Redefining the Gloucester waterfront in the "spirit of innovation"

Ocean Alliance and Gloucester find a new purpose

By Taryn Plumb |  Globe Correspondent

July 04, 2013

Lisa Poole for The Boston Globe (Iain Kerr of the Gloucester-based Ocean Alliance examines a humpback whale vertebra with Gloucester Mayor Carolyn Kirk.)

Clad in an orange rain jacket and canvas hat, Iain Kerr gently eases a skiff out into Gloucester Harbor.
He steers through the choppy waves, salty breeze blowing and seagulls wheeling overhead, toward a large structure looming on the nearby shore.
The salty barrage of sea and weather has taken its toll on the neglected building perched at the water’s edge: broken windows, missing clapboards, paint eaten away, rotted wood exposing interior studs, and the once bright-white giant letters proclaiming “copper paint” and “manufactory” faded to a dirty gray.
It certainly doesn’t look like much now, but this building is part of what many hope will be a renaissance – and, at least in part, a repurposing – of the Gloucester waterfront. The once prosperous but long-contaminated Tarr and Wonson Paint Manufactory is the new headquarters of Ocean Alliance, a 42-year-old nonprofit that researches whales and the health of the oceans.

“We bought this because it was an iconic site,” Kerr, the alliance’s chief executive, said through a Scottish lilt. “Here we have a group that studies pollution that bought a polluted site.”

Ocean Alliance, founded in 1971, has conducted research in 21 countries and all the world’s oceans, collecting volumes of information on whales related to toxicology, behavior, genetics, and bioacoustics. (Founder and president Roger Payne made the legendary whale song recordings that were launched with NASA’s Voyager I interstellar exploration spacecraft 36 years ago.)
Payne said in a prepared statement from the alliance that acquiring and restoring the factory is the biggest challenge the nonprofit has faced.
Formerly located in Lincoln, the alliance moved to its Gloucester headquarters in April. It has so far invested more than $3.25 million, raised through grants and donations, into restoration of the site, which it purchased in 2008 with the help of a grant from the Annenberg Foundation.
According to Kerr, the alliance hopes to raise $8 million to completely refurbish the buildings, so it needs roughly $4.5 million more to get the job done.
The finished complex is slated to have a state-of-the-art oceanographic research and education center, complete with a green chemistry lab, robotics lab, situation room with live feeds from its worldwide marine projects, as well as a community and conference center, educational labs and study spaces, a museum and art gallery, and media center. A public deck would allow access to the water, and the entire ground floor would be open to the public during office hours.
The site comprises several buildings constructed between 1863 and 1900 — former mills, boiler/engine rooms, manufacturing floors, warehouses, and paint laboratories. In the 1800s, James Tarr and Augustus Wonson created the country’s first antifouling copper paint, which repels barnacles, grass, and other marine life that can attach to, or damage, vessel bottoms. The paint was manufactured and sold all over the world, and also won numerous national and international awards.
“It changed the course of many a nation’s history,” said Kerr, who started as a volunteer with Ocean Alliance 26 years ago.
But in the 1980s, the site was abandoned, and after 150 years of operation, was found to be contaminated with various metals and solvents, while its interior also contained lead paint. Five buildings are to be restored; two brick buildings have been in progress since late 2011, and are expected to be completed this fall.
Initial planning and design started in 2009, with cleanup and remediation beginning the following year. Two wooden buildings were beyond repair and razed, Kerr said, while some toxic contaminated areas were capped and other materials removed.
The remaining wooden buildings will require substantial work; during a walk-through of the dank, low-ceilinged spaces, Kerr pointed out beams stained with streaks of hardened blue, yellow, white, black, and gray drippings from numerous chemicals, as well as hardened antifouling paint four inches thick on one part of the floor.
Kerr stressed that the manufacturer wasn’t being “malicious,” but that they “just didn’t know what we know nowadays.”
Ultimately, he said, the goal is to introduce a new use to the waterfront, but also to maintain the historical significance of the landmark.
“It’s an opportunity for Gloucester to redefine the working waterfront in the spirit of innovation,” Mayor Carolyn Kirk said while seated in a refurbished loft office at Ocean Alliance, seagulls often circling into view in overhead skylights.
With an eye to the 21st century and beyond, she said, the goal is to leverage the port’s assets in varied ways — and not with what she called the “restaurant, T-shirt, taffy” solution.
The ultimate question is, “What is the opportunity that the ocean itself represents?” she said.
An immense one, according to Kerr.
Ocean Alliance — which has nine full-time staff members, as well as affiliations with universities and other organizations around the world — has recently been focused on capturing and studying whale DNA through biopsies to determine what compounds have been absorbed and at what toxicity. Whales — of which there are 82 different species, Kerr explained — are a good “bio-indicator” of the health of the oceans, and the organization is most interested in what compounds and toxins damage whale DNA, and at what level.
This summer, the alliance’s ship, Odyssey, will embark on an expedition to the Gulf of Mexico to study the impact of the massive BP oil spill in 2010. The nonprofit also educates, advocates, and lobbies for ocean health.
As Kerr noted, there’s an initial challenge in getting people to understand about ocean pollution, because on the surface, the water looks beautiful.
But “oceans are downhill from everything,” he said, “and gravity never sleeps.”
At the rehabbed Gloucester facility, the first project he would like to embark on is creating plastic that is biodegradable in oceans. Another interest is drone-like craft that can go out in bad weather when boats can’t, and can provide information and eyes above, below, and on the surface of the water.
Then there’s the aptly named “snotbot.”
Drew Bennett, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering in Needham, is working on that project with Ocean Alliance. Essentially, it’s a flying robot with a spring-loaded cup that collects the detail-rich mucus expelled from a whale’s blowhole.
“It’s like doing a biopsy without ever having to touch the whale,” he said, explaining that mucus samples contain information about anything from gender to compound toxicity levels.
“They’re just shedding goo all the time,” he said. “We want to capture the goo.”
Ultimately, as far as Kerr is concerned, the ocean’s the limit.
“Some people are upset that we know more about the moon than our oceans, but I’m excited about that,” he said. “There is a huge adventure ahead of us.”

