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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.

Tags: Personal, Random access by GD
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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

Tags: Random access, Reading by GD
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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?

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Tags: Random access, Writing & editing by GD
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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.”

Tags: Random access, Reading by GD
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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”).

Tags: Random access, Tech by GD
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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.

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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.

Tags: Random access by GD
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Charles Purdy provides seven steps for using Twitter in your job search.

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As a telecommuter who works on web content, I rarely meet my colleagues face-to-face. My work world is virtual, based on emails, attached documents, and phone calls. In most cases, this suits me fine. But the recent death of a colleague I’d met only once pointed out some limitations.

I wanted to send my condolences to those closest to her. But who were they?

Google and Yahoo searches turned up the name of her high school, some Twitter and Facebook postings, her comments about an apartment she’d rented during a vacation in Paris. The local newspapers had no obituary for her.

From postings on the private blog she’d invited me to, I knew that her parents in a nearby city had helped care for her during previous bouts with cancer and that she’d found their help problematic: needed but tinged with a sense of impending doom that she greatly resisted. I knew that she had many friends. But who had sat with her in her final hours?

In the end, it was a mutual colleague who sent me an address for her parents, by email, of course. I bought a sympathy card and wrote the note, a stranger writing to strangers about a talented and complicated person, their adult child, whose death came much too early and was far from virtual.

Tags: Personal, Random access by GD
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Where you work helps define who you talk with, what you think about, how you solve problems, and how you think about the future. The economic downturn has led to changes in how and where a number of people do their work.

If you miss going in to the office, the San Francisco Chronicle has two recent stories about people who’ve found some new ways to work together:

• Tom Abate, Shared Work Spaces New Resource for Solo Worker (June 4)
• Carolyn Said, San Francisco Sees Influx of Tech Incubators (June 18)

Tags: Random access, Tech, Writing & editing by GD
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The May 2010 issue of the Editcetera newsletter mentions the onlinestylebooks.com site, where you can research style decisions from more than 50 style manuals.

Thanks to the people at Copyediting.com for the recommendation.

Tags: Grammar & usage, How to, Random access, Writing & editing by GD
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“Half of teens send 50 or more text messages a day, or 1,500 texts a month… Older teen girls ages 14-17 [are] averaging 100 messages a day,” according to this report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Many teens in the study used text messaging for chatting with peers and saved voice communication for calls with their parents.

Sources

. Ryan Kim, More than Half of Teens Now Send Text Messages, San Francisco Chronicle, April 20, 2010.
. Amanda Lenhart, Rich Ling, Scott Campbell, Kristen Purcell, Teens and Mobile Phones, Pew Internet & American Life Project, April 20, 2010.

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From the nation of Georgia comes an example of what not to do with your media.

French television station TV5Monde reported last night that a Georgian broadcasting station had perpetrated a hoax on the order of Orson Welles’s 1938 radio broadcast of War of the Worlds.

A news broadcaster at the station had falsely reported that Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili had been killed and that Russian tanks had begun to invade the nation.

The French station reported that Georgians had panicked, causing a run on food supplies at markets, and that calls for emergency medical help had skyrocketed as a result of the so-called news. But it was all a hoax.

In the article Panic in Georgia After a Mock News Broadcast, Andrew Kramer of the New York Times gives some details.

Tags: Random access, Tech, Writing & editing by GD
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Working with a new tool requires patience. Learning how to use it often takes time from the very thing that you wanted to use the tool for.

I recently worked with five busy professionals to put together a panel discussion on freelancing. Tiny decisions about who, where, when, what, and how had to be made around multiple schedules and across geographical distances.

At first, we communicated by email. But the volume of email soon got out of hand, and some information got lost in the shuffle.

I set up a Google Sites wiki as a virtual meeting place. We were able to write updates, introduce ourselves to one another with short biographies and photos, store contact information, post target dates, and work together on the questions that we would discuss. Best of all, each panelist could check in at his or her convenience to see what others were saying.

But some panelists hesitated to add to the wiki, perhaps intimidated by not knowing how to use the tool. Others were not checking in regularly. So we reverted to emails that said things like “Don’t forget to check the wiki!”

Although everyone agreed that we should meet before the night of the panel discussion, finding a time and place to meet in person proved too complicated.

To schedule a meeting time that would work for the greatest number of people, I set up a poll through Doodle.com. The panelists and our helpers could then vote on when they could attend.

We eventually held two conference calls on FreeConference. The service was not quite free, but setup was relatively simple and the call automatically recorded for later use.

The February 24 panel discussion, Tips for Surviving and Thriving as a Freelancer, went very well, with 75 people seated in the Mechanics’ Institute meeting room and café for the meeting.

Publicity had reached Bay Area Editors’ Forum, the Northern California Translators Association, the Northern California Science Writers Association, San Francisco Women on the Web, readers of the Sin and Syntax site, and likely a few others.

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Emily Pilloton works with Project H Design to create, refine, and publicize useful objects for “planet, people, and profit,” a field that she calls humanitarian design.

She recently demonstrated these items for Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report:

• Spider boots: These Herman-Munster-like elevator shoes protect human landmine-detectors from shockwaves set off by explosions.

• Adaptive eyecare: The wearer can focus the liquid-filled lenses on these affordable strap-on eyeglasses to achieve the prescription strength that he or she needs.
• Hippo roller: If you fill this 22-gal. water barrel, then set it on its side and roll it to your destination, you will be pushing a 200-lb. load of water as though it weighed only 40 lbs.

Pilloton and others are taking their design show on the road beginning Monday, February 1, in the San Francisco Bay Area. Here’s the itinerary. For more information, see the Design Revolution Road Show site.

Thanks to Nancy Noble, my former professor in the Design and Industry department at San Francisco State University, for the link.

Tags: Random access, Tech by GD
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