Scientific American's "The Amateur Scientist". Science Fair Edition

by: Dr. Shawn

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Editorial Review:

Product Description:
For over 70 years, Scientific American's "The Amateur Scientist" has been a reliable source of winning science fair projects. Now you can get all of these incredible columns, plus thousands of pages of supplementary material on one fully-searchable CD-ROM.

Over 1,000 projects, from raising tadpoles to looking for cosmic rays... it's all here. No matter what your level of science expertise, "The Amateur Scientist" has enough to keep you busy for a long time. Runs on Windows 95 or higher, Mac OS, Linux, and UNIX.

Average Rating:

Rating: - A treasure for the amateur scientist
This is a collection of articles from Scientific American from the 1920's to the 2000's. The articles are scientific experiments from several scientific disciplines including Astronomy, Chemistry, Biology, Physics, Archeology, Earth Science, and Mathematics. There is also some supplemental information (tools and techniques).

The experiments are generally not laid out step-by-step - one may have to create their own procedure from the guidelines in the article. There are illustrations ... Read More

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Rating: - The format of that files that are you buying, OK in Linux
This review is based on using the Amateur Scientist CD on my ancient Fedora Core 5 Linux machine. (I have not tried the other CD of "science software" that comes with the product.)

I suppose commenting on the Amazon product description is fair game when reviewing an item. The current description doesn't tell the customer exactly what kind of files he is buying. As one critical reviewer said, these are HTML files. To use these files in a naive fashion, you would figure out the folder ... Read More

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Rating: - A Handy Reference...
Based on content, the set is worth 5 stars - over 70 years worth of
information bound up on a CD, plus another with additional bits...

What put me off it is the interface... It's not always easy to access
files, and content is html-based (ie viewed via a web browser). My copy
(at least) has pages where images refuse to load, links that were
incorrectly tagged, and images are displayed at less than full size,
requiring you to click on them to bring them up, ... Read More

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Rating: - A Perfect 10...
From the moment I had the conversation w/ Shawn years ago, suggesting a compendium of the Amateur Scientist articles, he and sheldon worked tirelessly to locate, get the copyright release's and put together in one spot everything we'd come to love and remember about Sci Am's articles. Although I never had time to help w/ the project they carried it off with such dedication and perserverance that i gladly endorse the fruits of their efforts.. Now we have everything from the atom smasher and x-ray machine ... Read More

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Rating: - Complete? Bet your life on it!
For the record, I wrote "The Amateur Scientist" column for over 5 years and I put this CD collection together, as well as several printed compendiums from the column. So, of course, my 5-star rating, while shared by many reviewers, is clearly biased. I am posting this note to rebut the false and defamatory charges made by an un-named reviewer in N. Easton, MA who insists that I secretly abridged the articles by leaving out key text and illustrations.

The reviewer's claims of missing information ... Read More