Ocean Alliance’s history of studying whales

July 04, 2013

Sperm whales
55 to 65 feet long, up to 50 tons; usually dark gray or black.
For one of the deepest-diving whales, descending as far as 2 miles, Alliance chief executive Iain Kerr developed a tracking process using a multibeam scanning sonar. This technique enables researchers to calculate the whale's rate of descent, ascent, maximum dive depth, bearing, and speed, creating a three-dimensional dive diagram. 

Humpback whales

40 to 60 feet, up to 40 tons; dark gray or black with white patches on stomach.
In 1967, alliance founder Roger Payne, working with Scott McVay, realized that the humpback’s song was made up of fixed rhythmic patterns of repeated sounds. Ocean Alliance has gathered songs from humpback populations throughout the world, amassing more than 1,500 recordings from 14 geographic regions. 

Right whales
50 feet, up to 60 tons; dark gray/black.
For 40 years, Ocean Alliance has studied a population of rights — the most endangered of the great whales — that uses the bays of Argentina’s Valdés Peninsula as a nursery. It is believed to be the longest continuous study of any great whale.

SOURCES: Ocean Alliance, whalefacts.org 

Original story link here.

Unveiling the (now) largest art museum in Maine

Art Finds A Universal Home
Taryn Plumb 

Colby College Museum of Art
5600 Mayflower Hill Drive
Waterville, Maine
Grand reopening July 13


ELABORATELY CARVED BRONZE TRIPOD STRUCTURES FROM FOURTH CENTURY B.C. CHINA LANDSCAPES BOTH WISPY AND HAZY, LUSCIOUS AND RICH. EERIE MINIMALIST ETCHINGS OF MOROSE WOMEN IN BLACK; CROWDED BALCONIES IN AMSTERDAM. STILL-LIFES; HUNT SCENES; IRREVERENT SCULPTURES; CONTEMPORARY MIXED-MEDIA BRANDISHING ITS MIRROR ON SOCIETY.

