Billionaire Zuckerberg is betting his company’s future on the metaverse but is keen to make it a collaborative project, describing it as an “embodied internet”…
“We believe the metaverse may be the next generation of the internet — combining the physical and digital world in a persistent and immersive manner — and not purely a virtual reality world,” the report says.”
A device-agnostic metaverse accessible via PCs, game consoles, and smartphones could result in a very large ecosystem.”
The metaverse has the potential to further link realms. The embodied aspect is interesting to consider; how much will the offline body move in sync with the online body? How much further will we move beyond guiding an avatar around an online platform with a mouse or keyboard? And what potential is there to truly meld online and offline experiences at the same time?
I wonder how much this embodiment can happen in the metaverse as compared to other technological options. For example, Google Glass and similar options offered the opportunity to overlay data on top of what a person was seeing and experiencing. Or, Pokemon Go put video game characters in an offline map and reality.
Implicit in a decision to drop the last remaining safety rules is a willingness to abide the current mortality rate. Over the last week, COVID-19 has claimed an average of 626 lives in the U.S. each day. That’s fewer than the roughly 1,900 who die of heart disease and the 1,650 who die of cancer each day, on average, but well above the 147 are lost to influenza and pneumonia combined.
For public health experts, the calculus is more explicit. Mortality and morbidity — the words their profession uses for death and illness — are on one side of the equation, and tools like seat belts, blood pressure medication, smoking-cessation programs and vaccines are on the other.
Those tools vary in cost, intrusiveness and political acceptability. Despite public health campaigns and legal mandates, Americans continue to drive drunk and leave seatbelts unfastened. Tobacco kills more than 480,000 people a year in the United States, yet 34.2 million adults continue to smoke. Diabetes claims more than 100,000 lives a year, but efforts to discourage the sale and consumption of sugary drinks — a significant contributor — have met fierce resistance.
At some point, all efforts to limit preventable deaths will hit the hard wall of funding constraints, medication availability, and people’s willingness to take steps to protect themselves and others. That’s where the number of deaths that is “acceptable” comes into focus…
The CDC and other federal agencies are still deciding on the criteria they’ll use to determine when the pandemic has ended. There’s still time — Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the agency’s director, said as recently as last week that we’re not there yet.
What I would highlight here as a sociologist:
The relative risk of different illnesses or behaviors are not just determined by numbers. The first paragraph cited above highlights the number of people who die each day in the US due to different conditions. But, this does not mean each of these illnesses is experienced the same nor is thought of as the same kind of threat. See earlier posts on the acceptable deaths due to driving (and pedestrians).
Decisions like these are made by a constellation of actors with a variety of interests. The public is involved in how leaders think the public will perceive changes, pressure the public can place on officials to make particular decisions, and in how the public responds. This is a process with numerous organizations and institutions involved.
Declaring an end to the COVID-19 pandemic is not easy nor is addressing the illness beyond the official end of a pandemic. Like much involving health, policies and behavior depends on social conditions and influences.
The pandemic loosened ties between people: Kids stopped going to school; their parents stopped going to work; parishioners stopped going to church; people stopped gathering, in general. Sociologists think all of this isolation shifted the way we behave. “We’re more likely to break rules when our bonds to society are weakened,” Robert Sampson, a Harvard sociologist who studies social disorder, told me. “When we become untethered, we tend to prioritize our own private interests over those of others or the public.”
The turn-of-the-20th-century scholar Émile Durkheim called this state anomie, or a lack of social norms that leads to lawlessness. “We are moral beings to the extent that we are social beings,” Durkheim wrote. In the past two years, we have stopped being social, and in many cases we have stopped being moral, too.
“We’ve got, I think, a generalized sense that the rules simply don’t apply,” Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, told me. In some places, he says, police arrested fewer people during the pandemic, and “when enforcement goes down, people tend to relax their commitment to the rules.”
This perspective is interesting to consider alongside the millions who did follow national and local guidelines regarding masking and behavior. A lot of attention has been paid to those refusing to comply but many did; does the weirdness stand out even more because of this?
To take the Durkheim reference further, he thought the breaking of the rules and the subsequent reaction and sanctions could help reinforce the original rules.
I might add to the list of explanations in the article the influence of smartphones and social media. These could matter in multiple ways. First, the weird behavior can easily be recorded by others. People may have been weird in the past but was there such a visible record of that behavior? Second, the people with the weird behavior may be recording and sharing their own behavior. Overall, what may have been more private behavior in the past or actions limited to a relatively small set of people or closely connected set of people are no longer kept from a broader audience.
