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

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Immersion-a-people-centric-view-of-your-email-life-1024x542

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

 

  1. 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

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2013-07-12_20-17-58_129Felt 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_80Friends 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.

 



Fresh Pond Morning Run 6-23-2013

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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.



My first e-book purchase: Out for Blood…on Vampires, of all things!

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Just bought my first e-book…Out for Blood, by friend Margot Adler. She describes it as her “wild essay on why vampires have such traction in our culture and the relationship of all those things to power, morality and the fate of the planet. 
As explained ion Amazon,

 

Starting as a meditation on mortality after the illness and death of her husband, Margot read more than 260 vampire novels, from teen to adult, from gothic to modern, from detective to comic. She began wonder why vampires have such appeal in our society now? Why is Hollywood spending billions on vampire films and television series every year? It led her to explore issues of power, politics, morality, identity, and even the fate of the planet.“Every society creates the vampire it needs,” wrote the scholar Nina Auerbach. Dracula was written in 19th century England when there was fear of outsiders and of disease coming in through England’s large ports. Dracula – An Eastern European monster bringing direct from a foreign land – was the perfect vehicle for those fears. But who are the vampires we need now? In the last four decades, going back to Dark Shadows, we have created a very different vampire: the conflicted, struggling-to-be-moral-despite-being-predators vampire. Spike and Angel, Stefan and Damon, Bill and Eric, the Cullens – they are all struggling to be moral despite being predators, as are we. Perhaps our blood is oil, perhaps our prey is the planet. Perhaps Vampires are us. 

Margot , a great friend from NYC days and also my Harvard Nieman Fellowship,  is a long time NPR news correspondent, and the author of Drawing Down the Moon, the classic book on Contemporary Paganism, Wicca and Goddess Spirituality. She is also the author of Heretic’s Heart, a 1960’s memoir–recently republished as an e-book.

—Anita M.  Harris
Anita Harris is the author of Broken Patterns, Professional Women and the Quest for a New Feminine Identity, and of the forthcoming Ithaca Diaries. New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning public relations and digital marketing firm she founded in Cambridge, MA. 


Professional Women Opt Out: A Complicated Conundrum

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Much appreciated Katie Johnson’s insightful May 27 Boston Globe article “Many Women With Top Degrees Stay Home.” It’s about a Vanderbilt University study showing that married women with degrees from the most elite colleges and universities are likelier to opt out of professional careers than are women who attended the least selective schools–and that this differential has little to do with family income.

One analyst suggests that women with degrees from elite schools feel freer than others to opt out because they think their prestigious degrees will allow them to easily transition back into the workforce.

Mebbe so–although this implies that, given the choice, all women would rather leave their jobs to stay at home with children–which I don’t for two seconds believe is true.
Based on my research for Broken Patterns, Professional Women and the Quest for a New Feminine Identity, I’ll bet the explanation for opting out is a lot more complicated than that.

In my interviews, many women told me they chose male-dominated professions because they didn’t want to live the sorts of lives their homemaker mothers led–but many had grandmothers who worked outside the home in the early 20th century. This–and the historical record– led me to posit a push=pull process in which, going back to the industrial revolution in the US, the more women left the home for paying work in one generation, the greater the pull to domesticity, in the next. That push-pull process–driven by social, technological, generational and psychological forces–is also reflected in women’s personal development along their life cycles. I believe it helps account for some of the choices–such as schools, spouses, and careers– that women make.

I’m not saying Johnson and her interviewees are wrong…Only that that women make life choices for a multitude of reasons. The Vanderbilt study points out that women who graduate from elite schools tend to marry men from similar schools. It strikes me that if both spouses pursue highly competitive careers that allow little time for family life, something’s got to give when children come along. Most often, it’s the woman.

Like Sheryl Sandberg, the Facebook COO and author of Lean-In, I am troubled by the conundrum this creates: talented women who opt out of careers, even for just a few years, may lose the opportunity to attain positions in which they can influence workplace culture–and enhance the lives of women and men of the future. On the other hand, perhaps it is not the privileged who are likeliest to push for equality–but, rather, those who have struggled to overcome barriers.
–Anita M. Harris

Anita Harris is the author of Broken Patterns, Professional Women and the Quest for a New Feminine Identity (Wayne State University Press, 1995), A new edition will soon be published; please comment below if you’d like to reserve a copy.

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



Harvard Square Stay-cation

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Harvard Square Stay-cation

Harvard Square Stacation

Spending Memorial Day Weekend at home, in and near Harvard Square. Good start yesterday: Breakfast at Henrietta’s, lunch at Mexican, afternoon perusing books on Web design. More later!

–Anita M. Harris

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



Photos: Fresh Pond, Cambridge, After Snowstorm of 2013

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Photos by Anita M. Harris; kindly request permission and link before re-posting.

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



Small dog surveys hurricane damage to big tree at Fresh Pond, Cambridge

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photo of dog Dog surveying uprooted treeHappy 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.