Next time you go to buy a bed MÖRRUM or a coffee table KLUBBO, you might be able to save some money and get a used one.

On August 28, IKEA started offering used products online in Sweden. According to Peter Agnefäll, CEO of IKEA Sweden, the initiative is about "taking an environmental responsibility for how our products are used in the longer term." It could also be about stealing some of the second-hand market back from online trading posts like Craigslist, given that many cities are probably already saturated with IKEA stuff.

There's no word on when the program is coming to the States. Also unclear: Do you still get to assemble the furniture?

Photo (cc) from Flickr user Fabio Bruna

The artist Steve Powers has been painting "love letters" on a series of bridges in Syracuse, New York.

Phrases like “NOTHING TO DO IS EVERYTHING WITH YOU,” and, “I PAID THE LIGHT BILL JUST TO SEE YOUR FACE” are now painted on the surfaces of three formerly rusty, forgettable train bridges. Powers created these messages through conversations he had as his crew went door to door and attended community meetings to ask people about the city.

The goal of the charming project is to turn these bland bridges, which divide downtown Syracuse from the neighboring Near Westside community, into works of art that unite the city. It's part of a revitalization project called the Near West Side Initiative.

Via Unurth

Plumpy’nut illustrates the complex issues surrounding the business of alleviating hunger and poverty. The New York Times Magazine

Starting September 13, Ford will launch The People's Fleet, loaning 12 Ford Fiestas to 12 nonprofit organizations in Los Angeles. The goal is to provide a platform for Ford to get the word out about a dozen groups doing good while helping these groups save money and solve their transportation issues (and yes, gas cards will also be provided!). Like their Ford Fiesta Movement that gave 100 brand-new cars to artists, entrepreneurs and social media mavens, the program has a creative component:  A team of "storytellers" will ride along with the groups with video cameras to document the do-gooding.

It's a great idea but I hope that Ford is thinking beyond the eight-week pilot program. Rather than take the cars to another city as part of a campaign, Ford might work to establish a useful city-wide system where organizations working towards social change could share a fleet of cars with each other. There's a disappointing lack of car-sharing programs in L.A., with only two small nodes clustered around USC and UCLA—in fact, a new report by the city released yesterday recommended that companies like ZipCar add more stations to better serve the growing car-free population. If Ford stepped in, they could use the model of these non-profits to show other startups that sharing cars is a smart and sustainable solution for businesses.

If you're part of an organization based in L.A. that could use another set of wheels, register over at The People's Fleet site. And be sure to check the site for updates on which groups have Ford Fiestas in their future.

Did you take a vacation this summer? If you did, it was because your company generously allowed you a few paid vacation days. Unlike businesses in these other countries (all members of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development), U.S. companies are not required to give employees time off. Despite working some of the longest hours in the world, we take very little vacation. No wonder you're feeling burnt out.

View the infographic here.

SOURCE: CNBC.com; OECD.

A collaboration between GOOD and Amanda Buck.

 

Hat tip to Julie's Health Club blog over at The Chicago Tribune, which pointed to a collaboration between Whole Foods and the Food, Family, Farming Foundation (F3) to put 300 salad bars in schools around the country. The effort, dubbed The Great American Salad Bar Project, will provide $2,500 to schools that apply to help them set up salad bars inside their lunchrooms.

At the beginning of September, The Great American Salad Bar Project had already earned $681,000, enough to pay for roughly 272 salad bars. Any public school that is a member of the National School Lunch Program and is located within 50 miles of a Whole Foods is eligible for one of the grants. Donations can be made until the end of the month

F3 is the foundation set up by Ann Cooper, better known as the "Renegade Lunch Lady," who wrote on this site in June describing an effort to design school gardens in Los Angeles. 

Whole Foods is seeking help in getting schools to apply, so if there's one that you're particularly fond of, you might want to hip them to The Great American Salad Bar Project.

Photo via The LunchBox.

Aaron "Wheelz" Fotheringham is an 18-year-old wheelchair athlete from Las Vegas, Nevada. In the following video, watch as he triumphantly lands the first ever double backflip in a wheelchair (after enduring some painful failed attempts).

