Cambridge’s Luke Farrar Kickstarts fundraising for Aussie Claustral Canyon 3-D Film

With 17 days to go, and at 37% of his target, 3-d filmmaker Luke Farrar says things are going quite well for his Kickstarter campaign to fund an amazing filmmaking project–using a novel, 3-D camera–to bring a beautiful Australian canyon to your computer Screen.

Luke says Claustral Canyon is one of the world’s most ancient and beautiful slot canyons. Fifty million years old, it is ten times older than the Grand Canyon. There is no record of the Aboriginals ever having been there, which only adds to the mystery of the place. The canyon was only explored for the first time in the 1960s.

Here’s a link to Luke’s Kickstarter page, which includes a video explanation and demonstration of the project. Luke is based at the CIC, where I work; great if you could help him out with a few bucks.

Journey To A Lost Canyon .

–Anita Harris
New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning PR and digital marketing firm working with health, science, technology, energy and the environmental clients, worldwide.

CIC welcomes new (old) client…

Warm welcome to one of the newest (oldest?) clients at the Cambridge Innovation Center…My favorite entrant in the Halloween Competition, so far. It’s by Mike Burtov, CEO at Cangrade, which offers hiring automation/psychological testing. Back story is that this guy or gal is still waiting for Netscape to load…from 5 1/4 inch floppy disks. Pleased that s/he’s in C3 (shared space on the 5th floor) rather than on another floor, where I often work, which we’ve dubbed “elderhostel” for reasons you might be able to guess.

–Anita M. Harris
New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning PR, social media and content marketing firm based in the Cambridge Innovation Center, in Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA.

Guest Post: Mark Orton on Metadata, the Government and You

Mark Orton, our friend and former Cantabridgian, now living in Hudson, NY (aka Cambridge on the Hudson), suggests that the government is not being straightforward about how the multitude of data it is collecting is being used. He recommends a new tool called “Immersion” with which you can check out just how easy it is to compile and understand your own metadata.

Mark first posted the following on July 9 at Current Matters as “The uses of metadata: an experiment you can conduct with your own life.”

—AMH

With the recent revelations of the NSA vacuum cleaner collecting metadata about every aspect of our lives1 we have been subjected to calming incantations, “We are only collecting metadata, we aren’t looking at the content”. As I (and many others) have pointed out earlier, this is complete nonsense.

Now three fellows at MIT have provided us with a web tool to visualize metadata from our own lives. If you have a Gmail account, you should trundle over to Immersion and take a look at your own metadata.

I have been using my Gmail account as my main email system for a number of years. There are four other email addresses connected to it so the graphic below presents much more than just my Gmail email address’s activity.

(click on the graphic to see it full size)

Immersion: a people-centric view of your email life

Keep in mind that the Immersion site offers a great deal of interactivity. You set sliders to see different chunks of time, pick out particular people and see how they connect to others, and much more. There are three mysterious sliders on the left, “charge”, “node”, and “link” that change the organization of the chart. I have been unable to determine exactly what they do and the MIT guys have, to my knowledge, provided no explanation. Perhaps in their cocoon on Mass Ave, they assume that everyone will know or immediately intuit the uses of these sliders.

In my case it was very easy to identify the basic clumps of my life: family and friends, Hudson business community, and the library. Then you might notice floating around the periphery are a lot of nodes without links (or only occasional ones) to anyone else. These are my clients. I don’t email most of them very often. And, excepting a referral by me for some specific business purpose they never know about the existence of others amongst my client base, therefore no links between them.

Now, having played with this a bit one gets a much more visceral sense of how important and useful metadata is. And, imagining a pool of metadata that adds telephone contacts, location data from cellphones, text messages, Facebook, LinkedIn, and financial transactions, it is easy to see how fine grained and comprehensive a picture could be constructed.

So, as noted in an earlier post, NSA Vacuuming, Meta Data, Mistaken Misleading Metaphors, the government is being disengenuous, to be mild, to describe metadata as only metadata.

Here is a view of my data for just the last year. Some people have disappeared, new ones added, and the shape of the intensity of the interactions changed. Immersion: a people-centric view of your email life=last year

We are forced to assume that they are collecting everything, emails, telephone calls, financial transactions, text messages, anything digital which is virtually every aspect of life unless you took to the woods before 2000 and have been subsisting in an entirely cash economy without any communications that re not face to face. The tangle of lies by every government official involved will not support any other sensible interpretation. [↩]

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning public relations and marketing firm located in Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA.

Climbing the walls–literally–at CIC Party in Somerville

Felt very cool in joining 500 of my closest friends at the all-CIC (Cambridge Innovation Center) Party held at Brooklyn Boulder indoor climbing center, in Somerville, on Friday night. During the day, CIC is a vibrant workplace for 500 companies and 1700 people on nine floors of two high-rise buildings in Kendall Square, Cambridge. At the party, all of that energy 2013-07-12_20-17-49_347

and many of those people were unleashed in one huge horizontal space–literally climbing the walls, doing yoga, taking photos, who knows what else. We were given the choice of drinking or climbing…

2013-07-12_20-17-37_80 Friends Tom, R, Michael, Kathryn….heck, almost everyone I knew– chose the former, making us, perhaps, a bit less cool?

