Comment on CTBTO web pages – Infrasound and Gravity
CTBTO Webmaster, VDEC contact:
I did a screen clip of the page at ctbto.org/specials/vdec/ You can see that it is overlaying text over text. I highlighted the overlay and could sort of read it. I found the “here” to find the VDEC application form. I changed the magnification of the page but that just makes it worse. That clip below is 100%
I am going through most of the sensor networks on the Internet and just starting on the IRIS.edu microbarographs and related infrasound networks. I have gathered notes on infrasound for some time, but only just have time now to check the models and data and networks. If someone will tell me what signatures CTBTO is trying to identify and quantify, I can add that to my list of global sensor network requirements.
In a paper I am reading this morning, Measuring Infrasound from the Maritime Environment by Doug Grimmett, Randall Plate and Jason Goad, they filter an injected signal and it made me think of CTBTO, then they mentioned CTBTO again, I decided to try once more to look for the data.
I kept hearing about CTBTO having a network, but could never find if it was publicly available. Maybe this scrambled page is why I could not find it.
Anyway, maybe you can see what is going on with that page. Overall, CTBTO.org has poor text color contrast. And hard to read text variations and size combinations (large and small text sized mixed, too many font variations). You can do anything you want on the Internet, but best practices aim for clarity and simplicity. Please do not use ALL CAPS anywhere (your left panel and headers and footers). And please please don’t use pastel text.
Your “text only” is pretty horrible. If you cannot do it nicely, best to not bother. If it was for accessible to blind readers, you missed very badly. It does not allow selecting some of the text, and the links don’t work consistently. I see the entire Internet and every conceivable thing, and I would not comment if it were not really exceptionally bad. And probably not that hard to fix. Most website owners and builders on the Internet never check their sites, and never use any of the forms and tools themselves enough to see if they work at all. Overall, most forms on the Internet do not work the way people hope they will. Most of the sites just keep adding things, they never clean up, index, curate their own materials. It is a mess. But, even if I am supposed to write the policies, I just let people do whatever they want. You would think large corporations and international organizations would have more pride. But, like I said, almost all the website owners never check their sites from the outside, if at all.
I cannot tell, but I think CTBTO does not include the gravitational sensor arrays. That marine infrasound absolutely requires inertial measurements at high frequencies (oversampling and to correlate with higher audio and electromagnetic frequencies). I will see what alternatives there might be. So much has changed in just the last year with the precipitous drop in the cost of sensors and on-board processors – across all sensor types.
I will check to see how the earth-quake early warning groups are using infrasound. And all the low frequency electromagnetic groups. They all overlap in the range from nanoHertz to GigaHertz. That is what makes it interesting.
Richard Collins, Director, The Internet Foundation
