Seasick On the Queen Mary

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I've never taken a cruise, and you couldn't get me on one with a gun to my head. One reason, among hundreds of others, is that waaaaaay too often, we see reports like this of infectious illnesses on cruise ships:

The cruise liner Queen Mary 2 has been sidetracked by an outbreak of what appears to have been norovirus contagion that sickened over 200 passengers and crew during a 12-day Christmas cruise in the Caribbean that was to have ended on Thursday. According to the latest update by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 201 of the ship's 2,613 passengers have become ill and 14 of the 1,255 crew, and the main symptoms of the illness -- which the CDC  lists as still "unknown" in origin -- are vomiting and diarrhea.

Norovirus, the common culprit in cruise ship contagion outbreaks, is one of those awful illnesses that is spread from person to person and caused by contaminated food or water.

The CDC says that two of its environmental health officers and an epidemiologist will board the Queen Mary 2 on its expected arrival in Brooklyn on Thursday to conduct an assessment.

The Queen Mary 2 operates under the Cunard Line brand of the Carnival cruise giant. In June of 2011, the Queen Mary 2 flunked a Vessel Sanitation Program health-inspection by the Centers for Disease Control and Inspection. According to Cruisecritic.com, CDC inspectors found dozens of violations, including some involving ice machines. "The word 'filthy' is used in the report five times," says the Cruisecritic.com item. Oddly, Cruisecritic.comhttp://www.cruisecritic.com/news/ -- which I found on a few occasions in the past to have exhibited some interest in critical cruise news -- seems to be uninterested in the current crisis on the Queen Mary.

The Queen Mary 2 is currently "at sea" and steaming toward New York, according to the Cunard Web site.

Anyway:

Here's a link to the CDC situation report on the current crisis.

Here is a link to the CDC report on the failed inspection in June 2011.

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Google's Really Advanced Search

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You've know doubt heard of Advanced Search. How about Really Advanced Search?

I spotted this at the bottom of a Google Search Results page today and had to take a look.

Among the search features, including the usual ones, are:

• words almost, but not quite entirely unlike:
• rhyming slang for:
• this exact word or phrase, whose sum of unicode code points is a mersenne prime:
• subtext or innuendo for:

and this:

• the words , but not , unless they contain either the intersection of phrases , , and or a gerund in which case the disjunction of and will also be taken into account (on Tuesdays). 

At the bottom of the page are also several links:

You can also... Tickle a unicorn Download our ranking code so you can run Google at home Search by odor Some of the features of really advanced search might make a good coding project. They might also be a challenge to explain. But they really make a better April Fools Joke.

Tips from Google: What's Missing?

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One of my colleague's recent bookmarks caught my eye:  How to solve impossible problems.  
The link is to a story by John Tedesco of the San Antonio Times about Google search guru Daniel Russell who posed a daunting challenge to a room full of investigative journalists:

What’s the phone number of the office where this picture was snapped?

Here's the photo:
What makes this challenge difficult is that there is no direct information about the office from which the picture was snapped.
According to the article, "(Russell) wasn’t asking for a phone number for the skyscraper in the picture, which sounds hard enough. He wanted the phone number of the precise office where the photographer was standing when the picture was taken.  Nothing in that office was even in the photo. Yet in a few minutes, Russell, a research scientist at Google, revealed the answer by paying attention to small details and walking us through a series of smart Google searches."

Yes, most of us don't put Google's full power to use. Advanced features can make searching more surgical.  The article goes on to illustrate Boolean modifiers (what works and doesn't) as well as operators many people haven't tried lately, if ever. It's a good summary; take a look.
But Google is all about finding. Nothing about how good a result may be. This is typical of most students. We laugh when we hear "If it's on the Internet, it must be true," but that's how students actually behave. We're getting better at finding. We've made little progress at evaluating.
It's really not Google's business to tell us what to believe. And we resist attempts at interference when it comes to second-guessing what we want to see--although search engines are paying attention to what we click and are influenced by our choices.  Which is why it becomes all the more important that we develop good investigative habits.
Spoiler Alert
I managed to find an answer I'm pretty sure is right, but there is still some conjecture involved. If you'd like to solve Russell's challenge, go ahead. Answers are easy to find, thanks to Google.  Here's Russell's blog, and some answers.  Did I/they get it right?

