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The 2012 Republican primaries commenced this week and already the election has seen political scandals worthy of the books.  From Herman Cain’s sexual harassment charges, to Newt Gingrich’s open marriage proposal to Stephen Colbert’s joke campaign, this political season is one you will not want to miss.     

Here is a list of books that attempt to give you an inside look into what the campaign trail is really like.  Some are fiction and some are non-fiction but they all seek to paint a picture of the truly dramatic, scandalous and stressful lives of America’s politicians. 

Welcome to Make It By Monday, GOOD's weekly DIY feature in which we curate, demystify, and add our own tips for craft projects from around the web (and our apartments). This week: DIY your belated thank you cards.

Presidential candidate Rick Santorum has really gone after higher education lately. Earlier this month, he called President Obama's suggestion that everyone should go to college "elitist snobbery." Now, he's speaking out in response to Obama's State of the Union education plans:

It’s no wonder President Obama wants every kid go to go college... The indoctrination that occurs in American universities is one of the keys to the left holding and maintaining power in America. And it is indoctrination. If it was the other way around, the ACLU would be out there making sure there wasn’t one penny of government dollars going to colleges and universities, right?

Let's get one thing straight: Rick Santorum is about as educated as you can possibly get, and not from insular religious institutions, either. He got himself a bachelor's degree from Penn State. Then a M.B.A. from the University of Pittsburgh. Then he went back to Penn State to get his law degree. Would he be a millionaire running for president if he hadn't gotten those degrees?

Even Santorum must know that college isn't just a place the left goes in order to maintain power; it's a necessary stepping-stone to get a good job, now more than ever. And, of course, educated people make more money. In 2009, the median the median annual income of a young college-educated adult was $45,000, while a young person with just a high school diploma made $21,000.

Santorum is correct in pointing out that most academics are lefty—professors identify themselves as liberals more often than people in any other type of job. That isn't a coincidence; many conservatives—the faith-based kind embodied by Santorum—embrace being anti-intellectual. But when Obama stresses the importance of every kid going to college, he's not plotting for a liberal takeover. He's acknowledging the key to building a competitive economy.

Photo via (cc) Flickr user Gage Skidmore.

East Haven, Connecticut, Mayor Joseph Maturo, Jr. ruffled a lot of feathers this week when he told a reporter that he would address Latinos' concerns over police discrimination and abuse by "eating tacos." Maturo has since apologized numerous times, but activists around the country continue to take him to task. Some, like Connecticut's Latino and Puerto Rican Affairs Commission, have asked for his resignation. Others have gotten a bit more creative with their protest.

Immigrant rights group Reform Immigration for America started a "text-the-mayor-a-taco" campaign, in which they agreed to buy Maturo a taco for every text message they received from irate citizens. The group ended up getting more than 3,000 texts, but they decided to send only 500 tacos, all of which were delivered to Maturo's office Thursday night. The gesture was mostly symbolic, of course, and 499 of the tacos were donated to a community food bank for East Haven's needy. One taco was left for the mayor.

cartolleria:

Squirrel Highways Nervous squirrels, afraid of an attack on the ground, use the phone and television cables as highways wherever the tree canopy’s broken. Birds rest on the power lines. Image and caption copyrighted Denis Wood & Siglio Press reproduced with permission. (via Brain Pickings | Kirstin Butler)

The weekend is here. Don't forget to play. 

Two federal agencies will steer tax money for social programs through a new for-profit investing tool tested in the United Kingdom and Australia, according to a report co-authored by the White House and the Nonprofit Finance Fund.

Rather than providing social services directly, the bonds will allow the government to task a firm in the private sector to solve a public challenge, paying the company only if it achieves certain success metrics. Using pay-for-success bonds could save taxpayer money, earn a profit for impact investors, and incentivize innovation to solve chronic social challenges. In the United States, this is all theoretical at this point, but 2012 may be the year that changes.

