The Human Scale

Everything Gmail Knows About You and Your Friends, Visualized When Google hands over e-mail records to the government, it includes basic envelope information, or metadata, that reveals the names and e-mail addresses of senders and recipients in your account. The feds can then mine that information for patterns that might be useful in a law-enforcement investigation. What kind of relationships do they see in an average account? The chart depicts all of your contacts as nodes, and the gray lines between those nodes represent connections between people by e-mail. A word of warning for the privacy conscious: To use the service, you need to give MIT permission to analyze your e-mail metadata. What you see in my chart are five and a half years' worth of e-mails. In all, MIT counted 606 "collaborators" in my inbox, totaling some 83,000 e-mails.

Perfect masking using a highpass 1 Open any picture that contains a big shot of a person / celebrity / whatever. I use a picture of a well known celebrity. 2 Duplicate the background layer 2 times, you should that layer 3 times then. On the top layer use Filter / Gaussian Blur: 18px. Set the layer to 50% transparency in the layers dialog.Then go to Colors / Invert. You should have something similar to my picture now. 3 Click the right mousebutton on the layer in the layers dialog and choose “Merge down”.Colors / Desaturate (average). At the end you should have an image containg almost only black an white.