The findingDulcinea Blog

"All of a Sudden This Thing Came to Me"

During the 2008 Presidential primaries, we published an article asking whether traditional political rhetoric is a declining art.  We analyzed several view points, and provided historical context by harkening back to a few of the finer political speeches in recent American history.

In a separate blog post, I recalled the sad spectacle of our political leaders reading the Gettysburg address at the first anniversary observance of 9/11. A Newsday columnist wrote that the"appropriation of a distant generation's tragedy strikes me as lame and uninspired"and asked why George Pataki wouldn't "offer a new Gettysburg address instead, one that he crafts himself from the heart and not from a hired speechwriter?"

I then concluded that the problem with political oratory today is that it is always so calculating, so negotiated, so cowardly. I recalled that when Ronald Reagan first met with Mikhail Gorbachev at a Geneva chateau, Reagan's team carefully planned every move. Gorbachev's limousine would pull up and Reagan would stand regally at the top of the steps, forcing Gorbachev to ascend while looking up at Reagan. When Gorbachev's car stopped and no one exited it for a minute, Reagan bounded down the stairs, helped Gorbachev from the car, and slipped his hand under Gorbachev's arm to support him up the steps.  A Soviet aide later said "I left like we lost the game during the first movement...We started with the wrong move."

I realized that is what I really miss - politicians who are willing to suddenly bound down the stairs.

Today's On This Day covers the "I Have a Dream" speech by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on the National Mall in 1963. We developed the On This Day series because, no matter how well I think I know about an event in history, I learn something profound from nearly every article we publish in this series. And today I learned that nowhere in the manuscript King carried with him to the podium that day did it say "I Have a Dream."

King dutifully recited the first part of the prepared speech, but then "all of a sudden this thing came to me that. … I’d used many times before. … ‘I have a dream.’ And I just felt that I wanted to use it here. … I used it, and at that point I just turned aside from the manuscript altogether. I didn’t come back to it.”

Clarence B. Jones, who drafted the original script of the speech, asked in a recent Washington Post op-ed piece, "What could possibly motivate a man standing before a crowd of hundreds of thousands, with television cameras beaming his every move and a cluster of microphones tracing his every word, to abandon the prepared text of his speech and begin riffing on a theme that he had used previously without generating much enthusiasm from listeners?"

We'll never know how the public may have reacted to the original draft of the speech. But I'm willing to bet that, had King continued to recite it, our On This Day today would be about an event other than a speech he gave 47 years ago today. And the civil rights movement itself may not have accomplished nearly as much as it did.

Mark E. Moran

Founder & CEO

Finding The Real Source of Your Source

There is so much posting and reposting of content online these days, that it can sometimes be difficult to discover the true original source of a story.  Once a story becomes popular on the Web, thousands of copy cat stories crop up everywhere, often quoting or summarizing the original and not as often giving proper credit. The reason many stories online get sensationalized is because people just copy and recopy information from one source to another, without bothering to verify the source.

While using those less-than-reliable sources can be an easy way to read information, it can sometimes mean that the info you are getting (especially with a developing story) is dramatized or just incorrect. When doing any kind of research, you want to get as close to a primary source as possible.

So how can you find the true source of your information in a world overrun with automatic news aggregators? You have to use a little detective work.

First, evaluate the credibility of the source you've been sent.  Is it a trustworthy news source or publication, or is it a site filled with adwords and random content scraped from the web?  For tips, see our "How to evaluate web sites" from our On This Day challenge materials.

If you find that the source you're reading from doesn't look totally credible, look through the content of the story  and see if you can spot any attribution or links to an original piece. 

If that isn't available, try going to a news source you already trust and searching for some of your subject keywords to see if you can find a more reliable version of the story.

OR

If you think the story you read might be a copy from a legitimate source, try searching for an exact phrase from the story in a search engine by using quote marks.

If the news is about a person or organization, see if you can find their own web site for commentary or updates.

