An In-Depth Look at Changes to BRA’s Acceptable Materials List

TL;DR – BRA has always strived to reach a 99.9% level of purity in what they send to buyers. This was made all the more obvious by the recent proclamations by countries like China who are now accepting only incredibly pure shipments, and BRA has been mostly unaffected by those moves. However, many of the … Read more

Effect Senate Reform via Elections

I believe I have come up with a solution for how to get each party represented in Parliament without adding new steps to a citizen’s electoral process, and even without the need for additional stumping on the campaign trail. If you read this and have actually come across the same, or similar, idea before please … Read more

How to Protect Yourself from Facebook's Open Graph

Don’t kid yourself – Facebook cares very much about your data! They care about how much they can get their hands on, how easily they can index it, and then how much easier it becomes for them to target ads based on information you have on your profile and apps you use.

In fact, the defaults for Facebook’s privacy settings completely expose your profile not only to everyone on Facebook, but to the entire public including non-Facebook users. Meaning your current and potential employers, people you like and have pissed off, your parents – everyone – can see your Facebook profile. For a visual representation of Facebook’s expanding public defaults, click here.

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The School of One

Not good enough anymore
Not good enough anymore

While researching innovative approaches to educating our children, I came across a pilot project that was run this past summer at a single school in New York City. It’s been dubbed “School of One,” and the approach is very similar to the types of things I mentioned as possibilities in “The Textbook of the Future?” To quote thisĀ New York Times article:

The program […] consists mainly of students working individually or in small groups on laptop computers to complete math lessons in the form of quizzes, games and worksheets. Each student must take a quiz at the end of each day; the results are fed into a computer program to determine whether they will move on to a new topic the next day.

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A Sustainable Food Cycle

One of the largest contributors to problems in our society in general has got to be the way we’re eating right now. There are people in Canada who crave things like watermelons, cantaloupe and pineapple even in the middle of winter. Clearly none of those things can be grown in either Canada or the US in January without being grown in a greenhouse, so typically those fruits and others are flown/trucked in from thousands of kilometres away.

The result is a vastly inefficient food cycle. Things are even poorly managed locally during the past few years. E. coli outbreaks, listeria, salmonella, etc. The solution? It may be vertical farming.

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