02 June 2011

Does nobody TEST these sites?

So today an image search led me to a Canadian (Prince Edward Island) educational web site. I was looking for a good public domain image of a hydroelectric plant and dam.

This is aimed at fairly young kids, so there's a photo of a reservoir, a little animated clip art GIF of a dam ... then the third image is of a wind turbine. The page is, I must emphasize, supposed to be about water power. It's also a really, really bad picture.

That's followed by a 3D model of what I guess is a generator, and then, with the label "End result/diagram of how a dam works." we find ... a diagram of a nuclear power plant. Specifically, a Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR).


So was this site created for the educational system of PIE and never actually used, or are their teachers so incompetent they didn't notice these incredibly obvious mistakes, or so timid they didn't report them?

At the top of the page are a set of fairly standard navigational links: "KISH>Grassroots>Electricity". I wanted to find a "Contact Us" page so I could report this nonsense, so I clicked "Grassroots" to move up a level. No luck because the link is to this: "file:///G:/kish/grassroots/grassroots1.htm". Yes, that's right, this navigation link which appears on every page of this whole branch of an official government educational web site links to a local drive mapped on some person's Windows PC.

And nobody noticed either of these mistakes. Does PIE even have schools? Is this all just a bluff?

Fruits de Mer

At my day job, I was looking to buy some Nova DVDs for a program we're running. I noticed this banner on the Shop PBS site:
Yes, let's "plum" the ocean floor. Throwing stone fruit into the sea is an important part of the scientific process.

Maybe it's especially funny to me because of PBS's and Nova's educational mission.

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