Video clips from YouTube or other video hosting sites can be tricky to locate the original source of.  Look for any kind of watermark or logo within the video itself to determine the original source. If you know what program the video came from, search on that network's site to see if it has been made available for the public. Unauthorized copies of videos are often removed after a short time, so using an unauthorized video clip in research may mean that you won't be able to refer to it later, it is best to find the original source if possible.

If what you are looking for is an older source, try looking in newspaper archives or library archives, you'll be surprised how much information is available to those who look a little deeper. 

And of course, primary source material is always your best bet, for places to go to find primary sources, read our blog post from a few weeks ago, "Discovering Primary Source Material."

Haley Lovett

Audience Development

Why SweetSearch Is the Best Search Engine for Students

SweetSearch is the product of 100,000+ hours of research that went into creating findingDulcinea's 700+ Web Guides and thousands of articles. This content links to tens of thousands of Web sites that have been evaluated as credible by our research experts and librarian and teacher consultants (for a bevy of reviews of findingDulcinea and SweetSearch from top educators, see our media kit; to add SweetSearch to the search options on your Web browsers, click on the "Add On" box on SweetSearch; or get a widget for SweetSearch, to  embed it on your school Web site.).

For younger learners, we've recently introduced a beta version of SweetSearch4Me, which is the only search engine that prominently ranks high quality Websites created for elementary school students, and mixes them with accessible primary source sites. Please send feedback on SweetSearch4Me to sweetsearch@dulcineamedia.com so we can fully launch it with your input in September.

We search for more sites to include in SweetSearch by trolling through recommendations of librarians and teachers on their blogs and social bookmarking sites. You know those great lists you've been bookmarking for years? Well, SweetSearch is a giant, searchable repository of them. We constantly evaluate our search results and "fine-tune" them, by increasing the ranking of Web sites from organizations such as the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, PBS and universities.

We do more than merely exclude spam sites; we also exclude marginal sites that read well and authoritatively, but lack academic or journalistic rigor, and thus are not cite worthy. As technology journalist Paul Gilster wrote in his column in The News Observer, "Search here and you're working in a universe of checked, verifiable sources and solid information.....Google or Bing may find many of the same sites, but what I've noticed is that some of the better sites for a particular topic wind up deep in their search results, often outranked by Web pages more commonly used but of inferior quality...I was impressed with SweetSearch's focus on credible scholarship and emphasis on primary source materials."

Many articles that may be 3, 5, or 10 years old - but are still the most authoritative writing on the subject - are treated as stale by other search engines, and yet appear on the first page of SweetSearch results.  And to most students, the first page is the only one that exists. 

The result? Students find what they need, and they find it faster. When my generation was in school, the librarian pointed us to pre-screened resources on our general subject, and we decided which ones were the most relevant to our specific research project. That’s what SweetSearch does for students with online resources. 

To enable students to better scan results to determine relevancy, we've partnered with Yolink. From a SweetSearch results page, click on the Yolink toolbar on the left side, and add a term to narrow your search. Yolink will then browse your original search results and show an expanded view of the results in which your additional term appears. Yolink then enables you to save excerpts of search results, with the source link, to a Google doc, Web-based email, or social bookmarking and sharing services such as Diigo, and to the citation generator Easy Bib.

Together, SweetSearch, Yolink and EasyBib are utterly transforming Web search for students, from something they can barely use to something they can use quite effectively.

 Of course, students still need to follow the principles laid out in our Ten Steps to Better Web Research by, among other things, formulating good search queries, and often looking past the first few results to find the very best ones. Another principle is to use more than one search engine, so SweetSearch includes a toggle option to view the search results from Google. 

But enough of the "press release."  Let's take SweetSearch for a test-drive. We'll compare the results for "War of 1812" on SweetSearch, Google and Bing.

Many of the results returned by Google and Bing aren't quite up to snuff for including in a school paper. Wikipedia ranks first on both engines. While many people find Wikipedia a good place to begin their research, most educators are frustrated that students use it almost exclusively, and not wisely.  For this reason, Wikipedia almost never shows up in SweetSearch results.