The Department of Labor will make available $20 million for pay-for-success projects that help Americans find work through its Workforce Innovation Fund. The Department of Justice has not released a specific number, but says it will give preference to applicants to the Second Chance Act grants program who incorporate some pay-for-success element. That program, started in 2008, awards grants to governments and nonprofits that help ex-prisoners find work and get back on their feet so they don’t return to crime. That’s the basic idea behind the original pay-for-success bond—more commonly known as social impact bonds—in Peterborough, England. That plan, launched in 2010, was designed to lower young offenders' recidivism rates in one small prison outside London. The closely watched program won’t deliver conclusive results for investors or the juvenile offenders for a few more years. But the idea was attractive enough that other agencies in the U.K. and Australia started copy-cat programs to care for the disabled and fight homelessness.

The early evidence from the United Kingdom suggest social impact bonds are a promising innovation for lean budgetary times because the government doesn’t end up paying for projects that fail. If the company in in the U.K. pilot fails to reduce recidivism by 7 percent, its private investors, not the government, lose the $13 million spent on programs for the young offenders. Shifting risk from government to investors enables new designs for social projects—and in theory, frees up lots more money to spend on them.

“We’re seeing tremendous momentum for developing social impact bonds," in the United States, says Steve Goldberg of Social Finance U.S. His organization designed the first bond in Peterborough, and has since creating an office in Boston to capitalize on U.S. momentum for similar projects. "It's encouraging to see government at both the federal and state levels getting behind social innovation financing." 

It looks like a smart investment to the White House, too. “The hope is that Pay for Success will help us find better ways to get Americans the supports and services they need,” administration officials Cecilia Muñoz and Robert Gordon wrote in a companion post to the report.   President Obama asked for $100 million for social impact bonds in his budget, a hefty federal stamp of approval and financial carrot for states and nonprofits to get moving on how to spend that money. Massachusetts, Minnesota and New York City have all taken the bait and started issuing their own bonds. Connecticut, Michigan, New York State, Rhode Island, Virginia, and the cities of Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Louisville are considering pilots of their own.

“Our new fiscal reality requires that we change the way government does business," says Jay Gonzalez, the Massachusetts Secretary of Administration of Finance, the agency managing the bonds. He says the bonds provide better service while “stretching every taxpayer dollar as far as possible.” An earlier, less formal request for information from potential bond-issuers by the state yielded more than 30 responses.

According to the White House/NFF report, potential partners are particularly interested in using pay-for-success bonds to address criminal justice, homelessness, early childhood education, and workforce development. They also cited research showing the value of spending on prevention, specifically in education. For every $1 spent on early childhood development, the government saves $7 down the road on other programs, like special ed, teen pregnancy services, and the emerging pay-for-success poster case, juvenile delinquency. "In particular [pay-for-success bonds offer] a financing solution for preventive services, which are often the first services to get cut in hard budget times even though they lead to reduced costs and better outcomes in the long-term,” Muñoz and Gordon write.

If these announcements are any indication, 2012 will be the year of education for nonprofits, social impact investors, and local governments on this new hybrid solution to social challenges. After talking with dozens of public officials, the Nonprofit Finance Fund's Kristin Giantris says there is "tangible momentum" happening across the country. "We think we will see various proof of concept pilots in 2012 that will emerge at the state and local level," she says.

Photo via (cc) Flickr user The White House. 

Patrick Joust loves Baltimore. He loves the architecture, loves the topography, loves shooting portraits on the street. Though Joust grew up in California and Pennsylvania, he developed his photographic style only after moving to Baltimore. 

Joust's photographs are united by a cinematic sense of style. A librarian by day, Joust traverses the city and surrounding counties at night, playing with long exposures and teasing out rich tones from the landscape. A self-professed lover of street photography, he also conveys a sense of place through his photos. Through their own personal style, the characters he captures testify to the unique style of Charm City. 

See more of Joust's photographs on his website and blog. 