A Search I Couldn't Find

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I'm certain it happens to all of us.  We just can't find something we're looking for. We run out of options and/or energy and have to give up (for now or for good). It's one reason why I consider information research mastery on the Internet to be somewhere around 80%.

This happened to me recently while looking online for information about a musical score. A member of my church (where I'm the music director) recommended an arrangement of a hymn she heard while on vacation. Here's an excerpt from her email:

"I was in Albuquerque in May for my granddaughter's high school graduation; she played a recital on violin accompanied on piano. There was a beautiful arrangement of "Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing, arranged by Paul Bailey and Charles Romer.  It would be a beautiful piece to play on a Sunday morning if you know of a violinist."

Normally, this would be plenty of information to track the piece down to a source.  I was hoping to find a copy to download (for free or a license), but would have settled to find the publisher and order a copy.

A sensible query would be:  come thou font of every blessing paul bailey charles romer.  It's pretty long, but to find the song title and the arrangers, this seems like the best path.  But it doesn't work. In Google, you get about six relevant entries matching the title and arrangers before Charles Dickens references start popping up--apparently the most popular match for Charles. None of the results is a musical score or a path to a score.

Putting quotes around the title is risky. Am I sure the title is spelled correctly or includes only these words?  There is another spelling for fount (font). Putting quotes around the arrangers names may also eliminate all the instances where a middle initial is used. But it's worth a try. Quotes around the title returns 2 results, neither of which is relevant. Quotes around the arrangers names (separately) returns about 6 results, none of which is a musical score. The results are mainly bulletins that shows the song was performed in a service.

Hmm.

I thought I would try a Deep Web search by going to a database of scores and publishers. The biggies in this field (e.g., www.sheetmusicplus.com, jwpepper.com, etc.) don't list the song with these arrangers. There are plenty of arrangements of the song, but by different arrangers. This is starting to feel like looking for a needle in a haystack. But which Deep Web haystack?

Advanced search filters didn't help, limiting results to violin and title or arrangers produced no relevant results that lined up all the information.


I did find the music online and downloaded it. But the granddaughter first had to share a link with me. Sometimes the quickest way is still to ask someone who knows.

There are other clues such as the publisher of the music that may be found just with good searching.  I found that before I gave up. I'll leave that as the challenge. Who published the music? And if you're up for a tough challenge, where can you download a copy?

Searching isn't as hard as Thinking.

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Just google it. You're bound to find something you're looking for.
Finding is no longer the challenge it once was. Knowing what you are looking for remains no easy matter.

Asking the right question usually precedes touching a computer. What are the hours of the Louvre? Go to the computer. What is 4 degrees Celsius in degrees Fahrenheit? Go to the computer.

These are the average one-off questions an Internet search is really good--and fast--at answering.

But what about the occasional harder question? Harder questions include: a) those that lack precision in what is being asked, b) those with competing or rival answers and c) those with no known answers.  Googling the Internet is not particularly useful at answering this last type.

A and B type questions occur frequently and make easy searching harder. I've blogged before on the need to fact check B type questions to avoid trusting misleading and/or malicious information. Investigative searching is a remedy for establishing the credibility of answers.

Let's focus on A, ambiguous questions. These are questions that may be answered different ways (with different answers) and still be right. An example used on our web site is for the search challenge: What is the top speed of earth's fastest animal? Like most ambiguous questions, this question is unintentionally ambiguous. Only after searching and finding rival answers does its ambiguity become increasingly apparent. This requires real thinking.

Skimming the top ten Google results for the query speed fastest animal, possible answers include:

• cheetah (3)
• peregrine falcon (2)
• sailfish (2)
• pronghorn antelope
• wildebeest
• lion
• thompson's gazelle
• quarter horse
• man
• cow dropped from a helicopter

The student is confronted by a common problem: which one is right? The underlying problem is not that there are multiple answers (which one is right?) but that these are answers to different questions (which question am I supposed to answer?).

The problem could be simplified by rethinking the question: what animal travels the fastest? Now the differences between air, water and land don't factor in (cheetah is fastest on land, sailfish is fastest in water and peregrine falcon is fastest in air). The fastest speed belongs to the falcon.

But another search result--a cow dropped from a helicopter--reveals further ambiguity in the question. The originator of the question may have assumed the animal needs to travel under its own power. In that case, the falcon, which 'cheats' by virtue of gravity, could be bested by the cheetah. By the same token, what prevents an astronaut orbiting the earth from beating the falcon? It ultimately depends on the question.

