Earlier this year the Supreme Court ruled that California prisons were in such bad shape they violated the 8th amendment prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment. The reason? Overcrowding. California must to reduce its prison population by 30,000, according to the ruling. Overcrowding is ...
All over Reddit, Twitter, and various blogs, the armies are gearing up to defend themselves against an encroaching enemy: the government. And their greatest weapon is, ultimately, themselves. As a bill called the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, gets ready to go ...
Humans are an increasingly urbanized species; for the first time in history, more people live in cities than in rural areas. And that, of course, means more buildings, which means more concentrated energy usage. Many cities are trying to limit carbon emissions by ...
Due to the onset of winter and police crackdowns on encampments, Occupy movements in many cities have retreated from their initial tactics of long term public occupations. In this time of recalculating and rebuilding for the movement, a recent Occupier reflects back on ...
We all remember times when school felt completely useless and abstract – for me, it was in chemistry class, a subject I thought would never apply to my life or career. In this tough employment climate, debate about how to educate with dwindling ...
Picture a marriage between the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter and OpenIDEO, a platform where a community of users proposes solutions real-world design challenges and ultimately selects a winner. Their baby would be GOOD Maker, a recently-launched platform that links organizations with specific problems or ...
Directed at budding social entrepreneurs, Social Enterprise Bootcamp, a recent two day workshop organized by students at Columbia, NYU and the School of Visual Arts, offered practical advice from an impressive array of speakers. Here are a few of the key take-aways: A ...
A “flying toilet” is a particularly Kenyan device: a small grocery bag used as a toilet and then tossed out the window onto the street. The first encounter is both fascinating and grotesque—was that seriously what I just stepped on? Granted, finding a ...
Several weeks ago, as GOP presidential hopefuls Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry wrangled over the ethics and implications of vaccinating preteen girls against the human papillomavirus (HPV)—the virus that causes cervical cancer--Rwanda began rolling out the world’s first comprehensive nationwide effort to eliminate ...
Chances are, if you have a college or postgraduate degree, you also have student loans to pay back. Nationwide, Americans have around $1 trillion in education debt; each year, the cost of tuition at universities is rising (it rose 5.9 percent in 2008 ...