From Anytime Fitness has released the Weight of the Union 2.0 infographic to coincide with the U.S. State of the Union Address this week.

Last night, the President gave his State of the Union address to members of Congress and the general citizenry to report that our nation is moving in the right direction. But today we want to address what the President didn’t mention in his speech to the union. We want to discuss our nation’s biggest health concern: obesity. We are offering its own barometer for measuring progress — the second annual report called the “Weight of the Union.”

There’s a lot of data shown in this design, and a good blend of different data visualizations, illustrations and text descriptions. 

My biggest complaint is that many of the data points are just listed in text, and they could have been visualized.  For example, the dollar values showing that “Being Fat is Expensive”, should have been scaled so they could be easily compared to each other or some outside comparative spending values.

The other major issue I have is the shading of the silhouette as a stacked bar chart doesn’t work accurately.  Readers see the “AREA” of the colored sections as being representative of the values.  Because of the odd shape, you can’t just color by height.  The boots are showing the biggest value “Sleep”, but because that part of the silhouette is narrow, “Work” actually visualizes as a much bigger portion of the whole than the data really shows.

I like the inclusion of the QR Code at the bottom as a promotion tool for Anytime Fitness.

Thanks to Amanda for sending in the link!

With Valentine’s Day approaching – it’s happening February 14, you know – we want to give everyone the opportunity to be a little extra lovie-dovie and cheesy to the geek in their life.

Now we know that many of you will flock to ThinkGeek or some other geeky store to pick up some more or less well thought-out Valentine’s gifts, but that’s not good enough for us.

With just a simple tweet, you can win a gift certificate to be spent on flowers and chocolates for your geek this Valentine.

All you have to do is send out a tweet telling the world what you will do for the geek in your life for Valentine’s Day. Make sure the tweet includes the #pingdom hashtag and you’re in for a chance to win one out of 20 US$50 gift certificates.

Just click here to find out all the details and enter the competition.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.h

This week we bring you a collection of articles on JavaScript performance, use of Node.js, PHP, Ruby on Rails, and more.

This week’s suggested reading

• JavaScript Performance: An article by Steve Souder about his speech at the San Francisco JavaScript Meetup, which focused on script loading and async snippets.
• What JavaScript’s Inventor Really Thinks About Google Dart: Google’s Dart language, which attempts to address JavaScript’s supposed weaknesses, is getting a mixed reaction from the inventor of JavaScript itself, Brendan Eich.
• Node.js inventor extends JavaScript programming beyond browsers: Interview: Ryan Dahl discusses why his invention is catching fire with developers.
• Zend Developer Pulse: Zend, “The PHP Company,” is now doing a quarterly survey that “takes the pulse on developers.” Here are the results from the first one from Q4, 2011.
• Monitoring MaxCDN with Pingdom: Taras Mankovski noticed that stylesheets used on one of his sites were not always loading correctly. So he set out to monitor what was happening with Pingdom’s service.
• The future of End-User Experience Monitoring – The core of Application Performance Monitoring: Jonah Kowall at Gartner has published a new research note, discussing this critical aspect of APM.
• How Open Source Licenses Affect Your Business and Your Developers: Copyleft licenses have been the most popular choice for new open source projects. Recently, however, developers and companies seem to be moving from the GPL in favor of less restrictive permissive licenses for open source projects. What’s behind the trend and how does it impact your business?
• Ruby on Rails 3.2 said to speed Web app development: The new version of the Ruby on Rails framework features enhancements like a faster dev mode that could aid Web development.
• The State Of NoSQL In 2012: Siddharth Anand, a senior member of LinkedIn’s Distributed Data Systems team, gives his view of where NoSQL is today, at the beginning of 2012.
• 10 programming languages that could shake up IT: These cutting-edge programming languages provide unique insights on the future of software development.
• Node at scale: What Google, Mozilla, & Yahoo are doing with Node.js: Representatives from Google, Yahoo, Mozilla, and startup i.TV talk about using Node when instability is not an option.
• And finally…
• Minecraft™ LEGO® CUUSOO Project Passes LEGO Review: There will be an official LEGO set based on Minecraft.