The example is ridiculous but illustrates how 'right' answers may differ depending on how a question is interpreted and how thinking is aided by searching. Questions that leave room for interpretation make Internet searching more difficult (and may be more interesting). Teachers are advised to try the searches their students are likely to use in an attempt to avoid asking ambiguous questions and inviting 'smart' answers in return.

For the individual, questions may be improved the same way: try a search and see what happens. Don't expect the best answer the first time because the right question has not yet been asked. It's very hard to think of a question you haven't though of yet. Iterative queries are good at helping discover and refine questions.

So, how would you ask the fastest speed question? Go ahead and post your response.

Here are a couple more ambiguous questions that need refinement. See if you can figure out an unambiguous question without searching; then try a search.

• How many buffalo are living in North America today? link
• Between 1918 and 2012, in what year did Americans pay the most for a gallon of gas? link

Crazy in America

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[UPDATED] 
Christmas Day brings more detailed news of still another horrific shooting massacre, this one caused by a lunatic in upstate New York who set a house fire on Monday in order to ambush responding firefighters. The gun he used for the killings was the same model of semi-automatic-like assault rifle, a Bushmaster .223 (a civilian version of the military M16), as the weapon  used by another lunatic to kill those little children and those teachers in Connecticut less than two weeks ago.

The New York Times story on the latest shooting (link) is far better than the Rochester paper's (and the Buffalo News only runs wire, sadly, and, pathetically, so on Wednesday does the hometown Rochester Deomocrat & Chronicle, a Gannett paper, natch).  The killer shot and murdered two firefighters, and injured two others as they responded to the fire. Today, authorities found the body of another victim, believed to be the killer's 67-year-old sister, in the rubble of the burned house in Webster, N.Y. 

The killer, this Spengler, had a long rap sheet. In 1981, the Times story says, "he pleaded guilty to manslaughter for bludgeoning his 92-year-old grandmother to death with a hammer. He was imprisoned until 1998."

(Wait a minute, you and I are asking: He hammered his granny to death and got off with manslaughter and a sentence of less than 20 years? Explanation, please!)

But I was taken with a statement from the understandably deeply grieving fire chief, Gerald L. Pickering (emphasis mine): “We know that people are slipping through the cracks, not getting the help they need. And I suspect that this gentleman slipped through the cracks. Maybe he should have been under more intense supervision, maybe he should not have been in the public, maybe he should have been institutionalized, having his problems dealt with.”

I take no issue with a deeply distraught fire chief, but I do with the tenor of the times and with journalism, this reflexive assumption that somebody like this murdering psychotic needs "help." Let's examine that for a minute. A fellow who bludgeoned his grandmother to death, who is known locally as a dangerous lunatic, who proclaims that he wants to kill as many people as he can, who sets a fire in order to ambush firefighters, four of whom he shoots and two of whom he killed (plus the victinm found today in the rubble, so far publicly unidentified) -- this man does not need our "help." Rather, it's we who need help. Society needs help in the form of protection from a murdering maniac like this.

Chief Pickering is exactly correct when he says that "maybe he should have been institutionalized." That is, locked up -- not for his own good, to hell with him, but for the good of society.

To the extent that the mental health industry actually cares about treating the severely mentally ill (and the evidence is, the industry cares not very much at all for that mostly futile, largely unrewarding chore), the touchiest clinical subject at hand is the idea of institutionalizing the severely mentally ill who pose real and present danger to society. There is, for one thing, no money to be made in that. And, of course, there is the horrific history of the grim state-run mental hospitals (most of which were basically patronage mills for the benefit of state politicians).

On the other hand, until the insane asylums were emptied out in the 1960s and 1970s, there was, in fact, a place for society to keep people like Spengler (and the maniac who shot those children, and the other maniac who shot my congresswoman Gabby Giffords and all those others in Tucson, ad infinitum) away from the rest of us.

The subject of some form of reinstitutionalization is enormously complex and fraught with social danger, especially in a health-care system in which mental health services are a profit center, as they have been since the 1980s. Who decides? But I would submit that in a case like Spengler, institutionalizing him was not even a close call. And  Lanza in Connecticut, or Loughner in Tucson, among others in our pantheon of mass murderers probably would have had no problem making the cut, either, in an intelligently and honestly run mental health system.

