Tag Archives: Software

Improve Your Results with Google’s Advanced Power Searching MOOC

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A magnifying glass over shag carpet

At ProfHacker, we’re big fans of all things Google. We like Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, and even have a soft spot for Google Hangouts, the video chat tool that includes document sharing and editing. Google does so much for us, it is sometimes hard to remember that it all started with its eponymous search tool. (Of course, Google doesn’t really do anything for us; as Amy pointed out last year when Google’s new privacy policy went into effect, we are not Google’s customers so much as its products. Siva Vaidhyanathan has a few things to say about the Googlization of Everything as well.)

Now, you might think that there’s not a lot that you need to know about searching with Google. It more or less does what you want it to: find what you’re looking for on the Internet. But then again, I’m betting that ProfHacker readers know a thing or two more about searching than the average undergrad student. The use of quotation marks, for instance, to search for a specific phrase is invaluable. And if you’ve ever come across a site with a bad internal search tool (as is the case with many universities), you might have found a lot to marvel at in the “site:” command. (In short, put your search terms and follow it with the domain you want searched, e.g., “croxall site:chronicle.com“. [Bonus tip: Set up site searches you use frequently as Text Expander snippets! --@JBJ])

It turns out that Google is pretty concerned with helping people use its tools more effectively and information literacy in general. This is why they created “Google Search Education,” which George covered in two posts last year about teaching students to search and a follow-up on the same. But starting today there’s even more to learn about searching on Google. Today, Google launches its own version of a MOOC, or massively open online course, on Advanced Power Searching. Registration is—of course—free, and according to the site, you will be able to complete the course at your own pace and on your own time. The course will be structured around particular challenges that will require Google searches. For example, this teaser video asks you to find the name of the chief engineer of the Golden Gate Bridge, the name of a traffic flow invention that he patented, the patent number, and an image of the device.

(Spoiler: Joseph Strauss, Overhead Crossing Signal, 1,967,380, and here.) By the end of the course, you should have a bevy of new skills: know how to use various search operators (including the AROUND operator, that I don’t know anything about), have the ability to filter content by Creative Commons license, set Google Alerts, and make the most of Google Trends. If you complete the different assignments in the course by February 8, you’ll receive a certificate. Woot?

If you’re still warming up to MOOCs, a subject that Douglas H. Fisher covered this past November, this Google experience might be just the opportunity to try one on for size. If you want to know more about searching but don’t think you’re ready for “advanced” power searching, you could check out last year’s course on plain ol’  ”power searching.” I’ve never had the time to participate in a MOOC before, so this is going to be my first exploration, and I hope to report back in a few weeks about what I’ve learned through my experience.

What are your favorite power searching tips? Let us know in the comments!

Lead image: Magnifying glass / Ivy Dawned / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

Zotero Quick Tip: Transform Title Text

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Big Red Lowercase Letters

Have you ever used Zotero to grab a citation from a library or journal database, only to have to retype the title of the article because it’s not capitalized correctly? Or maybe the article has a superfluous space before a colon that you have to manually edit out?

I don’t know about you, but dealing with these nagging little details takes some of the magic out of the otherwise automagical powers of Zotero. A while ago I tweeted my frustration with this problem and asked if there was some way Zotero could automatically reformat lowercase titles into proper title capitalization.

And guess what?

Sheila Brennan, the Associate Director of Public Projects at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (developers of Zotero), wrote back with this quick and useful tip: Right-click in the title field in Zotero and you’ll have an option to transform the text to the title case. This trick will also remove those extra spaces before colons! On a Mac the trick works with a CTRL-click. I’ve tested this trick out on the Zotero Firefox extension and the standalone Zotero, and it works on both.

To recap: transform title capitalization in Zotero by right-clicking (PC) or CTRL-clicking (Mac) in the title field.

big red plastic letters photo courtesy of Flickr user David Salafia / Creative Commons License

Ye Olde iPhone Backup Server

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Toolboth Tavern 04 by Shadowgate, on FlickrDo you have an old smart phone, tablet, or computer in a drawer or a closet somewhere that you never got around to selling or giving away? You might consider setting it up as a development server as Jason describes here. You can also set it up to act as an extra layer in your backup strategy.