Fotheringham was born with a paralysis-inducing condition called spina bifida, wherein his spinal canal and backbone didn’t fully close. But you don't think about that when you watch him fly through the air. You just let your jaw drop like it does when you're watching any other amazing athlete.

Via Wired
 

On the eve of 9/11, architects and scholars discuss the difficulties of building structures that honor emotional events. KCRW

If you're like me, you've been watching the tragic floods in Pakistan with a sickening sense of helplessness. Although the death tolls to this point "only" number in the thousands—and thus the event hasn't grabbed the world's attention like the 2004 tsunami or the earthquakes in Pakistan in 2005 or in Haiti earlier this year—more people have been affected by this disaster than by all three of those events combined. A month ago the United Nations was already calling this the worst humanitarian crisis in recent history, and it's now thought that around 21 million people have been injured or displaced by the floods.

Millions upon millions of lives are still at stake. Rescue and relief efforts are ongoing, but many folks I talk to seem to feel sort of helpless to help.

But there is something we all can do. A Washington, D.C.-based organization called EcoEnergyFinance is raising money to purchase solar lanterns to use in rescue and relief efforts. EEF "was established to provide clean and efficient energy solutions to the rural poor in Pakistan," usually by helping finance small-scale solar. But they're responding with urgency to the crisis at hand, and have a goal of buying 1,000 solar lanterns to ship to Pakistan as soon as possible.

As EEF founder Shazia Khan wrote in an email plea:

In an effort to provide immediate relief to the flood victims, EEF is purchasing solar lanterns from Greenlight Planet to be distributed by our partners in rural Pakistan to the regions affected by the flood.  Solar lanterns are crucial for disaster relief simply because they provide light for rescue shelters, health clinics for treating children with malaria and cholera, and search and rescue missions.  These lanterns are portable, waterproof, and provide 16 hours of light after a 4 hour solar charge, making them ideal for disaster relief.   The cost of each lantern is $12.

 

We urgently need your help. Through your generous donations, you can help us reach our goal of sending 1,000 lanterns to the flood victims.

Lanters are $12 each. I think the GOOD community can go a long way in helping EEF meet their 1,000-lantern goal, and I hope we can help them blow past it. (We saw in Haiti how important solar lanterns were in for earthquake relief efforts there.) Your $12 will buy a lantern that will save lives in Pakistan.

Go to EEF's website and click on the donate link on the right.

Image: Sun King Solar Lantern

Have you ever felt that staying up-to-date on humanitarian crises is a lot harder than it should be? Ever been confused about which charity to donate to during a disaster? Sick of your local newscaster boiling down a humanitarian catastrophe to a 30-second news clip? If the answer to any of those questions is yes, Channel 16 is a resource for you.

The brainchild of a coalition of bloggers, campaigners and organizations, Channel 16 brings together reports from people on the ground during emergencies. Anyone in an affected region can contribute photos, videos or personal accounts through the website itself, or in the form of a text message, email, voice message or even a tweet. All reports go through a verification system before they are published, and users can then review a world map or browse through the list of countries where there are one or more reports available. The aim is to provide a timely, accurate, uncensored, unbiased resource to connect people with ways they can help during a disaster.

Named after the broadcast frequency of an international distress signal, the idea for Channel 16 is quite intuitive. Since the organizations helping people on the ground are often the ones who know best what is really going on, why not get news coverage directly from them? As the site explains, its "international network of eyewitness bloggers provides a view from the ground, not a newsdesk."

For a current example of how the site works, check out the Pakistan page. Then sign up for email alerts or simply bookmark the page, and get real information on the disasters other news sources aren't talking about.

Photo Credit: simminch

If you think there's nothing to fight over in the world's northernmost arctic region, think again. Because of climate change, below the lands of ice and snow where the reindeer roam and the remaining Inuit hunt them, untold natural resources are being revealed, spurring intensifying tensions between the region's countries. What's most surprising is that famously peaceful Canada is taking the military offensive against its arctic regional rivals, but paradoxically also engaging in diplomatic cooperation with some of them. This does not bode well for the reindeer, to put it mildly.

