Get the Little Book

The APA Publication Manual is an excellent reference for the overall writing process and specific technical issues that come up in compiling a research paper. It even provides two chapters on writing style and mechanics. But these two subjects are handled better by The Elements of Style. This book is incredibly brief and to the point and if you follow its tenets you will realize the same qualities in your own writing.

Usually when I write a paper, the lengthiest version is my initial draft. I’ll create a separate post to elaborate more on this, but the idea is that each sucessive draft proceeds as a reductive process. This book in particular aids in that reductive process. It allows your writing to convey more ideas with fewer words. Maintaining a succinct style allows you to spend more time on each sentence. It also requires less effort from your reader to process and remember.

Street Label Query

Here is how to apply a saved query to filter some unnecessary street labels. This is a lot quicker than converting to annotation just to remove one or two extraneous labels.

Free Textbooks A Reality

This new post ties in nicely with the beginning of the fall semester. I saw this article over at Ars. If you don’t already know, I read Ars daily so expect more posts about stuff I read over there. Anyway, the story is about Flat World Knowledge and one of the best business ideas I’ve heard in a long time. Flatword are offering free open-source textbooks to students and educators. The company aims to make mony by offering DRM free PDFs or audiobooks as well as customizable printed textbooks and class materials. As a student this is good for me in a number of ways.

Urban Planning in Toronto

Check out this article I found. It talks about urban planning and some of the consequences of incoherent development.

YourHome.ca

Shared via AddThis

Found a link to this article at BUZZBUZZHOME.

Modeling Terrain I

This lesson shows how you can use 2 dimensional point data with elevation attributes to construct a 3D surface. It then shows how to calculate useful data from the surface just created. P.S. Check out ScreenShots which I used to create this tutorial.

Hello world!

My first post on my first blog.

In the future I plan to post information and links about things I find interesting.