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The Soccket is a soccer ball with a twist — a generator inside that turns kicks into power that can run a small lamp. Its American inventors and celebrity backers say it provides hours of light so poor children in homes without electricity can study at night. But this bright idea has run into some technical problems.

Another example of how designing for good doesn't automatically equal good design.

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The farmers' disenchantment with Washington is about more than just a special interest angry that its traditional government assistance is threatened. It's about the deepening divide between rural and urban America. Isolated, shrinking in number, and cast out of the cultural mainstream, rural America now finds itself politically abandoned as well, as the party that once represented its interests is increasingly dominated by a more urban, libertarian, ideological strain.

Molly Ball. "How Republicans Lost the Farm." The Atlantic. 27 Jan 2014.

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This website is a fascinating look at how geography in the US impacts intergenerational upward income mobility. One unexpected finding--areas high in social capital tend to be more upwardly mobile.

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Interesting stuff in here about how educational institutions can do a better job of training artists to succeed in a variety of sectors.

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Demand new rules for public art now! An organisation born in Bristol, UK, Situations reimagines what public art can be and where and when it can take place. We like to think and reflect on what hap...

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This is fascinating, especially related to the impact art has on rural students.

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Most of the benefits we observed are significantly larger for minority students, low-income students and students from rural schools — typically two to three times larger than for white, middle-class, suburban students — owing perhaps to the fact that the tour was the first time they had visited an art museum.

--BRIAN KISIDA, JAY P. GREENE and DANIEL H. BOWEN. "Art Makes You Smart." The New York Times. 23 November 2013.

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All across Minnesota, cities and towns like Osakis, once assumed to be riding a slow train to nowhere, are proving surprisingly robust. Recoveries in agriculture and rural manufacturing are combining with rapidly spreading high-speed wireless access and other factors to yield numbers that few predicted.

--David Petereson. "Rural revival bucks dire forecasts for many Minnesota small towns." Minneapolis Star Tribune. 24 November 2013.

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Over the past few decades, the rate of people dying by drug overdose in the U.S. has risen dramatically. Drug overdose has become one of the leading causes of injury deaths in America, mostly due to the abuse of opioid painkillers like Oxycontin, which are responsible for the majority of fatal drug overdoses. According to a new study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, the rise in drug deaths hasn't been evenly spread out across the country, but has gone up most dramatically in rural areas. The researchers, from the National Center for Health Statistics, used small-area estimation statistics to estimate age-adjusted death rates for drug poisoning for each county in the U.S. They found that death rates from drugs have gone up in all regions of the county in the last decade or so, according to the study, increasing by 300 percent for the entire U.S.

"The Rise of Overdose Deaths in Rural America." Shaunacy Ferrow. Popular Science. 12 November 2013.

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Artists in Context

Some good big-picture thinking here:

Artists and the Future: Keynote Address by Robert D. Austin from Louisa McCall on Vimeo.

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Unanticipated or poor professional outcomes can occur when arts students graduate with skills, competencies and behaviors that are not in significant demand. For example, economist David Throsby identified the artistic workforce as a hypercompetitive winner take-all lottery (Throsby, 2010). Throsby’s view suggests that for the best chance of arts and arts-related career success, arts students may benefit from learning skills, competencies and behaviors outside their discipline. If intellectual diversity in professional arts training curricula is a goal, arts faculty and administrators may help facilitate this by structuring curricula in a way that encourages students to explore alternative arts and arts-related career-paths throughout the creative sector.

Jason C. White. "Barriers to Recognizing Arts Entrepreneurship as Essential to Professional Arts Training." Artivate. Vol 2, No. 3. September 2013.

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Creative capital provides the knowledge and ideas required for growth, but the incorporation of these assets into the local economy is contingent on local entrepreneurial context. [...] Counties with both higher proportions of creative class and richer entrepreneurial contexts, as measured by either the rate of self-employment or the number establishments per job, tended to have greater gains in establishments and jobs during the 1990s than counties with less of this combination. The relevance of this synergy was not pervasive across rural areas, however, but contingent on the level of local outdoor amenities.

--David A. McGranaham, Timothy R. Wojan, and Dayton M. Lambert. "The rural growth trifecta: outdoor amenities, creative class and entrepreneurial context." Journal of Economic Geography. 2010.

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Some of the most economically successful rural communities in Minnesota have focused on developing the amenities that attract entrepreneurs, telecommuting workers, retirees, and tourists. A new paradigm for rural economic development is emerging. Minnesota faces crucial decisions about its economic future that turn on the choice between chasing smokestacks or attracting knowledge workers and entrepreneurs. And the bottom line is: we probably can’t have both.

--Aaron Klemz. "Focus on rural Minnesota's creative class, not chasing smokestacks." MinnPost. 16 August 2013.

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Minnesota is “arguably the nation’s model in terms of rural philanthropy,” said Chris Beck, a senior projects adviser at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The state’s unique Legacy Amendment, allotting sales-tax money for the arts, coupled with support from private foundations, “give it a leg up on every other state,” he said.

Kristin Tillitson, "Minnesota farm country's newest crop: the arts." Star Tribune. August 9, 2013.

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Rural Americans are a proud and diverse group of people. They value their way of life and want to pass those values on to their children. They sadly believe the rural way of life may be fading and they want to stop it, reverse it, and revitalize rural America. They believe they can, and they think the American Dream is more attainable in rural America than it is in bigger cities. Lastly, they believe they are being ignored by politicians and place blame on government for the state of the rural economy because the government ignores rural Americans.

-- June 2013 poll conducted by the Center for Rural Affairs. Full results are available here. Interestingly, the poll also noticed a strong entrepreneurial streak among rural Americans.

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http://www.leg.state.mn.us/docs/2013/mandated/130292.pdf

More information on the demographic and economic trends affecting rural areas of the state. Produced by the Center for Rural Policy and Development.

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If there’s any health-care shortage in rural areas that exceeds primary care, it’s psychiatry. The Health Resources and Services Administration designates “health professional shortage areas” across the country in dentistry, primary care and mental health. In Minnesota, all but the counties surrounding the Twin Cities and Rochester are designated as shortage areas for mental health. Although large, mostly rural areas of the state also are designated as shortages for primary care, there are more exceptions — including the immediate Duluth area and all of Lake County.

--John Lundy, " Few mental-health specialists carry heavy load in rural areas." Duluth News Tribune. July 2, 2013.