Artwork stating 'Education Destroys Barriers', 'We Demand Treatment', and 'I Need A Chance'

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  • Spots of hope: Some good news for South Africa's cheetahs

    A cheetah conservation project in South Africa has helped the cat population rebound over the years by securing them in wildlife reserves. The Cheetah Metapopulation Project started in 2011 when there were 217 cheetahs, but a decade later, there are now 419 across the reserves. While there is debate about whether the focus should be on the quantity of cheetahs or the quality of their enclosures, the project has been successful and they’re looking to share their cheetahs and conservation lessons with other countries.

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  • Kenyan engineers recycling plastics for bricks

    Gjenge Makers Ltd is an alternative building product manufacturing company that creates products – such as pavers and blocks – out of recycled plastics. Founded by four Kenyan engineers, the team began by studying the manufacturing process and researching what products would do well on the market. They then built all of the machinery themselves, which break down the plastics, and then mix them with other building material products to ultimately create customizable plastic bricks that can withstand larger weight and are less expensive than concrete. They are popular in rural and lower-income areas.

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  • Taiwan's Crowdsourced Democracy Shows Us How to Fix Social Media

    vTaiwan is a mixed-reality, scaled listening exercise used by the government as a new way to make decisions. The platform provides an online space for citizens to debate and for politicians to listen to. The government lays out political questions, such as regulating Uber or changing time zones, and people can share their feelings, agree and disagree, but divisive statements and trolling are not posted. After debating for a period of time it became apparent that people converged around points of consensus. The government has implemented about a dozen laws and regulations based on the discussions.

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  • Chicago Teens Unveil Vision for Change and Public Safety in Their Neighborhood

    Twenty high school students enrolled in Territory, an urban design nonprofit, produced a zine and their own quality of life report for West Austin, where many of the students live. The students conducted interviews, surveys, and gathered community input to create the report. It includes sections on public safety, youth empowerment, and mental health.

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  • The Shared Spaces program: a crisis-driven experiment that could permanently change San Francisco's urban landscape

    The Shared Spaces program is a pandemic-driven initiative that increases outdoor dining space in commercial areas. The initiative made the permit process more user friendly and less expensive. Over 1,200 outdoor dining applications were approved in three months, which is more than the city approved in 2018 and 2019 combined. The increased capacity of outdoor dining seating takes away other public spaces, usually parking and driving space, but the program’s success has helped businesses survive pandemic-related restrictions and officials are assessing the program to maintain it moving forward.

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  • As Concerns Over Climate Change Rise, More Developers Turn to Wood

    Eastern Washington University recently built the first tall wood office building in the state joining hundreds of other large “mass-timber” projects in the United States. This growing industry constructs panels, beams, and columns from trees that need to be thinned to curb wildfires in forests. While wood buildings can be more expensive to build than ones constructed from concrete and steel, environmentalists are on board because wood can store carbon, which can help offset greenhouse gas emissions.

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  • Polish Drivers Beware: Road Work Ahead

    A series of methodically planned and publicized measures to improve traffic safety have significantly lowered Lithuania's highway fatalities in what is now serving as a model for safety advocates in neighboring Poland. Starting nearly a decade ago, after traffic deaths peaked, Lithuania began increasing penalties for violations, toughening enforcement, and improving roadways. Each phase was accompanied by public education. More lenient laws and enforcement are blamed for Poland's relatively high traffic-death rate.

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  • Soap on tap? A startup arrives in NYC with a plan to take the plastic out of cleaning products.

    To make food and cleaning products more accessible to those experiencing economic hardship, the startup Algramo has installed more than 2,500 automated bulk-dispensing systems throughout Chile where people can purchase an item and come back to refill it using the same container. Instead of competing against other consumer good companies, Algramo works with them to help change their packaging practices to reduce their plastic waste. Algramo is scaling the service to New York City and Indonesia to help cash-strapped and eco-friendly shoppers.

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  • Truck Convoy Brings Boon to Town Plagued by Violence

    Truck convoys ensure safer journeys for drivers and their goods around Kanyabayonga, an area that experiences intermittent instability and violence between armed groups. Up to 100 trucks carrying goods like charcoal, bananas, or lumber line up most days and wait for permission to continue their journey. The local economy has benefited, with restaurants and stores popping up to accommodate the influx of people. A ban on night time driving to prevent threats from armed groups has also supported the growth of a hotel industry, with 15 informal hotels now in operation.

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  • The Wayback Machine and Cloudflare Want to Backstop the Web

    The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine crawls and caches websites to preserve a history of deleted pages. The Wayback Machine has archived a large amount of the public web over the past two decades, adding more than a billion URLs a day to its databases. The archive has over 468 billion web pages in total, and more than 45 petabytes of data. A new partnership with the internet infrastructure company Cloudflare, which caches a static version of websites, has had promising results. Powering Cloudflare’s work with the Wayback Machine’s interface has allowed them to find more sites to archive.

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