This menagerie of work, crossing centuries and context, mediums and meaning, will soon enrich the walls of the expanded Colby College Museum of Art, which is set to open its new 26,000-square-foot Alfond-Lunder Family Pavilion on July 13.

With its unveiling, it will become the largest art museum in Maine, composed of five wings, nearly 50,000 square feet of exhibition space, and more than 8,000 works of art. “We want to be a destination for people interested in not just American art, but contemporary art,” said Sharon Corwin, the museum’s Carolyn Muzzy director and chief curator.

The $15 million project was born in 2007, when Peter and Paula Lunder promised to gift their expansive collection of more than 500 pieces to the school; the impressive cache of work was amassed over three decades and represents a wide spectrum of American art in painting, mixed media and sculpture, from the classical and richly-detailed John Singer Sargent, to the abstracted realism of Edward Hopper, to the ethereal, often moody James McNeill Whistler.
 
Read the entire article in our magazine pages...

View original link (and other great stories about art in New England) here.

Disc golf gaining speed

Get up and Go

Fans find disc golf a game for the season

By Taryn Plumb |  Globe Correspondent  

June 27, 2013

Aram Boghosian for The Boston Globe

Jason Dore played a round of disc golf during the finals of the 2013 Borderland Spring Fling held at Borderland State Park in North Easton.

EASTON — Let’s get started: Position yourself at a 90 degree-angle from your target.
Plant your feet in a comfortable, wide stance. Swivel your body, cross your throwing arm laterally across your chest — then release and follow through.
This is the basic drive — or starting/distance shot — in disc golf, known less formally as Frisbee golf.
You might be thinking: Frisbee? That’s easy, right? Played it in my backyard as a kid.

But consider disc golf the evolution — and revolution — of what you know of the simple backyard game.