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This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

For decades now, people have attempted to compare the modern gay rights movement to the famed American civil rights movement of the 1960s. And for every comparison made, some blacks have vocally decried them as being inapt. Writing for USA Today last year, black journalist Ellis Cose called the gay rights-black rights comparison a "false equivalency." Anti-black racism, he wrote, "was relentlessly oppressive, as entire communities were cordoned off and disadvantage was handed down through generations. With gays, we are not looking at roped-off communities."

A shocking new bill in New Hampshire may be enough to change the minds of Cose and his ilk.

This week, the House judiciary committee of the New Hampshire state legislature convened to discuss a bill that would allow businesses to refuse accommodations, goods, or services to gays getting married. New Hampshire legalized same-sex marriage in 2010, though with the caveat that churches and other religious groups could refuse to participate in same-sex ceremonies. The new bill would take that rule a step further, allowing a bakery to refuse to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple, for instance.

The New Hampshire legislature has taken a hard-right turn of late, prompted by the comeuppance of a group of ultra-conservative Tea Party candidates in the last elections. In December 2011, a trio of freshman House Republicans drafted a bill that would require every bill about individual rights and freedoms to "include a direct quote from the Magna Carta," the centuries-old English proclamation.

If African-Americans—or anyone else, for that matter, would like to continue to argue that the gay rights movement bears no strong resemblance to the civil rights movement, I'd suggest they take a serious look at this new bill in New Hampshire. Indeed, while there are currently no anti-gay, Jim Crow-style blockades at Americans businesses, it's not for lack of trying.

Photo via (cc) Flickr user lsasser

Is college designed to give students job skills, or to encourage them to study subjects they're passionate about? It's a question that can incite endless debate, but according to the 46th annual Freshman Survey—a project of the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA—students increasingly believe it's the former.

The survey, the largest of its kind, polled nearly 204,000 full-time freshmen entering 270 four-year colleges and universities last fall. Researchers found that 85.9 percent of freshmen said they're in college "to be able to get a better job." Prior to the recession, freshmen consistently answered “to learn more about things that interest me” as the major reason they pursued higher education.

Students pursuing different majors offered strikingly different motivations for seeking college degrees. Roughly 88 percent of freshmen planning to major in science, technology, engineering, or math, and 92 percent of students majoring in business, cited improved job prospects as the most important factor. Meanwhile, a relatively paltry 73 percent of humanities majors said job skills are most important to them. 

Also predictably, 85 percent of business students said they're in school "to be able to make more money" compared to just 56 percent of humanities majors. But the good news for humanities majors is that, although their overall salaries remain lower than STEM and business majors, salaries for those grads saw the biggest percentage jump last year.

The recession has reshaped the entire nation, so it's not surprising that students are reacting by changing their priorities. Just as Americans who grew up during the Great Depression were shaped by economic hardship, the current generation of students are understandably motivated by a desire for financial stability.

Photo via (cc) Flicker user David Berkowitz

Ahmad Ahskar is founder and chief operating officer of the Hult Global Case Challenge, an international competition that pits teams of business school students against one in another to develop social enterprise solutions to the world's most pressing problems.

Each year, a new challenge is selected—this year's is fighting global poverty in the areas of education, energy, and housing—and teams compete locally, regionally—and finally, at an international competition in New York City to present the best business plan to make a difference on these issues. The winning team receives $1 million to implement its idea, plus access to key partnerships through the Clinton Global Initiative. 

Ashkar's work with Hult and as a management consultant exposed him to many approaches to social entrepreneurship. Asked to advise aspiring social entrepreneurs, he noted that a common mistake is trying to reinvent the wheel by focusing only on products or services when innovations in distribution, business models, or marketing might produce much more impact. 

Every Friday, GOOD gives you a minute of insight from an impact economy leader.

