-The delayed start from a traffic light. Vehicles at the start of the line may not move for a few seconds after the light turns green, even when the path is clear. This slows down the rest of traffic, particularly when there are a lot of traffic lights in a row.
-The increased distance between vehicles. If drivers think they need more margin because they are not fully paying attention to the road, vehicles will be further spaced out.
-Not paying attention to directions or turns might mean people have to cut across lanes or make alternative paths.
Since traffic can act like waves, then even a slight disruption can have a ripple effect.
If all drivers took the “most efficient” or “fastest” routes according to their apps, would these hits to traffic be cancelled out?
It might also be worth remembering that one of the appeals of self-driving vehicles is that they could better address these issues. They could better safe themselves and adjust to changes in conditions around them.
Apps are invaluable when you miss your exit on the interstate or need the quickest route through gridlock. But dispensing directions in 10-mile increments on a tiny screen is not the same as spreading a U.S. map out and visualizing a journey.
Everyone has a “mental map … made up of both factual information about a place and also our own understanding and imagination about the place,” Maitha said. Paper maps help build that mental map and provide spatial awareness, he explained.
All of these options are aids to help humans. With a paper map or Waze, the external object is helping a person make sense of the physical world around them. Our brains could use the help as we get our bearings.
My sense is that the digital devices are very helpful in immediate information – what is the next step I take? – but not so great in providing the big picture. You can see a list of turns or a broad map. But, their primary value is right in front of the vehicle. The paper atlas or road map provides the big picture while not saying as much about what is right outside the vehicle.
Just recently, I spent some time examining a 1718 map of North America made by a French cartographer. In working on some research involving these areas, the paper map provided a sense of how the French viewed this part of the world. It does not provide granular detail but it hints at what they thought was important.
Like some of the people interviewed in this article, I will keep both my atlas and my devices with me while driving. Until the device can unfold a larger image of the full scope of a journey, I want that option and will continue to enjoy maps and atlases.
Specifically, it has everything to do with LKFS, which stands for “Loudness, K-weighted, relative to full scale” and which, for the sake of simplicity, is a unit for measuring loudness. Traditionally it’s been anchored to the dialogue. For years, going back to the golden age of broadcast television and into the pay-cable era, audio engineers had to deliver sound levels within an industry-standard LKFS, or their work would get kicked back to them. That all changed when streaming companies seized control of the industry, a period of time that rather neatly matches Game of Thrones’ run on HBO. According to Blank, Game of Thrones sounded fantastic for years, and she’s got the Emmys to prove it. Then, in 2018, just prior to the show’s final season, AT&T bought HBO’s parent company and overlaid its own uniform loudness spec, which was flatter and simpler to scale across a large library of content. But it was also, crucially, un-anchored to the dialogue.
“So instead of this algorithm analyzing the loudness of the dialogue coming out of people’s mouths,” Blank explained to me, “it analyzes the whole show as loudness. So if you have a loud music cue, that’s gonna be your loud point. And then, when the dialogue comes, you can’t hear it.” Blank remembers noticing the difference from the moment AT&T took the reins at Time Warner; overnight, she said, HBO’s sound went from best-in-class to worst. During the last season of Game of Thrones, she said, “we had to beg [AT&T] to keep our old spec every single time we delivered an episode.” (Because AT&T spun off HBO’s parent company in 2022, a spokesperson for AT&T said they weren’t able to comment on the matter.)
Netflix still uses a dialogue-anchor spec, she said, which is why shows on Netflix sound (to her) noticeably crisper and clearer: “If you watch a Netflix show now and then immediately you turn on an HBO show, you’re gonna have to raise your volume.” Amazon Prime Video’s spec, meanwhile, “is pretty gnarly.” But what really galls her about Amazon is its new “dialogue boost” function, which viewers can select to “increase the volume of dialogue relative to background music and effects.” In other words, she said, it purports to fix a problem of Amazon’s own creation. Instead, she suggested, “why don’t you just air it the way we mixed it?”
This change in how television audio works contributes to needing subtitles to understand what is being said.
I wonder if the bigger question is whether this significantly changes how people consume and are affected by television. If we are reading more dialogue and descriptions, does this focus our attention on certain aspects of shows and not others? Could this be good for reading overall? Does it limit the ability of viewers to multitask if they need to keep up with the words on the screen? Do subtitles help engage the attention of viewers? Do I understand new things I did notice before in the world with fewer subtitles? Does a story or scene stick with me longer because I was reading the dialogue?
