Tag: driving

Posted on by

How sporting events are driving tourism: ‘Think big Richmond. We’ve got big things coming.’

How sporting events are driving tourism: 'Think big Richmond. We've got big things coming.'

RICHMOND, Va. — Summer sporting events are bringing people from near and far to the Richmond area, helping the tourism industry recover and exceed the amount of lodging revenue brought in before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Richmond Region Tourism reports that during fiscal year of 2022 (FY22), $30.8 million came from lodging tax revenue, about $800,000 higher than it was in 2019.

Richmond Region Tourism President and CEO Jack Berry

WTVR

Richmond Region Tourism President and CEO Jack Berry

“June of 2020, the governor allowed sports tourism to continue and that saved us,” said Richmond Region Tourism President and CEO Jack Berry. “Now 80% of group travel is associated with sports tourism.”

Berry said this summer has been especially fruitful in terms of creating revenue through sports tourism.

“This summer, we’ll have hosted 33 sporting events, and it’s almost 100,000 visitors coming just this summer alone,” Berry said.

Poster image (33).jpg

WTVR

This first weekend in August, SwimRVA hosted the U.S. Masters Swimming Summer National Championship, bringing in thousands of competitors and spectators from across the United States and beyond.

“This is the first national championship in the sport of swimming to come to the commonwealth and the fact that it’s hear in the capital region is a really big deal,” said Adam Kennedy, SwimRVA’s Executive Director.

SwimRVA's Executive Director Adam Kennedy

WTVR

SwimRVA’s Executive Director Adam Kennedy

Kennedy said swimmers of all ages and backgrounds, coming all the way from places like Australia and Costa Rica, came to compete for several days.

“We see almost 900 athletes a day, and then we multiply that by the people they’re bringing with them and the coaches and the staff, there’s probably 1,200-1,300 a day coming through,” Kennedy said.

In Henrico County, a new sports and convocation center set to open in late 2023, recently had the first parts of its foundation laid. Another 17,000-seat arena off of I-95 is set to open in 2026. 

Poster image (40).jpg

GreenCity Partners, LLC

GreenCity development includes 17,000-seat arena off of I-95 is set to open in 2026 in Henrico County. 

“Think big Richmond,” Berry said. “It doesn’t have to stop here. We’ve got big things coming, between the new arena that’s being built. We are constantly raising the bar. Richmond is a small town that thinks big and we do big things, and we only need to think bigger.”

Posted on by

Climate change driving catastrophic weather events – NIWA

Climate change driving catastrophic weather events - NIWA

Increasingly chaotic weather around the world can be attributed to climate change, a top NIWA scientist says.

Dr Sam Dean, NIWA’s principal climate scientist, told Q + A’s Jack Tame on Sunday that extreme weather events have been intensified by the changing climate.

“The risk is double what it would’ve been without climate change and the intensity is about 10% more.”

In recent weeks, parts of Europe and North Africa have seen record-breaking heatwaves, which have caused devastating wildfires and even melted airport runways in London.

Dr Dean says some of the heatwaves were “very unlikely, if not impossible” to have occurred if it hadn’t been for climate change.

Back in New Zealand, there are concerns that rising temperatures will create fire conditions similar to those in Australia, where bushfires caused widespread damage.

2021 was the hottest year in New Zealand on record, according to NIWA.

“I think for all of us, fire is a scary thing that can be truly destructive and terrifying,” Dr Dean said.

He says areas on the east of the South Island and Central Otago are particularly vulnerable.

“The risk of the kind of fire in places that we live is going to increase if we don’t mitigate.”

Dr Dean says the cost of the impacts from climate change far outweigh the costs of implementing mitigation strategies.

“We’re looking at how those costs are going to increase in the future.

“That provides motivation for spending money now to mitigate against potential damages… social and financial costs.”

Posted on by

World events, time change and anger piling on pandemic pressures

World events, time change and anger piling on pandemic pressures






Chuck Norris

Chuck Norris


Don’t care much for the constant mid-March ritual of moving our clocks ahead one hour? According to Beth Ann Malow, a professor of neurology and pediatrics at Vanderbilt University, 63% of Americans would like to see it eliminated.

The thing is, daylight saving time represents much more than a disruption to daily routines. Given the stresses heaped upon us in our world of uncertainties, it could be the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.

