Skateistan began as a Kabul-based NGO, and now operates projects in Afghanistan, Cambodia, and Pakistan, with a second facility opening in Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan, in 2013.
via Students of DIY Workshop Make First Skateboards in Afghanistan | Creativity on GOOD.
From the merchant William Duer’s attempts to speculate on post–Revolutionary War debt, to an ill-conceived 1815 plan to sell English coats to Americans on credit, to the debt-fueled railroad expansion that precipitated the Panic of 1857, A Nation of Deadbeats (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), by Scott Reynolds Nelson, offers a crash course in the history of financial panics in the U.S. — and a concise explanation of the first principles that caused them all. The following excerpt comes from the preface, “A Republic of Deadbeats.â€
via A History of Financial Panics in the U.S. – Utne Reader.
In the classic TV show Dragnet, Sergeant Joe Friday famously admonished witnesses to give him “just the facts.† Generations of business executives have adopted the same approach, demanding substantiation rather than conjecture.
“Patenting Prosperity: Invention and Economic Performance in the United States and its Metropolitan Areas†is the first analysis of its kind to present patenting trends on a regional level from 1980 to 2012. The report ranks all of the nation’s roughly 360 metropolitan areas on patenting levels and growth, while noting the firms and organizations responsible. It also analyzes how patenting has affected productivity levels in each region, comparing patents—which embody novel inventions—to other sources of economic dynamism, such as educational attainment.
Top 10 Metropolitan Areas that Patent the Most:
#1: San Jose, CA
#2: San Francisco, CA
#3: New York, NY
#4: Los Angeles, CA
#5 Seattle, WA
#6: Boston, MA
#7: Chicago, IL
#8: San Diego, CA
#9: Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN
#10: Detroit, MI
House of Cards, the most remarkable new television drama of the year, is not being shown on any television channel. It may have been inspired by the 1990s BBC classic with which it shares a title, but this series belongs to the future of the medium, not the past.
