User:Danfmurphy/Sandbox

Articles of Interest
Magnetohydrodynamic drive The article is short and does not provide a whole lot of information. Additional information would be nice, as well as a possible merge with Caterpillar drive which is a fictional idea from the novel The Hunt for Red October.

Alaska Marine Highway

Categories
Category:Magnetic propulsion devices Marine propulsion Fluid dynamics

Alaska Marine Highway
Alaska Marine Highway System is a ferry system in southeast Alaska that links together numerous island communities to more populated and commercially available urban areas on the mainland and larger islands. The company is fairly small, possessing only 8 ships to cover a vast route of ports between dozens of islands and the mainland. A few island communities, such as Prince of Wales Island, are not content with the availability of the ferries and are proposing to make their own. The fleet of Alaska Marine Highway is also very old, they first started in the 1970's, and thus fuel and maintenance costs are rising, making it much more difficult to raise revenue. The company is looking at diversifying the fleet, not a simple nor easily affordable task, since it purposes much different employments during the seasons; passenger and cruise ferries up the coastline in the summer with rooms for rent and hotel services; and shuttling supplies to businesses in the winter where many of those rooms lie vacant and unused. Also, the ferries do everything from long sea cruises to short channel crossings, proving to be very inefficient with fuel. Change is on the table with Alaska Marine Highways, and hopefully soon to come to the fleet.Danfmurphy (talk) 20:09, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Research Assignment 4
Wikipedia offers a much more diverse span of information than that of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Maritime History on the Compass. But the OEMH has information on a sun compass, which Wikipedia doesn’t mention anywhere in the eighteen pages of articles it has. OEMH in comparison has only ten pages of information. OEMH is much more aloof when it comes to the origin of the compass. It talks about how it has existed in Europe for many centuries, and lists China as “the country for which the country is commonly claimed,” while Wikipedia gives information on another theory suggesting that it may have existed in Mesoamerica about a thousand years before the first evidence that the Chinese had discovered it. Wikipedia also has information the how the compass was likely discovered and put to use in geomancy before its applications in navigation were discovered, which OEMH does not mention at all. Wikipedia also provides some information on navigational practices before the invention of the compass giving more weight to the significance of the invention. With these few exceptions, both sources provide most of the same data, organized in slightly different ways, but still covering the same material. The Wikipedia article is actually quite reliable in this instance, according to Wikipedia’s guidelines. With thirteen of its twenty articles are published books and the remaining seven being academic journals which must first pass an academic peer review before publication. Therefore, the article is just as reliable as the encyclopedia. The Wikipedia article is much more reader friendly. It is easier to read and follow than the OEMH. The OEMH is organized into nine sections, and is limited to the amount of information it can provide, since being printed into a book, it must deal with the cross analysis of price. The print is small and compact, and the writing is professional in diction. Wikipedia, by comparison, is divided into seven sections, with twenty one sub divisions in between, and a helpful outline at the top outlining all of the divisions and sub divisions so one can quickly glance at it and know where to go for the information they desire. Wikipedia also has the advantage of the limitless space of the internet without the fear of cost, so it can provide the reader/researcher with much more information on other topics, such as opposing theories on where the compass was invented first. The print is more spaced out and not crammed into double columns as in OEMH. Wikipedia also has a section at the end of the article entitled, “Using a Compass” which explains how to use a compass in practical, everyday applications, which the OEMH more leaves the reader up to figure it out for his or her self. So the Wikipedia is much more user friendly. I commend and recommend Wikipedia over the Oxford Encyclopedia of Maritime History for this article because it is more user friendly and provides more information than the encyclopedia.

Refrences

 * Swagel, W. (1994). The alaska marine highway system: Staying afloat on troubled waters. Alaska Business Monthly, 10(7), 24-24. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/233095386?accountid=10353
 * Stapleton, R. (2009). Alaska marine highway system sails toward improvements. Alaska Journal of Commerce, 33(38), 26-26. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/219651780?accountid=10353
 * Carroll, E. (1997). The ferry debate. Alaska Business Monthly, 13(1), 16-16. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/233094961?accountid=10353

Draft Final Article
User: Danfmurphy/DanfmurphyDraft