Happy to report that Frankenstorm caused little damage in my immediate neighborhood or on my running path but this downed tree is evidence of Hurricane Sandy’s force, last night.
—Anita M. Harris
Anita Harris is a writer and blogger in Cambridge, MA.
New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, a strategic publications and online marketing firm based in Kendall Square, Cambridge.
Dropped by last night’s opening at the Davis Orton Gallery in Hudson, NY, where former Cantabridgians Karen Davis and Mark Orton featured photographers John Chervinsy, John Cyr, Elaine Mayes, and David Torcoletti –each making powerful statements about photography, art, perception, human emotion and the passage of time.
In “Studio Physics,” Chervinsky’s images challenge traditional photography by depicting not a single instant, but the passage of time. He begins by composing and photographing a still life. Then, he crops a subset of the image sends it as a file digitally to a painting factory in China, waits weeks for an anonymous artist in China to complete an oil painting of the cropped section and send it back in the mail, and, finally, he reinserts the painting into the original setup and rephotographs.
According to the Davis-Orton Website, “Chervinsky is interested in the tensions expressed in the comparison between reality vs. representation while adding, in this series, an unusual collaboration process with an anonymous artist half way around the world and subtle changes over time that we might otherwise take for granted.”
John Cyr’s photos of developer trays memorialize the specific, tangible tools used by photographer for a century–before the advent of digital media.
By titling each tray with its owner’s name–some quite renowned–” Cyr references the historical significance of these objects in a minimal manner that evokes thoughts about the images that have passed through each artist’s tray.”
While a few of the photographed trays appear relatively clean and empty, others frame beautiful abstract patterns and formations.
Elaine Mayes, former chair of the photography department at New York University, takes photos of artistic and advertising images in their context–usually through glass–to include not only the surrounding scene but also environmental particulars of the world beyond as reflected in the glass.
“While thematically, the project is about how photographs and advertising imagery permeate our lives; it is also about how the flattening of space in a photograph can produce a collage filled with unexpected content. ”
Especially moving were David Torcoletti “Soldiers”, a small portion of hundreds photographs of U.S. soldiers that, during the Vietnam War, were mailed to a South Vietnamese radio and television personality known professionally as “Mai Lan.” For hours every day, Mai Lan broadcast to American troops stationed there. She also spent much time visiting wounded soldiers in hospitals all around the country. English was her second language, but she was able to communicate very directly with her audience Often the photos were inscribed with simple, touching and sincere declarations of appreciation for giving comfort to the subjects of the pictures. When the North overran South Vietnam, Mai Lan had to leave quickly; she chose a small box of photographs to bring along, leaving hundreds behind.
According to the Davis Orton Web site, ” Years later, Mai Lan, now Denise, and a colleague of David Torcoletti’s at a private school, showed him the images”–many of which were not well preserved. Torcoletti photographed all of the images and, with her permission, digitally adjusted twenty-four that he found most powerful for exposure, contrast, burning, dodging, color balance and saturation. All of these decisions were emotional and aesthetic. “For Torcoletti, the power of these objects was in the way they were disintegrating, barely holding on to the original image while becoming something else entirely. They were now less specific to the individuals depicted and more about war and hope and a peculiar, distant “love” that sustained these men in impossible circumstances.”
The show closes November 11, 2012.
–Anita M. Harris
New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, a public relations and online marketing firm based in Cambridge, MA.
Sorry I couldn’t make it to this year’s Global Cleantech Meetup but am pleased to post information provided by Harold Simansky about his company, 360 Chestnut , which provides resources for consumers and service providers in the home improvement market, and about WeFunder, a crowd investing platform for startups.
Both companies are headquartered at the Cambridge Innovation Center in Kendall Square, where I share space, although I have not yet met either Simansky or WeFunder cofounder and President Mike Norman.
Simansky says the two companies “stole the show,” but I’ll bet they got a run for their money (so to speak) from my friend and informal PR client, Christine Adamow, who announced that her company, EuphorbUS, which has produced pure fuel oil from tree seeds in Africa since 2007, is setting up shop in Hawaii. [Link to Euphorbus release.]
Simansky writes that WeFunder is the premier crowd investing platform for startups, while 360Chestnut is growing into one of the largest home improvement sites on the web.
