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By Adam, on May 23, 2013, at 10:09 am 3D printing got a lot of attention recently because an American organization found a way to print a handgun. A direct reaction to that has been to launch a contest to promote the true potential of 3D printing by having a contest which encourages people to create designs that better the world.
It’s obvious that 3D printing isn’t inherently evil and that it can really shake up a lot of existing industries. Just think about printing your own replace parts for objects in your home or even printing food. Last year I put up a short primer on 3D printing (Read more…)
By Adam, on May 15, 2013, at 9:29 am Wikileaks has been a great source of information that governments and corporations wanted to deny or keep secret. Now Greenpeace has modelled a site, Arctic Truth, for whistleblowers who work in the world of arctic drilling for oil. As climate change turns the frozen north into accessible waters oil companies want to move in and further the reach of their harmful industry. Even people in the industry are realizing how dangerous it is to drill closer to the north pole than ever before and have started to speak up.
The website is intended to shield the identities of whistleblowers (Read more…)
By Adam, on April 10, 2013, at 11:38 am The overwhelming majority of personal cars use planet-killing, people-damaging, production-intesnive engines that consume a product that literally kills us. Most everyone understands this at some level, but it seems they don’t connect their fuel consumption with world hunger, polar bears dying, or even smog. A new organization in Toronto wants to change that.
Our Horizon wants to label gas nozzles at gas stations the same way that cigarette packages are labelled to warn users of potential harm.
“Imagine if we see these labels every time, how long will it be before we demand more from government institutions,” said Shirkey. Canada
. . . → Read More: Things Are Good: A Proposal to Label Gas Nozzles
By Adam, on April 2, 2013, at 9:18 am
Earth Rangers is a conservation organization focused on getting kids engaged in protecting and learning about the environment. They have a program currently focused on having kids actively engage in protecting wildlife and their ecosystems. Earth Day happens later this month but there’s no reason why you can’t be thinking about the planet everyday. Get inspired by all the great kids making a difference!
In September 2010, Earth Rangers developed Bring Back the Wild, a national education and fundraising program that educates children about the importance of protecting animals by preserving their natural habitats, while raising funds to support the
. . . → Read More: Things Are Good: Earth Rangers Wants You to Bring Back the Wild
By Adam, on March 28, 2013, at 10:33 am Researchers at UBC have studied the recycling behaviour of people who work in green buildings to those who don’t and found that – regardless of their past habits – people in green buildings recycle more. This is really nifty because it proves that design of an interior space alone can impact how people recycle and the efficiency of waste management.
“Design can absolutely influence people,” Susan Gushe, a principal with the firm, told CBC News.
She says there are several things designers take into consideration when integrating recycling and garbage receptacles into buildings, such as:
Locating them in areas where . . . → Read More: Things Are Good: People Recycle More in Green Buildings
By Adam, on March 27, 2013, at 9:59 am
The Peterborough Planetarium has been started by just two people with the primary goal to bring an excitement of space and our global environment to kids in Ontario. Being a big fan of outer space and the planet Earth, I think this is great!
Their goal is to introduce kids (and hopefully adults too) to all the amazing things that a love of the stars can bring. From seeing comets to understanding what’s going on at CERN. Who knows, maybe one of the kids will grow up to be the next Neil deGrasse Tyson or Neil Turok?
While we might
. . . → Read More: Things Are Good: Portable Planetarium Brings Space to Kids
By Adam, on March 25, 2013, at 8:00 am
SafetyNet from Dan Watson on Vimeo.
The James Dyson Award is an award for engineers and designers to encourage the creation of new devices that make the world a better place. A good example of what they are looking for is last year’s winner, SafetyNet, in the video above. The prize fund has doubled to $147,000, with the prize for the international winner tripled to $46,000 (and $15,000 for their institution).
The award, run in eighteen countries, celebrates ingenuity, creativity and sustainable engineering. Inspiring young people to think differently and invent.
Inventors are encouraged to design and develop their ideas,
. . . → Read More: Things Are Good: James Dyson Award Expands Prizes, Open for Entries
By Adam, on March 20, 2013, at 10:23 am EcoParent Magazine is all about raising children in an environmentally-friendly way while inspiring respect for the planet. The site currently has a range of tips and information ranging from edible gardening to greener home computing.