This is what I decided to do with an old iPhone 3GS that still worked, except a testy headphone connection, that had a nice 32GB of space on it. I wanted an extra place to backup my mail and dump larger files quickly for transfer to other devices that might connect to my local network (including guests who visit). While I won’t go into all the steps in complete detail, here is basically what was required to get this up and running (I’m writing here from perspective of using an iPhone and connecting to it from other OS X devices):

  1. If you have an iPhone or iPad (rather than an Android or other mobile operating system) you will need to first Jailbreak it in order to allow it to perform its new duties. Amy Cavender and Ethan Watrall have written more about what that means here at ProfHacker here and here. Depending on your version of iOS and which device you have, this may take a little googling about how to download the necessary software and perform the jailbreak.
  2. Once your device is jailbroken, you will likely have to install one of the standard “Networking” packages in Cydia called “OpenSSH.”
  3. Plug your old device in and leave it somewhere with a good connection to your local home network.
  4. Find out the IP address of your device. You will use this to connect to your device and copy files. On the iPhone or iPad go into “Settings > wifi > your connection” and look under the IP address listed there.
  5. Now you should be able to connect to your device with SSH or SFTP. Use an FTP application (such as cross-platform FileZilla, or Fetch and CyberDuck on OS X), configure it to use SFTP, and connect to your device with the IP address you took note of. Your main user on the iPhone should be the “root” account so use that for username (any tips out there for best way of creating new users on a jailbroken iPhone to use instead?) and the default password is “alpine.” This absolutely must be changed to stand any chance at security. To change it, connect via SSH connect to the phone and change the password of root to something else. You may wish to look into further ways to restrict access to the machine to only other computers on the local network.

Optional: If you know you will be connecting a lot to your backup server from various applications, it can be annoying to remember the IP address. You can call it something else by modifying a kind of a personal phone book called your “hosts” file. Editing this file you can, for example, change the less than memorable 10.0.1.16 to something like “oldman.” Then, when you connect to it, you need only enter the latter into the server address.

Bonus: In OS X can also connect to your phone directly from the Finder if you install one of various packages for jailbroken phones that enable connections through “AFP.”

For More Seasoned Hackers: Get lighthttpd or Apache web server up and running on your iPhone to use it as a kind of home network home page, serving information to your guests about their home or a standard set of files (“house-FAQ.pdf” or “guide-to-getting-shower-temperature-just-right.pdf” anyone?). Or, get standard development tools and languages running on the iPhone. As with hosting any web servers or servers on a local machine, this comes with additional security risks so be sure to keep this in mind and learn about how you can restrict access and “harden” your installations.

Gold Hacker Medal: Replace iOS completely with Linux and give your iPhone a new life.

Has anyone else found useful things to do with old smartphones and tablets they have?

Creative Commons licensed photo by Shadowgate

Digital Distractions: The Grading Game

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Exam resultsGiven the popularity of phrases like “grading jail” to describe the stress of the competing demands to offer meaningful feedback in the shortest amount of time possible, it seems unlikely that there’s any fun to be had in grading papers as part of a game, but that is the wager of The Grading Game, by modes of expression.

The Grading Game (iOS) makes you the TA of Dr. Snerpus, the meanest faculty member on campus, who demands that you flunk students for saying mean things about him on social media. You are then presented with a variety of papers with typographical and grammatical errors, and your job is to find them in a given amount of time. If you succeed, you will be able to pay off your (virtual) student loans. Game mechanics couldn’t be simpler: your finger is the red pen, and you tap errors to fix them. Beware, though: if you fat-finger the wrong line, or otherwise tap a correct word, you get a time penalty. And the pressure is on: If you don’t deliver average student grades in the C range or below, you don’t get paid!

Here’s what it looks like:

Screenshot of the Grading Game

Although they are very short and not very well-written, the essays are arguably the best part of this game, as they draw facts from reddit’s page of especially interesting Wikipedia entries (how can you not love this speech by Soggy Sweat, Jr.?) According the game designers, the typos and grammatical errors are randomly generated from lists of the most statistically common such errors.

