Unseen Visitors Yacht racers out on the Great Lakes have connected via modem and cell phone to collect the latest wind speed and direction from our tables of data from nearby buoys. Prospective graduate students from China have found information and application forms here. Penn State students use the site's many course pages to find information about a particular course they are taking or might want to take. They are not visible, but they are here. They come, they look around and ask questions, and they leave as noiselessly as they arrive.
Most people here are totally oblivious to their presence.
The only trace of their visits are electronic records on a disk by a computer on the second floor of the Deike building. Every visit to the Earth and Mineral Sciences World Wide Web site is recorded on that disk, including where the visitor is from and what he or she looked at. Our College hosts many thousands of such visitors every day. Roughly three fourths of the information delivered to our unseen visitors is weather-related. Sometimes, these folk actually leave messages that let us know a little bit about them.