For "War of 1812," the second result on Google is "Gateway New Orleans," which includes a brief summary of the war by an unknown author. The purpose of the site is to promote tourism in New Orleans, not to promote scholarship on the War of 1812. And both search engines prominently display a link that contains a teaser summary of the war by Gala Films, whose purpose is to get you to buy a movie.

Both of these sites rank so high because general commercial search engines display recently published content high in its results, since many times that is what the user finds most relevant. But when it comes to a war that ended nearly two centuries ago, recently produced material has little advantage over the “classics.” 

Both search engines also prominently feature "Warof1812.ca," and "Warof1812.net," likely because of the specificity of their domain names. The first offers a lot of material written by two people, whose credentials are not provided. The site contains no "About Us" section, and its primary purpose is to sell products relating to the war. The second is the result of a long-abandoned project to put student material on the Internet; it's primary purpose now seems to be to drive you to search the topic yourself on Google.

On the first page of SweetSearch's results, you'll find precisely the Web sites that a teacher wants students using. The first result is the Library of Congress' entire collection of primary source documents on the War of 1812. The second is a comprehensive ThinkQuest created by students under the supervision of teachers and professors, followed by sites from the National Archives and the U.S. Military.  Four sites in the next group—an Indiana University site about the political cartoons of the War of 1812, a Long Island University site about African-American Freedom Fighters, a Smithsonian site about the Star Spangled Banner, and the Avalon Project of Yale University—are sites that students could use to solidly distinguish their work from that of their classmates. Where are these results on Google and Bing? Scattered through the third to seventh results pages.

Now let's do a comparison for "Shakespeare" in SweetSearch, Google and Bing.

Again, Wikipedia ranks first for Google and Bing. Also appearing prominently, again due to the specific domain names, are "Shakespeare.com" and "Shakespeare-online.com." Each of these is a well-written "passion site," one created by an individual who is passionate about the subject, but does not possess academic credentials that would enable a student to rely on the sites when writing an academic paper. Each engine also contains several sites that are only about selling products.

On SweetSearch, you again find some outstanding academic resources, many of which are buried in Google or Bing. These include sites from the Library of Congress, the British Library, PBS and Project Gutenberg.

We'd love to get your feedback on SweetSearch. Try your own searches and let us know what you think by commenting below or by e-mailing sweetsearch@dulcineamedia.com.

Mark Moran
Founder and CEO

When Tragedy Strikes: Social Media Grows Up

When an earthquake struck Haiti earlier this week, people around the world read about the tragedy almost instantly. For many, news of the quake came not from traditional media outlets but from their profile pages on Facebook, or through a tweet from a friend on Twitter.

With phone lines down in most of the country, only those with access to satellite forms of communication, such as Internet-enabled mobile phones, could communicate with the outside world.

Within hours of the earthquake, images, videos and status updates flooded the Web with news about the disaster. People experiencing the quake in Haiti were able to share what was happening with the rest of the world using social media tools, long before volunteers and reporters could make their way to the country.  CNN published many of these updates to its iReport section, and that part of its site saw nearly 1.5 million visitors the day of the quake.

For some victims, social media has proved to be a lifesaver. The Miami Herald reported that many users from outside the country were able to post where they thought loved ones might be trapped, asking for help from anyone who might be in the area. For those trying to locate loved ones, Facebook and Twitter have helped the news spread more quickly than watching TV or reading the newspaper.

Even the rescue teams in Haiti are now heavily reliant on social media tools to communicate with each other. Groups from Canada and the U.S. are using tools such as Skype and Twitter to give each other vital information because phone lines are not working.

Long have social media users been accused of "slacktivism," a term Pete Cashmore of Mashable says refers to the endless posting of messages and online groups that don't achieve much, but allow social media users to feel like they are doing their part. But with the Haiti earthquake, organizations employed a relatively new method of gaining support: asking users to send text message donations that would automatically add a few dollars onto their next phone bill. It has been hugely successful, with the red cross having raised more than $8 million so far.

But even with all the good that social media tools have enabled people to do, not all efforts are safe. Rumors circled on Twitter and other social media sites that JetBlue and American were going to fly volunteers to Haiti for free. This turned out to be untrue. At this time, no airlines are able to fly passengers into Haiti due to congestion and lack of fuel at the airport. Though some airlines are offering frequent flier rewards for members who give monetary donations to the relief effort.