From their site:
Through our quarterly print magazine and our website (among our other activities), we strive to give you what you need to make responsible, sustainable and, most importantly, attainable lifestyle choices for your family. • Informative and non-judgmental in approach • Fun and inspirational in tone • Promoting engaged parenting and lifestyle choice • Relevant and do-able for the contemporary Canadian family
Check
By Adam, on March 18, 2013, at 9:26 am Scientists in Canada have come under attack and censorship under the federal Conservative government and Canadians want that to change. Science Uncensored is a new organization focused on ensuring that research funded by the government is freely available to Canadians and that the government stop censoring research results. In the past few years, research on the damage of salmon farming to the effects of climate change on Canada have been held back from public release due to alleged political pressure. It’s great to see people who want evidence-based debate on policy standing up against this sort of intervention in scientific
. . . → Read More: Things Are Good: Canadians Want Science to be Free
By Adam, on March 14, 2013, at 10:36 am Sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo have changed the way some projects get funding by using contributions from individuals on a large scale. There have been many art projects and products that have come into existence thanks to this new trend in crowdfunding.
Todd Aalgaard has wondered if crowdfunding can be used to encourage progressive politics. His insights into what crowdfunding can mean to political movements is a good read.
Expanding on the social remedy to this crisis that crowdfunding provides, the white paper goes on. “Besides the obvious benefit of increased fundraising potential,” it reads, “crowdfunding also offers a creative
. . . → Read More: Things Are Good: Crowdfunding for Political Change
By Adam, on March 7, 2013, at 10:17 am Often we hear that spending on experiences make for a happier life than buying into consumerism. In concept it sounds great, but many people think that it’s hard to rejig their life to be focused on doing things rather than consuming things. This TED talk is about breaking free of that passive normality and living life to its fullest.
By Adam, on February 26, 2013, at 10:01 am Teaching people about the environment makes a lot of sense since we live in it. Surprisingly, in many school systems knowledge and awareness about the environment is not shared. In Toronto, Evergreen has been working for years to make the environment important in education. Their efforts are paying off as schools throughout the province are benefiting from their programs.
At that institute, Inwood says, “Teachers learn concepts of ‘ecosystems thinking’—the idea that every action we take as humans affects some other form of life on the planet. Then we demonstrate how this can play out in their classrooms.”
Rather
. . . → Read More: Things Are Good: Environmental Education Improving in Ontario
By Adam, on February 19, 2013, at 10:01 am Skateboarding culture is often (wrongly) lumped together with criminal behaviour amongst youth. To those that still think that way, you should check out a study in the most recent Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability.
By looking at what young skateboarders would do in the city of Chicago the researchers found out that skateboarding culture is a great thing for urban environments. It’s good to see a positive take on a group of people who often get brushed aside.
Young people appropriate and redefine built environments through their everyday playful practices. Among a widening spectrum of young
. . . → Read More: Things Are Good: Skateboarders Help Transform Urban Environments
By Adam, on February 6, 2013, at 10:12 am Despite the fact that Toronto’s politicians want to make the city more dangerous for cyclists (by encouraging more car use and removing bike-focused infrastructure) the people of Toronto are loving bike riding more and more every year. Companies have caught on to this and some are now giving employee some rewards for opting to ride a bicycle instead of using a car.
It helps keep staff healthy and active, and “I actually think it saves money for customers,” he said. If a consultant has to drive from the suburbs to a client downtown, the client gets charged 50 cents per
. . . → Read More: Things Are Good: Companies Reward Cyclists For Choosing Bikes Instead of Cars
By kersplebedeb, on January 30, 2013, at 3:32 pm Left: A Freedmen’s school, a place of learning established by New Afrikans who had escaped the slave-system in the south of the united states. Right: a mob of euro-americans burns a Freedmen’s school to the ground.
It is necessary, first, to overcome the opposition between a physicalist vision of the social world that conceives of social relations as relations of physical force and a “cybernetic” or semiological vision which portrays them as relations of symbolic force, as relations of meaning or relations of communication. The most brutal relations of force are always simultaneously symbolic relations. And acts of submission and
. . . → Read More: Sketchy Thoughts: Two Aspects of Power: Consciousness and Physical Force
By Adam, on January 28, 2013, at 2:25 pm Way back in 2008 I blogged on Open Source Ecology (OSE) which is an open source project to create tools and knowledge to build a fully sustainable village. The project has grown since then and they are going even further by designing tools that can be fabricated on site. Recently, they made a good video explaining more about what OSE is all about.
Via bOing
By Adam, on January 24, 2013, at 11:17 am Get Your Shit Together (GYST) is a website dedicated to making it so that other people don’t need to experience what one mother had to go through when her husband suddenly passed away. Losing someone you love is hard enough, but what made things even harder was that the couple never planned for their inevitable deaths which meant that there were a whole series of hurdles that weren’t foreseen.
