French Parliament has voted in favor of a law that could revolutionize their food system. 

The upper chamber of France’s parliament has passed a law requiring all of the nation’s “collective restaurants” (school cafeterias, hospital cafeterias, senior living communities, prisons and other state institutions) to source at least 40 percent of their food locally. The proposal will need to be approved by the French Senate before it becomes law. 

In addition to being locally sourced, the food served must be in season, organically grown and certified ecologically sustainable.

While the law does not have a set definition of “local”, different recommendations will be given depending on the product and the geographical area. Currently, those recommendations are estimated to be about a 30-kilometer radius (around 19 miles) for fruit and vegetables and a 100-kilometer radius (about 63 miles) for foods that need processing before consumption (i.e. meat, grains). 

The ultimate goal of the law, according to the text, is to restructure the food system in France, stimulate local economies, and shorten the food supply chain to a minimum...

Like the natural world itself, the community credit landscape is diverse and dynamic and will never be fixed in a single pattern. That said, it is possible to recognize three distinct cultures that have emerged among these systems so far.  

They are LETS (Local Exchange Trading Systems), Business-to-Business (B2B) trading systems, and TimeBanks.  

Each of these groups organizes somewhat differently and uses different systems, but they’re all premised on the same basic principle of mutual credit exchange.  

A community credit facility results any time a group of people or organizations comes together and agrees to directly issue credit to each other for their own goods and services. (Some groups have a different way of describing this, but the result is the same.)  

This is usually called mutual credit, and it’s the most democratic form of credit creation: we issue credit ourselves backed by our own promises to redeem it in the future.  Organize these promises together, and you’ve got a bottom-up credit facility...

It's called Li-Fi and it may bring internet to half the world

Professor Harold Haas and his team have essentially unlocked what is known as "Li-Fi," or Light Fidelity and are using simple LED light sources to power their internet and deliver the information in one packet.  

“The potential expansion to the internet is massive and my aspiration is that this broadband solar panel receiver technology for Li-Fi will help solve the challenges of the digital divide throughout the world," Haas says.

The Importance of Being Genuine

Many of our most commonly used drugs, from painkillers to antidepressants, are dangerous and are killing us off in large numbers, says a  leading researcher visiting Australia next week. 

Peter Gotzsche, a co-founder of the Cochrane Collaboration, the world's foremost body in assessing medical evidence, arrives in Australia on Monday for a whirlwind speaking tour warning Australians about their use of prescription medications. 

He estimates that 100,000 people in the United States alone die each year from the side-effects of correctly used drugs. Similar figures are not available in Australia, although the Australian Bureau of Statistics estimates that 3000 people died after complications with medical and surgical care in 2012. 

"It's remarkable that nobody raises an eyebrow when we kill so many of our own citizens with drugs," Professor Gotzsche, who heads the Nordic Cochrane Centre, told Fairfax Media ahead of his visit.

Researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have sequenced the genome of the nearly indestructible tardigrade, the only animal known to survive the extreme environment of outer space, and found something they never expected: that they get a huge chunk of their genome - nearly one-sixth or 17.5 percent - from foreign DNA. 

"We had no idea that an animal genome could be composed of so much foreign DNA," said co-author Bob Goldstein, faculty in the biology department in UNC's College of Arts and Sciences. "We knew many animals acquire foreign genes, but we had no idea that it happens to this degree."

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-11-huge-chunk-tardigrade-genome-foreign.html#jCp

Voor de creativiteit is het goed om een beetje maf te zijn, blijkt uit een internationale studie, uitgevoerd op IJslandse bodem.

the unified triple operating system

Governance, business, and learning models are moving from centralized control to network-centric foundations.

For instance, coalition governments are increasing in frequency, businesses are organizing in value networks, and collaborative and connected learning is becoming widespread. 

In these cases, collaboration (working for a common objective) and cooperation (sharing freely without direct reciprocity) flow both ways. 

The networked organization trinity is based on the Triple-A organization, as proposed by Valdis Krebs. It is structured to take advantage of the complexity and noisiness of social networks, allowing information to flow as freely as possible, and affording workers the space to make sense of it and share their experiences and knowledge. 

The underlying concept of the trinity model is that organizations and their people are members of many different types of networks, communities of practice, and close-knit collaborative work teams.

Under the Swiss Federal Constitution, if a petition gathers at least 100,000 signatures within 18 months, a referendum is held on the issue a few years later. 

“In a nutshell, the proposal extends the Swiss Federation’s existing exclusive right to create coins and notes, to also include deposits.With the full power of new money creation exclusively in the hands of the Swiss National Bank, the commercial banks would no longer have the power to create money through lending.

The Swiss National Bank’s primary role becomes the management of the money supply relative to the productive economy, while the decision concerning how new money is introduced debt free into the economy would reside with the government”, reads the official website of the initiative. 

In Switzerland, referendums are usually organised 3 to 5 years after a popular initiative succeeds. The proposals first have to be debated by the Federal government and Parliament. In case the Parliament decides to adopt a proposal into law immediately, the organisers of the initiative have the right to renounce the referendum, hence speeding up the implementation of the proposal. However, this is very rare case, as most initiatives are ultimately submitted to a nationwide referendum.