fit and healthy cities

The web site of a local TV station is bragging that the DC Area Tops Index of Fit and Healthy Cities. The article says the metropolitan area which centers on Washington, DC, ranks number one in a report listing the 50 healthiest cities in America.[1] The account names but does not provide a link to the source of data. That source is a press release from the American College of Sports Medicine, America's 50 Largest Metro Areas Get Their Annual Physical.[2] The release gives a link to the full report (pdf).[3]

In calculating the index and building the ranking data, the authors considered a large number of indicators in two broad groupings: personal health indicators and community/environment indicators. The former include eating habits, incidence of obesity, amount of exercise taken, presence of disease, and the like. The latter include amenities such as availability of health care, farmers markets, rec centers, public swimming pools, ball diamonds, playgrounds, and the like per unit of the population, as well as percentage of people who walk or bike to work or use public transit.[4] The report lists all the variables and gives lots of information on their selection as variables, the collection of data for them, and the scoring process by which the index data were tallied. It does not give (that I can find) a list of the weights assigned to each variable (so you can see whether, for example, the presence of golf courses counted more or less than the likelihood that residents are eating five or more servings of fruit and vegetables a day).

Here are the results in rank order. As you can see, the number on the left is the rank, the metro area is then named, and the last bit of info is the score.

Rank Metropolitan Area Score
---------------------------
1 Washington, DC 73.5
2 Boston, MA 72.6
3 Minneapolis, MN 71.7
4 Seattle, WA 70.5
5 Portland, OR 70.4
6 Denver, CO 69.9
7 Sacramento, CA 65.8
8 San Francisco, CA 64.7
9 Hartford, CT 64.4
10 Austin, TX 63.9
11 Richmond, VA 62.7
12 Cincinnati, OH 62.5
13 San Diego, CA 62.0
14 San Jose, CA 61.0
15 Salt Lake City, UT 60.6
16 Atlanta, GA 57.7
17 Virginia Beach, VA 57.2
18 Providence, RI 57.2
19 Orlando, FL 55.5
20 Baltimore, MD 53.5
21 New York, NY 52.9
22 Raleigh, NC 52.4
23 Pittsburgh, PA 52.0
24 Jacksonville, FL 51.2
25 Cleveland, OH 51.0
26 Philadelphia, PA 50.4
27 Milwaukee, WI 49.2
28 Buffalo, NY 48.8
29 Kansas City, MO 47.9
30 Tampa, FL 47.8
31 Nashville, TN 47.8*
32 Phoenix, AZ 47.4
33 Chicago, IL 47.0
34 Charlotte, NC 44.0
35 Columbus, OH 42.8*
36 Riverside, CA 42.8*
37 Saint Louis, MO 42.2
38 Los Angeles, CA 40.5
39 Miami, FL 39.9
40 Dallas, TX 39.5
41 New Orleans, LA 37.7
42 Houston, TX 37.6
43 San Antonio, TX 36.9
44 Indianapolis, IN 35.9
45 Las Vegas, NV 35.3
46 Louisville, KY 32.5
47 Detroit, MI 31.9
48 Memphis, TN 31.6
49 Birmingham, AL 31.2
50 Oklahoma, OK 24.3

Looking at the list, I thought there might be a simple and straight forward correlation between wealth and health. I checked this by comparing the ACSM rankings with a list, in rank order, of the metro areas with the highest median household income. (This something that the Census Bureau keeps track of.) Unfortunately, the only ranking I could find doesn't in every case use the exact same metro area boundaries as ACSM uses, but the results are interesting nonetheless.[5]

Here's what I found. I put the ACSM rank at left. The next number is the median income rank. There are gaps in this sequence because my source gave data for some smaller metro areas which were not covered by the ACSM study. I've indicated where the metro area boundaries differ; they're all instances where the median income data come from a Consolidated metro area and the ACSM data do not.

Metropolitan statistical areas ranked by median household income

Rank Metropolitan Statistical Area
-----------------------------------
8 1 San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose CMSA, MSA: SF-Oakland-Fremont, CA
1 2 Washington–Baltimore CMSA, MSA: Washington-Arlington-Alexandria,
3 4 Minneapolis-St. Paul MSA
2 5 Boston–Worcester–Lawrence CMSA, MSA: Boston-Cambridge-Quincy
9 6 Hartford, CT MSA
16 7 Atlanta, GA MSA
6 10 Denver–Boulder–Greeley CMSA, MSA: Denver-Aurora
33 11 Chicago–Gary–Kenosha CMSA, MSA: Chicago-Naperville-Joliet
21 12 New York–Northern New Jersey–Long Island CMSA MSA: same designation
4 13 Seattle–Tacoma–Bellevue CMSA, MSA: same designation
47 16 Detroit–Ann Arbor–Flint CMSA, MSA: Detroit-Warren-Livonia
10 17 Austin–San Marcos, TX MSA
22 18 Raleigh–Durham–Cary, NC MSA
15 20 Salt Lake City–Ogden, UT MSA
26 23 Philadelphia–Wilmington–Atlantic City CMSA, MSA: Phila-Camden-Wilmngtn
40 25 Dallas–Fort Worth CMSA. MSA: Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington
13 26 San Diego, CA MSA
29 36 Kansas City, MO–KS MSA
27 37 Milwaukee–Racine CMSA, MSA: Milwaukee-Waukesha-West Allis,
34 38 Charlotte–Gastonia–Rock Hill, NC–SC MSA
7 40 Sacramento–Yolo CMSA, MSA: Sacramento-Arden-Arcade-Roseville
5 41 Portland–Salem CMSA, MSA: Portland-Vancouver-Beaverton
44 47 Indianapolis, IN MSA Metropolitan statistical areas

It strikes me that, generally speaking, health and wealth are indeed closely correlated. Where you see a variance between the two ranks, the cause can often be ascribed to the boundary differences mentioned above.

Here are cities where the boundaries appear to be the same, but the rank is different by 6 or more: Atlanta, Austin, San Diego, and Kansas City. New York and Seattle might be outliers but I suspect not; although they both have have their MSA and CMSA described using the same jurisdictions, I suspect the boundaries are not the same.

It's interesting that Atlanta has high income rank and low fitness rank while the other outliers have the reverse. It's tempting to account for this, at least partly, by presence or absence of a commitment among taxpayers to making their metro areas congenial, as a benefit to all citizens. That is, from a health and fitness point of view (including provision of parks, public transit, pedestrian-friendly transportation policy, and such like), I suspect Atlanta taxpayers are relatively stingy and the other three are relatively generous.[6]

{source: The Hamilton Spectator}

-----------

Notes:

[1] Full citation: DC Area Tops Index of Fit and Healthy Cities, by Pat Lawson Muse, Updated 7:16 PM EDT, Mon, May 24, 2010, on NBCWashington.com.