Climate change, or global warming as the term accurately applies here, is quickly opening more and more settlement and resource exploitation prospects in the once nearly barren arctic region near the North Pole. With these geographical changes, disputes in geopolitical borderlines are also rapidly beginning to surface, cooling peace prospects for the arctic region.

As global warming advances, so are the militaries of the region's national interests: the U.S., Russia, Denmark and Canada. Each of these countries has been carrying out reconnaissance and geo-survey missions for decades, but Canada is now escalating their arctic military presence and operations in response to similar moves by the other countries.

"To operate in the North is tougher than operating in Afghanistan from a logistics standpoint, because you are so far away from all the services," said Canada's Chief of Defense Staff Walter Natynczyk, who was on the ground for Conservative Party Prime Minister Stephen Harper's recent visit to the Nunavut territory. About 1,500 personnel, mostly from Canada but also from Denmark and the United States, were engaged in land, sea and air exercises for most of last month. This, in response to Russia's close military flying routes, skirting the others' territories by only thirty miles in already disputed areas.

As these military operations continue, diplomats from the three countries are involved in a different kind of operation: "negotiating who owns what in the increasingly in-demand Arctic waters," as the Canadian Press aptly put it. These contradictory practices, considering Russia's conspicuous absence, put Canada in the historically awkward position of being militarily aggressive just as the country continues its long and distinguished tradition of international negotiations and diplomatic resolutions.

Which of the two processes wins out will determine the fate of the arctic, its resources and peace prospects there, as well as Canada's global reputation, as our new century begins.

Photo Credit: An Honorable German

The last time I visited the nation's capital was in May. At that time, the idea of current Mayor Adrian Fenty not winning reelection seemed laughable. Fast-forward one summer, and that event is looking more and more like reality. A recent Washington Post poll has Fenty behind by 10 points to challenger and current City Council Chairman Vincent Gray in the Democratic Mayoral Primary—which in, heavily Democratic Washington, is the mayoral election.

One major consequence of a Fenty loss is the likely dismissal or resignation of current D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, who is easily one of the most recognizable names in the fight for education reform, along with Geoffrey Canada, Arne Duncan, and Joel Klein. Fenty essentially staked his entire tenure on Rhee, who moved with brusque alacrity to change everything from school lunches to the system's use of test score data. Her crown jewel was renegotiating the District's contract with its teachers to add in a lot more accountability and strike at the heart of teacher tenure. 

Unfortunately, both Rhee and Fenty are apparently going down because their brand of service was often performed without a smile. Rhee is routinely described as brash and combative in her dealings with other education officials and she failed to build a strong consensus around her reforms. Combined with Fenty's snobbish detachedness, especially felt by the city's large black population, those traits could be the duo's undoing.

What would be lost along with a Fenty defeat? Perhaps the most ambitious attempt to reform a school district outside of post-Katrina New Orleans. 

As argued in a new article in The Washington Post, Rhee was divisive, for sure, but she also introduced "a flurry of initiatives launched with high hopes"—many of which, with a changing of the guard, could go unrealized. She's helped turn the country's collective eye for the need for education reform, as nearly all coverage of the topic in a newspaper, magazine, network or cable news, or even in documentary form cannot help but feature her prominently. Her exit, after just three and a half years, would, ironically, be emblematic of an old crutch that's been tripping up school reform for years: lack of consistency in leadership.

In calling for D.C. voters to take stock of how education hangs in the balance in the current mayoral race, The New Republic's editors noted that Rhee and Fenty's reforms were made possible by a wave of teacher accountability backed fully by the Obama administration that for the first time in a while put powerful teachers unions on their heels. With her out of office, the unions might muster more of a fight:

A Fenty defeat, which would really be a Rhee defeat, would deal an especially noxious blow to the national fate of education reform. That’s because we’ve arrived at a curious moment. Thanks to Barack Obama, the Democratic policy establishment and a handful of high-profile politicians have turned against what Steven Brill calls “the base of the base” of the party, the teachers’ unions. With the Race to the Top program, Obama has inspired a wave of unprecedented legislation in the states intended to hold teachers accountable for their classroom performance. Unions have understood the new political environment. Since they have assumed the inevitability of reform, they have largely acceded to the change and resigned themselves to merely shaping it at the margins.

