David Rumsey Historical Map Collection

I loved the amazing collection of old city maps by Mr. Rumsey. These maps will be useful for many people. I thank him for collecting and organizing the maps.

Homepage
http://www.davidrumsey.com/

Google Maps
http://rumsey.geogarage.com/

My planning internship in Paris

I had some good news this week. French Institute in Seoul told me that I would work in the Institute of Urban Planning of Ile-de-France (IAU IDF) in this fall. It is a government institution which is specialized in the study of urban planning of Paris and its surrounding area (Ile-de-France). I wanted to do an internship there when I was a student in Paris years ago. However, I couldn't dream of working there at that time with my insufficient experience. This year I originally wanted to work in the City Hall of Paris but the IAU must be a better alternative than the original.

I will work for three months from Oct 1, 2010 and be given two main missions. According to my wishes, the first mission is about analyzing Local Planning Documents (Plan Local d'Urbanisme) of various communes in Ile-de-France including those of Paris. I am greatly interested in how urban planning is established and executed at local level in France. From the French practice, I would like to propose decentralization of urban planning system in South Korea whose planning system is very centralized.

The second mission is about my country. The IAU currently studies Science Cities. They try to benchmark reknowned Science Cities in the world. They finished their work on Europe in 2009. This year it's the turn of Asia: Singapore and Seoul. I'm both excited at Seoul's nomination and the possibility of my contribution in the study.

The turn of events confirms somehow my decision of studying in Seoul rather than continuing it in Paris. However you are international or cosmopolitan, you can't detach yourself from your root and you should understand your root first.

Zotero, a convenient referencing tool

Referencing is almost an art when writing an academic paper. As scholars all over the world continuously contribute to the accumulation of human knowledge, you always have a lot to read before producing your own contribution. Managing and mentionning the reading list is a cumbersome but unavoidable task in the process.
There are many softwares to make the task easy but Zotero is one of a kind. It has some nice time and typing saving features.

1. Zotero collects bibliographical information automatically from library or bookstore sites. You don't need to worry about typing in titles of books and author names which often have difficult spellings. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to work well for non English bibliography. However, it does record the site that the bibliographical information is collected, so it's still useful for bibliographical collection in other languages.

2. Zotero saves the information collected and you can search your huge booklist with ease. You can even link your bibliography to your e-documents in hard disk. Thus you can search and read your pdf almost instantly.

3. Zotero exports your bibliography to your academic paper in official referencing format. You don't need to worry about typing them all!

The only shortcoming is that the program is not standalone. You should execute Firefox first to use it and my Firefox seems somewhat unstable after installing Zotero.

Zotero Home
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First message

I've been thinking to set up a blog on my passion – urban planning - for quite a long time. I just didn't have enough courage to create one with the fear of abandoning it too quickly. I created one today with some pressure from my professor. Pressure and stress are good. Not many things will happen without them. J