Does this also mean that as Americans have been able to buy bigger and bigger TVs for cheaper prices, they are getting a worse audio experience?
This has been possible with Photoshop and similar tools for years but Magic Eraser from Google makes it even easier: we can get rid of strangers in our photos. Should we?
My most Andy Rooney opinion, at least since the latest flare-up of the sleepover debate (I’m pro), is that we should not erase strangers from our family pictures. My original nuclear family’s albums, which my mother maintained in those classic 1980s scrapbooks with self-adhesive pages, annotating each image in her distinctive handwriting, are absolutely, positively chock-full of randos. When I was in elementary school, I loved to look at these pictures, hauling out two albums at a time and paging through them at our kitchen table. It was a time when I was becoming acutely aware of the difference between our family and others—not in a bad way, but in an interested one. We lived in a small town, and our family vacations gave us information about how things were elsewhere. I wasn’t going to pass up analyzing those clues.
The people we are around are also parts of our lives, even if we do not know them. To take pictures in public often means that others are present. We may not interact with them but we do not live in a world where we have our own bubbles and no one else is around.
There may be occasional times where removing strangers makes sense. Perhaps we want to focus on particular people or a particular scene. But, doing this at a larger scale always puts us at the center and makes it appear as other people do not exist.
Is this a continuation of the emphasis on the individual self? Social media, which is linked to the images we take, see, and use today, also encourages emphasizing ourselves. In images and a world where there is no one portrayed around us, we are at the center.
A future world where our pictures only feature us makes me think of Black Mirror or an extended global pandemic where streets and public places are empty. It would be a loss of our collective memories and the ways that we rely on nameless others every day.
I get why. It is indeed tempting. The kids are running around and occupied. Their activity means that parents might have a few moments to themselves. The park often has benches or places to relax. Why not catch up on some texts or social media activity?
Even without kids around, parks feature plenty of phone use. Walk the dog and read the phone along the way. Try biking and phone use together. Lots of walking with earbuds in or headphones on.
However, parks can be inherently interesting places without phones. Kids are learning and developing skills. There are often hints of nature around, birds to spot, bodies of water to observe. There is plenty of people-watching to be done. If the park is a lively one, perhaps one envisioned by Jane Jacobs where people are using it in multiple ways and it is situated among other interesting uses, there is plenty to see and do.
(To be fair, adults are on their phones all over the place. I have just noticed it recently in parks amid my own efforts to use my phone less in this setting.)
Los Angeles-based car YouTuber effspot stumbled across something we’ve heard about but haven’t been able to dig up solid evidence of: dealerships are hiding a ton of new inventory in secret locations. Now you might think these dealers are putting their overstock vehicles in some secure location like a warehouse or locked lot, and some definitely are, but effspot found hundreds of Jeeps, Dodges, Rams, and Chryslers stashed in a public parking garage, all apparently put there by just one dealership.
This is a potentially interesting find. How common is this?
Dealerships have been running this scheme for months and months, but it’s starting to fall apart despite some media outlets trying to claim there may be no return to normal for the car market. Instead, both the new and used markets are going in only one direction: down. Just how quickly and by how much remains to be seen, but don’t believe car dealerships have hardly any vehicles and need to overcharge you big time for the privilege of new car ownership.
So we go from one parking garage is “dealerships have been running this scheme for months and months”? Roughly 51 seconds into the YouTube video, the maker says “these dealerships, or at least this particular dealership” has engaged in these practices. Later, at 5:52, he asks whether this is happening around the country.
This does not necessarily mean the larger argument is not true. But, the evidence presented here shows one parking garage and cars from one dealer. How broad is this practice? We do not know from this video and story.
This might just be the daily story of the Internet and social media. Interesting things are posted. Information is shared. People describe their experiences. But, it is difficult to know how this matches larger patterns or not. An individual reader might be able to make connections across stories. Or, people online could connect the dots for others. For example, others could make videos on YouTube detailing their finds of auto inventory in different locations. Sometimes these connections are made, often they are not. The next day comes and there is more information to process and relatively little that helps fit all the pieces together.
The connection is not just the Internet and social media and the way they connect us to more people and narratives. This is a change in statistics: we think we can see larger patterns and we can access more information.
Whether what we see on social media is a real pattern might not matter. (A reminder: relatively few people are active on Twitter.) We see more online and we can see what people are highlighting. This might appear as a pattern.
