[OT] Energy Efficient Search Engine

[Jeff Reynolds]

We did a large amount of reading studies for an NSF cdrom for kids a  
while back and what worked best for various aspects of reading on the  
screen vs the printed page.

Turns out black on white wins way over the reverse or messing with  
either text or bg color much. you can go to a slight beige background  
w/o much of a hit at all, but light text on dark gave a big downturn  
in reading speed, comprehension and retention. Study was one on jr  
high kids, but they did some side testing on grade school and high  
school/adult an all indications were that the results were the same  
on the gross level.

The study was done by UC Irvine educational testing group so was done  
in strict enough ways to make NSF happy (not enough to make me  
totally happy coming from a very heavy science background, but the  
statistics were good enough and process was good enough to see a very  
marked difference).

I know my eyes are a lot happier and i can scan thing soo much better  
on black on white than the reverse.

At times you can go too far in trying to be green and crippling the  
thing you were trying to do. I think the point that turning screens  
off or to all black screen savers is a much more worthwhile way with  
kids to save power rather than making the content harder for them to  
take in. It also helps instill in them the philosophy that they  
should turn things off when not in use, ie make it an active not a  
passive process.

cheers,

Jeffrey Reynolds



On Aug 15, 2007, at 5:46 AM, use-revolution-request at lists.runrev.com  
wrote:

> Didn't have any troubles reading the black pages. The techlogg post  
> is very
> interesting, especially in respect to the reverse outcome if you  
> use LCDs.
> As I have kids running 4 x 17" CRTs even at 10 watts instead of the  
> claimed
> 15 watts per monitor, I'll be weening my google junkies over to  
> Blackie :-