"What goes in must come out." By analyzing waste water in ninety-six municipal treatment facilities in Oregon, researchers were able to determine the prevalence, and kind, of illegal drug use in these communities. This relatively inexpensive method could also be used to track patterns of drug use in various regions over time.

A team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology SENSEable City Laboratory has launched Trash Track, designed to give people a better understanding of what happens to the items they throw away. Special electronic tags will be affixed to different types of waste “donated” by 3,000 volunteers, tracking their journey through the New York and Seattle disposal systems, providing data for use in monitoring the patterns and costs of urban waste disposal. The public will be able to follow the trash travels in real-time, and results will be shown at two exhibitions in Seattle and New York.

In Los Angeles, the Summer Night Lights program provides at-risk youths with organized activities aimed at keeping them out of trouble during the summer. The program’s centerpiece involves keeping parks open until midnight, a measure designed to combat gang violence. Summer Night Lights began last year when anti-gang outreach workers raised private donations to illuminate eight parks. Los Angeles has since pledged to match private donations to sustain the lights, and has partnered with the groups to include sports leagues, disc jockeys, and even food during the summer. Crime statistics have revealed that in the neighborhoods bordering the eight parks involved, there were 86 percent fewer homicides and a 17 percent drop in gang-related violence in 2008.

While schools have long used corporate partnerships for capital improvements, some institutions of higher learning are considering corporate sponsorship of academic courses as a means by which to make ends meet. The chancellor of the City College of San Francisco has proposed sponsorships of certain classes equaling up to $6,000 per semester. One community college in North Carolina has already sold the naming rights to individual classes and even entire academic programs.

In a bid to update the IT procurement process, the General Services Administration (GSA) will soon give government agencies the ability to procure computing services hosted remotely by third-party providers, known as “cloud computing,” through an interface replicating the familiar elements of a typical online store. Using the storefront, agency personnel would identify the services they need, such as software applications or other IT infrastructure, and will not need to be concerned about complying with various procurement and cybersecurity regulations as the products and services will already have been pre-cleared by GSA.

The U.S. Army is hiring civilian role-players to ensure that soldiers are training in the most realistic settings possible. In the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, soldiers engaged in a training mission must now also contend with wounded Americans and civilians, many of whom are played by true Iraqi nationals. Interaction with these “victims” teaches soldiers how to retrieve, triage, and evacuate them from battlezones.

Alabama has experienced continued success with Alabama Connecting Classrooms, Educators and Students Statewide (ACCESS), which uses online courses and interactive video-conferencing to ensure that students at every high school in the state can take a wider range of both core and elective classes. While the $10 million price tag and the logistics were initially questioned, ACCESS has since thrived. As of this summer, due largely to ACCESS, all of Alabama’s high schools will offer AP courses, compared to less than half just a few years ago. The increased success of minority students in these classes suggest ACCESS has been helpful in reducing the achievement gap.

To tackle climate change, some developing cities are planning and building long, segmented, low-emission bus systems—resembling an above-ground subway—in dense urban areas like Bogota, Columbia, Jakarta, Indonesia, and Mexico City. While it may not be feasible in all metropolitan areas, this public transportation alternative, known as bus rapid transit (B.R.T.), improves traffic conditions and reduces pollution at significantly less cost than the development of a subway.

While consumers of food stamps have been allowed to use them at farmers’ markets for several years, the replacement of traditional paper coupons with debit cards requiring expensive processing terminals and monthly fees has, until recently, complicated this arrangement. Now the federal government and states, with the aid of nonprofit organizations, have introduced hundreds of thousands of terminals at these markets. In Iowa, the state also pays all monthly fees associated with the terminals.