Things To Do In SW Florida

As political tensions ease, Florida’s tourism oversight district is considering a nearly $100 million plan to upgrade bridges and roads at the Disney World resort.

The Central Florida Tourism Oversight District’s board voted Wednesday to explore issuing bonds for six transportation projects by autumn.

The project list includes the third phase of the World Drive North improvement plan, which involves the construction of 1.6 miles of four-lane road. Funds would also go to replace aging bridges, widen Western Way, resurface roads and improve interchanges.

“It’s great we are able to take a positive step,” said Charbel Barakat, acting chairman of the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District’s Board of Supervisors.

The transportation upgrades come as Disney plans what one executive said would “probably be the largest expansion ever” of the Magic Kingdom. Details are thin on the project dubbed “beyond Big Thunder,” but it’s expected to involve about 11 or 12 acres of land.

Meanwhile, Disney’s competitor, Universal Orlando, is expected to open a new theme park, Epic Universe, next year. read more

Agnieszka de Sousa | (TNS) Bloomberg News

Placing plant-based lasagna in the most popular part of the canteen. Serving veggie stir fry so diners have to ask for meat. Renaming vegan food with enticing adjectives like “feel good” and “juicy.”

These are just some of the small changes adding up to a quiet revolution in school cafeterias, hospitals and on university campuses from San Diego to Oslo. The goal is to shift diners toward plant-based options — not by removing animal products entirely, but by nudging people into making different choices.

“Your choice is never in a vacuum,” says Sophie Attwood, a senior behavioral scientist at the nonprofit World Resources Institute, which works on climate solutions. “Your choices are always being nudged, whether or not it’s nudged for the profit motive of the company, or for the environmental motive of the company.”

The environmental footprint of livestock is huge, and the need to tackle it increasingly urgent. Animal agriculture is responsible for roughly 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and livestock is a drag on precious land and water resources. Even if emissions from fossil fuels were to disappear overnight, food emissions alone would still prevent the world from limiting warming to 1.5C as outlined in the Paris Agreement, according to research published in Science. read more

Michael Shepard and Gregory Korte | (TNS) Bloomberg News

Many swing-state voters say they are worried that the growing presence of artificial intelligence could one day diminish privacy and hurt job prospects, according to a new Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll that also found majority support for efforts to ban TikTok.

More than half of respondents in seven battleground states predicted a negative impact from AI on privacy, with nearly half seeing a future negative impact on jobs, the poll found. At the same time, artificial intelligence was seen having positive impacts on health by 45% of respondents and on education by 41%.

In the survey, half of voters support banning TikTok in the U.S. if its Beijing-based parent ByteDance Ltd. fails to divest the video-sharing platform under a new law signed by President Joe Biden last month. Two-thirds of those polled said they were worried that the app could be used by foreign adversaries to collect data and manipulate information in the U.S.

The poll results offer a window into how Americans view hot-button tech challenges in Washington, including AI’s rapid emergence, concentration of market power in a handful of big companies and security concerns raised by TikTok’s Chinese ownership. The survey of 4,962 registered voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin has an overall statistical margin of error of 1 percentage point. read more