“It’s still considered a niche sport, not a lot of people know about it,” said Matt DeAngelis, president of the nonprofit New England Flying disc Association (www.nefa.com), after a Sunday-morning round at Borderland State Park (www.mass.gov/dcr/parks/borderland). “But every day, we see new faces out here.”
Disc golf is a burgeoning sport that is similar to a typical game of golf: Flying discs are used to tee up, drive, shoot mid-range, and putt, all with the goal of landing a shot in a ground-mounted, chain-draped basket using the smallest number of throws (or strokes, if you prefer). Games are typically 9 or 18 baskets, and players work with a variety of discs that range in size, weight, and thickness, (and feature uniquely beveled edges to cut different swaths through the air).
As DeAngelis explained while showing off his collection of discs in a spectrum of colors, “it’s not a standard Frisbee you’re used to throwing.”
Like many, the North Easton resident got into disc golf in high school as a “natural progression” from Ultimate Frisbee (which operates more on the principles of soccer) and good old-fashioned golf. Since then, he’s become part of the committee that keeps up an 18-hole course at Borderland (www.borderlanddiscgolf.com), as well as the New England Flying disc Association, which has about 500 members throughout the region, as well as parts of New York and New Jersey. The nonprofit hosts numerous events, and also provides grant money to help improve and establish courses.
“It’s all about getting more people involved in the sport,” said DeAngelis.
And more players are, indeed, letting the Frisbees fly. According to the Professional Disc Golf Association (www.pdga.com), its members in the United States have increased from 8,304 in 2003 to 18,089 in 2012. Likewise, the number of courses nationwide has nearly tripled, growing from 1,512 in 2003 to 3,762 in 2012.
Meanwhile, there are ever more prevalent local, regional, and national tournaments, as well as both male and female pro sponsored players. Borderland was recently the location of a popular “Spring Fling” tournament on June 8 and 9 that attracted 77 male and female players, with the top prize fetching $215.
New England has more than 80 permanent courses, according to the New England Flying disc Association. Twenty-four of those are in Massachusetts, peppered throughout the state, from Amesbury, to Athol, to Barnstable, to Conway. Borderland is one of the more popular destinations, according to numerous ratings sites, as is Maple Hill Disc Golf in Leicester, which is set to host the 2013 Vibram Open in August, described as one of the sport’s premier amateur tournaments in the world.
As for the sport’s inception: It’s about as easy to track as a drive lost in the brush. According to the Disc Golf Association (www.discgolf.com), it has waxed and waned in one form or another since the advent of flying discs in the late 1940s. But it wasn’t until the late 1960s and early 1970s that it started to (quite literally) take off, spurred by Ed Headrick of California, who designed and installed the first course, coined the sport’s name, invented the first target, established the first tournaments, and founded several governing bodies, including the Disc Golf Association, Professional Disc Golf Association, and Recreational Disc Golf Association.
Today’s enthusiasts say they are drawn to the sport for numerous reasons — most notably, the competition, relaxed atmosphere, and camaraderie.
“Everybody I’ve met so far, I’ve been happy to shake their hand,” said 34-year-old Tavis Dunne of Fall River, who regularly plays with his two brothers, 26-year-old Dylan and 14-year-old Kealan, and their dad, 58-year-old David.
He described the aerodynamics, strategy, innovation, and skill involved, and a “finesse” and beauty in watching a great player work a course. All told, “it’s a laid-back, very therapeutic environment. There’s nothing better.”
And as fellow player Jonah Kurman-Faber, an 18-year-old from Sharon, noted, it’s a sport that can be whatever you make it.
“You can take it as seriously, or as non-seriously, as you want,” he said, pointing out that some people are incredibly competitive, while others are decidedly nonchalant. In any case, it’s a “great time to catch up with friends, a great bonding experience, and great for all ages.”
And he promised one thing: “If you give it one chance, you’ll be hooked.”
That has certainly been the case for the Dunnes; they try to play every day, whether on a course like Borderland, or a homemade one they created adjacent to their homes in Fall River.
Ultimately, they all agreed, it allows them to be together as a family in a non-cloistered, non-stressful setting.
“I wanted to be closer to my kids, have a good outlet without invading,” said David, sweaty from a walk up the green at Borderland, black baseball cap corralling a gray ponytail.
All in all, he described it as “frustrating fun.”
Dylan, who got his family into the sport, was introduced to it while living in Florida, where one day a group of buddies “said they were going to go throw Frisbees around in the woods.”
It took him 14 drives to get the disc to finally go straight — and when that happened, he described the feeling of being “hooked.” Now, he’s able to throw a drive about 500 feet, and is described as being in the “professional” class by the Professional Disc Golf Association.
His youngest brother, Kealan, hopes for that distinction, as well. “You can have a great future in the sport if you start young,” he said, a bag stuffed with 21 discs of various designs and colors — yellow, orange, purple, red — plunked at his feet.
The crew was just back from a round at Borderland on a picturesque Sunday afternoon. Groups of players traversed the park’s two woodsy courses cloaked with willows, maples, and pines, pockmarked with rocks, and often emerging into wide green fields. Some baskets were perched precipitously atop boulders; others were obscured by a maze of trees; one was set against a backdrop of the park’s 1910 three-story stone mansion with its intaglio of vines.
“It’s a relaxing alternative to enjoy the outdoors, get some exercise,” Kurman-Faber said after finishing up, calling it an “interactive hike.”
And if you’re just beginning?
DeAngelis suggested using lighter-weight discs — widely available in starter packs found at most major sporting goods stores — that offer better control and more consistent shots.
And when throwing, “don’t move too much, keep it simple,” he advised.
If you stick with it, you’ll eventually need to carry a wide range of discs — just as a golfer keeps a cache of numerous clubs — typically toted in a rectangular, shoulder-slung bag.
“As you get better, you’ll want to have the right disc for the right shot,” DeAngelis explained.
You’ll probably also progress to more sophisticated moves; advanced players gain more power and momentum by taking lead-up steps, or grapevine-style runs, before releasing.
But above all, DeAngelis and others stressed, don’t get discouraged.
“We were all horrible” at first, said David Dunne. “Practice is half of the game.”