Learn more about Haiti in our blog post from yesterday.

Read how you can help quake relief efforts in this findingDulcinea article.

Haley Lovett

Audience Development

Introducing the On This Day Challenge

Today marks the official launch of findingDulcinea's brand new tool, findingEducation. It's an online resource that allows teachers and students to save and share their favorite Web sites, as well as post and share assignments with the findingEducation community. It's up and running now in alpha mode, and we'd love for you to sign up and take a look around.

In conjunction with findingEducation, we've launched the On This Day Challenge. We're asking students to write articles about historic events by conducting online research, with chances to win gift cards and cash and have their work published on findingDulcinea.

Click here to read everything teachers need to know about getting involved in the project. You'll find a section on motivating students to participate, advice for writing and researching an On This Day article, tips for evaluating Web sites, an FAQ and more. Learn about the mission behind findingEducation and the On This Day Challenge by reading our founder Mark Moran's message to the findingEducation community.

We'll be working toward building a community of teachers and students (and a collection of amazing Web resources) on findingEducation over the coming weeks and months, and would appreciate it if you'd spread the word. Sign up and tell your friends, whether they're teachers or parents, or just need a reminder of how much fun learning can be!

The Internet Holds the Past, Too

Modern-day students live in a ‘now’ society, but now is constantly shifting. What’s ‘now’ right now—Kanye West’s rude interruption of country crossover Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards—has already begun sliding into the archives of our minds. It will appear in media outlets for days to come, and will be revived on end-of-year lists recapping the wackiest moments in pop culture, but it’s already passé to a lot of people, particularly young people.

A week is a long time in politics. It’s also a long time in a student’s life. My tenth grade history teacher once wisely told our Western Civ class, “Every year of your life will feel shorter.” Ten years later, I see he was right. For today’s students, the media—and particularly the Internet—is helping to stretch time even more. The number of events, exchanges, videos and emoticons that a young person experiences in a given week is far greater than it was for me ten years ago. But each digital transaction seems to hinge on the present, or better yet, the future. What about the past?

Beloit College publishes the Mindset List every fall. It’s an “effort to identify the worldview of 18 year-olds” entering their first year of college. The list is made up of cultural phenomena that have existed during these students’ lifetimes. For example, the class of 2013 has “never used a card catalog to find a book.”

As Time Magazine rightly notes in an article on the list, a lot has changed since 1991, the year most of this year’s college freshmen were born. “In 1991 the world watched a black motorist named Rodney King be beaten by L.A. cops, all of whom were acquitted; a majority of whites still disapproved of interracial marriage. Ask yourself, Would the people we were then have voted for a mixed-race President and a black First Lady?”

We can look back, and pat ourselves on the back for how far we’ve come. But to keep moving forward, we have to keep looking back—not only at last week, when outbursts by Rep. Joe Wilson, Serena Williams and Kanye West got us thinking about topics like race, sportsmanship, egotism, manners and musical talent—but farther back, decades and even centuries back.

The Internet has a reputation for showcasing the next big thing in an ever-refreshing browser page. But today’s young thinkers should remember that the Internet is a limitless store of information, and it has a very good memory.

Check out our article “Web Sites for Researching History” to delve deeper into the past online.

Stay tuned for our On This Day Challenge, launching next week, where students will improve their online research skills and general Web savvy by writing articles about historical events using online resources. Students will post their articles to findingEducation, our collaboration tool for teachers and students, and we'll be selecting the best for publication on findingDulcinea.

Sign up for findingEducation to get notified about the challenge launch!

Sweet Sites | Finding News in New Places

Part of my daily role at findingDulcinea is to find news stories that are provocative, educational and informative. We take these stories and try to answer other questions readers might have about the topic. For example, North and South Korea appear to have reached a new chapter in their relationship since the death of former South Korean President Kim Dae-jung in August. But what of the countries’ relationship with the U.S.? How have relations fared since the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950?

