Hats Off to TCS

Editor,

Hats off to you guys! Great work and keep it up.

I always stop by once a week to check out the news. Thanks.

Would be interesting to read some of those old columns from Scientific American. I used to read the old blue book when I was a kid. And hanging in my garage is the old wind tunnel. I think all the neighborhood kids planes have log time in it.

Thanks again!

Robert Cunningham

Thanks for the nice comments, Robert. You can find the complete collection of more than 1,100 projects from all 73 years of the famous "The Amateur Scientist" column at the Society for Amateur Scientists store. The CD comes with a second CD with shareware and freeware programs selected specifically for amateur scientists. Editor.

Hurricane Rita Pressure Data

Editor,

This may be of interest to the group.

Here is the web site for a buoy that was in the path of hurricane Rita about 180 nm Southwest Pass, Louisiana.

Number 42001 ( there is a map showing the location)  After Rita passed by, the buoy lost its mooring.

The atmospheric pressure record shows a big drop in pressure, down to 27.41 inches!

This was very interesting to watch, for as the pressure dropped, the wave size and wind speed increased.

Starry Nights,

Bob Schalck

Thanks for the report, Bob. Readers, see the news department for more about Hurricane Rita. Editor.

Skyscrapers and the Invasion of Mars

Editor,

Perhaps you could solicit some articles from your friends who work in high-rise buildings about instruments that detect and measure the swaying of a skyscraper in the wind, which is supposedly
discernible, but just barely, to the human occupants. Not too many of those in Kansas.

I really enjoyed the article about the Opposition of Mars by Paul Curtin. It's so extraordinary to think there are two robots there, Opportunity and Spirit, as well as two satellites, Odyssey and Global Surveyor. This Halloween, unlike the story in the famous 1938 Orson Wells Broadcast, we'll be the invaders >:)

Mark Valentine

Readers, if you have a good seismometer project or if you want to design an instrument that can detect the sway of tall buildings, please share your work with your fellow amateur scientists! Please send proposals for articles on these topics here. Editor.

World Science News

Editor,

World Science is a science web site that offers a free newsletter that gives a review of events in the world of science.

Craig Kendrick Sellen

Heavy Text Books versus Laptops

Editor,

As I watch my children struggle to and from school every day bent under the weight of backpacks seemingly as heavy as they are, I can't help thinking that e-books would be SO much better. As the Arizona Daily Star points out, e-books have an incremental weight of zero, they can be kept up to date easily, they can be searched quickly, and they aren't "so last-century".

However, there are some drawbacks. E-books are just plain hard to read. A laptop screen has much lower resolution and image quality than even a cheesy paperback book. Far less information can be effectively displayed on the screen than on a single high-quality printed page. Unlike some aspects of computer technology, this drawback isn't likely to change: in 20 years, typical laptop screen resolution has only improved from around 50 dots per inch to 100-120, and the screen diagonal dimension from 7 inches to 14-15. An open textbook (two facing pages), on the other hand, has a resolution of 400 dots per inch or better, and a diagonal dimension of 17.

Navigation in e-books is often more difficult (and much slower) than flipping through a text. Although there are electronic equivalents of 3M Post-it notes and index tabs, they are clumsy and (unlike the real thing) their user interfaces take away valuable display space from the content. Electronic highlighting and annotations are wonderful ideas, but rarely implemented well (or at all).

The disadvantages of laptop displays can be partially overcome with content optimized for on-screen presentation, such as that seen in well-designed web pages. Often, however, production in e-book format is done in the worst possible way: printed pages are converted directly to PDF format for on-screen viewing, thus wasting screen space for useless artifacts like margins and page numbers, and
forcing repeated vertical and horizontal scrolling to navigate through each page's print-optimized multi-column layout.

The argument is often made than in-class laptops are a bad idea because of the distractions they present. Good system design can minimize those risks, and it's hard to see that web-browsing during class is much more problematic than reading comic books. Still, it's a new classroom management issue for teachers and administrators .A more serious problem with using technology in the classroom is that it breaks. A book, let alone a whole backpack full of them, just doesn't suffer catastrophic failure very often. A laptop computer, on the other hand, can be expected to fail--in a class of 25, several complete failures per school year are likely. Any school taking this approach needs to be sure it can replace the computers--and the books--almost instantly, a task likely to be made quite difficult by electronic licensing and digital rights management (DRM) provisions.

Finally, traditional textbooks are produced by a powerful, entrenched publishing industry. This industry has learned how to market very effectively to its customers: school boards and administrators (NOT students, parents, or taxpayers). To justify ever-increasing prices, they add fluff like glossy pictures (in an algebra book?) or CD-ROMs full of never-used shovelware. Anyone who expects these producers will lower their prices to reflect the lower production costs of e-books is living in a dream world. Instead, they will likely try to use DRM as a tool to extract MORE revenue by spreading out costs over a multi-year period--and also probably making it impractical for interested students to purchase their books to keep after the school year is over.

For e-books to be a benefit to the students--rather than being appealing trinkets for school administrators--they will need to have computer-optimized content supported by an infrastructure that can respond effectively to the challenges of ubiquitous classroom computers. Schools need to demand the content that their students need, from producers that are capable of delivering it in a cost-effective manner. It's not obvious that Vail has gotten past the trinket stage, but for the sake of their students' postures, I certainly hope they have.

Olin Sibert

Letters to "Backscatter" are welcome. Letters are subject to light editing to correct punctuation, spelling and grammar. By placing "Backscatter" in the subject line, you give us permission to consider publishing your letter. Send your letter to Backscatter.