“Beyond simple inconvenience,” writes Malow on TheConversation.com, “Researchers are discovering that ‘springing ahead’ each March is connected with serious negative health effects.”

“In a 2020 commentary for the journal JAMA Neurology, my co-authors and I reviewed the evidence linking the annual transition to daylight saving time to increased strokes, heart attacks and teen sleep deprivation,” she says.

A separate post on TheConversation.com co-authored by Deepa Burman, co-director of the Pediatric Sleep Evaluation Center at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, and Hiren Muzumdar, director of the Pediatric Sleep Evaluation Center, notes that sleep deprivation can result in increases of workplace injuries and automobile accidents. One individual’s sleep deprivation can affect an entire family.

People are also reading…

“You may notice more frequent meltdowns, irritability and loss of attention and focus,” they say.

I wonder, could uncontrolled anger be far behind?

Now, watching a devastating war unfold on social media is also hammering away at our collective mental health. We’re all being heightened by graphic and disturbing images that fill our feeds, writes Time magazine reporter Jamie Ducharme.

“Tracking up-to-the-minute developments can come at a cost. … Footage and photos from Ukraine flooding social media and misinformation spreading rampantly (has) implications for public health,” she reports.

It has long been the responsibility of traditional media outlets for editors to decide which content is too graphic to show, or to label disturbing images with warnings. As pointed out by Roxane Cohen Silver, a professor of psychological science at the University of California, Irvine, today anyone “can take pictures and videos and immediately distribute that (on social media) without warning, potentially without thinking about it.”

Jason Steinhauer, founder of the History Communication Institute, says, “Russia has been waging a social media and misinformation war for the past 10 to 12 years.” This has only gotten worse since its invasion of Ukraine.

We should not be surprised at all that studies now suggest that news coverage of the pandemic has contributed to our mental distress. “Adding yet another difficult topic to the mix can worsen those feelings,” Cohen Silver says.

Yet the war is hardly the only attack on our senses. At a time when we are most vulnerable, the Federal Trade Commission reports that predatory fraudsters bilked consumers of an estimated $5.8 billion last year. According to the agency, it represents a 70% increase over 2020. “Almost 2.8 million people filed a fraud complaint, an annual record” and “the highest number on record dating back to 2001,” reports the FTC. “Imposter scams were most prevalent, but investment scams cost the typical victim the most money.”

“Those figures also don’t include reports of identity theft and other categories,” the report points out. “More than 1.4 million Americans also reported being a victim of identity theft in 2021; another 1.5 million filed complaints related to ‘other’ categories (including credit reporting companies failing to investigate disputed information, or debt collectors falsely representing the amount or status of debt).”

The mounting stresses placed upon us are now posing a threat to not just our mental and financial health but our physical well-being.

According to a working paper from researchers at the Naval Postgraduate School and the University of Pennsylvania, “In 2020, the risk of outdoor street crimes initially rose by more than 40% and was consistently between 10-15% higher than it had been in 2019 through the remainder of the year.” Researchers also believe that the finding “points to the potential for other crimes to surge the way homicides have as cities reopen and people return to the streets,” says the report.

Adds Megan McArdle commenting on the report in an op-ed for the Washington Post, “community trust in the police might have plummeted, possibly making people more likely to settle scores on their own. Or police might have reacted to public anger by pulling back from active policing, creating more opportunities for crime.”

Hans Steiner is a professor emeritus of Stanford’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences who has logged decades of work studying anger and aggression. In an interview posted on the Stanford University website, he says he believes that “the coronavirus pandemic, with its extreme disruption of normal daily life and uncertainty for the future, compounded by several other crises (economic distress, racial tension, social inequities, political and ideological conflicts) puts us all to the test: we find ourselves immersed in a pool of negative emotions: fear, sadness, contempt, and yes, anger. What do we do with this forceful emotion?”

“Anger signals that we are being threatened, injured, deprived, robbed of rewards and expectancies,” Steiner says. It should be “one of our adaptive tools to deal with the most difficult circumstances. Sometimes it becomes an obstacle to our struggles, especially when it derails into aggression and even violence.”

