The Other Side Will Make You Grow Taller
Google Search: 15,500,000
Google Scholar Search: 1,410,000
SUMMON: 1,205,345
One Side of What?
Finding What You Need and Not the Whole World
Vedana Vaidhyanathan M.S.L.S.
Begin at the Beginning
The Other Side of What?
One Side Will Make You Grow Smaller
Keep in Mind the Politics of a topic
- Remember that a search engine like Google will give you everything
- Putting in more details gives you a smaller amount of search results
- Or use a specialized database
- Peak oil and green employment (Peak oil AND green employment) G: 1,830,000 GS: 83,700
- congestion taxes on cars in central cities (Congestion Taxes AND Cars AND central cities) G: 1,440,000 GS: 70,700
- the carbon footprint of ethanol (Carbon footprint AND ethanol) G: 337,000 GS: 39,200
- Climate change is a topic that can make people angry.
- Sometimes the information you find can be biased away or toward a specific opinion.
- Look for websites that end in governmental or non-profit or education suffixes (.gov, .org, .edu)
Any Questions?
Look for Information from other countries
Of the Mushroom!
From Spore to Mushroom
Other countries consider climate change differently than the US.
Try looking at Canadian or British websites to see if the information is different.
What would you trust?
- Going from the small amount of information to a larger amount of information can happen quickly
- Information is constantly changing and relying on quality information is a must.
- If what you are looking for is Data, go here: http://catalog.data.gov/dataset
Datasets are like Mycelium
- Using Library databases intead of a search engine (even Google Scholar) can create an interesting fact finding system that mushrooms
- Start out small and then grow, instead of starting out big and going small
- Start out with an encyclopedia entry like Wikipedia or Encyclopedia for Global Change http://bit.ly/1H3q3vw
They can be used to grow a project or they can sink it if the data does not exist yet.
If there is no hard data on your subject, do not give up hope!
Newspapers often contain data that has not been analyzed yet: http://www.50states.com/news/