[2] Full citation: America's 50 Largest Metro Areas Get Their Annual Physical, For immediate release, May 24, 2010; ACSM American Fitness Index™ Provides a Snapshot of the State of Health and Fitness; Washington, D.C., Tops List of Healthiest and Fittest Metro Areas.

[3] ACSM American Fitness Index™ Health and Community Fitness Status of the 50 Largest Metropolitan Areas, 2010 Edition, by Brenda E. Chamness, Walter R. Thompson, Terrell W. Zollinger, Barbara E. Ainsworth, Carolyn M. Muegge, and Jessica M. West, for the American College of Sports Medicine

[4] My niece, Heather, will appreciate that having a relatively high number public dog walks per thousand residents is an indicator of civic fitness and health.

[5] My source for median income data is the wikipedia entry: Highest-income metropolitan statistical areas in the United States

[6] The ACSM overview lists for Atlanta and Austin shows the main categories where they fell short, compared to the average, and where they did well.

ATLANTA

STRENGTHS/ADVANTAGES
• Lower percent with disability
• Lower percent with angina or coronary heart disease
• Lower percent of days when physical health was not good during the past 30 days
• Lower death rate for diabetes
• More park units per capita
• More golf courses per capita
• More swimming pools per capita
• More recreation centers per capita
• Higher park-related expenditures per capita
• More tennis courts per capita

OPPORTUNITIES/CHALLENGES
• Higher percent unemployed
• Lower percent of city land area as parkland
• Fewer acres of parkland per capita
• Fewer farmers’ markets per capita
• Lower percent using public transportation to work
• Lower percent bicycling or walking to work
• Fewer ball diamonds per capita
• Lower number of primary health care providers per capita
• Fewer dog parks per capita
• Lower level of state requirement

AUSTIN

STRENGTHS/ADVANTAGES
• Lower percent unemployed
• Lower percent with disability
• Higher percentage eating 5+ servings of fruits/vegetables per day
• Lower percent obese
• Lower percent with angina or coronary heart disease
• Lower percent with asthma
• Lower percent with diabetes
• Lower death rate for cardiovascular disease
• More acres of parkland per capita
• Higher percent of city land area as parkland
• More swimming pools per capita
• Higher level of state requirement for Physical Education classes
• More dog parks per capita

OPPORTUNITIES/CHALLENGES
• Fewer farmers’ markets per capita
• Lower percent using public transportation to work
• Lower percent bicycling or walking to work
• Fewer ball diamonds per capita
• Fewer golf courses per capita
• Fewer park units per capita
• Fewer recreation centers per capita
• Fewer tennis courts per capita
• Lower number of primary health care providers per capita
• Lower park-related expenditures per capita

thing is

It's a term of law and governance from the Nordic, Germanic races. The Early English knew it as a council of elders, a court with its judges, a meeting of lord and thanes, and, from that meaning, the matter to be decided by the assembled men (always men of course) who did the deciding.

It's grown since then.

One source tells

The thing "what's stylish or fashionable" is recorded from 1762. Phrase do your thing "follow your particular predilection," though associated with hippie-speak of 1960s is attested from 1841. Used colloquially since 1602 to indicate things the speaker can't name at the moment, often with various meaningless suffixes, e.g. thingumbob (1751), thingamajig (1824).

And from OED:

'to see his things'
1550 in Acts Privy Council — The Lord Admirall desired licence to go into Lincolnshire for a moneth to see his thinges that he had not seen of a long tyme.

'go you thing'
1598 SHAKESPEARE Henry IV, Pt. 1 — Go you thing, go.

'my thing is'
1652 J. FLETCHER Wild-goose Chase — Well, there is something, Sister. Or. If there be, Brother, 'Tis none of their things, 'tis not yet so monstrous; My thing is Mariage.

'quite the thing'
1775 F. BURNEY Diary — Mr. Bruce was quite the thing; he addressed himself with great gallantry to us all alternately.

'things are in a good way'
1776 S. FOOTE Bankrupt — Never fear, things are in a very good way.

'such a thing'
1813 J. AUSTEN Pride & Prejudice — It would have been such a thing for me! The quiet, the retirement of such a life, would have answered all my ideas of happiness!

'I'll tell you...'
1831 T. C. GRATTAN Jacqueline of Holland — I'll tell you a thing, Bishop Zweder; you know as little of the bold candour of chivalry as this English earl does of the guile of priestcraft.

'know (or not know) a thing'
1844 R. W. EMERSON New Eng. Reformers in Ess. 2nd Ser. — We are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation-rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.

'the thing had clean disappeared'
1893 R. L. STEVENSON Catriona — Wi' the bang and the skirl the thing had clean disappeared.

'old man, the thing is'
1915 J. GALSWORTHY Freelands — Look here, old man, the thing is, of course, to see it in proportion.

'done a thing (or not)'
1956 M. DICKENS Angel in Corner — I haven't done a thing all day, and I'm as tired as a dog.

'that poetry thing'
1906 ‘H. MCHUGH’ Skiddoo! — When it comes to that poetry thing he thinks he can make Hank Longfellow beat it up a tree.

'not my thing'
1936 G. B. STERN Monogram — If pottery's your thing. Mountains are not my thing. The sea is my thing.

'make a thing'
1952 E. GRIERSON Reputation for Song — Steady on, Laura... Don't let's make a thing of it.

'having a thing with'
1959 P. D. CUMMINS tr. D. Dolci Rep. from Palermo (U.S. ed.) — One of my pals..found out he was having a thing with a gorgeous blonde.

'a black thing'
1967 N.Y. Times — Few whites are journeying to Harlem for entertainment. ‘It's a black thing now... It's by blacks and for blacks and you don't see many whites up here.’

'boy things'
1983 M. MACKIE Exploring Gender Relations — Similarity provides a basis for shared activities, in this case, doing ‘boy things’ or ‘girl things’.

'a guy thing'
1991 J. PHILLIPS You'll never eat Lunch in this Town Again — I entertain us both with a brief negotiation, not something I care to do, but I know if I don't he'll think I'm a wuss and feel compelled to rip me off. Not his fault. It's a guy thing.

'a thing for books'
1994 N.Y. Times Bk. Rev. — Sally Beaumann clearly has a thing for fat books.

