What If Every Street Project Required Rightsizing And Traffic Calming?
Detroit’s Department of Public Works spends a lot of time repaving streets. It doesn’t spend much time thinking about what might make those streets safer.
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Author: Nat M. Zorach
Energy Burden: The Elephant in the Electrification Room
Dr. Destenie Nock and Shuchen Cong presented from Carnegie Mellon University on a new approach they are taking to assess energy burden in communities around the United States. It is important analysis that will help inform how public service commissions develop better energy efficiency policy for utilities, and how utilities assess the needs of their most vulnerable customers.
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It’s Time To Talk About Speed. No, Not The Adderall Shortage.
A society with 40,000 deaths each year from traffic violence can’t claim to be virtuous, progressive, or innovative– at least, not when we have plenty of proven solutions to reduce the rates of traffic fatalities.
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Consolidating Inefficient Private Transit Systems
Large employers like hospitals, universities, and big corporations often contract with private transit operators to ferry their employees around, usually between parking lots and office buildings or other facilities. Would there be a resulting economy of scale if these services were consolidated into, say, the transit operations of a public agency?
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Yes, We Still Have To Talk About Elon Musk’s Media Relations Response.
Twitter’s media relations team has been dissolved and replaced by a bot that sends out a poop emoji to inquiring journalists.
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Prose Rife With Burstiness & Perplexity: AI & Its Jargon
Artificial intelligence models can generate outputs we can understand from conversational input. But how does an AI narc on itself? We look at a couple of the rationales for why one author says that an AI detector “thought” that the US Constitution and the Book of Genesis were almost certainly written by AI– and unpack some more details about the mysterious innerds of the model.
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Green Stormwater Infrastructure Is A Win For Everyone
Gather round, children, for Handbuilt story hour. A few years ago at the Michigan Transportation Bonanza, an all-day forum in
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How ChatGPT Saved Me While Traveling
Hiking up an Icelandic glacier is already pretty daunting, but it can be made a bit less daunting with an AI assistant. It can’t help you climb, but it can explain some missing puzzle pieces.
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Two Things Making The Internet Unusable In 2023
The tech sector is trying to both expand the use of artificial intelligence while clinging on to the dying days of an epic business cycle. Both are contributing to making the internet, IoT, and any consumer product even remotely connected to the internet, increasingly unusable, increasingly resource-intensive, and increasingly frustrating.
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TED Countdown Detroit: Sustainability’s Problem With Elitism and Respectability Politics
Al Gore, McKinsey alums, and half of the Ivy League descends on Detroit this week to tell the peasants about sustainability and decarbonization. Just kidding, it’s a for-profit, invite-only event that costs $4,000– no peasants will be invited.
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