How to play disc golf

June 27, 2013 

Some basic rules:
Play begins at each hole with players taking turns throwing/driving from the designated teeing area.

The next throw/drive resumes from the location where the thrown disc landed (as with golf). Players again take turns throwing/driving down the course (generally with the person farthest away from the basket going first, and so on).

To “hole out,” or land a disc in the basket at the end of each hole, players take turns throwing, or essentially “putting,” again from the spot where their disc last landed. The thrown disc must come to rest supported by the chains and/or the inner cylinder of the basket tray to be considered valid.

As with golf, each hole has a “par,” and the goal of players is to meet or exceed that. The fewer throws, the better.
Courses are generally 9 or 18 holes.

SOURCE: Professional Disc Golf Association

Original story link here.

Impulse buying? Try "Impulse saving."

Jun 28, 2013

Startups & Venture Capital

Turning impulse buys into savings

Taryn Plumb, Special to the Journal

 

W. Marc Bernsau 

Almost everyone makes impulse buys. But what about impulse saving? Spontaneously tucking money into a savings account instead of buying a candy bar or another item of clothing you don’t need? Helping people achieve this — and pad out their bank accounts, rather than drain them — is the objective of Cambridge-based ImpulseSave.
“It’s really very simple: In this world that’s designed to get us all to spend more money, we’ve designed a set of products that make it just as easy, if not tempting, to save money,” said Philip Fremont-Smith, CEO of ImpulseSave, who co-founded the company in 2011 with CTO John Mileham.
Users download the free iPhone or Android app, or Chrome browser plug-in, link their checking account, and set as many goals as they want (such as “vacation fund,” or “rainy-day money.”)
ImpulseSave users open a savings account with Arlington-based Leader Bank — and can then start impulse-saving.
For example, instead of giving in to the temptation of a $20 shirt at Target, a user can instead choose to transfer that same amount from their checking account to their savings through the app. Or if they’re online, a window pops up in Chrome to remind them about their goals, and to suggest saving instead — or at least putting aside a percentage of what they’re about to spend.
Although it might sound like it takes a great deal of self-control, Fremont-Smith — who hit upon the idea after working in sales and marketing for more than 15 years — called it a “fun engagement platform that people get hooked on,” because it’s “leveraging human nature, rather than fighting against it.”
Users consistently save about $3,000 a year, he said — with one even racking up as much as $30,000. The most popular savings goals are related to student debt, vacation and emergency funds.
“Where we’re headed is establishing and proving out this new model, this new paradigm of personal finance,” Fremont-Smith said.
Users can also set up auto-saves that automatically transfer small amounts to the savings account on a regular basis.
ImpulseSave user Nathan Lubich says he saved up enough over the past six months to pay for a trip to Mexico City, which he plans to take this fall.
“It’s guilt-free, because I feel that it’s specifically for that,” said the Fairfield, Conn., resident. “And it’s money that, quite frankly, I was going to spend anyway.”
In lieu of picking up a daily soda, he said, he transfers $1 or $2 to his savings account; the same goes when he finds himself shopping online late at night. It’s inevitably made him realize how small purchases of a dollar or two can add up — and where he is leaking money day-to-day. Ultimately, ImpulseSave sees wide-ranging opportunities for this kind of platform. Fremont-Smith described a “huge influx” of partners seeking to work with the company — from celebrities to financial institutions — through either co-branding or white labeling their product.
Leader Bank pays a commission to ImpulseSave whenever a user opens a savings account, and the company raised an initial investment round of $200,000 from several angel investors, including Avid founder Bill Warner.
ImpulseSave, which has five employees, took part in the 2012 TechStars Boston fall session, and is now working on completing a second seed investment round, Fremont-Smith said.