'a thing for my friend'
2006 Cosmopolitan — I'd had a thing for my friend Jon since I'd met him two years earlier, but because we were part of a group of friends, we'd done nothing more than flirt.

Then there are

'wild things'
'a queer thing'
'a funny thing'
'the least thing'
'thinking things over'
'get things done'
'take things as they come'
'from the beginning of things'

From my current read:

'praying things to come out'
The spontaneity and savage freedom of the plant life in this land of alternate hot sun and warm showers at last blurred and made insignificant to me the men who braved it in silk hats and broadcloth there, and the trains, and the jewellers, shops, for my experience of vegetation was got on my knees in a London suburb, praying things to come out of the cold mud. Here, I began to suspect, they besieged us, quick and turbulent, an exhaustible army, ready to reconquer the foothold man had hardly won, and to obliterate his works.

'beat our poor weak bodies against an adamant thing'
Our captain is a very excellent master mariner, but occasionally he likes to test the security of his absolute autocracy, to see if it is still sound. I never knew it when it was not; but yet he must, to assure himself of a certainty, or to exercise some devilish choler in his nature, sometimes beat our poor weak bodies against the adamant thing, to see which first will break. I will say for him that he is always polite when handing back to us our bruised fragments. Here he was giving us a day's freedom, and one's first city of the tropics in which to spend it; and we agreed with him that such a waste of time was almost unbearable, and left hurriedly.

There's a verb form, as in De-Thinging Thursday, or this mystery:

The Taoists constantly said, "To thing things, but not to be thinged by things." The things which assist the transforming and nourishing processes, these are not merely in the category of things (i.e., not to be thinged by things). The distinction between those two classes consists in whether they have enlightenment or not.
-- The Spirit of Chinese Philosophy By Fung Yu-LAN

And I've already quoted the Cooper Square duo:

Girl: Aaron! Hi!
Guy: Hey! Are you going to the thing?
Girl: Yeah, the thing!
(guy starts walking away)
Girl: Wait, Aaron! Hold up!
Guy: What?
Girl: Did you see that puppy?
Guy: Yeah, I pointed at it and laughed at it a few times.

And from the same source:

Father: Yeah, Shakespeare didn't write too many kids' plays.
Small child: Why?
Father: Um, it just wasn't his thing.

-- Central Park

There's more, if you're inclined: Definitions of thing on the Web

{Schlock Mercenary; Wednesday, December 8, 2004}

form, function, and aroma

I'm fond of the work done by a guy named Dave on a blog called Shorpy. He recently showed this old photo from collections in the Library of Congress.

{LC caption: Overman Cushion Tire Co., Harris & Ewing photographer}

Since this truck advertises a creamery, the reference to "Overman Cushion Tire Co." in the LC caption presumably is to the building in the background and the tires on the truck, but not the truck itself. The LC curator says the photo was made "between 1905 and 1945," but the truck has a license plate for 1920 so the start date is much too early and it's very unlikely the truck was still in commission as late as 1945. A Shorpy commenter says the truck was probably manufactured by the White Motor Company, probably in 1920, and another says it's a White Model 15 from that year.* It's clearly been in use for a couple years or more, so I'd guess the photo to be from 1925-30.

Here are some detailed views.

1. When I first looked at this, I experienced a vivid recall of the complex and distinctive smells that you sense when seated behind the wheel of a 1920s car or truck. I couldn't say what it was that emitted the odors — lubricating oils, the rubber compound on the steering wheel, the leather seat and its padding, or what. But the aroma is pleasant to me, nicely nostalgic.** This front view shows something obvious: apart from the engine and gearbox, there's almost nothing out of view. The design is pretty much as functional as a truck can be. There are no wipers, but upper half of the windshield can either be swung down on a hinge or (apparently) removed entirely as desired. I'd say the creamery that owned the truck didn't use it to haul milk products, but rather something that isn't required to be kept clean.



2. In this shot you can easily see the engine's crank handle and the truck's hard rubber tires, studded wheels, spring suspension, and slightly damaged radiator.



3. The truck is registered in DC as the license plate shows. The radiator cap does not appear to have a pressure release and there is no temperature gauge on it. The fender is a bit crumpled. The side lamps use oil for fuel.



4. There's torn fabric on the bench seat. The brake and shift levers emerge from floorboard. So do the iron brake and clutch pedals. The steering wheel has spark advance. The steering column is a hollow metal rod.



5. There's no glass behind the driver, just a curtain. The roof is properly roof-shaped. Someone has taken the trouble to do some non-functional paint decoration.



6. The slogan shown here contrasts with the ruggedness of the truck itself. The rear "fender" is merely a spray shield. You can see the large beam to which the body is bolted. No one seems to have seen a need for a tailgate latch.



--------------

Notes:

* These photos of White Model 15 trucks from 1920 do indeed look like the one in the LC photo.

{source: hankstruckpictures.com}

{source: flickr}

** Back when novels contained lots of description, authors would sometimes tell how how things smelled as well as how they looked. That rarely resonated with me and never so intensely as the olfactory memory that this photo calls forth.

social leakage

Social Leakage

Close to a year ago, two scientists reported a serious violation of privacy policies among prominent social networks. They studied Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LiveJournal, LinkedIn and seven other social networks. Contrary to the privacy policies that each of them adopted, they were leaking personal information to third-party servers that specialize in aggregating internet data for commercial purposes.* The researchers' report is unusually clear and succinct. Its conclusions are damning. Yet, at that time, news organizations paid no attention.

The report is On the Leakage of Personally Identifiable Information Via Online Social Networks (pdf), Aug 2009, by Balachander Krishnamurthy and Craig E. Wills. The credentials of the authors are good. One works at AT&T Labs in the Research Dept. and other is from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Mass.

Looking back, now, I can find only one instance in which the report was picked up and disseminated: Social network privacy study finds identity link to cookies (Aug 2009). Nine months have gone by and, I guess it's fortunate for us, a major news outlet has finally taken notice: Facebook, MySpace Confront Privacy Loophole by Emily Steel and Jessica E. Vascellaro, Wall Street Journal, May 21. 2010. And fortunate also that other news sources have begun to play catch-up. My favorite of these: The billionaire Facebook founder making a fortune from your secrets (though you probably don't know he's doing it).