We choose stories from a variety of sources, and in our own stories, include information from an even wider variety. But how do we find such a diverse collection of headlines? Below are five interesting sites that I recommend to Web newshounds new and seasoned.

Current has expanded from being an online television station of provocative, user-submitted content; it is also a social bookmarking tool. Users post stories from all over the Web, and the selections speak to the users’ inquisitive eye for quality, thought-provoking stories.

DailyMe syndicates news stories from newspapers around the country, and allows you to customize your own start page. This is a nice full-text alternative to an RSS reader. See the whole story, not just the headline, and see stories in only the topics that interest you.

Smithsonian Magazine isn’t about breaking news or sensational stories; it covers big ideas on a range of topics, loosely categorized into sections such as “People & Places” and “History & Archaeology.” Last week, the magazine’s article on micronations prompted us to profile a few eccentric and innovative micronations in a feature called “What is a Micronation?”

Bing News is Microsoft’s answer to Google News. At first glance, there are a lot of similarities, but Bing has a column off to the left that reads your IP address and brings you local news. The design of the site is cleaner and easier to read, there is a special section for news videos and I often see headlines here that I don’t see elsewhere.

The Slatest is Slate Magazine’s top 12 list of news stories from around the Web. It’s frequently updated, stored for archival perusal and includes the top stories from major news sources in a separate box to the left.

Liz Colville
Senior Writer

Remembering the Start of World War II

A war veteran stops by the monument of World War II casualties in Sheffield, Yorkshire, United Kingdom

On Sept. 1, 1939, World War II began with Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland. This week’s 70th anniversary commemoration of the event saw diplomatic gestures between former enemies. The war killed 6 million Poles, Christian Science Monitor’s Elizabeth Pond reports from Gdansk, Poland, in an assessment of “old enemies” on the 70th anniversary. Half of them were Jewish.

Poland is the center of this year’s commemoration because it “suffered the highest ratio of war deaths per population.” But today, “Poles and Germans are friends and allies,” Pond notes, and another old foe, Russia, this week made efforts to denounce the Hitler-Stalin pact forged just before the outbreak of the war. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany described her country’s role in the atrocities of World War II at a ceremony yesterday, saying Germanybears an “‘eternal’ responsibility” for what happened, Bloomberg reported.

“There are no words that could even remotely describe the suffering caused by this war and the Holocaust,” Merkel said at the Westerplatte peninsula in Gdansk. “I bow before the victims.”

This week also saw British wartime songstress Dame Vera Lynn reemerging on the UK album chart at number 20, becoming the oldest living singer on the chart (she is 92).

As her Allmusic biography explains, the “mere mention of Vera Lynn's name evokes images of London skies filled with barrage balloons, and Britons riding out the German blitz in shelters and subway stations.” Wartime songs like “Auf Wiederseh’n Sweetheart” became hits in the U.K. and U.S., and Lynn became the British troops’ “sweetheart” when she travelled to entertain them, “often at great personal risk,” AFP explains.

Learn more about the circumstances surrounding the outbreak of World War II with findingDulcinea’s article, “On This Day: Nazi Germany Invades Poland, Starting World War II.” Then, read about the final day of the European portion of the war with “On This Day: V-E Day Ends World War II in Europe.”

Liz Colville
Senior Writer

Get Acquainted With Health Care Reform Issues

I don’t think that health care reform will be Obama’s “Waterloo,” as South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint was quoted as saying by Ben Smith of Politico. But the stakes are high, both personally and politically.

An article in Slate Magazine explains how private insurance companies give incentives to employees to drop expensive accounts—just before a major surgery—“based on stupid technicalities.” These are called rescissions. According to Slate, an employee at WellPoint received a high score on her job evaluation due to “the dollar amount [$10 million] she had managed to deny through rescission.”

My mother was a victim of rescission. After suffering from gingivitis for 15 years, she had two teeth taken out. The cores of the teeth had rotted with infection. Unfortunately, these teeth anchored her permanent dentures, so she not only needed two teeth removed but also a new denture. Her insurance company, which paid for her previous dentures, dropped her two days before she was scheduled for a $38,000 procedure on the basis of an “undisclosed previous condition.”

