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I followed a link on BoingBoing to this Times of India article: Delhi is getting a 45-kilometer monorail system.

The technology panel will announce their selection for Honolulu’s proposed fixed guideway mass transit system tomorrow, according to this article in the Honolulu Advertiser. The five panel members are evaluating four technologies, including:

1. trains (steel wheel on steel rail)
2. buses (rubber tire on concrete)
3. monorail
4. magnetic levitation

The decision will also be announced on the Honolulu High Capacity Transit Corridor’s web site. The video simulation of the proposed Aloha Tower station is pretty good. Most of the site’s content is trapped in PDF files, however.

As I posted on 6 February 2008, I support the bus option. This option could create a two-lane elevated road that can also be used by emergency vehicles. The buses for this system might also be deployed on surface roads as demand warrants. The other three technologies are less flexible and more expensive. City councilmembers Donovan Dela Cruz and Ann Kobayashi appeared on the byline for this article in the Honolulu Star-Builletin on 26 August 2007. The article includes a picture of one bus model. Below is a promotional video for the Eindhoven bus system.

I’m testing a web-based research tool called Zotero. I hope this free service can replace bibliographic database products like EndNote and Citation. I’ve recommended that software to IS 6100 and professional paper students. However, both products cost over US$100 for the student versions.

Zotero is free. It’s an add-on that can be installed in the Firefox web browser. The database is saved in that computer. I’m looking for a way to overcome this limitation. Zotero will not work well or at all with Internet Explorer, Opera or Safari.

Like other software packages, Zotero can capture citation information from web pages. This is a very helpful feature, especially for users who are dealing with long reference lists. Users can import listings directly from EBSCO and ABI.

It’s also possible to add photos from Flickr and materials from the Internet Archive. Zotero keeps adding support for more sites, and web site developers can add some support on their own. Yesterday, I added Zotero support to this blog. Zotero users can click the icon in the address bar to add a billso.com article to their Zotero library.

Zotero also plays nice with Microsoft Office and its leading freeware competitor, OpenOffice. The OpenOffice software can be downloaded from its web site.

One feature I want to try is file management. Zotero can import PDFs and other documents into its search database. I usually save web pages and articles as PDFs for long-term storage.

Of course, a big reason to use any bibliography manager is auto-formatting. Any decent bibliography package, including Zotero, let users build a reference list. The software then creates a list with the user’s choice of formatting, such as APA style.

Please note that I will not require my IS 6100 and IS 7010 students to use Zotero or Firefox, of course.

As I promised on Monday, I have posted a brief example of the reference list format for Paper 4 and the final exam. It’s the second PDF document link on the Paper 4 web page.

My Spring 2007 course materials are no longer available on this web site. I’ve archived most of the PowerPoint and PDF files for my Spring 2007 IS 6100 and IS 7010 courses. Some of the old links are still active, but they will retrieve blank files.

I call this a spring cleaning

I usually make some changes to the syllabi and assignments between terms. Fall 2007 students would not benefit by seeing the old assignments, presentations and syllabi, even though both courses will use the same textbooks that I used earlier this year.

During the next few weeks, I will finish the syllabi, course schedules and web sites for the Fall 2007 courses. When these resources are available, I will post links in the IS 6100 and IS 7010 Fall 2007 course pages on this blog.

WebCT or TurnItIn.com? That’s the question I face

There is a very good chance that I will use WebCT instead of TurnItIn.com to manage the courses gradebooks and assignments. While TurnItIn.com is an excellent course management system, it cannot deliver multiple choice exams.

If I do use WebCT, I’ll include some short quizzes and objective exams in my courses. There will still be several written assignments that will be analyzed by TurnItIn.com. I’ll also build a dedicated page in each course that shows all of the relevant blog posts from this web site.

This article explains why your computer might substitute one character for another in an e-mail message. This is a common question in Hawaii and at my university, as we have many computer users who speak English as a second language.

It all revolves around ASCII, “quoted printable”, and Unicode.

I found this link in the New York Times.

This is a good time to mention that some news sites, like the New York times and CNN, are difficult targets for hyperlinks. The Times shifts many news articles to a paid archive after a few days, while CNN deletes some articles from its public web site after a few weeks. There are ways to maintain links by adding additional arguments to the URL.

Sometimes, Google’s cache can be used to find old news articles.

So for New York Times and CNN articles, I usually save the print-friendlty version of the article as a PDF. Mac users can use the Print, Save as PDF dialog to do a PDF capture. Windows users can install freeware like CutePDF.