About us
Last updated: March 27, 2008.
About this site
Who writes that stuff?
Most of the articles on Explain that Stuff! are by British writer
Chris Woodford, who has written lots of
books on science and
technology, including three best-selling how-it-works titles:
Cool Stuff and How it Works (published worldwide by
Dorling Kindersley in 2005/2006), Cool
Stuff 2.0/The Gadget Book (the follow-up, co-written with Dr Jon Woodcock and
published by DK in 2007),
and
Scientific American: How Things Work Today
(published worldwide by Crown/Random House in 2000/2001).
Why do it?
Explain that Stuff! is our way of putting something back into the World
Wide Web.
All the information on our website is provided free of charge.
We hope you find it useful and enjoy it. If you do, or if you don't,
drop us an email and tell us why.
Why are there different articles for different readers?
It's impossible to write anything that satisfies all the people, all of
the time.
The articles on Explain that Stuff! are designed for a variety of
readers.
Each one has a colored dot next to the title showing who it's intended
for:
A short,
simple introduction, particularly suitable for younger readers.
A longer and more detailed
article, suitable for most readers.
A more academic
piece. Younger readers may find these articles too detailed and complex.
Obviously this is a very crude system. Don't let it put you off reading anything!
Is this site safe for children?
This is an educational website designed to be safe and suitable for
family users. We take our responsibilities to young people very
seriously. All our site content is labelled using the standard
Internet Content
Rating Association (ICRA) system. Our Google-powered site search
has "safe search" enabled by default. Although our site carries contextual
advertisements, we have disabled them on pages (like how bullets work) where there
is a possibility of inappropriate ads appearing.
If you find any content that you think may cause a problem,
please alert us straight away using the email address at the bottom of
this page.
Legal notices
Copyright
We
created this website to help young people understand science and
technology, so the more people who read our words the better!
We positively encourage teachers and students to
copy our material for personal research and study
or non-commercial educational purposes.
We wrote all the words on this website—well over 150,000 of them—and
we've decided to publish them
under a Creative
Commons License.
Put simply, this means you are welcome to use our written material for
noncommercial
purposes only, providing you
credit this website as your source, link back to us, and follow the
other terms in the license.
Except where we've noted otherwise, all the images (photos and
artworks) used
on our site were either created by us (in which case, they are
published under the same Creative Commons licence) or they are
believed to be in the
public domain.
(In case you're wondering, we have "cropped," blurred, scrambled, or otherwise disguised people's faces in most
photos to protect their legal privacy rights.)
Please play fair if you use our material:
- Please seek our permission for any commercial
use of our material.
- Please kindly check with us before you use our material on
websites that carry advertising, because that counts as commercial use.
- Please do not copy anything from this website onto Wikipedia or similar sites. That would count as making a derivative work (which we do not allow) and it's published under different terms and conditions from ours (which we don't allow either).
- If you use any of our material, please be
kind enough to credit this website as your source and make a link back
either to the page you use or our home page. That's only good
manners!
- Bandwidth (shooting pictures and words over the Internet from us
to you) is getting expensive as the site becomes more popular, so
please do not use our server to serve
up images on your own site or blog.
Please simply right click on the image you want, save it to your hard
drive, and upload it onto your own
server instead. We're very happy for you to do that. No need to ask
permission!
- Please do not copy large volumes of our material onto other
sites.
Feel free to copy the odd article here and there, but we don't expect
to see
huge chunks of the site replicated somewhere else! Just make a link to
our site instead.
Please contact us if you have any queries about copyright or if
you'd
like to use a particular image and you're not sure of its status.
Privacy policy
Please see our privacy policy page.
Product photographs
Our website contains photographs of real-world products purely for
illustrative purposes.
The inclusion of a photograph in an article does not represent any
endorsement by us
of the product shown or any endorsement by the product manufacturer of
this website or anything we may say in the text.
Advertising on our site
We're delighted when advertisers enjoy a business boost by advertising
on our site.
We have chosen the very effective Google Adwords program to serve our
targeted advertisements.
If you'd like to advertise on our site, please would you do so through
Google Adwords?
We think you'll find it's a highly cost-effective way to boost traffic
to your site and promote your business.
We're very sorry, but we do not sell advertising space or advertising links directly.
Link policy
Thank you very much for your interest in making links.
We're delighted to make links to (or swap links with) other high-quality,
high-content sites likely to be of genuine value to readers, but please note:
- We don't exchange links with sites simply to boost page rank (yours or ours);
we will only make links that are of genuine value to our readers.
- We never sell links to or buy links from other sites.
- Thanks anyway, but we're not interested in using the services of SEO firms at this time.
Contacting us
We're very sorry, but we cannot provide extra information about any of
the
articles on this website or help students with projects, essays, or
schoolwork.
Try a Google search in the box below. Just think of five or ten words
that sum up the information you're looking for, type them in the box,
and click search.
If you're about to send us an email inviting us to swap links to boost your page rank, please would you kindly go back and read our link policy up above before you do so..
For any other things, you can write to us by sending an email to:
ets2008mail[at]explainthatstuff[dot]com