Both startups were featured presenters at the two day conference: Norman gave the keynote address to the more than 500 attendees and Simanski spoke on home improvement and sustainability.
Simansky points out that 360Chestnut is using the WeFunder platform to raise its most recent round of investment, and in his keynote, Norman called 360Chestnut an “ideal company” to use crowd investing to fund its growth.
Simansky describes WeFunder as “a crowd investing platform for startups.” Using the platform, crowd investors can purchase stock for as little as $100 in promising new businesses around the country. With the passage of the US JOBS Act in April, startups will soon be allowed to solicit investment from small, “unaccredited” investors and sell small stakes in their businesses online.
He says that 360Chestnut is “a no-cost, trusted source” where homeowners learn what to do to make their homes more healthy, energy-efficient and comfortable; connect with qualified service providers, and access the more than 5000 rebate and incentives that will pay for this type of work.
For service providers, 360Chestnut is “a constant source of educated, nurtured customers; marketing & sales support; easy-to-use software and applications; online training; financing options and more. Service providers pay to join and may purchase products and service son the site.
–Anita M. Harris
New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning public relations and online-marketing firm based in Cambridge, MA.
Over the weekend I paid a visit to the MFA in Boston — my first in over a year. In the hours I spent wandering through the museum’s impressive collections and newest exhibitions, nothing held my attention quite so raptly as one tiny room of black-and-white photographs by Edward Weston. Simple and luminous, many of his pictures capture the effects of American civilization on landscapes as varied as the green hills of Ohio and the white sands of New Mexico.
The collection — on loan from the Lane Collection — is titled “Leaves of Grass” after Walt Whitman’s masterwork, perhaps the greatest of American poems. In 1941, Weston was hired by the Limited Editions Club of New York to illustrate its two-volume limited edition of Leaves of Grass (of which a copy is available for display in the gallery). The photographer subsequently took off on a road trip that brought him and his wife from New England to the Southeast and back across the country to their native California.
Circling the collection, I could not look away from the image of a narrow road snaking its way through the moonlit fields of Connecticut farmlands — just as my attention was held by the picture of a Louisiana plantation house far into decline. Weston’s photographs in some way capture the thrill of being a traveler, of stumbling upon something that is at once new and ancient. It is the thrill of both discovery and recognition.
While Whitman’s poetry is often extravagant in its descriptions and range (and at times even a little rough around the edges), Weston’s photographs are controlled, subdued, and exacting. However, the subject of the collection is really no different from that of Whitman’s opus. Both these pictures and the poem are a meditation on America, in all its variety and contradictions. At the start of the exhibition, you can glimpse a quote from Weston that just about says it all: “I do believe . . . I can and will do the best work of my life. Of course I will never please everyone with my America — wouldn’t try to.”
Weston’s “Leaves of Grass” will be on view at the MFA on December 31, 2012.
Will Holt also blogs at Letters from a Bay Stater, where this entry was first posted.
New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group–an award-winning PR and marketing firm based in Cambridge, MA.
On August 20, the Boston Globe published a front-page story by staff writer Noah Bierman titled “Brown, Warren pledge holds up.” In January, Bierman writes, Senator Scott Brown and Professor Elizabeth Warren agreed to keep third-party ads out of the Massachusetts Senate race despite their recent inundation of airwaves elsewhere across the country.
This agreement between the Republican incumbent and his Democratic challenger comes only two years after the decision in the now-infamous Citizens United case, in which the United States Supreme Court effectively ruled — to put it rather bluntly — that money is speech and corporations are people in the realm of campaign finance law. Whatever one thinks of either Warren or Brown, they’re certainly bucking a national trend.
With an eye toward the rest of the country in this heated election season, Bierman writes that over $90 million have been in spend in 13 states with Senate races this year alone. None of this money, trickling down from political action committees (PACs) and other interest groups, has so much as paid for a sound bite in the election here in Massachusetts.
You have to wonder how the candidates are making this work in what might very well be one of the country’s most acrimonious, grudging, and competitive Senate race this year. But early on they came up with a relatively simple solution: every time a third-party group runs an advertisement, the party that benefits from the advertisement’s message must make a donation to charity directly out of its own coffers.
The Brown-Warren pledge represents a model for the rest of the country, one that should be strictly adhered to in an election season that promises to be rife with a slew of misinformation and even outright lies. And while I’ll refrain from coming down in this post for one candidate or the other, I should mention that I have a great deal of respect for both Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren in light of this agreement. At least the candidates are speaking for themselves.
