Look-up and how-to questions answered via informational crowdsourcing?

What's on your mind? A question? Well, you can send it to your facebook friends and wait for answers. Or, you may transform your question into a “What's happening?” twitter tweet and wait for replying Twitterers. Before doing so, you probably want to use Google, Wikipedia or any of your other bookmarked Web wizards to get—at least—an idea of what the answer might be.

No success? What about informational crowdsourcing? A crowdsourcing service connects you with real and yet virtual human beings, who will hopefully answer your questions [1]: Yahoo answers and Answerbag.com work this way. There will be no guarantee that an answer is correct. Do your own backcheck!

The critical point is the type of your question. To answer a look-up question is mostly a matter of finding the appropriate dictionary, encyclopedia, library or accessible database. Some person sitting in that adequately stuffed knowledge center or at a fittingly linked electronic device should be your friend in the crowd (whom you might never go to lunch with).

A how-to question makes a different story. There usually is no instant answer. For domain-specific question you need to find the right crowd. For example, if the nature of your questions lies embedded within a field of science, you could try ResearchGATE: There you'll find a “What's on your mind?” form as well and, in addition, a multitude of specialist groups to join, to follow and to consult.

Also, think of how to formulate your question and make it obvious whether you expect a yes or no, a multiple-choice-like answer or a concise narrative.

Finally, there are still those question that only you can answer yourself—always password-free.

Reference
[1] David Pogue: Question Time • To find the best answers, digital services are turning to actual humans. Scientific American October 2010, Volume 302, Number 4, page 38.

Twitter and all those TwitXXXs

The social networking and microblogging service Twitter offers, according to its page head, “the best way to discover what's new in your world.” Noticeable is the phrase “your world” instead of “our world,” hinting at Twitter's effortless use for self-expression and its functionality in broadcasting personal “my-world-view” news.

Real-time news, trivial as well as history-making, can be found on Twitter while the story of interest is happening and evolving. Although typically wrapped keyword-style within the tweet format, an included URL—also typically shortened—may connect the reader with more detailed resources. These tiny URLs are derived by employing URL-shortening services. Further, Twitter add-ons are available to integrate Twitter service with web-page design.

There exists an array of third-party tools, whose names start with “Twit” that support customization of Twitter applicability and performance. Some are specific and device-dependent, such as Twitterrific, adhering to the Mac and iPhone community. TwitThis comes in handy if you want to place buttons on your pages and blog posts, which enable your visitors to forward, via click, a site-link to the Twitterverse. TwitterCounter tracks statistics of your and other people's twittering activity. And while I am writing, the next great TwitXXX is already in the making—for sure!

German: Knoblauchzehe; English: clove of garlic

The German word Knoblauchzehe is composed of the two nouns Knoblauch, meaning garlic, and Zehe, meaning toe. The noun Knoblauchzehe, however, refers to what in English is called a clove of garlic. Garlic toes are unheard of in English, aren't they?

The meaning of the English noun “clove” in German is context-dependent: The noun may refer to a part of a bulb (Nebenzwiebel), basically meaning the same as the word “clove” in the phrase “clove of garlic.” It also can mean Gewürznelke, literally translated as “spice carnation,” referring to the same spice as the English word in garlic-free context does—the spicy, rich red, dried, unopened bud of the clove tree (Syzgium aromaticum).

Summarizing overview (m. for masculine, f. for feminine):

• Gewürznelke, f.: clove
  
• Knoblauch, m.: garlic
• Knoblauchzehe, f.: garlic clove
  
• Zehe, f.: toe

The town of Boca in the Sierra Nevada named after the Spanish word for mouth

The town of Boca was located in the Sierra Nevada at the junction of the Truckee River and Little Truckee River. The town's name refers to this river-mouth location: Boca means mouth in Spanish. All there is left today of Boca is a cemetery and a few other remains.