The original report is worth reading. Do spend ten minutes of your time on it. It gives the social networking sites the benefit of the doubt in guessing that poor coding practice rather than devil-may-care greed was the reason personal data became exposed to third parties. It's really not difficult to mask that data so it's disheartening, but I guess not surprising, that the researchers gave their findings to the social networking sites last August and none then responded. Only now, contacted by the authors of the WSJ article, have they, for the most part, claimed to have fixed or be in the process of fixing the problems.

It also doesn't surprise that, as you've no doubt noticed, the press is now reporting that Facebook is expected soon to announce an abrupt about-face in its privacy policies.

{source: the Masalai blog}

-----------

*Notice that the report says

Although we focus on OSNs [online social networks, like Facebook] in this study, it should be obvious that the manner of leakage could affect users who have accounts and PII [personally identifiable information] on other sites. Sites related to ecommerce, travel, and news services, maintain information about registered users. Some of these sites do use transient session-specific identifiers, which are less prone to identifying an individual compared with persistent identifiers of OSNs. Yet, the sites may embed pieces of PII such as email addresses and location within cookies or Request-URIs. We have carried out a preliminary examination of several popular commercial sites for which we have readily available access. These include books, newspaper, travel, micropayment, and e-commerce sites. We identified a news site that leaks user email addresses to at least three separate thirdparty aggregators. A travel site embeds a user’s first name and default airport in its cookies, which is therefore leaked to any third-party server hiding within the domain name of the travel site. By and large we did not observe leakage of user’s login identifier via the Referer header, the Cookie, or the Request-URI. It should be noted that even if the user’s identifier had leaked, the associated profile information about the user will not be available to the aggregator without the corresponding password. Our preliminary examination should not be taken as the final answer on this issue. A thorough understanding of the scope of the problem along with steps for preventing leakage in general remains a primary concern. Any protection technique must effectively ensure de-identification between a user’s identity prior to any external communication on any site that requires logging in—OSN or otherwise.

blazing belly fur

Girl: Aaron! Hi!
Guy: Hey! Are you going to the thing?
Girl: Yeah, the thing!
(guy starts walking away)
Girl: Wait, Aaron! Hold up!
Guy: What?
Girl: Did you see that puppy?
Guy: Yeah, I pointed at it and laughed at it a few times.
--Cooper Square (Overheard in New York)

Pronouns

As the Fowlers point out, it's easy for writers to entangle themselves in pronominal puzzles:

Mr. Sidney Lee's study of the Elizabethan Sonnets, the late Mr. Charles Elton's book on Shakespeare's Family and Friends, and Professor Bradley's on Shakespearean Tragedy — a work which may be instructively read with Professor Campbell's ' Tragic Drama in Aeschylus, Sophocles and Shakespeare' — remind us that the dramatist still holds his own with the publishers. The last two or three weeks have seen two new editions of him. — T.

The writer has thoroughly puzzled himself. He cannot call Shakespeare Shakespeare, because there is a Shakespeare just before: he cannot call him he, because six other persons in the sentence have claims upon he: and he ought not to call him the dramatist, because Aeschylus and Sophocles were dramatists too. We know, of course, which dramatist is meant, just as we should have known which he was meant; but the appropriation is awkward in either case. The dramatist is no doubt the best thing under the circumstances; but when matters are brought to such a pass that we can neither call a man by his own name, nor use a pronoun, nor identify him by means of his profession, it is time to remodel the sentence.

-- The king's English abridged for school use by Henry Watson Fowler and Francis George Fowler (The Clarendon press, 1918)

A grad student named Jessica Love has written an entertaining article on the study of pronouns: They Get to Me; A young psycholinguist confesses her strong attraction to pronouns by Jessica Love, in The American Scholar. She tells us linguists have a technical term for pronouns that show up without context (the way thing appears abruptly above); they call them "unheralded," a word which yields up nice associative rings. These pronouns are royal beings who arrive at the portcullis without fanfare, having neglected their majestic obligation to send forth couriers warning of their approach. They surprise, as does death by violence on field of battle. They perplex, showing up unpredicted and causing us to wonder at their antecedents. Poetic, even in the negative, as in the quote with which OED favors us:

1845 NEALE Euphratean Angels iv. in Seatonian Poems (1864) 7 "Yet not unheralded by fear, The End of all things shall draw near."

She says,

I used to be a normal psycholinguistics graduate student. I wanted to study how the mind parses improbable metaphors, unintelligible accents, and quirky syntax. Sexy things. Things that would play out well at parties.

I imagined myself dropping newspaper headlines like “Iraqi Head Seeks Arms” into conversations with beautiful people. I would defend Internet chatroom slang on local radio. I would exchange holiday cards with Steven Pinker.

But something has happened. I am in my third year of graduate school, and I have fallen in love. I have fallen for pronouns. It’s hard to shut me up about them.

And she tells a little story:

The next day, the postdoc I share an office with listens to my story about buying a catnip candle so that I could watch my cat roll endearingly on the carpet while the scent wafted across the room, and how it didn’t quite turn out that way, how instead my cat pounced on top of the candle and the fur on his belly instantly broke into flame. When I say all this and four hours later the postdoc sees me and shakes his head and says, “They should be illegal,” I know that by they he means catnip candles. Unheralded, see? The source of that blazing belly has seared itself so prominently on both our minds that it doesn’t even need to be mentioned to be there.

And she concludes:

Lucky for me, there are plenty of pronouns in need of more study — the diectics (here, there), the reflexives (himself, themselves), the interrogatives (who, what), the possessives (his, mine), the indefinites (somebody, anything) — each with its own relatively unexamined life. Or, for the freshest pronoun around, I could always coin one myself.

In Baltimore, some teenagers already have: their candidate, yo, is a new gender-neutral third-person personal pronoun. As in Yo was tuckin’ in his shirt or Yo sucks at magic tricks. If yo sticks around — and if it spreads — maybe we can put the ever-awkward he or she to rest forever. And what would that mean? What consequences could that have for how we think about our world? Empirical question. Send in the psycholinguists.

On this topic, I'll let them have the final words, but note that their advice of 1918 is hardly better than the grammatical tangles they wish to solve:

They, them, their, theirs, are often used in referring back to singular pronominals (as each, one, anybody, everybody), or to singular nouns or phrases (as a parent, neither Jack nor Jill), of which the doubtful or double gender causes awkwardness. It is a real deficiency in English that we have no pronoun, like the French soi, son, to stand for him-or-her, his-or-her (for he-or-she French is no better off than English). Our view, though we admit it to be disputable, is clear — that they, their, &c, should never be resorted to, as in the examples presently to be given they are. With a view to avoiding them, it should be observed that (a) the possessive of one (indefinite pronoun) is one's, and that of one (numeral pronoun) is either his, or her, or its (One does not forget one's own name: I saw one of them drop his cigar, her muff, or its leaves) ; (b) he, his, him, may generally be allowed to stand for the common gender, (c) Sentences may however easily be constructed (Neither John nor Mary knew his own mind) in which his is undeniably awkward. The solution is then what we so often recommend, to do a little exercise in paraphrase (John and Mary were alike irresolute, for instance). (d) Where legal precision is really necessary, he or she may be written in full. Corrections according to these rules will be appended in brackets to the examples.

