Morning Roundup:
From USA Today: Michelle Obama aims to end childhood obesity in a generation
Obama says she will use all the power of her White House pulpit to promote a multifaceted campaign that will include more healthful food in schools, more accurate food labeling, better grocery stores in communities that don't... 
After teaching local high-school students the benefits of design, a team of frog designers helps them realize a goal.
As mentioned in our first post on this blog, “Why We Should Teach Design Early,” our initiative, TeachDesign, is a collaboration between a team of designers from the Austin studio of frog design, architects... 
When you look at the unemployment numbers like this, it makes the Obama team look pretty bad. But when you look at them like this:
...it's actually pretty impressive. What you're seeing in the chart above is a turnaround in the rate at which jobs are being lost each month that coincides almost exactly with Obama taking office. That said,... 
The architect Andrew Burgess projects an image of the Icelandic parliament building onto the building itself and then mucks with it in various interesting ways.
Fun fact: "Thing" means "parliament" or "assembly" in Icelandic. So the projection is another thing, literally.
Via Archinect.
Architect Andres Duany, best known for work designing New Urbanist communities (walkable, small-scaled, mixed-use) has shifted gears a bit to create a light, expandable shelter known as the “core house” for Haiti’s homeless. The house, designed to stand up to earthquakes and hurricanes isn’t Duany’s first foray into disaster relief housing:... 
We've been hearing a lot about these Zero Rupee Notes, which Indian citizens have been handing to corrupt officials who demand bribes. They were created by a University of Maryland professor and distributed by the "corruption killer" NGO 5th Pillar.
I was at first skeptical that they could be effective, until I read this explanation of their... 
The European Union is doing an impressive job of switching over to renewable sources of electricity:
Renewable energy made up the bulk of new power generation capacity added in the European Union last year, the European Wind Energy Association, or EWEA, said Wednesday.
Renewables accounted for 61% of new electricity generating capacity in... 
This morning the Obama administration announced the formation of a new “climate service,” an agency “aimed at providing long-term forecasts to assist fisheries managers, farmers, state governments, renewable energy developers, water managers and others,” according to Greenwire. The new agency will fall under the National Oceanic and Atmospheric... 
NASA Images is making 50 years worth of media in its archive available to the public and launching a "Guest Showcase" series of online exhibitions curated by experts in the fields of science, education, art, entertainment, business, and academia. The first participant is Stephen Nowlin, Vice President and Director of the Alyce de Roulet... 
If the successful lobbying by the beverage industry to stop in its tracks a tax on sodas is any indication of its power and influence, our first lady had best beware.
Tomorrow, as part of her campaign on reducing childhood obesity, she will unveil her new plan for healthy-eating. It will include a ban on junk food in schools.
Already, the... 
Last week, the Civil Rights Project, a part of UCLA's Graduate School of Education & Information Studies released a report titled "Choice without Equity," where it asserted that charter schools are far less diverse than normal public schools.
Here's an excerpt from the report's foreword:
Some charter schools enrolled populations where... 
It kind of breaks my heart that the Federal Trade Commission may soon crack down on “greenwashing.”
For years, polluters’ claims that they were the biggest friends of the environment have made for hilariously contradictory ad campaigns. Hilarious in the sense that you had to laugh to avoid crying.
The very existance of greenwash marketing... 
The economist Samuel Bowles has an interesting theory about why it's good to keep wealth inequality in check. When there's lots of wealth inequality, he says, more and more people have to be employed as "guard labor"—as protectors of the rich peoples' stuff and defenders of their interests. From the Santa Fe Reporter:
Inequality leads to an... 
The practice of individually packaging consumer products may not have originated in the 20th Century, but that's certainly when it was perfected; our landfills are stacked with unconscionable mounds of plastic waste as a reminder. Fortunately, there are those among us working to buck the trend and put a dent in our masses of trash.
What... 
Little City Gardens is a blossoming urban farming business located in the Mission District of San Francisco. Farmers Brooke Budner and Caitlyn Galloway produce an artisinal salad mix, braising mix and culinary herbs, which they sell weekly to a restaurant, and neighborhood subscribers.
As they work, they are developing and analyzing the... 
A company in Australia is offering families the chance to live rent-free in an energy- and water efficient smart house as part of an experiment to test new renewable and efficiency technologies. Energy Australia and Sydney Water ask only that prospective tenants show an interest in environmental issues, have experience in some field of... 
In a report slated for release on Wednesday by the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), a survey of 2,500 people, asked about their views on public policy and other matters of civic nature, found that the more educated a person is, the more liberal they are, as it regards social issues.
From The Chronicle of... 
The CircleBath Hospital in Bath, England, was designed by the high-profile architecture firm Foster + Partners to be a more pleasant place to convalesce:
CircleBath is Foster + Partners’ first hospital and represents a radical departure from orthodox approaches to hospital planning. The three-storey building is set into the hills on the edge... See who's sparking the conversation on GOOD right now.
Hi Nia--This sounds really cool. Are you a member of EarSay? I'd love to learn more about it.
So no bottled water, I agree. But what about juice? Is that a good substitute for soda?
In Europe there are plenty discussions about BRT and light rail as well, for the feeling of the passenger (and therefore politics?) the bus …
I work for a non-profit called Neighborhoods Partnership Network and we put out a magazine called The Trumpet that is written solely by …
For me Life is a journey, and in this journey you can only make two choices either do good or do bad ... and I would believe that anyone …
