Christina Inge: Cuts to “Meals on Wheels,” HHS Programs Unfair To Hard Workers

Guest Post

We hear that elders without the means to hire help don’t deserve a few public dollars to receive a hot meal and see a kind face. Because they should have had the foresight to grow rich and if they didn’t, it’s time for them to succumb to hunger.

Yet, every one of us benefits from many people’s labor for which they are paid but modestly.

Go out on the street today. Are they clean? That’s because of the sanitation workers you feel do not deserve life.

Can you read this? That’s because of the teachers you feel deserve to freeze.

Going to church today? It’s there because of the clergy and church secretaries you think should receive no medical care.

Did you buy food? Someone stocked those shelves-someone you would see starve.

The nursing associates who watched over you in the night when you were in the hospital cannot and would not take your life and health back.

Your teachers will not take back the knowledge we gave you, though you wish us so ill.

The garbage man will ensure clean streets tomorrow; the church folks will pray for your soul.

To those imposing the cuts: You will not defeat us. You are defeating your soul.

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.

Brown and Warren keep their promise: no third party ads

By Will Holt

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.

Ann Getman: At a Loss for Word

At a Loss for Word

I spent the day trying to write and wrestling with Word. I’m a decade late with this rant, but today it got me.

I can barely remember why, but I loved Word Perfect. It was so well named from a writer’s perspective. It was the document software in which I learned to type and for a long time the standard for writers and PR people and everyone who wanted to share a common language. It could catch my thoughts as they leapt fully formed (if out of context) from my brow; store sidebars without getting sidetracked; set up and organize the page, stylize it with heads and subheads and put things in the order I wished; insert exported images and show me how they looked; accept Tom Swifties and newly minted puns; and help me express my thoughts in my own voice.

Then came PCs and laptops and Word slipped in under the tent flap and became the standard. Let’s face it, by comparison, Word bites and . . . behaves in other infantile ways. (You know what I mean, but you’ll see in a minute *** why I can’t type it.)

Who made Microsoft geeks the emperors of syntax and spelling and slang (Oh my!)? Who taught them to spell and keep up with language? Why are they the Wizards of Word? Why don’t they know that the basics (page layout, font, ability to insert, addition of typographical and graphic marks) should be doable without leaving the page? How come they use spellcheck to block current spelling of workplan and wasteland and inhouse that don’t have hyphens- and make us change our use of speech to accommodate that quirk? What kind of bleeping editing program does not challenge words like ‘pubicrelations’ when you meant public relations, or f*** and s*** when you meant to write funk or shim? C’mon, that’s adolescent geekspeak for gotcha, smartyhosen!

What’s your favorite Word bugaboo? While I’m at it, why do they call it Windows when they’re opaque, and laid on top of what you need to see for reference? For puzzle fans there are seven words flagged here in red by Word (none were on Lenny Bruce’s list). Can you find them?

All for today. Rest easy (See? If they knew syntax they’d have flagged that for easily!).

Guest blogger Ann Getman is a writer, painter and public relations consultant based in Cambridge, MA.
New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group of Cambridge, MA.