In a note left at the crime scene before he shot himself, this Spengler clearly self-diagnoses: homicidal maniac. "I still have to see how much of the neighborhood I can burn down and so what I like doing best: Killing people," the note reads in part.

Incidentally, the promise inherent in deinstitutionalization was that after we closed the horrible industrialized public insane asylums, we would establish in their place effective, adequately funded community mental health centers, emphasis on "community," where a range of critical-care services would be available, and where clinical psychiatrists and other trained professionals would be able to closely monitor cases from a local perspective. In other words, a Spengler or a Lanza or a Loughner would be on the radar, at least.

[UPDATE: Wednesday's Times has an op-ed piece by a psychiatrist named Paul Steinberg who assumes the sanctioned industry position on whatever the hell schizophrenia actually is -- which officially sanctioned position is, that it is a diagnosable physical disease (hence treatable with reimbursement under insurance policies, at least for those who have enough insurance).  Steinberg mentions another homicidal mass murderer, the one who massacred 32 people at Virginia Tech in 2007 (emphasis mine): "At Virginia Tech, where Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people in a rampage shooting in 2007, professors knew something was terribly wrong, but he was not hospitalized for long enough to get well." The assumption being that this particular homicidal maniac might have gotten  well through intervention and therapy, rather than that society could have been protected through custody.]
 
After deinstutionalization and the concept of genuine community mental health clinical care went terribly wrong, nearly all mental health money flowed toward luring the worried well into treatment. As the psychiatry establishment, long a kind of orphan child in medicine, sold its soul to profiteers, it gained unaccustomed hospital-industry respect as financial rainmakers, if not as physicians. The promise of deinstitutionalization and community mental health. focused on the truly mentally ill, was cynically dashed. The desperate homeless roaming city streets were only the most visible, and in many ways benign, consequence. The Spenglers and Lanzas and Loughners and were the real payoff. (Abetted, of course, by the gun lobby that ensured that homicidal maniacs could be armed to the teeth with the latest in murderous assault weaponry).


The subject of critical mental-health care is on the table again, and I'm currently working on a revision and update of my 1994 book "Bedlam: Greed, Profiteering and Fraud in a Mental Health System Gone Crazy" (St. Martin's Press), under a new title, "Crazy in America," and a new publisher.

The book is focused on the greatest health-care financial fraud of them all, the pillaging of the mental-health-care system by rapacious for-profit psychiatric hospitals and affiliated therapists, including alcohol and addiction charlatans, in the 1990s. But the book also provided a primer on the sordid history of mental-health care in this country, where the money all started flowing toward the "worried well" who had insurance to bilk, and away from the truly crazy, who tend not to have much insurance coverage to bilk, tend to resist treatment, and in many cases are impossible to cure anyway.

"Bedlam" will be reissued, in a revised edition, as "Crazy in America," in the spring.

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Department of Worthless Surveys, Air Travel Division

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Whenever I see that the source of a particular piece of news is the U.K., I slip on my skeptical specs.

And here today we see, getting some mileage in slooow-day news reports where editors know nothing about travel (which is nearly all of them), a survey on flight attendants' pet peeves about passengers that seems to reflect realities that haven't been real in several decades.

It's via Skyscanner, a British (uh-oh) site that purports to have its finger on the pulse of air travel, and purports to have surveyed 700 "cabin crew members" (translation: flight attendants) on their complaints about passengers. (I'm waiting for a survey of passengers on their complaints about flight attendants, but oh well).

Annotated in my italics:

Top complaint (26 percent); "Clicking fingers to get your attention." Now really, when is the last time you saw that on a flight, or even had the presumption that a flight attendant had the time, or inclination, to respond? 

No. 5: "Talking through the safety demo." Yes, let us not deny the flight attendant the opportunity to explain how to buckle that seat belt without distractions from a passenger in the middle seat of row 28, arms pinned to his side as the five-hour flight begins, gasping for air.

No. 6: "Asking for more blankets/pillows." More?!!

No. 8: "Asking for a different meal." Different meal?!! They don't even pass out peanuts these days.

No. 10: "Asking for a specific brand of drink." Coffee, tea, or you're under arrest for disrupting a flight.

Here's the link to this giddy survey.

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