—Anita Harris

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning public relations and marketing agency located in Cambridge, MA.

“Redlegs” featured at Roxbury Film Festival, in Boston Debut

Executive Producer Bryan Kane, Producer Brett Greene, Witer/Director Brandon Harris

Executive Producer Bryan Kane, Producer Brett Greene, Writer/Director Brandon Harris

Joined friends, family and other enthusiastic audience members on Saturday night, June 29, for the Boston premier of feature film “Redlegs” at the Roxbury Film Festival, at the Massachusetts College of Art.

I liked the film–which was written and directed by Brandon Harris (and executive produced by Brett Green –who happens to be my cousin). It’s about three 20-somethings trying to deal with their grief after a childhood friend is killed, in Cincinnati.

The film begins at the friend’s funeral and slowly unfolds– revealing the friends’ relationships with one another and with the victim, and where they are now, in their lives.

The friends’ actions and reactions sometimes seem inexplicable– irrational anger at one another; attempts to stay busy by playing frisby and attending sporting events; beating up a guy who challenges them; incessant use of the “F-word.” But it works because the point of the film is that they don’t know what to do or how to act–and,taken as a whole, it all expresses the chaos of grief.

I found it especially interesting to see how a 20-something director portrayed the interactions of males his own age struggling to define themselves and one another as men.

Congrats, guys!

Here’s the favorable New York Times Review: http://movies.nytimes.com/2012/05/25/movies/redlegs-by-brandon-harris-is-a-cincinnati-tale.html?_r=0 .

—Anita M. Harris

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, a public relations and digital marketing firm located in Cambridge, MA.

Journalist/Producer Bill Lichtenstein Wins Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism

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Exposed School Use of Restraints and Seclusion Rooms in Lexington, MA and Nationally

Our friend Bill Lichtenstein has won a Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism for “A Terrifying Way to Discipline Chlldren,” an Op Ed piece he wrote for the September 8, 2012 New York Times. Lichtenstein, an investigative journalist and filmmaker, exposed the largely unknown use of seclusion rooms and physical restraints in schools across the country. Lichtenstein became aware of such rooms and restraints when his young daughter encountered them in a Lexington, MA public school.

According to the award announcement: “After learning that his 5-year-old daughter had been repeatedly locked in a converted closet in her elementary school, the author exposed the largely unknown use of seclusion rooms and physical restraints as forms of punishment in schools around the U.S. The piece attracted a flood of media attention to the issue, sparked tremendous response from readers, and helped coalesce a national effort to end these practices and promote positive behavior interventions in schools.”

Lichtenstein, along with five other parents, has launched Action to Keep Students Safe, a non-profit initiative to curtail the use of restraints and seclusion rooms in schools and to support parents in advocating for their children. See: KeepStudentsSafe.com .

The Casey Medals celebrate the past year’s best reporting on children, youth and families in the U.S. Lichtenstein’s article received an Honorable Mention.

According to the Casey Medals press release: “Judges sought journalism that packed a punch, stirred the conscience and made an impact; meticulously reported, powerfully delivered stories that shined a spotlight on issues, institutions and communities that rarely receive media attention.

The Casey Medals are administered by the Journalism Center on Children and Families at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, University of Maryland and are funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. The Journalism Center on Children and Families received entries representing the work of hundreds of reporters, editors, photographers and producers at more than 100 news organizations. Among the winners: The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, PBS Frontline, New York Magazine, The Center for Public Integrity, The Center for Investigative Reporting, and The Des Moines Register.

—Anita M. Harris

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning public relations and digital marketing firm located in Cambridge, MA.

Fresh Pond Morning Run 6-23-2013

Met my summer goal of running around Fresh Pond, this morning (with brief stopover at Starbucks, at Fresh Pond Shopping Center-and frequent stops to shoot these photos). Next time–all the way!

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning public relations and marketing firm located in Cambridge, MA.

Pedicab Service Launched in Harvard Square

Boston Pedicab–operating in Boston for about six weeks–expanded to Cambridge, yesterday, as I learned while walking in Harvard Square. Driver? Cyclist? Operator? Bryce Read said it was his first day, first hour, working in Cambridge–so had not yet had any customers. But he’ll take you wherever you’d like to go, give a tour, get you across campus–and you can pay what you think the service is worth. He said that a trip to Porter Square–maybe half a mile?–might be worth $10. Or $15. Or $25. I said that seemed like a lot when you can get the bus for $1.75–but he said you’re paying for a novel, fun experience. I’m sure he’ll get a lot of business on Harvard Graduation Day–shlepping students’ elderly relatives around the campus. Perhaps he sensed I was feeling tired when he asked if he could take me somewhere….I was tempted…but had to admit I was just on the way to my car. The Cambridge service is called Charles River Pedicab; to reserve call Bryce at 978, 473-1508, 617-266-2005 or visit www.Bostonpedicab.com–which bills “tours, weddings and Fenway shuttles.”

—Anita M Harris

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning public relations and digital marketing firm based in Cambridge, MA.