1. Cluster Housing Environmentally Friendly, Socially Supportive For the past fifty years, towns and cities in the state of New Hampshire have worked to impose zoning restrictions on lands within their borders, in large part to protect against overdevelopment. Some towns require building lots of anywhere from a half-acre to five acres for a detached single-family home. Unfortunately, an unintended consequence of this regulation has been that real estate developers have subdivided large parcels of land into smaller plots and leveled forested areas, filled in swamps, and generally degraded the ecosystem of the property in favor of rows of houses, all with their own little front and back yards.
Cluster housing, which is beginning to be considered in New Hampshire, uses a different approach. If a town requires that a particular piece of land have a two-acre minimum for building sites, a traditional developer would subdivide the land into ten units and build a home on each unit. A cluster development, however, involves concentrating those same ten houses in a single area on perhaps four acres of the land, leaving 16 acres relatively undeveloped, thus preserving natural wildlife habitats and forested areas that can be enjoyed by the residents.
The Nubanusit Neighborhood and Farm, a new housing development project in Peterborough, New Hampshire, takes the cluster housing concept one step further. Twenty-nine small single-family homes will be augmented by shared areas on the 113-acre site, which will also include a small working organic farm. The shared facilities offer places where the community’s residents can interact. This co-housing concept, which originated in Denmark, offers community support while utilizing the land in an environmentally sustainable way.
2.The Awful Truth About Television: The little box that transformed society Based on how engrained the television is in our society, one might think that it had been around for centuries. With the ubiquitous presence of TV’s in houses, schools, banks, cars, cell phones, and more, people wonder how they ever survived without their daily dose of Oprah and Monday Night Football.
Yet, television was not officially introduced to the world until in 1939 at the World’s Fair. At that time, many people did not think that families would have enough time or patience to sit down for long periods in front of a flickering screen. "The average American family hasn’t time for it," said one commentator.
TV ownership explodes World War II stalled the development of television. After the war though, TV sales took off faster than you could say "Hi Ho Silver, Away!" By 1950, about 9% of American homes had a television set. By 1953, half of all households had a TV. By 1962, 90% of all households had a set . Today 98% of American households have at least one TV set and 76% of families have more than one set.
Initially, only two networks distributed television programming for approximately 3? hours per day . Today there are hundreds of channel sproviding entertainment twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. As a result, people are glued to their screens for an average of 4? hours per day. This is more than half of people’s leisure time. Many people cannot even imagine life without TV. This phenomenal transformation occurred within only three generations.