Anger problems are now spilling over into record accounts of hate crimes. It seems that today’s circumstances, with anger management and rule of law seemingly at an all-time low, have caused many individuals to become ticking time bombs. Reports CBS News, “the total number of hate crimes nationwide has increased every year but one since 2014, according to FBI data, which includes statistics through 2020.”

Steiner says that “maladaptive anger and aggression has the following characteristics: 1. It arises without any trigger, seemingly out of the blue; 2. it is disproportionate to its trigger in its frequency, intensity, duration and strength; 3. it does not subside after the offending person has apologized; 4. it occurs in a social context which does not sanction anger and aggression.”

Who among us has not seen or maybe even experienced some, maybe all, of these behavior characteristics?

“In such conflicts we need to remind ourselves that diatribes, lies and accusations will not move us forward; compassion, empathy and the reminder that we are all in this horrible situation together (needs to) inspire us,” Steiner advises.

Write to Chuck Norris at info@creators.com with questions about health and fitness.

Posted on by

Four trends driving brand events and experiences in 2022 | Econsultancy

Four trends driving brand events and experiences in 2022 | Econsultancy

Companies are ramping up investment in experiential marketing, as consumers crave in-person experiences. According to AnyRoad, 81% of brands say their event and experiential budgets will “match or exceed” pre-pandemic levels in 2022.

But post-pandemic, is experiential strategy the same? Here’s a look at how companies are attracting people IRL, and some trends driving the industry. 

Hybrid experiences in the metaverse

The limit on ‘live experiences’ during the past two years has already given way to virtual and hybrid experiences, which combine real-life social interaction with digital elements. At the same time, we’ve witnessed the emergence of the ‘metaverse’, or at least a more fleshed-out concept of a new immersive digital environment where these interactions take place. This could create opportunity for new brand experiences, with the fashion industry in particular already taking advantage.

Evidence of this comes from the upcoming Metaverse Fashion Week, which will see global brands including Hugo Boss stage virtual fashion shows, as well as virtual after-parties and other immersive experiences (such as live music performances). Hosted by metaverse platform Decentraland, it’s expected that virtual visitors will be able to buy the digital wearables featured on the catwalk, as well as real-life designs and NFTs.

With more fashion brands expected to invest in the metaverse, and the likes of Gucci already releasing digital items, the virtual fashion week is a way for brands to test the water (and pique consumer interest in digital fashion).

With the lines between online and physical worlds becoming increasingly blurred, we are likely to see more brands take a hybrid approach to experiential in future.

Paid-for experiences that drive positive engagement

With consumers eager for in-person experiences, brands are cashing in on the so-called ‘experience economy’ in more ways than one. While experiential and events activity is typically about brand perception and recall, brands are also generating direct revenue from paid-for experiences.

Hasbro’s ‘Monopoly Lifesized’ is one example – it is an immersive live-action experience that combines elements of the Monopoly board game with escape rooms and challenges. Commenting on the launch, David Hutchinson, CEO of Gamepath, said: “For us, Monopoly Lifesized represents a major entry into a growing and exciting marketplace. Audiences want to consume live performance differently, and what better way than to jump into a lifesized version of the world’s favourite board game?”

As well as the live-action experience, the 22,000 square foot space (which is located in the former Paperchase on London’s Tottenham Court Road) also includes a Hasbro retail outlet and Monopoly-themed bar and restaurant called Top Hat, a good example of the evolution of retail space in the past two years.

But is this type of paid-for experience a commercially viable business, or actually another strategic type of experiential marketing? Interestingly, research suggests that by being ticketed, paid-for events can have a positive effect on consumer’s perception and engagement.

A study undertaken by creative agency Imagination – which looked at 40 paid-for experiences and 30,000 data points – found that paid-for experiences achieved double the rate of brand and product mentions compared with free experiences. What’s more, the study also found that 17% of conversations around paid-for experiences were recommendations compared with just 1% for a free experience.

Overall, the study found that paid-for experiences drive deeper engagement, higher quality leads, are more valued by customers, and brings customers closer to the product (driving more mentions of a brand or product). This is because, as the study concludes, by paying for an experience “people are shifted into a different mindset – they have invested in the experience and are more willing and open to engage, to be entertained, to learn something new.”

Social media IRL

Social media continues to influence buying behaviour. According to 2021 research from Bazaarvoice, 23% of UK shoppers use social media to discover and purchase new products. At the same time, 40% of shoppers say they won’t make a purchase if there isn’t user generated content on the brand or retailer’s product page, again highlighting the extent to which social content can drive ecommerce.

