Wherewith shall it be salted?
So, during my instruction class today, a guy gave a session on Boolean operators. He asked for two topics, any two topics to be search. Someone yelled out "salt and pepper!" He used these terms. Oddly, in the NEOS library catalogue when you enter salt or pepper as a keyword all fields search, the first 20 results are really Mormocentric. (I've bolded the titles, for those of you that can't spot all of them at sight).
The videos are all owned by the local Lutheran Institution (which makes me wonder about their curricular value...do I smell a research project?)
- They built with faith : true tales of God's guidance in L.D.S. chapel building worldwide
- Sperry Symposium classics : the New Testament
- Recapitulation (Stegner, Wallace Earle, 1909-1993)
- Personal voices : a celebration of Dialogue
- David Matthew Kennedy : banker, statesman, churchman
- Life in Christ (Millet, Robert)
- Terrestrial vertebrates of tidal marshes : evolution, ecology and conservation
- Salt
- On the way home. [videorecording]
- The lamb of God [videorecording]
- Together forever [videorecording]
- Our heavenly Father [videorecording]
- Family first [videorecording]
- Temples of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
- Mormon claims answered
- The truth about "the God makers"
- SALT (Serving and Learning Together) 2001-2002
- Salt, light, and signs of the time : the life and times of Alfred M. (Rip) Rehwinkel
- Life goals : how to discover and achieve your own
- Web search garage [electronic resource]
Additionally, bonus points to anyone who can frame a situation in which exclusive or (XOR) could be used for database searching [it finds items that contain (A or B) but not (A and B)]. See diagram, below.
5 comments:
The only XOR situation which comes to mind would be one that involved cleaning up the records in a database. Like, if all books over 28 cm in height are supposed to have a "Quarto" prefix, you could search for books which have a height greater than 28 cm in the 300 $c XOR have a "Q" prefix. Any records that you found would need to be cleaned up since all records are supposed to satisfy both those conditions, or neither.
Did you come up with any others?
I thought of another one. If you liked chocolate and cheesecake, but not chocolate cheesecake, you could search a recipe database for "chocolate XOR cheesecake." (It sounds contrived, but I think there's actually someone in my family who likes chocolate and cheesecake but not chocolate cheesecake.)
I can't come up with any. I understand the record cleanup idea. The chocolate /cheesecake recipe search runs into the problem I generally have with this operator: it seems like you're trying to do two searches with one string. Back in the days of Dialog, I can see what this would matter but nowadays it seems more confusing than it's worth.
Right. It does seem like a lot of XOR searches would be a bit contrived.
you're forgetting the best and most important use of XOR: as a suffix, as in "suxor", "roxor", and yes, "fuxor".
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