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It’s time for me to move on to a new chapter.

If you’d like to keep in touch, my contact information is on the Bay Area Editors’ Forum website.

Thanks for reading, and take good care.

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I sit at my computer most mornings to read the daily digest from several email discussion lists. People ask questions, offer opinions, share information.

I recently asked for recommendations of good house painters on the neighborhood email list, a group with 190 participants. Five replies came in, all sent only to my email address, not to the list.

Why would people choose to keep such responses private? The topic was far from sensitive, unless the forum is filled with people who paint houses for a living.

If the Internet is about community, and if it’s true that we all want to share, what accounts for people’s reluctance to post publicly on such discussion forums?

Do email discussion lists attract a more selectively social, less open, less trusting group of individuals than do some of the big-name social media sites? (Even the terms of the discussion assume that openness is good, that reserve is bad.)

A recent study from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project “explored people’s overall social networks and how use of these technologies is related to trust, tolerance, social support, and community and political engagement.”

Take a look at the summary or the full report.

Thanks to San Francisco Chronicle business and technology reporter Benny Evangelista for his June 18 article about the study.

Sources

Benny Evangelista, Web Users Have Better Social Lives, Study Finds (published in hard copy as “Facebook Can Bring Friends, Trust, Support”), San Francisco Chronicle, June 18, 2011.

Keith Hampton, Lauren Sessions Goulet, Lee Rainie, Kristen Purcell, Social Networking Sites and Our Lives, Pew Research Centers Internet & American Life Project, June 16, 2011.

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“Perhaps each book is a mistake I want to correct with the next book,” says artist, designer, and book maker Irma Boom in this six-minute video.

You can learn more about the artist on Irma Boom’s website.

Source

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I’ve updated My Tech Glossary.

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Mark S. Luckie of the Washington Post has put together a collection of newspaper sites that help you view and visualize 2010 U.S. census data.

Type in your zip code on the New York Times census map, for example, to see how population and demographics have changed where you live.

Thanks to the Newsfeed at MediaBistro.com for the pointer.

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This excellent infographic showing some effects of radiation exposure appeared earlier this week in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Compare the radiation you might be exposed to with a dental x-ray as opposed to with a CT scan. Then consider whether you’d apply for a job as a radiation worker.

The graphic artist is Melina Yingling of McClatchy Tribune Information Services.

Source

Erin Allday, Japan Nuclear Health Risks Minimal, Experts Say,” San
Francisco Chronicle, March 16, 2011.

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Click on the word Play under this interactive map to watch depictions of seismic activity in Japan before and after March 11.

Ken Schwencke and Thomas Suh Lauder of the Los Angeles Times prepared this mashup from USGS data.

It’s odd that watching these graphic depictions of Richter scale numbers can cause the heart to beat faster, something that might not happen if we were to read the data in a simple table. Is it the motion that causes this?

Related Posts

Visualizing Data: Infographics
Infographics: U.S. Unemployment Since 2007
Infographics: Radiation Exposure

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A 37 percent success rate would get your program cut in big business.

But for graduates of an Alameda County (California) program that offers at-risk young people the chance to train as emergency medical technicians, it may be enough.

Since 2002, writes Scott Johnson of the Bay Area News Group, the Bay EMT program has offered “two five-month courses each year… to 30 students” at a time. “Nearly 200 students have gone on to successful medical and firefighting careers.”

Says one recent graduate:

I’d never been the guy in class who had the answer… I’d never felt like that before, like I had something to look forward to.

Can our society afford to live without this particular kind of success?

Source

Scott Johnson, Transforming Lives Through Emergency Medical Technician Program, Feb. 21, 2011; published in Contra Costa Times print edition as “A Lifesaving Program.”

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“Somehow it makes little sense that amateur ‘ham’ radio continues to thrive in the age of Twitter, Facebook, and iPhones,” writes David Rowan of Wired UK.

More than 700,000 people in the United States alone sit before whistling static-filled radios, homing in on friends, strangers, and the occasional royal, according to Rowan.

Their communication is based on codes of numbers, letters, and etiquette; and it includes exchanges of (paper) postcards between ham radio operators.

Wired provides a how-to page to help aspiring U.S. ham radio communicators get started.

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“Why write?” asked interviewer Jeffrey Brown of author Roger Rosenblatt, author of the new book Unless It Moves The Human Heart: The Craft and Art of Writing.

“We write to make suffering endurable, evil intelligible, justice desirable, and love possible.”

Rosenblatt advises students of writing to “strive for anticipation, rather than surprise, imagination, rather than invention,… and to write with precision and restraint.”

Read the transcript or watch the video of this interview on PBS Newshour, January 31, 2011.

Thanks for the pointer, MC.

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San Francisco Chronicle travel editor Spud Hilton lists the many gadgets he packs for audio, video, communications, Wi-Fi, and emergencies on the road.

The article is in three parts, with listings of essentials, optional but important gear, and high-tech gadgets for the “gear junkie.”

Perhaps the most interesting item on the list is one that doesn’t require electricity: a small roll of gaffer tape: “Easier to work with than duct tape, and has saved me in dozens of situations.”

Source

Spud Hilton, Gadget Junkies Love to Take Technology on Trips (published on paper as “Gadget Junkies Taking It Along”), San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 10, 2010.

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We live in a culture of sharing, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook told Wired.com in 2009:

people choose to share all this information themselves…. people need to move through this process of realizing that sharing information is good, and slowly sharing more and more information over time. But by doing that you get a lot richer information…

We feel more connected when we share, and the sense of being in community can have positive effects.

It’s often said that the Internet is a global village. But anyone who’s lived in a village knows that a village has both its cranks and its heroes, its gossip and its town crier, its snoop and its police, its fool and its sage.

Which one will you be?

Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen says you should think twice before posting to the Internet. “Think about how [what you write in email, blogs, or discussion forums] will look to a hiring manager in ten years,” advised Nielsen in 2005.

What is the dividing line between sharing about your life and projecting a professional image that will help you get that job interview?

Nobody likes a person who shares too much, but nobody likes a big phony either.

Sources

. Jakob Nielsen, Weblog Usability: Top Ten Design Mistakes (see rule nine), Alertbox, Oct. 17, 2005.
. Fred Vogelstein, The Wired Interview: Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, wired.com, June 29, 2009.

Related Postings

. Social Networking, Privacy, and the Law
. Tamar Weinberg: Social Media Etiquette Handbook

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Updated Dec. 6, 2010

The Library of Congress now has a video channel on YouTube, says ResearchBuzz.

Here’s a selection titled Early Films of San Francisco, 1897-1916. What’s striking is the silence. The viewer has to fill in the blanks.

Research by film historian David Kiehn dates the making of the film A Trip Down Market Street to a few days before the great San Francisco earthquake and fire (April 18, 1906).

Sources

. ResearchBuzz, circa Nov. 16, 2010.
. Edward Guthmann, Historian David Kiehn Traces Old Bay Area Films, San Francisco Chronicle, Dec. 6, 2010 (published in hard copy as “Detective Work Tracks Earliest Bay Area Films”).

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Fall has begun and with it the new term of the community chorus I joined in January. You can watch videos of other groups performing some of the pieces and listen to the part recordings put together by our choral director, Mary Stocker.

Thanks to my friend Elyse for putting together the page template.

Related Post

Singing in the Choir

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The notes for this video on YouTube say it’s “A stunning film from Will Hoffman and Daniel Mercadante to accompany Radiolab’s Words episode.” Thanks to my friend Jonathan for the pointer.

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