Today (Nov. 28) was Giving Tuesday, a day designated by the United Nations and New York City's 92nd Street Y as a universal day of giving, as a way to establish a contrast to the consumerism of the holiday season. But despite that rampant consumerism, the month of December is when Americans are most likely to donate…
This past weekend we set our clocks back one hour as we do every year. Ideally when we get up in the morning it will be a little lighter, and, not so ideally, after we work we'll all be stumbling home in the dark. But why do we do this? Supposedly Benjmain Franklin first proposed…
The state Department of Transportation has just issued a Notice of Project Change for the Green Line Extension. The extension from College Avenue in Medford to the Mystic Valley Parkway has been delayed for fiscal reasons. The Notice of Project Change is intended to initiate further Massachusetts EPA review of the Mystic Valley Parkway Extension…
We're past the late spring/early summer when many of us are beginning to think about what to plant on our back decks or in our window boxes. But there's no reason we can't start planning what to grow indoors. Plants are beautiful, they make us feel better, and they can even clean up our environment….
Last week I posted about the filter bubble–the selective bias programmed into search engines via your search histories and the cookies web sites leave on your computer. This week I'm posting about how to break out of the filter bubble, so that the results of your web searches don't merely reflect your previous searches but have…
…which sites you visit? If you think you do, you're right only up to a point. Sure, you decide which links to click on, but who decides which links appear on your screen when you keyword search in the first place? If you're searching with Google, Bing, or Yahoo, they use your previous searches, the…
Decades ago, when people were looking for jobs, they answered ads in the jobs section of a newspaper or a trade magazine. Sometimes they walked down streets looking for businesses with "Help Wanted" signs in the windows. Then the Web came along and upended all that. Soon job seekers were going to Craigslist, or web…
Many Somervillians (such as the members of our thriving community of artists and writers) have specialized interests and undertake projects that might benefit from access to an academic library. However, many of those same people are neither students nor employees of any of the local universities. Fortunately, Harvard now offers adult researchers with no academic…
June is LGBT Pride Month, when we celebrate the LGBT Community and recognize their history and present struggles. During this month some posts on this blog will commemorate significant dates in LGBT history. On June 13, 1995, after the Justice Department refused to become engaged in the legal fight against a Colorado amendment that denied…
