to see if there is a correlation with NSF funding for science research.

We know it’s good to look for professorships in October, but does this hold true across all fields? Searching by a generic field name (“physics”, for example) doesn’t do much good, as it picks up all of the job posts that are looking for majors in that area. But we can look for specializations. For example, the graph for “superconductivity”, we see:

Which shows that the majority of positions are announced between October and January, and that the summer is the worst time to find one.

I tried to think up specializations in the humanities, to see if the pattern held. A search for “egyptology” gives us this graph:

I’ll allow you to draw your own conclusions.