Anybody else who have only themselves in view. — RICHARDSON, (has ... himself)

Ce n'est que le premier pas qui coûte, in novel-writing as in carrying one's head in their hand. — S. Ferrier. (one's ... one's)

The feelings of the parent upon committing the cherished object of their cares and affections to the stormy sea of life. — S. Ferrier. (his)

But he never allowed one to feel their own deficiencies. — S. Ferrier. (one's)

Which leaves each free to act according to their own feelings. — S. Ferrier. (his)

Suppose each of us try our hands at it. — S. FERRIER. (tries his hand ; or, if all of us are women, tries her hand)

Everybody is discontented with their lot in life.—BEACONSFIELD. (his)

Or, maybe not quite the last, since you've been dying to tell me the entertaining quote at top does not illustrate problems with pronouns. To which I reply, "that's the thing" and walk away.

one dreary November morning, 1909

I've begun reading a first-person adventure yarn which begins with the author telling us us what motivated him to sign on as purser on a tramp steamer taking coal from Wales to Brazil. He's a journalist and you can tell in this brief extract how much he greatly relishes a nice phrase.

That day was but a thin solution of night. You know those November mornings with a low, corpse-white east where the sunrise should be, as though the day were still-born. ... It occurs to you at once that a London garden, especially in winter, should have no place in a narrative which tells of the sea and the jungle. But it has much to do with it. ... There it was: the blackened dahlias, the last to fall, prone in the field where death had got all things under his feet. My pleasaunce was a dark area of soddened relics; the battalions of June were slain, and their bodies in the mud. That was the prospect in life I had. ... I knew of nothing to look forward to but December, with January to follow. ...

It is necessary for you to learn that on my way to catch the 8.35 that morning — it is always the 8.35 — there came to me no premonition of change. No portent was in the sky but the grey wrack. I saw the hale and dominant gentleman, as usual, who arrives at the station in a brougham drawn by two grey horses. ... There was the pale girl in black who never, between our suburb and the city, lifts her shy brown eyes, benedictory as they are at such a time, from the soiled book of the local public library, and whose umbrella has lost half its handle, a china nob. ...

I have a clear memory of the newspapers as they were that morning. I had a sheaf of them, for it is my melancholy business to know what each is saying. I learned there were dark and portentous matters, not actually with us, but looming, each already rather larger than a man's hand. If certain things happened, said one half the papers, ruin stared us in the face. If those thing did not happen, said the other half, ruin stared us in the face. No way appeared out of it. You paid your half-penny and were damned either way. If you paid a penny you got more for your money. Boding gloom, full-orbed, could be had for that. There was your extra value for you. I looked round at my fellow passengers, all reading the same papers, and all, it could be reasonably presumed, with foreknowledge of catastrophe. They were indifferent, every one of them. I suppose we have learned, with some bitterness, that nothing ever happens but private failure and tragedy, unregarded by our fellows except with pity. ...

I put down the papers with their calls to social righteousness pitched in the upper register of the tea-tray, their bright and instructive interviews with flat earthers, and with the veteran who is topically interesting because, having served one master fifty years, and reared thirteen children on fifteen shillings a week, he has just begun to draw his old age pension. ... Again, the young prince, we were credibly informed in all the papers of that morning, did stop to look in at a toy-shop window in Regent Street the previous afternoon. So like a boy, you know, and yet he is a prince of course. The matter could not be doubted. The report was carefully illustrated. The prince stood on his feet outside the toy shop, and looked in.

To think of the future as a modestly long series of such prone mornings, dawns unlit by heaven's light, new days to which we should be awakened always by these clamant cockcrows bringing to our notice what the busyness of our fellows had accomplished in nests of intelligent and fruitful china eggs, was enough to make one stand up in the carriage, horrified, and pull the communication cord. So I put down the papers and turned to the landscape. Had I known the Skipper was back from below the horizon — but I did not know. So I must go on to explain that that morning train did stop, with its unfailing regularity, and not the least hint of reprieve, at the place appointed in the Schedule. Soon I was at work, showing, I hope, the right eager and concentrated eye, dutifully and busily climbing the revolving wheel like the squirrel; except, unluckier than that wild thing so far as I know, I was clearly conscious, whatever the speed, the wheel remained forever in the same place. Looking up to sigh through the bars after a long spin there was the Skipper smiling at me.

The writer is H. M. Tomlinson and the book is The Sea and the Jungle. (Being the narrative of the voyage of the tramp steamer Capella, 1909 and 1910.) by H M Tomlinson (Duckworth & Co.: London, 1912).

Here is Tomlinson.



The tramp steamer looked very much like this.



Here are online versions of the book.

The Sea and the Jungle Henry Major Tomlinson (New York, E. P. Dutton & Co, 1920) 1912

The Sea and the Jungle by Henry Major Tomlinson (E.P. Dutton & co., 1920)

Muybridge Yosemite

In which I celebrate family and friends.

A few months back my sister sent me Rebecca Solnit's River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West. We both like taking pictures and both admire good photography. She thought I'd like the book and she was right. I thought at first I might find it tedious since I'm not particularly interested in the stop-action photos for which Muybridge is famous (and which he pioneered). But Solnit is an excellent critic, she writes well, and, I was pleased to discover, a lot of the photography is aesthetically more appealing than the motion studies. For Muybridge, it turns out, made many images of places and people in the "Wild West" of Solnit's subtitle. Some of these, as she says, are not only innovative and technically ept, but also strikingly beautiful. The book's frustration is that it describes but does not show this beauty. The few photographs that it contains are, in my Penguin paperback copy, dreadfully reproduced.

Enter my friend John. He noticed that the Corcoran Gallery here in Washington DC has mounted a very large exhibit of Muybridge's work: Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change. It's on view through July 18, 2010. John took summer art lessons at the Corcoran when he was young and uses his drawing skill as a teacher of 6- to 9-year-olds in a local publc Montessori School. When one of his students recently showed an interest in stereoscopic photographs, John brought in his own antique stereoscope (which looks something like this), and, between his own fond memories of the gallery and his student's blossoming interest, the Corcoran exhibition (which shows off many Muybridge stereographs) was bound to be a major draw for him.