Here’s how Kevin Gannon draws the distinction. Courses can be difficult intellectually; they can be difficult logistically. Professors sometimes conflate the two, imagining that content and policies move together. But they need not, says Gannon, who directs the teaching center at Grand View University, where he is also a professor of history…
From this vantage point, flexible course policies might not be at odds with demanding rigor, as the terms of the debate are often delineated. But intellectual rigor turns out to be tricky to pin down…
Instead, the faculty developers think that professors often rely on the wrong information as evidence they’ve achieved rigor. Grading on a bell curve, they argue, doesn’t prove a course is rigorous. It compares students with their classmates, but doesn’t demonstrate what they know or learned. Neither does assigning a lot of work: There’s no strong correlation between learning and the quantity of information taken in or repeated back. Yet much of the evidence of rigor comes down to either grades or time on task…
Despite the many biases found in course evaluations, Sonal Khullar, an art historian who is an associate professor of South Asian studies at Penn, has found they can provide useful evidence that she’s hit the mark on rigor. Khullar was surprised to hear grades, assignments, and standards held up as key evidence of rigor. “I measure it by their own standards,” Khullar says. The goal isn’t for students to hit some benchmark she has set; it’s for them to improve…
Most professors aim to both support and challenge their students. It’s just that some of them think the standard structures of higher ed work toward those goals— and others aren’t so sure.
I am consistently surprised as a college instructor about how much could be in each class I teach. Regardless of the subject, there is always more we could get to or worth through. As noted in this article, a question about rigor can be expressed as the difference between covering content and applying that content or developing depth with that content. There can often be much knowledge to share and work with but applying and utilizing the knowledge is key. Thinking about Bloom’s Taxonomy can help guide classroom efforts.
I clearly remember how I experienced this as a K-12 and college student: the instructors who had high expectations but also provided the encouragement and the resources necessary to reach for those expectations.
A country grows or shrinks in three ways: immigration, deaths, and births. America’s declining fertility rate often gets the headline treatment. Journalists are obsessed with the question of why Americans aren’t having more babies. And because I’m a journalist, be assured that we’ll do the baby thing in a moment. But it’s the other two factors—death and immigration—that are overwhelmingly responsible for the collapse in U.S. population growth…
As recently as 2016, net immigration to the United States exceeded 1 million people. But immigration has since collapsed by about 75 percent, falling below 250,000 last year. Immigration fell by more than half in almost all of the hot spots for foreign-born migrants, including New York, Miami, Los Angeles, and San Francisco…
The implications of permanently slumped population growth are wide-ranging. Shrinking populations produce stagnant economies. Stagnant economies create wonky cultural knock-on effects, like a zero-sum mentality that ironically makes it harder to pursue pro-growth policies. (For example, people in slow-growth regions might be fearful of immigrants because they seem to represent a threat to scarce business opportunities, even though immigration represents these places’ best chance to grow their population and economy.) The sector-by-sector implications of declining population would also get very wonky very fast. Higher education is already fighting for its life in the age of remote school and rising tuition costs. Imagine what happens if, following the historically large Millennial cohort, every subsequent U.S. generation gets smaller and smaller until the end of time, slowly starving many colleges of the revenue they’ve come to expect.
Even if you’re of the dubious opinion that the U.S. would be better off with a smaller population, American demographic policy is bad for Americans who are alive right now. We are a nation where families have fewer kids than they want; where Americans die of violence, drugs, accidents, and illness at higher rates than similarly rich countries; and where geniuses who want to found new job-creating companies are forced to do so in other countries, which get all the benefits of higher productivity, higher tax revenue, and better jobs.
This matters for communities and cities in at least a few ways:
The “growth is good” model in the United States assumes continued population growth. This is good for status as well as for other things (see #2).
When populations are growing, the incoming revenues help pay for existing infrastructure and services as well as suggest money will be there in the future. In contrast, stagnant or declining populations can require cuts or reductions.
It will be particularly interesting to see what happens if more major population centers experience relatively little or no population growth while a few continue to grow rapidly. Does this change the balance of power and status among places?
