Someone has just been teleported through time, in this scene from the 1966 science-fiction
television series, "The Time Tunnel." During the series, two scientists are teleported to
several historic events, via a secret government time travel project.
(Image Source: http://skunkfeathers57.blogspot.com )
Astrophysicist Robert Nemiroff and his students were playing cards
(for chips) last summer, chatting about Facebook. They wondered: If
there were time travelers among us, would they be on social media? How
would you find them? Could you Google them?
"We had a whimsical little discussion about this," said Nemiroff, a professor at Michigan Technological University. The result was a serious-but-fun effort to tease out travelers from the future by sifting through the Internet. Unfortunately, they have uncovered no DeLorean time machines, but that hasn't made the search less interesting.
You can't just put out a cattle call for time travelers and expect good results. So Nemiroff's team developed a search strategy based on what they call prescient knowledge. If they could find a mention of something or someone on the Internet before people should have known about it, that could indicate that whoever wrote it had traveled from the future.
They selected search terms relating to two recent phenomena, Pope Francis and Comet ISON, and began looking for references to them before they were known to exist.
"We had a whimsical little discussion about this," said Nemiroff, a professor at Michigan Technological University. The result was a serious-but-fun effort to tease out travelers from the future by sifting through the Internet. Unfortunately, they have uncovered no DeLorean time machines, but that hasn't made the search less interesting.
You can't just put out a cattle call for time travelers and expect good results. So Nemiroff's team developed a search strategy based on what they call prescient knowledge. If they could find a mention of something or someone on the Internet before people should have known about it, that could indicate that whoever wrote it had traveled from the future.
They selected search terms relating to two recent phenomena, Pope Francis and Comet ISON, and began looking for references to them before they were known to exist.
More - Link >>> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140103205133.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Fspace_time+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Space+%26+Time+News%29
Sources: Michigan Technological University, ScienceDaily.com .
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A type of search allowing users to combine keywords with operators such as AND, NOT and OR to further produce more relevant results. For example, a Boolean search could be "hotel" AND "New York". This would limit the search results to only those documents containing the two keywords. At SourcingLab you can easily create Boolean searches across multiple platforms and store them for future searches.
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