In the United States, there is a tremendous amount of focus on people who buy things they can’t afford, and why that’s bad. We’re an example of an overworked married couple who bought a lot of things they could afford but should never have purchased. This is the story of how we went from asking ourselves “can we afford to buy this?” to “should we buy this?” The shift was harder than we ever thought it could be.

Cara Kitagawa-Sellers: I’ve spent a lot of time attempting to pinpoint the moment when I started to buy stuff I could afford, but shouldn’t own. I’d always accumulated extra things, but it really got bad when Doug and I drove cross-country on our move from D.C. to San Francisco. We wanted something more than photos to commemorate each stop of the trip. We decided on coffee mugs. By the time we reached the West Coast, we had eight new coffee mugs we didn’t need. Doug already owned more than 30 mugs at the time.

When we arrived in San Francisco, we each scouted new apartments. I found mine first, a large one-bedroom in San Bruno, right outside the city. Doug put his stuff in two storage units in the building while he searched for a place of his own. Eventually, he stopped looking and moved in with me. We kept the storage units.

Doug Sellers: We always felt a little bothered by the fact that we had so many things in storage, but not bothered enough to stop buying stuff. After a year in San Bruno, we upgraded to a two-bedroom apartment in Haight-Ashbury. We thought a bigger apartment was the answer to all of our to all of our stuff problems. We quickly realized that even two bedrooms weren’t enough to hold all of the stuff we owned.

We were frustrated, but not frustrated enough to start getting rid of stuff. Instead, we kept the living room, kitchen, and one bedroom well-organized, and used the second bedroom as storage. Whenever a guest came to stay, we did our best to hide our excess stuff and make the spare bedroom presentable. We always felt a little embarrassed that we had a spare bedroom full of stuff we never used, but not embarrassed enough to stop buying more.

Cara: The turning point was when we moved out of that place and back into a one-bedroom. We took the opportunity to make a pile of things we didn’t need or want. By the time we moved, we calculated we had donated, given away, or trashed more than $10,000 worth of stuff. Left by the wayside were a flip camera, an extra rice cooker, an immersion blender, a closet full of clothes, numerous books from college and beyond, pots and pans, and picture frames we had never used. Then, there were the items we kept but thought about shedding—a Dolce and Gabbana skirt (worn once), an ancient copy of War and Peace (read once), a bowling ball and bowling shoes (used in one bowling league in 2005), stuffed animal bunnies (of no use, but gifts from Doug’s mom from childhood), and numerous cookbooks (never used, but full of potential).

Doug: We hadn’t hit rock bottom yet.

Cara: That happened when we moved to Los Angeles. The apartment was spacious, but once we unpacked our U-Haul, the place looked like it belonged on Hoarders. For about a month, our moving boxes were stacked to heights taller than me. I often wonder in horror about how much stuff we'd have today if we had never moved.

Doug: We began experimenting with every possible method of getting rid of stuff. Nothing worked. We tried focusing on individual problem areas and purging hard. Books—which we had hundreds of—and jackets—of which we owned more than 40—seemed like natural areas to start. We got rid of half of our books and about 15 of our jackets. At first, it felt like we were making hard cuts and real progress. Then, we realized we still had 25 jackets and 75 books we would never read again. We needed something more radical.

Being two type-A intellectual types, we began with research. We knew we weren’t the only ones who had stuff we didn’t need but couldn’t get rid of. Google led us to the "100 Thing Challenge." The rules were simple: Downsize to 100 personal items or less. We thought we could do it! We were wrong.

After defining our own rules for what constituted a “personal item”—kitchen stuff was communal, underwear was considered all one thing—we found that we had more than 300 personal items each. We struggled with each and every cut. We didn’t get anywhere close.