Plans were to raze the majority of the largely vacant mall to make way for 560 apartments and townhouses, a hotel, new restaurants and retail spaces along East Main Street…
“It’s a good plan but the question is, is this the best use of space?” 2nd Ward Alderman Ryan Bongard said at the meeting. “In speaking with constituents, they don’t want to see 500 apartments.”
On Friday, St. Charles Mayor Lora Vitek confirmed the developers have pulled out of the project. The partnership of S.R. Jacobson Development Corporation and Lormax Stern Development Company LLC had previously entered into a purchase agreement for the former Charlestowne Mall property with current owners The Krausz Companies LLC.
In December 2017, Krausz closed Charlestowne’s interior shops and enclosed mall space at the center. Anchors Von Maur and Classic Cinemas Charlestowne 18 remains…
“That’s the overwhelming comment that I have heard through the city council,” Vitek said. “And I do believe that we can try to accomplish that. We shouldn’t settle. We’ve got a lot going for us. We know there needs to be more people here and we’re going to bring residential, but there needs to be a balance over there, too. The east side is very important to our town, but we do want to see the right fit.”
On one hand, I can understand this common suburban concern: if you eliminate commercial property and rezone it for other uses, will you ever get the same amount of money in tax revenues from the property? A successful shopping mall or entertainment area brings in sales tax revenue in addition to paying property taxes.
In some ways, Arenson says, St. Louis was at the heart of these questions. Geographically, it was located where North, South and West came together. It had been a slave state, but had not seceded. It was central to many railroad lines. And it was growing at a remarkable place—it would rise from the country’s 24th most populous city in 1840 to the fourth biggest in 1870.
No one was more convinced of the importance of St. Louis than local businessman and booster Logan Uriah Reavis. Reavis was a remarkable man, with a remarkable appearance. He wore a long, messy red beard and walked bent over a cane due to a childhood illness. Born in Illinois in 1831, he failed in his early career as a schoolteacher “when the students ridiculed him ceaselessly,” according to Arenson’s book. In 1866, he arrived in St. Louis intent on starting a newspaper and elevating the image of his adopted hometown.
Reavis wasn’t the first to suggest the city as a new capital for the nation. In 1846, St. Louis newspapers claimed that the move would be necessary to govern a country that grew significantly in size after the end of the Mexican-American War. But Reavis may have been the most outspoken supporter of the cause. He presciently envisioned a United States stretching not just out to California but up to Alaska and down to the Gulf of Mexico. And he saw St. Louis as the obvious place for the government of this mega-United States: “the great vitalizing heart of the Republic.” In contrast, he wrote, Washington was a “distant place on the outskirts of the country, with little power or prestige.”…
In response, between 1867 and 1868, three House representatives from the Midwest proposed resolutions to move the capitol toward the middle of the country. As historian and educational publisher Donald Lankiewicz writes for History Net, the first two of these stalled in the Ways and Means committee. But a third, introduced by Wisconsin Representative Herbert Paine in February 1868, came to a vote on the floor. Eastern congressmen saw the proposal to move the seat of government to somewhere in the “Valley of the Mississippi” as a joke. But it shocked them with the amount of support it received, ultimately failing by a vote of just 77 to 97.
This story sounds very American: local boosters combined with an expanding frontier and disorder after the Civil War to produce a vision for a new capital in a booming city. Even though this did not come to fruition, it sounds like there was a short window in which is could have happened. And then what would have happened to Washington, D.C., one of the most important cities today?
I also cannot help but contrast this to the fate of St. Louis after this era. I recently showed my urban sociology class the documentary The Pruitt-Igoe Myth. This documentary puts the infamous public housing project in the context of a city that peaked in population in 1950, lost residents in white flight, and is racially segregated. Add this to the competition with Chicago for the center of the Midwest and St. Louis might be a great story of a city that did not live up to its lofty dreams.
At the least, Ryan can enjoy lounging outside his large dwelling by a ping-pong table and think about handing it off to Jonathan Taylor?
I wonder what the market is for large houses of former athletes. I know of some high profile houses in the Chicago region where pro athletes sell their homes to other athletes who are coming to town. Some big houses, such as Michael Jordan’s mansion, languish for years.
From what I saw, Ryan’s home is not a mansion or a megamansion. Because it is more of a McMansion, it likely will find a buyer in a growing metropolitan region among those with resources to purchase such homes and who like such homes. Perhaps it might depend on how much football the house reflects; for example, see former Bears coach Matt Nagy’s house listing.