Not too long ago, we were more limited in our ability to compare our actions to others. The mass media existed but in more packaged forms (television, radio, music, films, newspapers, etc.) rather than the user-driven content of social media. The comparisons to that mass media still mattered – I remember sociologist Juliet Schor’s argument in The Overspent American of how increased TV watching was related to increased consumption – but people’s ties to their family and friends in geographic proximity were likely stronger. Or, in Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone world, people spent a lot more time in local organizations and groups rather than in the broad realms of the Internet and social media.
Now, we can easily see how our choices or circumstances compare to others. Even odd situations we find ourselves in quickly be matched across a vast set of platforms for similarities and differences. Whether our tastes are mainstream or unusual, we can see how they stack up. If I am on college campus X on one side of the country, I can easily see what is happening on college campuses around the world.
Even as the Internet and social media is not fully representative of people and society, it does offer a sample regarding what other people are doing. We may care less about what the people directly near us are doing and we can quickly see what broader groups are doing. We can live our everyday lives with a statistical approach: look at the big N sample and adjust accordingly.
The National Association of Realtors first started collecting data on virtual real estate transactions in April 2020, according to Jessica Lautz, deputy chief economist and vice president of research. Virtual home sales, which are sometimes referred to as “blind offers” or “sight unseen sales,” peaked at 13% of all transactions in January 2022. By November 2022, that number dropped to 9%.
Lautz sees two drivers for virtual sales, beyond the pandemic. “It’s not only because inventory is tight, but people are moving longer distances. It might be very difficult to make your way to that home before it is under contract,” she said. “If you’re moving to a different state, the ability to quickly book a flight because that perfect home has just come onto the market may be impossible.”…
Lautz sees virtual transactions continuing, even if they’re less frequent. “If you had asked me that at the start of the pandemic, I would have thought it was a fluke. But it seems to be here to stay.”
Virtual transactions may reflect another shift, as the National Association of Realtors sees the median distance folks relocate increasing to 50 miles. “It makes sense because of housing affordability, people are moving farther out because of hybrid or remote work,” Lautz said. Being close to friends and family is top priority for so many buyers today, so they may be moving to a different area to seek that.”
Several thoughts in reaction to these numbers:
-I thought the percentage might have been higher during the pandemic. But, even then, seeing a property in person matter mattered.
-How much can technology remedy the desire to see a property in person? How long until prospective buyers could walk through a housing unit in the virtual realm? This is related to the biggest question I have: how well could technology substitute for being in a space? One matter is feeling like you were in person and could experience everything. Another matter is whether the technology allows you to consider everything. If that technology could be improved, maybe it can provide enough or all of the experience.
-Would more virtual showings increase the need for realtors or reduce them? If the main issue is technology being able to show everything about a unit, I could imagine it done without a realtor. If the main issue is about knowing a community and having connections, then the realtor continues even if the technology improves.
This month, Seoul plans to launch the first stage of Metaverse Seoul, an ambitious five-year plan to code a digital re-creation of the South Korean capital. When it’s finished, residents will be able to explore historical sites, tour museums, attend virtual events, and even stop by City Hall to hack away at red tape without leaving their couches. Given Governor Jared Polis’ love of all things high-tech—including collecting state taxes in cryptocurrencies—it’s only a matter of time until Colorado follows suit, starting with our own capital city. Which is why we came up with some of Metaverse Denver’s most important points of interest.
There are a lot of possibilities here in addition to what Seoul is pursuing. Should a city aim for a brick for brick recreation? A hint or flavor of the offline city? A new kind of experience? An online site meant for tourists and/or those considering relocating? A place to try out new ideas? A gathering place for current residents?
One quick reminder as cities and communities consider this: the online and offline realms are not separate. What ends up in the Metaverse at the behest of cities will be connected to the offline city and vice versa.
These “heavy tweeters” account for less than 10% of monthly overall users but generate 90% of all tweets and half of global revenue. Heavy tweeters have been in “absolute decline” since the pandemic began, a Twitter researcher wrote in an internal document titled “Where did the Tweeters Go?”
A “heavy tweeter” is defined as someone who logs in to Twitter six or seven days a week and tweets about three to four times a week, the document said.
This echoes earlier analyses of power users on social media. Many members of social media platforms contribute relatively little while a small number do a lot.
I would be interested to hear more about social media platforms or online sites that are able to encourage broader participation. Is there a way to build broad-based online communities with more equitable contributions and influence?
I also wonder how much this matches offline communities that can also be marked by a small set of participants doing a lot. Is the online realm simply mirroring offline patterns or are there new dynamics here that are important?
Legally Sociable 