The literal-minded might object to several aspects of the game, such as the fact that it imagines a world where TAs are paid by the error, where it’s possible to earn more than $1000 for correcting a three-sentence essay, and where grading is fundamentally a hunt-the-typo enterprise. And there’s no doubt that for people who actually do grading, it’s a bit disorienting to shut down your normal grading instincts and focus only on typos and obvious grammatical errors. (For example, errors of citation–leaving out quotation marks around quotations, for example, are not recognized by the game. Similarly, writing that is awkward or vague or misleading, but not outright ungrammatical, is fine.)

I also would have to agree with Phil Scuderi‘s observation that the game isn’t really about either grading or grammar, but is rather about tricking your brain to see what is actually on the screen, rather than seeing the correct grammar that it expects. And it’s also true that there’s not a ton of variety in the game: it offers you one trick, and you either enjoy it or not.

But I will say that The Grading Game makes proofreading surprisingly engaging. By organizing each challenge into three 30-second increments, the game is a fun way to kill little pockets of time. While it’s no Kingdom Rush, It’s currently priced at $0.99, and there’s also a free version that lets you play a few levels before you plunk down your dollar.

(I learned about The Grading Game via “The Fiver, which is The Guardian‘s daily tea time e-mail rounding up news, commentary, and videos about soccer football, and which is a fine digital distraction in its own right.)

Do you have a mobile game you’re enjoying at the moment? Why not share in comments?

Photo “Project 365 #231: 190810 The Proof of the Pudding” by Flickr user Creative Commons licensed BY-2.0

 

All Things Google: The New Gmail Compose

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Picture of a hand holding a quill pen

We’re probably at the point here at ProfHacker where we might not have to tell you that we tend to like all things Google. So I was plenty interested when Gmail rolled out a new interface for writing a few weeks ago that makes it a lot easier to multi-task while writing emails.

In the past, composing email worked in the same way that reading them did: it took up your entire screen. The new writing environment drops a compose window in the lower-right corner of your inbox.

New compose window in Gmail

At first, you might be a bit annoyed about the smaller space for writing. And many of the formatting options that you’ve grown used to having right above the compose space in Gmail have been tucked inside different menus. Where, for instance, is the option to add bullet points? How do I CC someone? It turns out the bullets (and most of the other formatting options, including font sizes, indenting and colors) live under the “A.” The option to CC someone appears once you click on recipients.

While it might take you a while to figure out where all of your options now live, the real advantage of the new compose is that you can now move throughout Gmail while composing. Looking at different emails or conversations, running searches, even changing your Gmail settings can all be done while keeping your compose window open. This ability is worth the price of entry alone (and, of course, the price is free). In the past I’ve had to resort to opening multiple Gmail tabs to refer to multiple message threads while writing in a third or fourth window. The new compose more or less gets rid of this problem altogether. If I need a bit more space to read the email, I can minimize the window, and if I want to write while looking at other tabs, I can pop the window out.

And it turns out that all of those hidden features have actually been improved with the addition of keyboard shortcuts. Google tools already supported a number of keyboard shortcuts in Gmail, which I wrote about last year, and which you can see by simply typing “?” once you’ve turned them on. But the new compose supports many more of them. Inserting a bulleted list, for example, is as easy as “CTRL + Shift + 8″ on Windows and “Cmd + Shift + 8″ on a Mac. Adding a CC to an email is “CTRL + Shift + C” on Windows or “Cmd + Shift + C” on a Mac. Neither of these shortcuts was available in the previous compose. And since I like having keyboard shortcuts for EVERYTHING, this means I love, no, LURVE the new compose.

You can start using the new feature by clicking on “Try out the new compose experience” to the right of the Labels button at the top of the classic compose pane.

New compose option

If, however, you find that you prefer your old way of writing emails, it’s easy to switch back. Just click the small arrow in the lower-right corner, next to the trash can, and choose “switch back to old compose.”

It took a week or two for me to get used to the new version, but I’ve found the new compose features tremendously helpful in helping me plow through my email. How about you? Are you using the new compose? Let us know what you think in the comments!

Lead photo: Quill / rachaelvoorhees / CC BY-SA 2.0