Franca Leeson's Page

For one day on June 10, Israeli newspaper Haaretz asked 31 of Israel’s finest authors and poets to cover the day’s news, and sent most of his regular reporters home. From the Jewish Daily Forward (an on-line newspaper):

"The idea behind the paper’s June 10 special edition was to honor Israel’s annual Hebrew Book Week, which opened the same day, by inviting Israeli authors to get away from their forthcoming novels and letting them bear witness to the events of the day.

"This wasn’t a… Continue

Athanasia Psaraki of Archivirus Architecture and Design has designed a "skatable habitat". Yes, that's a guy boarding in his kitchen, and no, his mom is not going to kill him. Awesome!

The idea was to create a house designed around the concept of skateboarding (or blading), of fast mo… Continue

I really enjoyed this description of a creative way around getting people to answer embarrassing questions on surveys. They use a coin flip to create an abstract “screen” for the reluctant respondent. (Apologies to those to whom this is old news) Read on:

“Studies linking disease to sex… Continue

Hubber Ken Wall has just had an article on productive thinking published on Yahoo Australia's Small Business site. Worth reading! Here's the lead to get you started:

"How can you get through the downturn by simply thinking differen… Continue

Again from the indispensible Delancey Place, an excerpt from Jared Diamond's The Third Chimpanzee tells us that in the 1940s a doc surveying blood groups among new parents discovered that even respectable people screw around a lot.

"The study's research plan was straightforward: go to the obstetrics ward of a highly respectable U.S. hospital; collect blood samples from one thousand newborn babies and their mothers and fathers; identify the blood groups in all the samples; and t… Continue