–Will Holt also blogs at Letters from a Bay Stater, where this blog initially appeared. http://williambrianholt.wordpress.com/
New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning marketing and communications firm.
Cambridge startup Latitude News and Public Radio Exchange (PRX) have launched a podcast series aimed at bringing global stories with local importance to new audiences.
Latitude was founded earlier this year by veteran BBC producer Maria Balinska to bring “a new brand of global storytelling connects on an emotional level to audiences who are curious about the world,” Balinka said. Its journalists–based in Cambridge and abroad, use a Website, social media and podcasts to crowdsource stories that connect Americans with the world.
PRX operates public radio’s largest distribution marketplace, offering thousands of audio stories for broadcast and digital use. Signature PRX programs include the Moth Radio Hour, RadioLab, This American Life, KCRW Music Mine and the Public Radio Player.
Under an agreement announced earlier this week, Latitude will produce 12 podcasts and broadcast segments for PRX showcasing a distinctive editorial style that links Americans to the rest of the world.
The first podcasts launched this week; one looks at why the US faces a shortage of cod and Norway does not; the other examines the role that one US preacher has played in the anti-gay movement in Uganda.
The Latitude News podcasts are hosted by award-winning journalist Daniel Moulthorp.
Moulthorp is co-founder of The Civic Commons. He is also a former program host of 90.3 WCPN’s Sound of Ideas and co-author, with Dave Eggers and Ninive Calegari, of the best selling book Teachers Have it Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America’s Teachers (The New Press, 2005).
John Barth, Managing Director of PRX, said, “The extension of Latitude News to podcasts and broadcast is a natural step as PRX reaches engaged audiences hungry for more meaningful international stories.”
“We’re thrilled to work with PRX to illustrate how our new brand of global storytelling connects on an emotional level to audiences who are curious about the world,” Balinska said.
The podcasts and segments are made possible by a grant to PRX by the Open Society Foundations aimed at expanding global storytelling for American audiences.
http://www.prx.org/group_accounts/142068-latitudenews
–Anita M. Harris
Anita Harris is a writer and communications consultant in Cambridge, MA.
New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group–an-award-winning strategic communications firm based in Kendall Square, Cambridge.
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Last week at swissnex, the Swiss Consulate in Cambridge, university communications and institutional research experts expressed frustration at the ways in which university rankings are established–and doubt about the accuracy and usefulness of most rankings.
Urs Hugentobler, head of Institutional Research at ETH Zürich/Swiss Federal Institute of Technology–the top ranked university outside of the US– described the vagaries of ranking systems and especially the nebulous “reputation” category, which both impacts and is impacted by a university’s ranking.
Norbert Staub, head of internal communications and deputy head of corporate communications at ETH, emphasizzed the importance of managing a university’s reputation in order to attract students, donors, funding, faculty and the like–all of which influence and are influenced by rankings.
Roundtable participants Dawn Terkla, Associate Provost for Institutional Research and Evaluation at Tufts University, and John Scanlon, an institutional researcher at Harvard, described the challenges involved in responding to differing requests from numerous ranking agencies and in evaluating the meaning of rankings when results change from year to year.
Hugentobler pointed out that rankings ordinarily do not change substantially over the short term–but Terkla said that one year, Tufts saw a 30% decline when a ranking agency changed its methodology. All of the participants agreed that rankings that can be inaccurate, haphazard and difficult to influence.
Gina Vild, associate dean for communications and external relations at Harvard Medical School said that while it is not easy for a university composed of many smaller organizations to raise its overall ranking, it may well be possible for individual units to raise their rankings through communications outreach. In fact, she said, even a crisis, if well-handled, can help raise rankings by increasing an institution’s name recognition and enhancing its reputation.
undefined | Harris Communications GroupJoe Wrinn, former director of news and public affairs at Harvard, emphasized the importance of honesty and transparency in dealing with crises and the media.
But several participants cited examples of rather nefarious tactics–such as inviting huge numbers of unqualified applicants to apply for admission and then turning them down in order up appear more selective and, thus, obtain higher rankings. And before the meeting, Hugentobler mentioned that it is not uncommon for Asian universities to contact those in Europe–at the very least enhanging name recognition should they be contacted by a ranking company.
