Some Facebook back-and-forth on new TTC safety measures to protect streetcar drivers.

The art and architectural designs of Delhi-based Sanjeev Shankar explore India's everyday acts of innovation.

ART | Russians have for decades fashioned functional objects from such cast-off items as forks, plastic bottles and onion bags. Collector Vladimir Arkhipov sheds light on the artful labours collected in his archive of "post-material folklore".

Maybe it’s because I’ve been hanging around environmentalists, urban planners, academics and other “change agents” lately, but the phrase “effect change” — often followed by a nebulous but inspiring call to action — seems to be on the tips of everyone’s tongues.

CULTURE | Having spent much of the last 15 years photographing the world's tattooing cultures, indigenous and otherwise, Chris Rainier long-hauls it to the Indonesian island of Siberut. There he finally meets the Mentawai, one of the planet's best preserved, most ancient body art cultures.

[Photo: XO Laptop, One Laptop Per Child] While on the subject of technology and development, I should direct your attentions to a recent post by Jon Evans at his World Fast Forward blog. One of the debates currently raging in development circles has been the relative merits of mobile phones vs. laptops in advancing the economic [...]

[Photo: Christopher Frey] Technological interventions have often been held up as an almost panacea for meeting development challenges in poor countries. I have two magazine articles now nearing publication, both of them dealing with West Africa’s food security and how it’s being addressed by various competing development strategies. The material also figures in the book, especially [...]