Plain Text

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.”

Tags: Random access, Reading by GD
Comments Off

“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.

Tags: How to, Tech by GD
Comments Off

“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.

Tags: How to, Reading, Writing & editing by GD
Comments Off