Here’s one I forgot to mention yesterday, a news site devoted to “world news, Twitter style”: www.breakingtweets.com.

Content is a bit thin right now, but you can certainly see the potential.

And here’s a spooky one for journalists–a call for a military approach that includes attacks targeting reporters and the news media.

I recently ran into Stephen Rees’s Blog, which focuses on transportation and planning issues, including issues around rail transit. I was initially interested in an entry from several years ago regarding Vancouver’s Skytrain, the system that Honolulu officials want to recreate here.

He wrote:

SkyTrain is very nearly unique. It is only found in Canada (Scarborough) and the US (Detroit, and a slightly larger version feeding JFK airport). Originally conceived as a maglev people mover, the innovations when it was launched were linear induction motors (LIM) and driverless operation (except in Scarborough). Small volume production and the use of proprietary technology means higher costs, as there is not the ability to tap into volume production.

More recently, he’s blogged about “the great ethanol scam” and lots of other topics of interest.

And in light of Honolulu’s current transit debate, check out this article, “Design by Deception, the politics of megaproject approval“.

In the conclusion, the author calls for “institutional checks and balances—including financial, professional, or even criminal penalties for consistent and unjustifiable biases in claims and estimates of costs and benefits” of major projects by “project-promoting politicians and officials”.

Isn’t that an interesting thought? Prosecute public officials who make unsupportable claims about a project’s benefits or costs? How about those consultants who, time after time, produce estimates of benefits that never materialize? Are these a form of consumer fraud? What a concept!