Genealogy newcomers typically search everything at once. For instance, when looking for records on a particular ancestor, newbies typically enter the person's name into the search field and then search through everything on FamilySearch at once. If the person has a rather unusual name, that might work. However, most of the time, the newcomer receives hundreds or even thousands of "hits," can't filter out the ones of interest, loses interest, and then goes elsewhere.
In contrast, experienced genealogists usually FIRST search for the smallest subset of the many databases as possible. For instance, the more experienced user will generally enter the last name of interest leave the first name blank, (first names are often different in the records from what we expect), and then perhaps specify only one database (such as the census records for one year), only one county, and any other parameters available to narrow the search as much as possible. If the search is unsuccessful and doesn't produce the information needed, the experienced user then expands the search just a little bit and tries again. For instance, he or she might add in the previous census or the following census and then search a second time. If unsuccessful this time, the experienced genealogist might start a third search by adding in the adjacent counties. And so on and so on.
Bit by bit, the experienced genealogist typically expands the search by a small amount each time. All of the search parameters are based upon what the genealogist already knows about the person of interest. Did he likely live in Monroe County? If so, there is no need to search the entire USA at once. Did he serve in the Civil War? If so, there is no need to search for records prior to 1820 and probably not prior to 1830 (on the first search) since he probably wasn't born yet. (Very few Civil War soldiers were 40 years old or older.)
By focusing the first searches on as narrow a geographic area as possible and as narrow a time range as possible, you greatly increase the odds of finding the one person you seek. If unsuccessful in your search, broaden the search area a bit and the years of interest and try again.
I suspect the experienced genealogists have far better results with their online searches than do the newcomers who jump in and search everything, everywhere, at once. Which would you prefer: finding one or two men with your ancestor's name, located in the area where he or she lived, in the years he or she lived there? Or will you find 100 men or women across the country with the same name?
BY ADAM GORLICK
Flu season is here. And with every social interaction comes a game of chance: Does the person you're talking to, shaking hands with or kissing have a bug? And if they do, what are the odds you'll catch it?
Doctors and public health experts try to make mingling with the sick safer. They develop vaccines, promote the need for frequent handwashing and enforce other common-sense measures to keep coughs, sniffles and sneezes from spreading.
But in order to follow and better understand how infectious diseases spread through real-life social networks, a group of Stanford researchers used wireless sensors to track high school students, teachers and staff members throughout one day during the height of last January's swine flu outbreak.
"Do you know how many contacts you have with infectious people on a daily basis? Do you know how many contacts you have with anybody on a daily basis?" said James Holland Jones, an associate professor of anthropology and senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment. "Very often, those are the things we know the least about because they're the hardest to measure."
Epidemiologists have always tried to answer those questions through pen-and-paper surveys, asking individuals to recall who they were in contact with on any given day. They've been forced to rely on shaky memories and vague recollections for their data.
Jones and his colleagues – led by Marcel Salathé, a former postdoctoral researcher at Stanford – used the wireless sensors to design a better method for tracking interactions in order to study how a flu outbreak might be headed off in a school. Their work is detailed in an article published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers outfitted each teacher, student and staff member at an unnamed American high school with credit card-size gadgets that transmitted and received radio signals every 20 seconds during one day.
The devices logged more than 760,000 incidents when two people were within 10 feet of each other, roughly the maximum distance that a disease can be transmitted through a cough or sneeze.
"The enormous amount of interactions that occur in a single day is mind-blowing," said Salathé, who is now an assistant professor of biology at the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics at Pennsylvania State University.
So are the chances to catch a cold.
After collecting the electronic tracking data, the researchers ran thousands of simulations of what would happen if there were a flu outbreak in the school.
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