Cara: At that point, we got truly desperate. Doug suggested we attempt to sell all of our worldly possessions for a lump sum of $10,000. I thought that was crazy. I tried to get my brother-in-law Mike, a self-proclaimed minimalist, to take things from us. That was an equally crazy strategy, although my logic at the time seemed sound: Mike didn’t have a salad spinner, an extra colander, an air mattress, photography books, or cookbooks—why wouldn’t he have wanted to take our “extra” stuff? He politely declined all of my offers. Eventually, we managed to pawn some camping stuff off on our coworkers and pass some kitchen supplies on to our parents. But we knew this was not a long-term strategy—we began to see that the people who accepted our things didn’t really want or need them, either.

Over time, we came accept that we needed to do more than whittle—we needed to change our entire relationship to our possessions. We’ve discovered that hanging on to stuff we “might use one day” is a fast-track to becoming a junior hoarder. Now, we donate things we haven’t used in a year or two. We try to be ruthless about getting rid of sentimental things, but not too ruthless. I still have a collection of birthday cards that friends and family have sent me through the years, but I’ve done away with the mix tape I made in the 7th grade. When we receive bills or other physical papers, we keep what we have to, scan what we can, and throw the rest away.

Most importantly, we try to buy only what we need, and always keep the size of our apartment in mind. We’re much happier with the amount of stuff we have now, but we failed to find the silver bullet to getting our clutter under control. Necessity is something we have to actively consider every time we make a purchase. But in a country where many of us can afford to buy things we don’t even really want or need, that’s how it should be.

Almost exactly a year ago, a world-class hospital opened its doors in rural Rwanda, bringing health care to a district of 400,000 people who had never had access to doctors and nurses. The 150-bed, 60,000-square-foot Butaro Hospital was constructed by hundreds of local residents and is breathtaking for its setting—it's perched on a lush green hillside overlooking a winding valley—design, and craftsmanship. It’s a job-creating, people-healing, field-innovating success story with origins in a most unlikely place.

Until last May, the designers behind Butaro Hospital were architecture students at the ivory tower of all ivory towers: Harvard. In 2007, one of the students, Michael Murphy, attended a lecture across campus by global health leader and Partners in Health founder Dr. Paul Farmer. Like many architects, Murphy had barely heard of Farmer—a household name among public health advocates for his work in Haiti, which was chronicled in the 2003 book Mountains Beyond Mountains—but he found himself moved by Farmer’s tales of building hospitals, housing, schools, and even roads—all with the aim of improving health conditions in developing countries.

Murphy approached Farmer after his talk, eager to find out which architecture firms were working with Partners in Health so he could apply to work for them after graduation. He was stunned by the doctor’s response: The global health leader with decades of fieldwork under his belt had never worked with an architect, a reality still all too common in the field of international aid and development.

Joined by classmates Alan Ricks, Marika Shioiri-Clark, and others, Murphy accepted Farmer’s invitation to design a hospital in Rwanda, despite the fact that none of them had ever designed or built anything in their lives. Together, they co-founded a nonprofit they called MASS (it initially stood for Mobilizing Architecture to Serve Society), moved to Rwanda, and embarked on the journey of a lifetime. Today, the founders will accept the 2012 Designers of the Year Award from Contract Magazine, a design industry publication with an eye for spotting emerging talent.

MASS, a young organization in every sense, still has much to learn, but also plenty to teach the growing field of public-interest design. The firm joins the ranks of veteran organizations like Architecture for Humanity, Design Corps, Project H Design, and Public Architecture; newer entities like bcWORKSHOP, IDEO.org, and SCALEAfrica; and even mainstream firms with pronounced pro bono agendas, like fuseproject, HOK, Pentagram, and Perkins+Will. But with offices in Boston,, Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Kigali, Rwanda, and Los Angeles, Murphy, Ricks, and their 25-person team are raising expectations for the field in every conceivable way.

MASS’ projects stretch far beyond the low-tech or temporary solutions that the design field had come to expect of resource-limited settings like rural Rwanda, proving that public interest design can and should be culturally appropriate, location-specific, and built for the long haul. The team’s almost-anthropological process—immersing themselves in the local culture by living on-site for months or years at a time—is as crucial as the final product as the design theory behind it.

