I was at a reggae beach party last night, mixing with the ridiculously good-looking and creatively homemade surfer crowd. (One of my most favorite, secret niches of the Basque Country). I say “homemade” not only because you know those muscles are so ocean-fresh that they still reek of saltwater, but also because almost everyone [...]
Singapore International Foundation has been around since 1991 carving out greater community understanding on the western seaboard, but this year marks the first time they’ve instituted a camp for young, aspiring social entrepreneurs. In partnership with Volans Asia, they’ve launched a three-day camp at the YWCA Fort Canning Lodge in Singapore to cultivate the [...]
One of the greatest challenges of being a teacher is trying to convince your students why they should care about anything that you write on the blackboard. You have to bridge the gap between their current boredom and ten years later, when they will finally appreciate the utility of what they are learning.
Yet there [...]
As a follow-up to my last post (an ode to self-reliance), I want to give mad props to Afghan locals and the MIT Bits and Atoms lab crew. It took over seven years for the World Bank to deliver on its promise of some wireless internet access and that was seven years to get [...]
Today is the last day to send in your nominations for Civic Ventures annual Purpose Prize, dedicated to people over the age of 60. If you know a senior who has taken advantage of their retirement to change the world for the better, you can nominate them to receive a cash prize of either [...]
Now we have a problem. On January 12th, 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake rocked the tiny island nation of Haiti. Just a month and a half later, an 8.8 magnitude earthquake ripped through the South American country of Chile. Death tolls in Haiti have now climbed well over 150,000 while Chile has reached at [...]
My notoriously unsleeved laptop has seen its fair share of abuse, but it knows nothing in comparison to the approximately 17,000 people who are sex-trafficked into the United States each year. Laptop dents and scratches and the plight of sex-trafficked women might seem completely unrelated and a somewhat insensitive correlation to make, but due [...]
I’m just now getting around to watching my TED talks…Author and publisher, Dave Eggers, and his “Once Upon A School” presentation so far takes the cake. I have been a fan of Eggers ever since his best-selling, quirky memoir, entitled: “The Heartbreaking Working of a Staggering Genius” came out in 2000. Ten years later, [...]
The majority of immigrants come to the United States with a dream and very little money to make it on. Instead of starting on the streets, what if all they needed was a big idea and their financial security could then be petitioned for? That’s what “The Start-Up Visa Act of 2010“, introduced by [...]
One of the many challenges of my job as an English teacher in the Basque Country is to inspire a level of understanding in my students on just how big the world is. Now living in a foreign country, the spectrum of cultural differences seems obvious to me, but for my my students, the [...]
The Foreign Policy blog recently gave charitable celebrity, Madonna, a chide or two for uprooting villagers in order to build her school in Malawi and I feel obligated to come to her defense. No one knows the real story, but what we do know is people love to complain about rich people who are [...]
Wind farms are still a relatively new form of sustainable technology. There is still a lot of room for a improvement and a few visionaries over at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena have gone so far as to forget about the air and look to the water for the answers on how [...]
As an Olympic snowboarder, one is required to go big or go home, but U.S. gold medalist, Hannah Teter, is taking it one step further and encouraging her fans to get naked. Teter has recently launched her own underwear line in support of international humanitarian causes. For each pair of underwear you buy at [...]