As moderator, I asked if any of the participants knew of instances when the rankings had been used to encourage positive change within a university; no one responded.
When I mentioned that it seemed like universities are held hostage by the rankers, Terka said that if universities don’t respond, they will likely be ranked anyway. Philip Altbach, director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College, agreed–saying that sometimes university units are ranked even if they don’t exist.
When I asked what can be done to remedy the situation, both Terkla and Scanlon mentioned that institutional researchers often communicate with ranking agencies in order to ascertain what information is being sought. Terkla said that an organization comprised of institutional research experts frequently discusses the rankings. James Honan, senior lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, advised: “Educate your trustees” so they understand what rankings do and do not show.
HarrisCom Group member David Rosen, former Chief Communications Officer at Brandeis and Harvard Universities, the University of Chicago, and Emerson College, posted a blog on various international ranking systems and how communicators can influence results at eduniverse.org:
—Anita M. Harris
Anita Harris is president of the Harris Communications Group, a strategic pr and marketing communications firm specializing in health, science, technology, education and energy.
CNN host Fareed Zakaria said yesterday that despite the world’s current economic and political difficulties, he is optimistic about the future but that it is by no means clear “who will be winners and the losers” in what he called a “new global landscape.”
In a keynote talk at the Biotechnology Industry Organization International Convention in Boston, Zakaria said, that the world is currently “extraordinarily peaceful” compared with previous decade and that it is quite “unified, with a global economic system, interactive communications and technology and greater computing power than ever before. (For example, the cell phone has more computing power than did the Apollo spacecraft capsule in 1969. ” It could go to the moon, he said, but it could not tweet,” he quipped. )
In the past, he said, the US has always been able to emerge from economic difficulties due to its tremendous capacity to innovate–and in the second half of the twentieth century, maintained a substantial economic and innovative edge over other nations. But, he said, “we forget that at other times, other countries have had the edge.” He asked, “Will the US maintain its edge?”
Zakaria outlined what he called three distinct historical phases or causes that, he said, account for the US’ “extraordinary” lead:
(1) During World War II, the forces of destruction had a huge spillover effect. Germany, a major US competitor, was “leveled to the ground” and England was bankrupted.
(2) During the Cold War, fears of losing out to the USSR in the 1950s led the US government to make double the investment in US companies than it is making now; government purchases of US computers and components accounted for the lion’s share of profits for those companies, until the cost curve began to decline. What is more, the government invested heavily in higher education, so that citizens could obtain the world’s finest education in public universities” without paying a cent”
(3) “The third pillar was Jews ” he said. “If Hitler had not made the morally reprehensible to target Jews, the US would not have had the influx of scientists who created the bomb, transformed theoretical physics and gave the US a 30-year lead.”
What this shows, he said, is that America’s propensity of innovate is “not due to DNA,” but rather, that there are specific historical reasons why the US took a commanding lead.
Today, he said, there is a new global landscape in which it is possible for smaller nations– such as Denmark, where the Global company Novo Nordisk, known for its diabetes treatments, was founded– to be at the leading edge in certain technologies.
What is more, Zakaria pointed out, innovation does not necessarily correlate directly with spending for research and development. Apple is often considered one of the most innovative companies in the world–but that is because it understood consumers and how to create a new need, rather than because it offers the most cutting edge technology, he said. “Big company and big country advantages no longer hold, going forward.”
On a panel following the talk, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, founder and chair of the Indian biotechnology company Biocon, said that the current process of biotechnology development is unsustainable and most products are too expensive to benefit most of those who need them. “Countries in Asia must reinvent the process of drug innovation,” she said.
Greg Lucier, CEO of Life Technologies, which supplies systems, biological reagents and services to enable scientific research, said that new genomics tools will be the stimulus to streamline innovation, cut costs, and change the future of human health.
Derek Hanekom, South Africa’s Deputy Minister of Science and Technology emphasized the importance of government’s role in providing access to care and sanitation. Governments can promote innovation by recognizing and supporting it, reducing unnecessary regulations yet adding regulations to promote competition, and supporting education to develop a skilled workforce.
Yucel Altunbasak, president of Tubitak, the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey, listed financing, talented people, regulatory framework, and a governmental support mechanism as keys to helping emerging markets do “what the US did in the 1950’s.”