More than half (51 percent) of Americans admit that they don't understand the issues involved in health care reform. The numbers are even lower for Americans’ faith in members of Congress: Only 27 percent of Americans believe that members of Congress have a good grasp of health care issues.

The sheer complexity of the current health care debate needs to be understood. Get informed with a variety of perspectives on health care reform:

Jonathan Cohn, a writer for The New Republic, is stationed in Washington, D.C., and reports what he sees in The Treatment, The New Republic’s health care blog.

The Washington Post's health care blog, Health Care Rx, is a reliable source of breaking news. Turn here for new research on the complicated social policies involved in the debate.

The Cato Institute, a nonpartisan, nonprofit think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C., presents different philosophical views on the health care debate in its blog, Cato @ Liberty.

Jim Sabin's blog, Health Care Organizational Ethics, keeps an eye on policy ideals and the most efficient distribution of health care.

David Williams, cofounder of MedPharma Partners, covers business issues in health care in his blog, Health Business Blog.

Health Beat is a project of The Century Foundation, an organization that examines public policy. The blog is maintained by Maggie Mahar, a fellow at the Foundation and author of “Money-Driven Medicine: The Real Reason Health Care Costs So Much.”

The Covert Rationing Blog, written by a former professor of medicine, explains why it's unavoidable to ration health care, and distinguishes between productive and unproductive means of rationing health care.

Read findingDulcinea's four-part article series on health care to learn more about landmarks and issues leading to President Obama's plan:

Part I: Surveying the Facts of the American Health Care Landscape
Part II: Revisiting HillaryCare: What It Proposed and Why It Failed
Part III: Does Socialized Medicine Work? A Look at British Health Care
Part IV: Deconstructing the Democratic Plan for Health Care

Josh Goldberg

What I Didn’t Know About Tiananmen Square

Photo: Elizabeth Dalziel/AP

In the spring of 1988, I traveled to China with a small group of other high school students and a much larger group of older adults. I’ve always liked to say that I learned more about American tourists during that trip than I ever learned about the Chinese. There were the two ladies who refused to eat anything but white rice. The woman who had to keep purchasing new luggage to fit all the souvenirs she was buying. Her daughter, who was so focused on videotaping everything, that she never seemed to look at anything with her own eyes. The man who thought it was funny to kick the back of my seat on every short plane flight, and who apparently decided that the very real machete fight that we inadvertently witnessed and which left one man with serious head wounds was light entertainment put on for his benefit.

That’s not to say that I didn’t have any encounters with the people who actually lived there. Unlike my trip the previous year to what was then the Soviet Union, no one tried to block us from making contact. The other students and I talked with young people on the streets of Shanghai who were anxious to practice their English, waved to an adorable, rosy-cheeked kindergarten class who chanted “Good morning! Good morning!” as we passed, ignored the desperate vendors who tried to sell us trinkets through the windows of our bus and watched an elderly woman with bound feet painfully limp down a flight of steps in the Forbidden City, leaning on the arm of a soldier.

Although my high school friends and I felt that we were obviously better behaved travelers and more open to truly experiencing the country than the adults with us, that did not mean that we ever really had a clue about any of China’s most pressing political issues. One peaceful evening in Beijing, we lay in the middle of Tiananmen Square and sang “You Can Call Me Mao,” parodying a song popular at the time, Paul Simon’s “You Can Call Me Al.” A little more than a year later, that spot was overrun with protesting students, tanks and soldiers firing on civilians.

It was deeply upsetting to me that a site I associated with a silly memory became associated in the eyes of the world with such horrifying bloodshed. It’s equally upsetting that in the 20 years since, the Chinese government has made significant efforts to obliterate all recall of that terrible event, and have forbidden people to commemorate it in any way. During the days leading up to the anniversary this year, authorities have tried to block discussion about it on the Internet.

Learn more about what happened in June 1989 by reading findingDulcinea’s Web Guide to the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

Amy Goldschlager
Editor