GYST provides people with the basic documents they need to ensure that whoever takes care of their estate and things after one’s death has an easier time. We all die and
. . . → Read More: Things Are Good: Leave Loved Ones With an Exit Plan
By Adam, on January 23, 2013, at 9:51 am Beer is delicious so it’s exciting to find out that at least one brewery is out there using their delvious suds to help a threatened species. Pelican Pub & Brewery in Oregon are using profits from one of their beers to fund the protection of butterflies from encroaching development and invasive species.
Now we have the newish Silverspot IPA, introduced last summer by the Pelican Pub & Brewery of Pacific City, Oregon. Downing one of these English-style IPAs will help efforts to increase populations of the threatened Oregon Silverspot Butterfly.
Once fairly common in northwest grasslands, the OSB (Speyeria zerene
. . . → Read More: Things Are Good: A Beer for Butterflies
By Guest Blog, on January 18, 2013, at 5:10 am by Assembly of First Nations | Jan 16, 2013 The Assembly of First Nations (AFN) is pleased to offer this update regarding recent discussions, strategy sessions, meetings and developments regarding the First Nation-Crown relationship, and the continued priorities of First Nations in achieving change for our peoples, communities and nations. Meeting of First Nations Leaders and READ MORE
By Adam, on January 9, 2013, at 11:39 am Social media can actually be useful for more than sharing pictures of your lunch! There is a whole collection of apps and web services that can be used to help development efforts around the world. They provide the ability to track how projects are coming along and their current status to being able to connect farmers to more information and their own local social networks.
My favourite service is one that allows people to report corruption:
I Paid a Bribe is an anticorruption movement that harnesses the power of collective voices. Protected by anonymity, users are encouraged to report on
. . . → Read More: Things Are Good: Social Media Helps Global Development
By Dan Harrison, on November 1, 2012, at 1:33 pm The Better Block initiative was started in Dallas, Texas as a rapid urban revitalization project of an underused, nearly abandoned block of old buildings along an old streetcar line. They project takes the “pop-up” business model to completely revitalise old city blocks with storefronts, community events, and cafés, and sustainable transportation (like bikes and streetcars)! By combating out-of-date laws, re-purposing unused space, and connecting with engaged citizens, the Better Block has spread to multiple cities in the USA.
Watch an energized, exciting, and inspiring talk by Jason Roberts (who started The Better Block) from TEDxOU (Oklahoma University):
Thanks to
By Adam, on October 15, 2012, at 11:04 am Your32 is an effort by CivicAction to promote a financially sustainable and more efficient transit solution for people living in the greater Toronto area (GTA). This project is a great way to engage the people in the GTA as the region is regressive when it comes to transportation, even going so far to remove bike lanes – the opposite of every other city of comparable size.
Your32 is promoting a region-wide plan that will improve transportation for everyone and echoes what other major cities are doing around the world.
There’s a plan in place to dramatically improve transportation in the
. . . → Read More: Things Are Good: An Extra 32 Minutes a Day for People in Greater Toronto
By Adam, on October 10, 2012, at 8:35 am Sadly, even in these modern times, children go missing and finding them can be difficult. The NotFound Project hopes to help find missing children by making use of 404 pages online. 404 pages refer to pages on a website that cannot be found, so it makes thematic sense to use that classification of page to find people.
You can see an example of this by clicking here.
If you have a website then you can help the project too!
The NotFound Project.
By Adam, on October 3, 2012, at 8:44 am Forests around the world are in danger and a new group, ForestWatchers, is looking to the average person to save all the trees. It’s a very simple idea: use people to scan tree lines from images to help scientists focus their efforts. Citizen science for the win!
( {“video_url”: “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXMlCWmCzEs”} )
We propose a new paradigm in conservationism based on the convergence of volunteer computing with free (or donated) catalogues of high-resolution Earth imagery.
This citizen science project aims at making possible to anyone (locals, volunteers, NGOs, governments, etc), anywhere in the world, to monitor selected patches
By Adam, on October 1, 2012, at 11:26 am Have a lot of stuff you no longer need or want but is still in a good enough shape to be used? Well, you can take inspiration from The Social Capital Project which is one person’s idea to get rid of things she no longer wants. Instead of disposing of her stuff by throwing it out she is giving it away to a good home which does a good thing.
I have a lot of great stuff. Most of it I don’t need. I started The Social Capital Project to help me find homes for my stuff. I didn’t want
. . . → Read More: Things Are Good: The Social Capital Project
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