Of course, it will also be interesting to see where Ryan settles in the Indianapolis region. Will he settle in the wealthy suburban communities of Carmel or Fishers where I would guess some McMansions can be found?
When people’s average perceptions of group sizes are compared to actual population estimates, an intriguing pattern emerges: Americans tend to vastly overestimate the size of minority groups. This holds for sexual minorities, including the proportion of gays and lesbians (estimate: 30%, true: 3%), bisexuals (estimate: 29%, true: 4%), and people who are transgender (estimate: 21%, true: 0.6%).
It also applies to religious minorities, such as Muslim Americans (estimate: 27%, true: 1%) and Jewish Americans (estimate: 30%, true: 2%). And we find the same sorts of overestimates for racial and ethnic minorities, such as Native Americans (estimate: 27%, true: 1%), Asian Americans (estimate: 29%, true: 6%), and Black Americans (estimate: 41%, true: 12%)…
A parallel pattern emerges when we look at estimates of majority groups: People tend to underestimate rather than overestimate their size relative to their actual share of the adult population. For instance, we find that people underestimate the proportion of American adults who are Christian (estimate: 58%, true: 70%) and the proportion who have at least a high school degree (estimate: 65%, true: 89%)…
Misperceptions of the size of minority groups have been identified in prior surveys, which observers have often attributed to social causes: fear of out-groups, lack of personal exposure, or portrayals in the media. Yet consistent with prior research, we find that the tendency to misestimate the size of demographic groups is actually one instance of a broader tendency to overestimate small proportions and underestimate large ones, regardless of the topic.
I wonder how much this might be connected to a general sense of innumeracy. Big numbers can be difficult to understand and the United States has over 330,000,000 residents. Percentages and absolute numbers regarding certain groups are not always provided. I am more familiar with some of these percentages and numbers because my work requires it but it does not come up in all fields or settings.
Additionally, where would this information be taught or regularly shared? Civics classes alongside information about government structures and national history? Math classes as examples of relevant information? On television programs or in print materials? At political events or sports games? I would be interesting in making all of this more publicly visible so not just those who read the Statistical Abstract of the United States or have Census.gov as a top bookmark know this information.
Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) has revealed renderings of the “cyber-urban” Liberland metaverse, a small virtual city made of futuristic, curving buildings in the architectural style that made the late architect’s firm famous. When complete, it will offer users the ability to traverse the hub as an avatar, and feature a city hall, collaborative working spaces, shops, business incubators, and a gallery for NFT art shows. The community it hopes to foster will have a focus on self-governance as well as fewer rules and regulations.
Those ideals are based on the so-called Free Republic of Liberland, a real-life micronation founded by Czech politician Vit Jedlicka in 2015 with a goal to implement small government libertarian values. Wedged between Serbia and Croatia, the 2.7-mile territory, which is larger than the Vatican and Monaco, is a disputed land and claimed by neither country. Since its founding, no one has moved to Liberland, which lacks any infrastructure, nor has construction started in earnest. But it does have 7,000 approved residents and 700,000 applications, according to Jedlicka, who told CNN in an email. The micronation also has a national flag, anthem and currency — the cryptocurrency Liberland merit…
Though many metaverse concepts have been born out of video game aesthetics — Mark Zuckerberg’s concept for a Metaverse, for example, looks similar to Nintendo Wii’s avatar design — the digital architecture of Liberland is meant to be more grounded in reality. The buildings, while hyper-futuristic, are similar to the glossy look of typical architectural renderings. But they were made with parametric design — a method that employs algorithms to create complex forms…
But while many online forums and social media companies have had to grapple with how much to moderate their users, with sites like Reddit having to move away from their ideals of unmitigated free speech as their user base ballooned, Liberland will start out as an exclusive space and expand slowly, in order to keep its community in check. Jedlicka confirmed that Liberland citizens and residents will have first access.
This combines several ideas with their own fan bases – the metaverse, libertarianism and small government, this architectural style – and tries to put them together in once place. I wonder if this hints at a fragmented metaverse where people of different interests and community ties come together in a few settings but they do not go elsewhere.
It is also worth noting that while this is only a online place, it is not disconnected from the offline realm in multiple ways. First, the online realm tries to imitate the offline with its use of space, buildings, and architecture. Second, those who operate in the online realm still have physical bodies and interactions outside of Liberland. This will be billed as new and exciting because it is in the metaverse…but physical matter still matters in multiple ways for this new community.
Legally Sociable 