Libraries Are the Future of Manufacturing in the United States

Public libraries are becoming a one-stop shop for manufacturing in the digital age. Because libraries are investing in machines like 3-D printers, someday soon everyone with access to a public library could become an inventor or create something.

Justin Lynch

Jul 27, 2015

 

Harold Washington Library in downtown Chicago, Illinois. (Photo: NancyRoque/Wikimedia Commons)

In the Chicago area, there’s a nearly exact replica of a 10-year-old boy’s head. It’s not an exact replica because, last year, he had a cranial defect. Doctors needed to perform craniofacial surgery on his skull to protect his brain.

Operating on the brain or skull leaves little room for error. “If something goes wrong I can destroy that person's character ... forever,” said noted neurosurgeon Henry Marsh in the 2009 documentary The English Surgeon.

It helps to make a model. A team of doctors at the Loyola University Medical Center wanted to do just that to assist the doctors performing the operation, but ordering a replica of the boy’s skull would have taken two to three weeks and cost about $4,000. Instead, they went to the Chicago Public Library as part of a trial study and printed out a replica of the boy’s skull using a 3-D printer. The model of the skull was sanitized, and took just 12 hours to make. It cost $20 and the surgery was successful.

Public libraries are becoming a one-stop shop for manufacturing in the digital age.

 

Read more: http://www.psmag.com/nature-and-technology/libraries-are-the-future-of-manufacturing-in-the-united-states

Boy Who Couldn’t Afford Books Asks Mailman For Junk Mail To Read; Mailman Responds Spectacularly

Because he couldn't buy books or a bus pass to the library, he'd been reading ads.

Ryan GrenobleNews Editor, The Huffington Post

Posted: 07/28/2015 | Edited: 3 minutes ago

To view video, please go to link

Twelve-year-old Mathew Flores is a bit different from the rest of us. He loves junk mail. 

Until recently, advertisements were the only reading materials available to the boy. Flores loves reading so much that he approached his mailman in a Salt Lake City suburb on Friday to ask if he could have any junk mail.

The strange question prompted the mailman, Ron Lynch, to ask why. Lynch detailed Flores' response in a heartbreaking Facebook post afterward.

"Today while delivering mail to his apartment complex, I saw him reading ads, and then he asked me if I had any extra mail he could read," Lynch wrote. "He told me his wish is to have books to read. I told him the library had many, but he said they don't have a car, and couldn't afford the bus."  Read more....http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/boy-asks-mailman-junk-mail-books-read_55b6b002e4b0224d88338ba4

STOP CYBER SURVEILLANCE! #StopCISA

For more information: https://www.stopcyberspying.com/
 

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