She's the stern, at times boorish, data-driven, results-oriented maven who was the face of education reform, for better or for worse. I, along with many others, would like to know if what she had in mind would have worked. If Fenty can't figure out a way to fix his image in the next week, we may never find out.

Photo via Time. 

Senator Diane Fienstein says the U.S. Senate should exercise the precautionary principle by banning BPA in the food safety bill. Politico

Politics and parochialism are keeping half a billion BP dollars from funding critical long term oil spill research. OnEarth

The designer John Szot has published an incredible gallery of photographs from the Packard Auto Plant, the Thornapple Valley Slaughterhouse, and other abandoned structures in Detroit.

The site's trademark bullying raises questions about who owns words.

Hide your face and your books! That ravenous social monster Facebook is on a trademark hunt. It’s vigorously going after websites—such as Teachbook, a proposed website for teachers—that in any way play on the name of Mark Zuckerberg’s creation. Stories have also spread about Facebook trying to trademark “Face." Whether the networking site is acting reasonably or not, they are certainly making a new name for themselves as a trademark bully.

In their complaint, Facebook accuses Teachbook of “Misappropriating the distinctive BOOK portion of Facebook’s trademark... in a blatant attempt to become Facebook ‘for Teachers.’” Basically, what Facebook fears is that “book” could become a generic term for social networking sites. Generification is something companies always fight like wild hyenas; Google never wants you to “google.” But the idea of the monolithic Facebook fearing this tiny website-in-the-making, which appears focused on sharing lesson plans more than anything else, seems a little ridiculous. Plus, as Edward Lee wrote in The Huffington Post, “The two sites look quite different, and the names themselves indicate affiliation with each other just as much as ‘Kmart’ and ‘Walmart’ do. Of course, no one confuses Kmart for Walmart, or assumes their affiliation, just because they both have ‘mart’ in their names.”

Since trademark law is about as far from my specialty as the moon is from Hoboken, I consulted Jessica Levy, trademark lawyer, who clarifies things considerably. In this case of Teachbook, she thinks Facebook has a pretty good case: “If Teachbook were using its name to identify a source of, for example, teaching guides, I’d say Facebook wouldn’t have a chance. But what Facebook has done is to combine two terms that have common meanings to create a unitary term is something altogether different. Thus, what Facebook has done in a trademark sense is create ‘secondary meaning’ in the term. What happens with a term that has acquired secondary meaning, even if it is a composite of two descriptive elements, is that when a third party adopts one of those descriptive elements for the same, similar, or related goods or services, the public is likely to be confused into believing that the so-called junior user is somehow connected with the so-called senior user. At least that’s what Facebook is arguing. And though I’m often skeptical of aggressive trademark enforcement, this time I believe Facebook may have some strong arguments here.”

So the issue isn’t whether Facebook can own the old-as-hell words “face” or “book.” The issue is the success of this secondary meaning, which Facebook certainly has created by its omnipresence. Levy says, ”In a nutshell, because of the fame associated with the Facebook trademark, Facebook can pass the smell test by arguing that any party trying to use ‘face’ or ‘book’ on a social networking site risks confusing the public into believing its services are sponsored by or affiliated or connected with Facebook.” Face-whatevers and Blah-blah-books in totally different realms are probably safe, but in the social networking realm, Levy advises, "I’d bet on Facebook.”

And yet, even though Facebook may have a case, making that case is not doing anything to dispel their growing rep an Orwellian overlord that yearns to sink its tentacles into every nook, cranny, and baby picture of our lives. I have to agree with Edward Lee that Facebook’s actions betray a “...tin ear to public relations.” As Lee says, “Going after a small website intended to help teachers with lesson plans is just not good PR, no matter how you slice it. The company's aggressiveness...might strike many people as trademark bullying. And if there's one lesson that is true both in trademark and in life: no one likes a bully.” Overzealous trademark protection just makes a corporation look petty and insecure, like when Xerox insists their name is not a verb, or McDonald's tries to keep "McJobs" out of dictionaries.

