7 Things Your Homeowners Insurance Likely Doesn’t Cover

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7 Things Your Homeowners Insurance Likely Doesn’t Cover
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Al_HikesAZ, Flickr // CC BY-NC 2.0
New York City is home to an incredibly diverse array of people, foods, crafts, and businesses—but that diversity is rarely represented by its street fairs. For years, the Big Apple’s bazaars have been dominated by the same few vendors, no matter where or when they’re hosted. But now, Politico reports, Mayor Bill DeBlasio’s administration is working on bringing a bit more local flavor into the mix.
De Blasio’s administration has proposed several major changes that could benefit local businesses and communities—not to mention fairgoers’ tastebuds. Instead of allowing the same handful of vendors to run the stalls and concessions—selling the same sausages, grilled corn, novelty t-shirts, and pashminas block after block—the proposed rules would require half of all stalls to be operated by local neighborhood businesses. This would not only help make street fairs less generic, but allow store owners and restauranteurs in the community to directly benefit.
The new rules would also help more communities across New York City to host markets of their own. Right now, the vast majority of the city’s street fairs are held in just three community board districts in Manhattan. The new rules would limit the city to around 200 such events a year, and require that at least half be hosted outside of Manhattan. Together, the new rules would help more communities host fairs that directly benefit local businesses and better represent local cultures, foods, crafts, and identities.
“We’ve criticized street fairs in the past, but not on principle. These could be so amazing for New York City,” Jonathan Bowles of the Center for an Urban Future told Politico. “New York City has so many independent and entrepreneurial businesses, but so few of them have been represented in street fairs that it’s been a missed opportunity.”
[h/t Politico]
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September 23, 2016 – 11:30am
The Elsewhere headset is designed to bring the photos and videos on your iPhone’s camera roll to life. Unlike most virtual reality headsets, the Elsewhere isn’t designed for immersive gaming or 360 degree video. Instead, WIRED reports, the headset adds a third dimension to two dimensional photos and videos and lets users view the real world from a new perspective.
The strange headset is built a little like a 19th century stereoscope. Viewers look through the lens and snap their iPhone on to the end at a slight distance. An app, which comes with the device, transforms photos and videos into 3D images, and even allows users to zoom in and out, and control the depth of field. Elsewhere’s creators, Wendellen Li and Aza Raskin, claim the device can even add more depth to the real world. By connecting to the iPhone camera, the Elsewhere app lets users view flat surfaces in the world around them, like screens, mirrors, and artwork, as three dimensional. The device also ostensibly makes the real world look even “more 3D than usual—as if it had too much volume and wants to burst” (the Elsewhere website calls this experience “hyper-dimensional”).
“Elsewhere uses a new model of human perception to convert motion directly into depth,” the website explains. “Instead of attempting to reconstruct a 3D model after the fact—which fails for everyday stuff like smoke, liquids, mirrors, screens, and GIFs—Elsewhere shows two videos (one for each eye) packed with depth information encoded in the input format of the human visual system.”
[h/t WIRED]
September 23, 2016 – 11:00am
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