When John said what he would be going, I asked if the show included any of the (reputedly) great Yosemite photos and when he said it did I leapt at the opportunity to join him on a visit there this past weekend. I wasn't disappointed. There were room after room of stereographs along with many medium-format and mammoth-plate images, lots of them from Yosemite.

I particularly wanted to see the mammoth-plate ones. They're big, as the name suggests: each at least 17 inches high and 21.5 inches wide. As are all his photos, they're also direct images from the photo plates — contact prints rather than enlargements. This means the camera he used had to be large enough to accommodate the 2-foot-wide glass negatives. He made these glass plates using the wet-plate collodion process that was then most common and this required a portable darkroom and wagon load of equipment and chemicals. The contact prints are positives pulled directly from the developed and fixed glass plates. He made them using the prevailing albumen photoprint technique. Most of the Yosemite images come from the early 1870s, a time not far from a century and a half distant from us. Given how many years that is and all that can occur over such long periods, I was pleasantly surprised at the Corcoran exhibit to see how well the prints have been preserved.

Muybridge was one of maybe a dozen photographers and artists who were working in Yosemite during the decade after it gained federal protection and was set aside for preservation and public use. His technique and his aesthetic values distinguished him from the others in a few significant ways. (1) Technique: He took his bulky camera into difficult locations to get the views he wanted. This often involved scrambling up peaks and descending down steep slopes to place the camera on whatever support he could find at his chosen vantage.* To get around a serious problem with the color sensitivity of the photographic emulsions of his day, he would use a self-invented "skyshade" to obscure part of the scene during part of the exposure.** Also he sometimes added clouds by taking separate images and putting them in the negatives after development and fixing.*** Alternatively, he would sometimes simply under-expose an image, making foreground dark and sky appear somewhat closer to what the eye expects to see. (2) Aesthetic: Muybridge observed the general design principles then common, including fore-, mid-, and background elements to convey a sense of depth, but, unlike others, he would show debris in foreground — flotsom, fallen limbs, brush, stream-wash, and the like. He, like the other photographers of his time liked to show falling water with its sense of motion conveyed in the blur that the required lengthy exposures brought about. But he also used the blur-effect to convey an illusion of misty-light, feathery atmospherics. He also sometimes placed an object, an axe for example, or figure in the fore- or mid-ground not just to show scale, but also to indicate presence: to draw attention to the human element in the grandeur of the scenery. Also, at a time when photographers usually worked when the light was brightest and shadows least intrusive, he would sometimes take photos in the long-shadow periods early or late in the day.

I don't have images of the actual mammoth-plate prints in the Corcoran show, but there are many good ones to be seen in the collections of Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley. You can find them in the Online Archive of California web site: Valley of the Yosemite by Eadweard Muybridge, 1872. Here are a few from that source.**** Click an image to view it in high resolution.

1. This image uses the usual technique to give illusion of depth and its composition reflects design basics that artists had been observing for many years. It also uses reflection, a favorite technique of the Yosemite photographers. Notice that the reflected part of the image is less affected by the blue-light sensitivity of the photo plate. My favorite photos at the Corcoran exhibit all used reflection to good effect. This shot also shows the long shadows for which Muybridge is known. And finally it contains some of what other photographers considered to be unaesthetic debris.

{Caption: Sylvan Bar. Valley of the Yosemite.}

2. I'm particularly fond of this one. Notice how he shows the reflected image of the rock face to the right, but does not show the face itself (that is to say you can't see it because of the foreground trees).

{Valley of the Yosemite. From Mosquito Camp.}

3. This shows the feathery water blur. Click and view high-res to best see how this effect works in the photo. It's also pretty clear that to take the photo he had to place his big bulky camera in a perilous spot.

{Pi-Wi-Ack. Valley of the Yosemite. (Shower of Stars) "Vernal Fall," 400 Feet Fall.}

4. This image shows a scene that his contemporaries took from pretty much the same vantage. I've included images from two of them and one modern version below.

{Mirror Lake. Valley of the Yosemite.}

5. Here is a photo of Mirror Lake by one of Muybridge's competitors,
Carleton E. Watkins. It's half a stereograph card which accounts for the square format. Much smaller than Muybridge's mammoth-plate version, it succeeds very well in my view.

{Mirror Lake; source: Stereographs of the West from The Bancroft Library Pictorial Collection, ca. 1858-1906}

6. This is Albert Bierstadt's treatment of the same subject. It's also half a stereograph and is also well made.

{Mirror Lake; source: wikimedia}

7. Just to round things out, here's an example of a modern effort to replicate the old technique. It comes from an 8" x 10" wet collodion plate.

{Mirror Lake; source: collodion-artist.com}

8. Bierstadt was also a painter, of the Hudson River School. Here's an example of his work. Paintings like this were highly treasured, of course, but they were also extremely expensive, very slow to produce, and not as easily shared with the public as the photographs of Muybridge, Watkins, and Bierstadt himself.

{Yosemite Valley, Yellowstone Park, 1868, Oil on canvas, 36" x 54"; source: wikimedia}

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Notes:

* In 1872 the San Francisco newspaper Alta California described this:

He has cut down trees by the score that interfered with the best point of sight; he had himself lowered down by ropes down precipices to establish his instrument in places where the full beauty of the object could be transferred to the negative; he has gone to points where his packers refused to follow him, and he has carried the apparatus himself rather than to forgo the picture on which he has set his mind

**The emulsions were sensitive only to blue light. This meant the positive prints showed sky and cloud to be much lighter than the human eye perceives them to be. The appearance is a washed-out uniformity of bright sky with only slightly brighter areas of cloud. Muybridge made the sky seem more natural by using a mask to under-expose the sky area of the image.

Later orthochromic and panchromatic films were better spectrum-balanced than the emulsions Muybridge used. Even when using these films, photographers would quite often use yellow, orange, or even red filters to cut the amount of blue light.


B & H Foto & Electronics Corp.

*** He seems to have done this by making a small-plate cloud image and laying it over a large-plate landscape during the printing process.