Original story here. 

Graffiti of a different kind...

‘Yarn bombing’ artists strike with colorful pop-up display

By Taryn Plumb |  Globe Correspondent

June 16, 2013

As dusk was settling in, a group of graffiti artists struck in Ashland — but not in the way you might expect.
Armed with clews of yarn, they transformed a series of utilitarian light posts into colorful, whimsical, eye-luring structures.
It’s called “yarn bombing,” “guerrilla knitting,” or “graffiti knitting” — wrapping and otherwise decorating everyday structures with yarn under the cover of night. As executed by the group Ashland Creative, the phenomenon can be expected to pop up in unexpected places all over town this summer.
“For a lot of people, it just appeared,” said Dana Cox, one of the artists involved with the first explosion of color that appeared in front of the Ashland Public Library earlier this month. “It’s something to stop and think about, wonder about.”

It is a worldwide movement — the first international “yarn bombing day” was observed on June 11, 2011 — that has emerged in the last decade, with elaborate designs hitting bicycles, statues, trees, steps, parking meters, phone booths, and subway interiors, filling potholes, and even draping entire buses and military tanks in various countries.

In its local application, though, Ashland Creative wasn’t completely rogue. Organizer Andrea Green sought approval from selectmen, Town Manager Anthony Schiavi, and library trustees, and also notified the police force on the night of the “bombing,” so they wouldn’t be apprehended as vandals.
The group’s plan for its “Ashland wrap-it-up art project” is to decorate various structures in town — from benches to mailboxes to bike racks — every few weeks, according to Green, a mixed-media artist who runs Starting Line Studio on Cross Street.
“It’s nonpermanent, not destructive, really more about the process of doing it, and the process of people discovering it,” said Cox, a creative director by trade. “We really want to activate [downtown] and make it more creative and interesting.”
Which comes down to the group’s main motive: To help, if in a small way, reenergize the former factory town.
As Green pointed out, there are many community-building endeavors burgeoning in Ashland, including a community garden, farmers market, Ashland Creative — with more than 200 members, and dreams of eventually opening an arts center — and the playfully titled “Off Center for Wild and Disobedient Creativity,” started by local artist Julie Nardone in September 2011, and now with a base of 225 members from across the area.
“The greater goal is to build community, giving Ashland residents more worthwhile reasons to spend time together in our town, thereby helping to grow the local economy,” said Green.
Nardone, who also took part in the yarn bombing, described it as one step in a “whimsical” plan to attract more people downtown, foster “old-fashioned conversation,” and promote arts, creativity and culture in the community.
“It’s a conversation starter about public art and public participation,” Nardone said in an e-mail. “It’s something different, out of the ordinary. It makes folks sit up and take notice. So many of us spend our days sleepwalking, doing the same routine, following the generic blueprint we get handed at birth. An art project that appears out of nowhere pulls us into the present, back in the wonder of our own lives, flips on our alive selves.”
Using colorfast acrylic yarn — less inclined than wool to run when it gets wet — the small group set about decorating roughly a half-dozen light posts in front of the library on the evening of June 5. The decorated structures feature bands of fuzzy red and lime green, alternating stripes of turquoise and purple, and motley bows and loops in bold colors.
“We improvised, creating whatever designs came to mind,” Nardone said of the artistic process. “I started out doing one pattern and my subconscious took over and I ended up doing something else.”
And the response? Curiosity from both adults and kids, the latter of which have named their favorites and been more than happy to explore their texture.
“People have just been delighted to see the way ordinary functional objects have been transformed into fun, interesting works of art,” said Green, noting some people have admitted to being oblivious to the lamp posts, despite having passed them multiple times, before the yarn bombing caught their attention.
“People often have the perception that art has to be seen in museums,’’ Green said, “but amateur artists can create it, and it can still entertain.”