Boca started as a construction camp in 1866, when the Central Pacific Railroad was laying tracks over the Mountains. For a short period, Boca was a bustling town with a lumber and ice industry. During the pre-refrigerator days ice was harvested.

An interpretive board along the quarter-mile-long Boca cemetery trail informs today's visitor that this town once featured a brewery, producing lager beer that even won awards at the 1883 Paris World Fair. The Boca Brewery employed up to 35 men, mostly German, and had an annual production of 20,000 to 30,000 barrels with shipments throughout the west. Unfortunately, a fire destroyed the brewery in 1893 and Truckeemünden soon became history, not only due to the lack of beer, but also as a result of the lack of lumber, since almost every nearby tree was cut and forest conservation was not part of the Zeitgeist of a late 19th-century small town in the High Sierra.

Keywords: California, Nevada, Comstock mining era, history of breweries

Reference
Boca Cemetery Resoration Project, May 29, 2004. http://www.k9forensic.org/boca.html.

An acronym in economics and geopolitics: MAVINS, a collective notation for six countries and future global players

A mavin (also spelled maven) is someone who is experienced or knowledgeable [1]. The plural mavins denotes two or more of those expert freaks. The acronym MAVINS, however, encodes a listing of six countries: Mexico, Australia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Nigeria and South Africa [2,3]. This is a very diverse set of countries—geographically, politically, economically and culturally. These countries are grouped together as MAVINS with respect to their recent economic growth stories and their significance in shaping and impacting world markets and policies in the near future. The MAVINS are also referred to as the next BRICs, the four giants of recent and current headlines.

So, be prepared to be a mavin of the MAVINS!

Keywords: politics, geography, economy, emerging markets, population growth, investing, commodities

References
[1] The word mavin in the Meriam-Webster dictionary.
[2] Seeking alpha: Beyond BRIC: Introducing MAVINS.
[3] Tom Lydon: Step Aside, BRIC ETFs: What about the 'MAVINS'?

Pizzo, an ancient word of Sicilian origin meaning protection money

Pizzo is money that shop and business owners in Palermo and other places in Sicily pay for protection or “allowance to run their business.” In a certain sense, this is a tax paid to a criminally, rather than a governmentally authority—although the alude is occassionally been made that this distinction can not always been derived that clearly. Anti-mafia activists and business people in Sicily are gaining strength and are refusing the pizzo scheme. Libera Terra is such an affiliation of people that are starting agricultural projects on land confiscated from the Mafia [1], creating employment and confidence in “enterprises without a Godfather.”

The meaning of the Italian compositum Adiopizzo is easy to guess: Goodbye Pizzo. This is the name of a new citizen group organizing resistance to illegal protection payments [1]. Palermo now has stores that sell only goods from artisans and manufacturers that refuse pizzo payments.

Reference
[1] Joshua Hammer: Defying the Godfather. Smithsonian October 2010, Volume 41, Number 6, pp. 37-47. Smithsonian.com: In Sciliy, Defying the Mafia.

Italian: fiaccolata; English: candlelight vigil

The Italian word fiaccolata is derived from the Italian noun fiàccola (femminile: feminine), meaning torch or flare. Fiaccolata means torchlight procession or candlelight vigil. Such events take place in Italy, for example, to commemorate and honor assassinated anti-Mafia citizens and politicians [1]. Another example is the Fiaccolata da Solferino a Castiglione, an event born in May 1992, commemorating the nurses who, in 1859, took injured soldiers from the battlefield of Solferino to the first medical outpost in Castiglione [2] and, by doing so, were “giving birth” to Henry Dunant's idea of neutral medics and the corresponding international humanitarian movement known to everyone as the International Red Cross.

References
[1] Joshua Hammer: Defying the Godfather. Smithsonian October 2010, Volume 41, Number 6, pp. 37-47. Smithsonian.com: In Sciliy, Defying the Mafia.
[2] The Story of the batthe of Solferino (24 June 1859).