****The curators write:

This collection is an incomplete set (45 of 51) of mammoth plate albumen prints taken by Muybridge in 1872 and published by Bradley & Rulofson at 429 Montgomery Street, San Francisco during subsequent years. The collection includes duplicate prints of numbers 9 and 51, bringing the total number of prints to 47. Thirty-nine of the scenes are of the Yosemite Valley, five are of the Sierra Nevada mountains and one is of the Mariposa Grove of mammoth trees. The set is made up of prints from various editions; therefore some prints lack the photographer's number or have a variant caption typeface. Captions for the lacking prints are supplied by Bradley & Rulofson's Catalogue of Photographic Views Illustrating the Yosemite, Mammoth Trees, Geyser Springs, and other Remarkable and Interesting Scenery of the Far West (1873) . The Bancroft Library's prints are numbered according to the photographer's number in this catalog. Therefore there are gaps in the library's numbering of the prints. Born Edward James Muggeride in Kingston-upon-Thames, England, April 9, 1830, Muybridge came to the U.S. in the early 1850s and opened a bookstore in San Francisco in 1855. After being seriously injured in a fall from a stagecoach, he returned to England, where he turned to photography. He came back to San Francisco in the late 1860s and did photographic work for the U.S Coast and Geodetic Survey.

leather man

My mother believed in early childhood education. When I was three she sent me off to a preschool down by the river in Scarborough. Weekday mornings for much of a year, she packed me into a taxi for the 2.5 mile ride. I have some recollection of the taxi ride and the building which was its destination but mostly I recall my emotional reaction: confusion, fear, and a grave mistrust of this new environment and its inhabitants. I don't remember that I eventually settled in and learned to accept much less enjoy myself there. She tried a different preschool when I was four, of which I have better memories.

I did not know then and in fact — all these years — have not known until now that this first school close to the old Croton Aqueduct as well as one of the region's oldest landmarks, the Sparta Cemetery. The blue squares on this map show where we lived (home), the Scarborough preschool, and the Sparta graveyard. The green line shows the path of the aqueduct.

{USGS map of 1943 showing Scarborough and part of Briarcliff Manor; source: UNH DIMOND LIBRARY Documents Department & Data Center, Historic USGS Maps of New England & New York, White Plains, NY Quadrangle}

The cemetery came into being a year or so after 1763. It was consecrated by the Scarborough Presbyterian Church whose building is not far away and it contains the remains of original settlers and many veterans of the Revolutionary war. There's a hole in one of the headstones and an old marker said to have been made in 1780 by an errant shot from a British ship that was bombarding the village of Sparta as it passed up the Hudson.

The most famous grave is that of a 19th-century vagabond, an eccentric and harmless creature whom everyone called the Leather Man. He showed up just before the Civil War dressed in crudely-sewn pieces of leather head-to-toe in leather. For the next 30 years he tramped a circuit through Westchester and Fairfield counties in New York and Connecticut. He took the same route from Scarborough and Briarcliff north and east to Mt. Kisco and across the state line to Danbury, then on to through Watertown to Middletown, then south down along the Connecticut River before turning west along the Connecticut coast to New Caanan, then back north into Westchester.

He spoke no more than monosyllables like eat and yes and he would never stay inside, but would be outdoors in all seasons, reportedly sleeping in caves and improvised shelters at nightfall. He carried no pack, but only a walking staff and leather satchel. He accepted donations of food at houses and farmsteads but did no chores in return and neither asked for nor received any money. His schedule was punctual. People would report Leather Man sightings to the local newspapers and would remark whether he was a day early or late.*

This map shows his route.

{Source: ghostvillage.com}

Here are a couple of photos of him.

{The Old Leather Man in 1888, by F. W. Moore, enhanced by H.N. Gale}

{The Old Leather Man, by James F. Rodgers, 1887, taken at the Bradley Chidsy House, Branford, CT}

There are other photos of him and his environment at a site called HISTORICAL PHOTOS OF THE LEATHERMAN (from which the above photos come).

A great deal has been written about the Leather Man, much of it wishful thinking. The most durable legend maintained that he was a Frenchman named Jules Bourglay who became heartbroken, having been disappointed in love, and emigrated to America. The story, which has no basis in fact, is given in full here. It is true that he was harmless. When harshly treated, he would afterward simply avoid the place of occurrence. He was said not to accept money, but he somehow did acquire funds enough to buy himself tobacco and some other items that he couldn't count on being given. It was tobacco that caused his death from cancer of the mouth. He was treated kindly by many farmwives and seemed to enjoy being around children. When brought to a hospital when suffering from frostbite during an especially bitter winter, he departed as soon as he could.

----------

Some links:

Leatherman, wikipedia article

Old Leather Man, a compilation of facts and lore

Legend of the Old Leatherman on makemeknow.com

The Legend of The Leatherman on dreadcentral.com

The Leather Man on skyweb.net

Legend in Leather in Hudson Valley Magazine

Sparta Cemetery and The Leather Man on hudsonvalleyruins.org

The Old Leatherman on curbstone.org

The Leather Man's Keeper from Yankee Magazine

The old leather man: historical accounts of a Connecticut and New York legend by Dan DeLuca with Dionne Longley (Wesleyan University Press, 2008)

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* A search of old newspaper articles turns up many more than 500 accounts in local papers about the Leather Man, most of them about sightings.

Brassaï

{Brassai: Paris by Night (Bulfinch Press, 2001) and
Paris de Nuit - Brassai (Art et Metiers Graphiques, 1933)}

{Brassaï photographing Paris at night, 1932; source: LA County Museum of Art}

{Les Escaliers de Montmartre, 1936; source: lemonde}

{No title given; source: sealmaiden on soup.io}

{Chateau tremlant; source: laurence.perrigault.free.fr}

{Avenue de l’Observatoire, 1934; source: ackland.org}

{Pont neuf; source: clusterflock.org}

{No title; source: labombetaencesa.wordpress.com}

{No title; source: gonzoaboutstyle.blogspot}

{Beggar in metro; source: iphotocentral.com}

{L'Africain; source: laurence.perrigault.free.fr}

{Une Fille, Rue de la Reynie et Rue Quincampoix, c.1932}

{women dancing; source: bolsh_july livejournal}

{Brasserie; source: bolsh_july livejournal}

{Lady musician on quay; source: bolsh_july livejournal}

In 1924, he wrote his parents:

Depuis mon arrivée à Paris, c’est ce qui m’intéresse le plus: comment Paris vit et bouge, mais aussi comment les hommes bougent avec lui aujourd’hui […] non, Paris n’est pas encore un musée, comme Florence et Rome, c’est une ville très vivante.
-- Actualités 34, LeMonde.fr

Brassai was a philosopher, reader, writer, and photographer with a passion for literature. He found a place in history when he published his book Paris de nuit (Paris by Night) in 1933 and claimed the night as his subject. Brassai used shadows as skillfully as he used light to construct nighttime pictures. The shadows and reflections that he was able to capture on film, release the worlds of the imagination and desire. He taught the viewer to love what cannot be seen in a photograph and penetrated the secret of light and night. His photographs provoke questions that ask the viewer to search for answers.
-- SEASONS OF PARIS, An Ackland Art Museum Exhibit at the University of North Carolina

Brassaï article in wikipedia

cruft, dandruff, and predictive models

Facebook and its principle founder, Mark Zukerberg, are taking a good deal of heat lately about changes that affect users' ability to keep things out of public view. Despite some overblown rhetoric, there's some real basis for concern.

