Czech supermarkets are banned from throwing away unsold food and must instead donate it to charities or to non-profit organisations.
Czech Shops Give Food To Needy
Phantom Lakes on Titan
Titan, Saturn’s mysterious moon, gets a little weirder.
https://www.cnet.com/news/nasas-cassini-finds-disappearing-phantom-lakes-on-saturns-largest-moon/
Connecticut Prisons Go Deep On Personal Responsibility
A prison in Connecticut is taking cues from Germany, where inmates do yoga and have keys to their cells. “60 Minutes” reported on it in 2016.
Guerilla Gappistas Repair Rome When Public Services Fail
As Italys capital falls apart, a secret organisation is doing the repairs the authorities won’t.
They always leave their signature, a logo of a hammer and screwdriver, either painted with stencils on the ground or on a piece of paper. They also leave leaflets exhorting their fellow Romans to follow their example: “The Gap are a secret organisation – instead of carrying out sabotage actions the gappisti make repairs where bureaucracy fails. Find your goal, organise and repair: become a gappista yourself!”
Utah Tests Out Preferential Voting, Eliminates Primaries
Payson and Vineyard will likely be the only cities in the state of Utah trying out a new form of voting, called ranked choice voting, for their municipal elections in 2019, after multiple other cities that had expressed interest ended up backing out of the new pilot program.
Ranked choice voting is a system that allows people to rank all candidates in a race from first to last. If a candidate receives more than half of the first-choice votes, they win the election. If no one receives more than half, however, the last-place candidate is eliminated. When a voter’s first choice is eliminated, their second choice is included in the count for the second round. That process continues until a candidate receives more than 50 percent of the total vote.
Advocates of the system say benefits include obtaining a true majority winner and more civil races because candidates are trying to appeal to all voters, rather than just their base, because the candidate wants to be that voter’s second choice.
The concept was discussed at a Payson City Council meeting last week, with the council opting to stay with the pilot program. Payson Mayor Bill Wright said there will be a cost savings for the city, since ranked choice voting eliminates the need for Payson to hold a primary.
‘Birthday Boxes’
A 9-year-old girl is ensuring that none of her classmates miss a birthday celebration.
A List Of Nice Things
By Guardian Cartonist ‘First Dog On The Moon’
These are dark times so we asked you to tell us your own nice things. And you did
Norway’s Halden Prison is a ‘Campus’
Halden Prison in Norway looks sort of like a fancy dorm room or a hotel — much different than the barbed wire and cramped cells we often associate with prison design. Its look is all part of a plan to create a more humane prison, one where the architecture isn’t part of the punishment. Most prisons around the world are consolidated into one single building. This style makes it easy and efficient for inmates to move around, but the design is monotonous and full of visually unappealing materials, like steel and concrete. Plus, tight quarters inside these spaces can foster conflict.
Halden has a different structure: a campus design, where inmates move from one building to another, and are surrounded by lots of windows and construction materials that help muffle noise and take advantage of natural light. The prison’s layout also encourages guards to interact with inmates face-to-face, which fosters better relationships and reduces security-related incidents.
Halden’s design style is expensive — which is why we mostly see it implemented in places with good social support systems, like Western Europe and Scandinavia. Still, the design is setting new standards for what prisons could be like in the future.
Sustainable Straws from Vietnam
A Vietnam company is making compostable, chemical-free straws out of wild grass.
Tran Minh Tien is the owner of Ống Hút Cỏ, a Vietnam-based company that makes two kinds of straws out of sedge grass, which grows wild along the Mekong Delta, The Epoch Times reported. As explained in a Facebook video by VnExpress International, the sedge grass has a hollow stem, so it is naturally straw shaped.
To make both the fresh straws and the dried straws, the grass is harvested, washed, and cut into straw-sized tubes. Then, an iron rod is used to clean the inner part of the straws, followed by one last washing.If the batch of straws is going to be sold fresh, a bundle of 100 straws is collected and then wrapped in banana leaves.
Floating Cities Recommended by United Nations
Oceanix City, or the world’s first sustainable floating city, would essentially be groups of hexagonal platforms – anchored to the seabed – that could each house around 300 people, effectively creating a community for 10,000 residents. Cages under the city could harvest scallops, kelp, or other forms of seafood. Marc Collins Chen, the chief executive of Oceanix, said the technology to build large floating infrastructure or housing already exists.
“The Future Is African”
Future Africa just unveiled its ultra-modern campus in South Africa, with the dream of building a ‘transdisciplinary’ research center.
The legacy Future Africa is working towards is building a truly Pan-African research hub. Being able to say, years from now, that the center was instrumental in training a Kenyan Ph.D. student or a postdoctoral fellow who has gone home to launch a life-changing project in Nairobi, is an ambition worth chasing, Slippers says. “By providing quality research environment in Africa that connects to the global network, we don’t have to go to Sweden, Sweden can come here.”
Illustration (& header image) by Miriam Sugranyes for BRIGHT Magazine.
Data-oriented approach ends homelessness in 3 USA cities
Nine more have ended veteran homelessness. It’s part of a national program called Built for Zero that uses a data-based approach to help officials figure out exactly who needs what services. Now it’s accelerating its work in 50 more cities.