Trademarks aside, Facebook's follies are starting to outweigh the delights of getting back in touch with that one dude from the ninth grade. I can’t be the only person who feels dangerously close to vomiting when seeing commercials for The Social Network, a.k.a., the Facebook movie. The portentous music makes it sounds as though Zuckerberg invented the stars and the moon, rather than a slightly less annoying version of Friendster and MySpace. Between this absurd aggrandizement, and the endless pokings into our privacy, and now this aggressive trademark business, Facebook feels more and more like the Darth Vader of our time. Where’s Obi-wan and a lava planet when you need ’em?

Last week on Twitter, Facebook, and our blog, we asked our friends: Why do you work? Our goal was to collect a variety of response to include in our upcoming magazine, the Work Issue. You can learn more about that, here.

We ask a question to our Twitter and Facebook faithful once a day, so if you’re not yet following @GOOD or a fan, make sure to sign up and participate in the conversation.

Check out what our Twitter followers had in mind:

And here is what our Facebook buddies had to say:

We want to hear from you. Why do you work? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Thanks to everyone who responded.

Reason TV produced this six-minute video arguing for the legalization of moonshine. We regard home brewing as a fun, safe hobby that contributes to the delicious variety of beer in the world, but making spirits at home is still a federal crime.

Via Boing Boing

In an inventive (and slightly unnerving) move, the city of Vancouver will release a new brand of speed bump that uses an optical illusion to keep drivers alert. A painting of a child on pavement (as in the photo above) will appear to be three dimensional when cars get within 100 feet of it, giving the drivers enough time to slow to a stop. Once the cars pass the ideal viewing distance, the image returns to its two dimensional form.

From Discover Blogs:

The illusion is part of a $15,000 safety program that will run this week, led by the BCAA Traffic Safety Foundation and the public awareness group Preventable.ca. As drivers approach, the police will monitor the fake girl’s effects. Despite fears that drivers may stop suddenly or swerve into actual 3D children, David Duane of the BCAA Traffic Safety Foundation told CTV news that the bump was meant to bring attention to driver-caused pedestrian injuries, and that the fake girl should not cause accidents.

The image will appear in front of the city's Pauline Johnson Elementary School, and it could serve as an effective safety reminder to motorists.

With two months left before the midterm elections, 2010 is on track to be the most expensive midterm election ever. Campaigns have already spent $864 million.

The freedom to pursue happiness is an inalienable human right in this country, but what does happiness actually cost to attain? According to researchers at Princeton, who surveyed 450,000 Americans between 2008 and 2009, it's about $75,000.

From the Los Angeles Times:

The study found that people's evaluations of their lives improved steadily with annual income. But the quality of their everyday experiences -- their feelings -- did not improve above an income of $75,000 a year. As income decreased from $75,000, people reported decreasing happiness and increasing sadness, as well as stress. The study found that being divorced, being sick and other painful experiences have worse effects on a poor person than on a wealthier one.

The researchers do point out that people earning $75,000 a year would not necessarily be unhappy to receive a raise.

According to the U.S. Census, median household income was $50,303 in 2008.

Photo (cc) by Flickr user Kevin Dooley

It turns out that optimism is good for all sorts of things, the job search included.

Stephen Dubner, over at the Freakonomics blog, asks whether it pays to be optimistic. And at least for MBA students looking for work, the answer is yes.

Business professors Ron Kaniel, Cade Massey, and David T. Robison are out with a working paper, which concludes: 

Dispositional optimism is a personality trait associated with individuals who believe, either rightly or wrongly, that in general good things tend to happen to them more often than bad things. Using a novel longitudinal data set that tracks the job search performance of MBA students, we show that dispositional optimists experience significantly better job search outcomes than pessimists with similar skills. During the job search process, they spend less effort searching and are offered jobs more quickly. They are choosier and are more likely to be promoted than others. Although we find optimists are more charismatic and are perceived by others to be more likely to succeed, these factors alone do not explain away the findings. Most of the effect of optimism on economic outcomes stems from the part that is not readily observed by one's peers.

Are you an optimist, a person who believes that things will generally work out for the best? While we're at it: Any tricks for the rest of us?

Photo (CC) by Flickr user erix!.