Thursday, November 1, 2007

November 1st Blog

1. My new topic is: how many helium balloons does it take to make a person float? What happens as they rise in altitude?

2. Some recommended search words were "balloons" and "floating" as a combo. Another grouping was "balloons" and "man airborne." There are many other combinations that are possible but those were the best ones we came up with for generating results.

3. I found that using any other terms with balloons limits my results too much. To overcome this I began searching using only the term "balloons" and received much better results. My first article was regarding general information about balloons, and it was found on: http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=26380079&site=ehost-live. It was from a scholarly periodical. My next source was information regarding hot air balloons and the history of flight using balloons: http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=24408212&site=ehost-live. To continue my search i would try other databases with similar or identical search terms. However i found Academic Search Premier to give the best data towards answering my question.

1 comment:

Aline said...

I'm interested in the fact that you didn't choose "helium" as one of your search terms. Also, you might try "balloon*" next time. If you use an asterisk after balloon, you will get entries/results with both "balloon" and "balloons." It's a technique called truncation.

Good question!