While MASS focuses its public-interest design efforts abroad, Project H Design is doing similar work closer to home through its Studio H program for high schoolers in rural Bertie County, North Carolina. The program teaches students design and construction skills, then helps them create their imagined project in the real world.  “Our projects represent the visions of the youth we teach. We have to be there, everyday, because the impact comes from those face-to-face relationships,” says Project H founder Emily Pilloton. “By being here, we eliminate the ‘us and them’ separation. We’re fellow citizens. We’re designing for collective benefit, not just producing a solution for a separate group.”

While MASS and Project H Design offer viable models for environmental challenges, IDEO.org leads the way on rethinking and redesigning the ways we live and work, speaking to another major development in public-interest design: a focus on services and systems, not just structures. IDEO.org, the nonprofit spinoff of the decades-old IDEO design firm, employs “human-centered design,” with a focus on user insights and observations, a practice more novel than most would suspect.

Meanwhile, funding for and investment in public interest design is growing bigger, smarter, and more coordinated. Many in the public-interest design sector believe 2012 will mark a tipping point at which funders—foundations, corporate philanthropy, and private individuals—become more committed to design as a way of addressing some of the greatest challenges facing education, health, and the environment. In one particularly promising sign of the times, next month the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum will convene representatives of the National Endowment for the Arts and several leading foundations for a first-of-its-kind Social Impact Design Summit.

Public-interest design has existed in some form for decades, but too often designers and admirers have hyped insignificant experiments as radical or world-changing solutions. MASS and the new generation of designers it embodies show that the field is finally fulfilling its promise, not just as art, but as a meaningful way of improving the world.

Photos courtesy of Partners in Health

Things are easier said than done, or so the old adage goes, and we couldn't agree more. That's why we do The GOOD 30-Day Challenge (#30DaysofGOOD), a monthly attempt to live better. Our challenge for January? Financial fitness.

Set up a work-sponsored retirement plan.

What have we learnt from 70 years of Desert Island Discs? See who's been in and what they chose • Get the data

As Radio 4's Desert Island Discs enters its 70th year, our Scraperwiki spreadsheet reveals a number of themes running through castaways' choices over the past seven decades.

With the entire Desert Island Discs archive now available on the BBC Radio 4 website, guests' selections of books and luxuries are comprehensively revealed in all their profound, surprising - and occasionally downright odd - glory.

Since the programme began in 1942, a total of 43 guests, including Terry Wogan and George Clooney, elected to while away the hours with Tolstoy's War and Peace, according to the BBC archive.

Camila Batmanghelidjh and Raymond Tallis chose the existentialist writings of Sartre and Heidegger to aid the solitude, but Proust was the philosopher of choice, featuring in at least 50 episodes.

Unsurprisingly, booze featured heavily on the imaginary island, with politicians particularly keen on a tipple. David Cameron was one of dozens of guests who wanted whisky, while David Davis requested "a magic wine cellar which never runs out".

Lord Brian Rix's choice of a "proper orthopaedic cushion" epitomised the trend towards home comforts: Christabel Bielenberg chose a "comfortable chair"; Daniel Baremboin a piano with a mattress.

The musical instrument was a winner, with 183 guests, including Sir Ian McKellen, opting for a piano - perhaps unsurprisingly given 1212 of the show's 2892 guests have been from stage, screen and radio, and 635 from music backgrounds.

Guitars were next, with 57 appearances in the archive. Five castaways chose the trombone and 12 chose the saxophone. One: James Mason in 1961, wanted bagpipes, to the undoubted consternation of island wildlife.

Ever resourceful, guests have increasingly chosen to harness solar power in their attempts to stay sane on the island. Thirty-six chose solar-powered items, the most eye opening of which being the solar-powered vibrator chosen by Cornelia Parker.