Original story link. 

© 2013 The New York Times Company

LGBT-friendly businesses "standing on the right side of history."

Jun 14, 2013

Startups & Venture Capital

OutGrade reviews LGBT-supportive businesses 

Taryn Plumb, Special to the Journal 

 

W. Marc Bernsau 

The gay and lesbian community has many prominent figures and proponents on the national level — but Travis Lowry and Conor Clary didn’t see a whole lot going on at the community level.
So the two self-described straight allies began the site OutGrade, which launched in January and allows users to review the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered friendliness of various businesses. (An earlier version of the site had launched under the name Rainbow Chronicle in early 2012.)
As Lowry explained, the goal of Cambridge-based OutGrade is to “bring change on a local level to empower a prominent and powerful community.”
OutGrade users can search by place, category or neighborhood, and rate restaurants, bars, grocery stores and numerous other businesses anything from “the most unfriendly,” to “smugly unfriendly,” to “neutral,” to “ludicrously gay friendly,” and also comment on their experiences.
The site then aggregates reviews and calculates scores of 5 to negative 5, which appear on colored pinpoints on a map running the spectrum from red (the worst) to green (the best).
For businesses, meanwhile, the site offers a managed listing service that allows them to communicate with reviewers, place ads, post images and information about deals and sales, and claim endorsement badges. OutGrade is also running a pilot program with 20 LGBT-supportive businesses which, for a small fee, receive highlighted listings, improved search results and featured blog posts.
The startup is currently focusing its attention on Boston, and features several thousand reviews of hundreds of businesses, according to Lowry. Although he didn’t offer specific numbers, he did say that the site has a few thousand users. There’s also an iOS app available, and an Android app forthcoming.
With three employees, OutGrade is supported by $135,000 raised from friends and family in 2011, and is currently working to raise a $500,000 seed round.
Lowry, who came up with the idea for the site in 2010 after nationwide attention was drawn to a rash of gay teen suicides, said he and Clary opted for the platform of a review site because established sites such as Yelp or TripAdvisor have “proven that community-driven reviews will change the behavior of businesses.”
And just as it allows the LGBT community and its allies to voice their opinions and experiences — good, bad and neutral — it also enables businesses to take a stance of support. The site lets businesses “publicly stand on the right side of history,” Lowry said.
That’s the case with Long’s Jewelers in Burlington, one of the companies involved in the pilot program.
“We have always been supporters of the LGBT community,” company marketing manager Allison Fraske said in an email, noting that, because jewelry is typically a large purchase, online reviews have become crucial to their business.
“On the subject of trust, we believe OutGrade will be a great source to help ease pre-shopping anxiety of anyone from the LGBT community who is concerned about the acceptance level of a business,” Fraske said.
Going forward, the startup hopes to use its seed funding to launch in three cities and grow to 100,000 users, Lowry said.
Ultimately, though, he sees enormous, wide-reaching potential for the site, noting that a long-term goal is to eventually introduce it to the developing world.
“We want to highlight the fact that this is something that’s applicable outside of Boston,” he said. “It’s applicable nationwide (and) worldwide.”

Original story link.

Alexanderia the Great!

Please check out (and support!) Alexanderia the Great's audition from this week's "America's Got Talent." 
From Medway, Mass., she's one of the world's only female escape artists, and she's doing things that no one else has ever attempted. She is a truly talented and inspiring woman (and a mother of three!).
Here it is. 
Also, here's an additional video with comments from the judges:
Howie Mandel: "This was the best escape artist that I have seen. I think Houdini has been reincarnated. Harry, Harry, is that you?"
Howard Stern: "Home Run, A+, this is a tough thing to pull off, and you pulled it off."