Monthly Archives: July 2006

Issue Lab

issue lab logoIssue Lab looks like a pretty neat concept! Essentially it’s a place for non-profits, charities, and other research bodies to amplify their research results. You can post your research there to ensure that more people can get access to it and know that it exists in the first place.

Every month they have a feature topic, this month is concentrating on immigration.

“Nonprofit organizations consistently build on an important body of written work that focuses on understanding and solving societal problems. IssueLab was created to help bring this body of work into focus.

Launched in 2006, IssueLab is a wide-ranging, searchable and browseable archive of critical publications. It simplifies the process of locating and accessing research and policy analysis materials, including reports, white papers, fact sheets, case studies, data sets and more.”

Man Grows Furniture, Art From Living Trees

It’s called arborsculpture, and Richard Reames has been doing it for years. He plants trees in patterns, and uses bending and grafting techniques to form the saplings into benches, staircases, sculptures, and an assortment of other amazing living things.

I believe that if enough people put their minds to using living trees, we can learn to grow houses. I believe that if we put our minds to it, like going to the moon, there’s no reason we couldn’t all be living in houses where the walls and ceilings are composed of living tree material and there are leaves coming out of the roof. We could accomplish this in one generation. We’d build doorways and windows that the trees would grow around, and also plumbing and electrical conduits. The trees would just swallow all the pipes. We’re going to call this “arbortecture.”

You’ve just got to see the pictures in this article!

India Continues to Blog

The Indian Government recently tried to stiffle free speech of many of its citizens by blocking their access to certain blogs and blogging sites. This was in reaction to the recent terror attack in Mumbai, the blogosphere and many people around the world felt that India reacted too strongly.

India has announced that they wanted to selectively censor some pages and that “Because of a technological error, the Internet providers went beyond what was expected of them which in turn resulted in the unfortunate blocking of all blogs.”

Well, today, the Indian Government has said that itwon’t ban bloggers. Free speech online can continue in India!