Some more facts from the archives:

1. 25 guests wanted pillows 2. 41 guests chose the Encyclopaedia Britannica 3. 149 chose paper 4. 47 guests wanted a television 5. 136 requested paint

No doubt the ingeniously simple and effective Desert Island Discs format will continue to provide interesting data for years to come.

What do you think of the castaways' choices? And how different will they look in another 70 years' time?

The 70th anniversary edition of Desert Island Discs, featuring Sir David Attenborough in his fourth appearance on the show, will be broadcast on Sunday 29 January

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In New York City, public life is conducted in school auditoriums. They’re the only spaces big enough to hold the crowds that show up to public meetings about contentious neighborhood issues. So on Tuesday night, grown-ups filed into the Carroll School to hear the Environmental Protection Agency’s plan for cleaning up the Gowanus canal. The agency declared the canal a Superfund site in 2010, and in December, it released a draft of the feasibility study for its next actions. Tuesday’s presentation laid out the next steps to the community. It will take another six to eight months for the EPA to come up with a proposed plan. The agency plans to publish its recommendation before the end of the year. The Gowanus canal has been polluted for decades, and it took years for the city, state and federal governments to fight out who might take responsibility for it. Now the clean-up process is starting. But with an environmental issue of such long standing, the clean up can be just as complicated and politically difficult as getting an agency like the EPA to commit to fixing the problem to begin with. Before Tuesday’s meeting started, the EPA’s Walter Mugdan, who directs the agency’s environmental planning and protection in this region, instructed the audience to interrupt the presenters if they needed an acronym explained. Environmental remediation requires many acronyms. In the bottom silt of the Gowanus Canal, the EPA found PAHs (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons), PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), and NAPLs (non-aqueous phase liquids). NAPL rhymes with apple and in the case of the Gowanus means, more or less, coal tar. The canal is also contaminated with barium, cadmium, copper, lead, mercury, nickel and silver, but the EPA can shorthand those with an acronym, as “metals.” There’s also CSO — combined sewer overflow — which is what’s dumped into the canal when rainfall is heavy and household waste mixes with storm water. PRG stands for Preliminary Remediation Goals. “Because we need another acronym,” an EPA presenter quipped, RTA stands for Remediation Target Areas. But meetings like this one have been going on for years in this neighborhood, and no one asked for a refresher on acronyms. Instead, community members asked questions like “Who’s going to pay for all of this?” and “What’s the point of cleaning up the canal if the land surrounding it is still polluted?” (One of the canal’s many pollution problems is contaminants flowing in with groundwater or street runoff.) When the EPA took responsibility for cleaning up the canal, it allowed this neighborhood to start moving forward with a long-desired goal. While momentum towards the clean-up grew, the city worked on rezoning the area around the canal, developers imagining large condo projects milled about, and plans began for erecting a Whole Foods in a nearby brownfield. The industrial neighborhood became an increasingly hip zone, with artists’ studios and music venues opening up. Now, finally, there’s a little more clarity about what direction the clean-up is heading, which influences decisions by developers to build, potential home-owners to buy, businesses to open up. People can start to move on with their lives. But it’s also not so simple. Just because the EPA has taken charge of one set of problems doesn’t mean it’s fixing every environmental issue left over from the area’s industrial past. “For our organization, it has liberated us to have a final determination about a clean-up for the canal itself,” says Hans Hesselein, who works for the Gowanus Canal Conservancy, a local environmental group that’s been pushing for years for the canal to be dealt with. Now that the EPA has taken responsibility for the canal itself — or, more specifically, the contaminated silt at its bottom — Hesselein’s organization can focus on issues like storm water management (that’s dealing with CSO) and with watershed improvements. The answer to the question about the pollution on the surrounding land is that the state environmental department is dealing with it. The GCC is still worried about CSO, because that’ll be the city’s responsibility to fix. Although clean-up of the canal is moving forward, in some ways, it has yet to begin.

Photo via (cc) Flickr user listenmissy.