EARL FREDERICK AND GPS
In the Summer 2006 issue of the "Millersville Review," I came across this Note: |
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In the Summer 2006 issue of the "Millersville Review," I came across this Note: |
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I dug up the first photograph I ever took of Earl, as early as summer 1967 on one of our first fieldtrips or cruises aboard the R.V. "Lydia B" out of Lewes, DE. Earl Frederick, Don Wiggins and Brigitta Krieg were among my most enthusiastic students. Earl also drafted all maps and charts for my 1971 Ph.D. dissertation on "Suspended Sediment Transport in the Delaware Bay." He also worked for our non profit corporations, "ESRA" (Environmental Science Research Associates and The Marine Science Consortium., together with some of my other students, e.g. Bob Swift and Tom Patrick. The reference to the GPS (Global Positioning System) brought up another, rather sad memory of the conflict I had with Dean Al Hoffman. I E-mailed the following comments to the Editor: |
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Letter to the Editor,
Millersville Review August 7, 2006 Better Accuracy than that! It was good to see your Class Note entitled “Mapping the globe” in the Summer 2006 issue.The subject, Earl Frederick, was one of my first and most active oceanography students in the late 1960’s and early 70’s. He also worked for ESRA and The Marine Science Consortium in Millersville, Lewes and Wallops Island as a draftsman and Pre-College Oceanography Program instructor for hundreds of PA high school students. In 1976, he and Bob Swift, another of our oceanography alumni then working at the Wallops Island Marine Science Center as station director, went to work with EG&G for our neighbor NASA ' – after 6 years of contracting our 90 ft R.V. “Annandale” to them. Since that time, Bob has co-authored numerous articles dealing with laser applications, while Earl became an expert on GPS. (ESRA donated one of the first GPS devices to the MU ES department in 1992) At the end of your note, you say that the accuracy of GPS positioning is 4 cm, and equate that with 10 inches. You are using the wrong conversion, for while 4 inches equals 10 cm, one cannot conclude that the opposite also holds true. Thus, your readers among the one remaining major nation still hanging on to the clumsy and cumbersome British measurement system were misinformed about the GPS accuracy which in this case actually amounts to 1.6 inches (sorry, going decimal again) or about 1 and 19/32 inches. Wishing Millersville and the Review good sailing and accounting: Ben Oostdam, Prof.Emeritus Earth Sciences (1997) |