Am I worried? Yes, a bit. In FB as in life in general, I try to be cautious but not compulsively private in sharing information about myself. I don't do much FB statusing and adjust my settings every time I hear there's been a privacy change. I realize, must not we all, that there's much available about me which I can't control. I try to surrender my social security number as little as possible and it used to annoy me that my work ID contained an SSN barcode. It concerns me that financial institutions have required I give it to them when I've applied for a credit card, opened an account, or applied for a mortgage. I know that my accounts with utility companies, wireless & landline phone providers, and my ISPs yield up publicly available information about my use of their services. Many companies with which I do business accumulate information about me which they can, and under certain circumstances, freely do share. When I've bought the homes I've lived in, a whole raft of information became publicly available about the transactions.

I used to be amazed at how sloppy some organizations were about account data; quite often I found I could search membership data in unprotected files. That's less common now, but no matter how grand a privacy policy sounds, I know I really can't control what an organization does with the personal information I give it. Despite good intentions, some are inept or maybe just naïve. And any commercial enterprise is liable to be bought out by some other organization which can choose to ignore whatever privacy promises the old org. made. Even nonprofits get absorbed by others or go commercial with resulting nullification of whatever policies they had.

I suspect most of us know that the computer we're using supplies information about itself when we're online. There are a number of web sites that show you this info, this one, for example. You probably also know that programs which put spyware in web cookies can accumulate a whole lot more about your internet sessions.

It's the business of data snoops to accumulate this information along with every thing else they can tag as pertaining to you, your computer, and the use you make of it. Many people now assume that all their email traffic is subject to either machine or human inspection, or both.

These are some of the reasons people are growing increasingly concerned about recent changes in Facebook's privacy policy. Facebook is a huge success and, in using it, its vast numbers of participants give enormous amounts of information about themselves — that's the point of this primo social network. The potential for abusing that information is also very great. I've noticed that Facebook apps are increasingly apt to have invasive elements in them and the recent furore is mostly about FB's policy of making certain info you give FB available to all its users, certain of it accessible to search engines outside FB, and certain of it available to FB advertisers; it's also about the complexity of privacy controls and gaps in what you can keep from public view; and it's about the difficulty of getting off FB and deleting what you've put there.

Columbia law professor Eben Moglen summarized the risk in a speech last February:

The Problem is the Cruft and Data Dandruff of Life: In fact the degree of potential informational inequality, and disruption and difficulty that arises from a misunderstanding, a heuristic error in the minds of human beings about what is and is not discoverable about them, is now our biggest privacy problem. My students ... show constantly in our dialog they still think of privacy as the one secret they don't want revealed. But that's not their problem. Their problem is all the stuff that's the ... data dandruff of life, which they don't think of as secret at all but aggregates to stuff they don't want to know. Which aggregates not just to stuff they don't want other people to know, but to predictive models about them which they would be very creeped out to know exists at all. The data that we infer is the data in the holes between the data we already know if we know enough things.

This isn't very precise, but captures the main cause of concern. A whole mess of facts, each by itself benign, can be assembled and put to a nasty purpose.

{sources: PCWorld, ipao.org, }

Here are some links about the current noise regarding Facebook.

Has Facebook gone too far this time? (SocialMedia.biz)

Weekly Wrap-up: Deactivating Facebook, Social Oversharing, iPad vs. Netbooks, And More... (ReadWriteWeb)

Facebook Privacy: A Bewildering Tangle of Options (New York Times)

Could a start-up called Diaspora knock Facebook off its perch? (Christian Science Monitor)

Facebook's Washington Problem, The social network is facing a privacy backlash that could prompt congressional hearings (Business Week)

Europe slams Facebook's privacy settings (Agence France Presse)

Facebook Gives Us Statement On Latest Zuckerberg IM And Company Privacy Policy (SFGate)

Facebook Privacy: A Bewildering Tangle of Options (NYT again)

19-Year-Old Facebook CEO Didn’t Take Your Privacy Seriously, Either (Gizmodo)

Facebook: Facts You Probably Didn’t Know (Mashable)

Facebook confirms informal company meeting (CNET News)

Mum's the word from all-hands Facebook company meeting on privacy (NetworkWorld)

Facebook downplays privacy crisis meeting (BBC)

Facebook caves in to privacy pressures; Sort of, partly (Inquirer)

Your public Facebook status updates? Now publicly searchable outside Facebook (TechCrunch)

Anti-Facebook project rockets to $120,000 in online donations (VentureBeat)

Blogrunner Facebook news snapshot (NYT)

Facebook downplays privacy crisis meeting

This Is MySpace’s Moment To Shine, But That Obviously Isn’t Going To Happen (TechCrunch)

Facebook Adds Two Privacy Tools (Information Week)

Are privacy concerns causing an about face on Facebook? (MassHighTech.com)

How to delete your Facebook account forever (GeeshuiLiving.com)

NY Times Graphic on Privacy Settings

{click to view full size; source: Facebook Privacy: A Bewildering Tangle of Options (New York Times)}

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Incidentally:

Mark Zuckerberg was born in White Plains, which is not far east of the path taken by the old Croton Aqueduct, and he was raised in Dobbs Ferry through which the aqueduct passed on its way to Manhattan. The green line marks its route. Click image to view it full size.

{USGS, White Plains, NY Quadrangle, 1938, southwest corner; source: UNH DIMOND LIBRARY
Documents Department & Data Center}

Also, as it happens, my great-uncle Adolph Windmuller and his wife Caroline Hague lived in Dobbs.

I've written a few posts about the aqueduct and Mrs. Hague:

• a river three miles wide
• Beechwood and vicinity
• the resurrection of Sparta
• Croton Water
• Hugo B. Roelker
• at Madame's
• the shame of Madame Thurn
• Caroline Hague