This also demonstrates how intertwined the two worlds of social and retail have become, which has led to an increasing number of partnerships between social platforms and retail brands. These are usually online, of course, but we are seeing brands partner with social media companies on experiential marketing. One recent example of this is Argos, which has partnered with Pinterest to launch ‘The Argos Mood Hotel’ – an initiative it describes as “a world-first concept hotel curated using interior design products from the high street brand, based on the hottest interiors trends emerging from Pinterest’s annual trends report.” As well as visiting in real life, the hotel can also be experienced virtually via 360-degree video and shoppable digital formats, which can be accessed on Pinterest as well as Argos’ social media channels. 

Speaking about the partnership, Sibylle Tretera, Head of Creative Strategy for Pinterest explained how the brand experience aims to transform passive social browsers into active shoppers. “This innovative approach from Argos explores the ways people are using the platform and brings to life the very trends people are searching for, making it easy for home decor fans to take action on their creative ideas,” she said. Indeed, by giving shoppers a real-life version of an online mood board, the idea is that they are more likely to be inspired to buy – and continue using Pinterest as a source of product discovery.

Another social media platform to move offline is TikTok, which also made an appearance ‘IRL’ last year with its TikTok For You House – an experiential pop-up in Westfield London shopping centre. Designed in a house-style format, the TikTok experience enabled visitors to interact and learn from popular TikTok creators, re-creating viral recipes in the kitchen and showcasing fashion in the dressing room. While there was no shopping element involved, the experience was designed to drive footfall to Westfield post-pandemic, while also enabling TikTok to engage with existing users and attract new ones to its platform. 

OOH becomes more interactive than ever

OOH advertising is designed to stop people in their tracks with big, bold, and powerful creative. With consumers often bombarded with messages, however, it can be difficult to cut through the noise and truly grab attention. Consequently, more brands are incorporating experiential strategies into OOH advertising, combining immersive elements with clever marketing to generate engagement and create memorable experiences. 

In December 2021, Bombay Sapphire took over three window displays in New York’s Soho district, using them to showcase holiday-inspired fashion, art, and live dance performances. Additionally, each window included a QR code that enabled passers-by to redeem a free drink at a nearby participating restaurant, ensuring that those who engaged with the billboard felt surprised and rewarded, and most importantly, received an experience that they would remember.

3D billboards also enable brands to drive similar engagement, transforming otherwise passive or humdrum everyday experiences into something more memorable. One example of this comes from Balenciaga, which teamed up with Fornite last year to create immersive 3D billboards in London, New York, Tokyo, and Seoul.

Posted on by

Cell stress-related biochemical events may be partly driving Parkinson’s disease

Cell stress-related biochemical events may be partly driving Parkinson's disease

Parkinson’s disease may be driven in part by cell stress-related biochemical events that disrupt a key cellular cleanup system, leading to the spread of harmful protein aggregates in the brain, according to a new study from scientists at Scripps Research.

The discovery, published in The Journal of Neuroscience in February 2022, offers a clear and testable hypothesis about the progression of Parkinson’s disease, and may lead to treatments capable of significantly slowing or even stopping it.

We think our findings about this apparent disease-driving process are important for developing compounds that can specifically inhibit the process of disease spread in the brain.”


Stuart Lipton, MD, PhD, study senior author, Step Family Endowed Chair, founding co-director of the Neurodegeneration New Medicines Center, and professor in the Department of Molecular Medicine at Scripps Research

Parkinson’s disease affects roughly one million people in the United States. Its precise trigger is unknown, but it entails the deaths of neurons in a characteristic sequence through key brain regions. The killing of one small set of dopamine-producing neurons in the midbrain leads to the classic Parkinsonian tremor and other movement impairments. Harm to other brain regions results in various other disease signs including dementia in late stages of Parkinson’s. A closely related syndrome in which dementia occurs early in the disease course is called Lewy Body Dementia (LBD), and affects about 1.4 million people in the U.S.

In both diseases, affected neurons contain abnormal protein aggregations, known as Lewy bodies, whose predominant ingredient is a protein called alpha-synuclein. Prior studies have shown that alpha-synuclein aggregates can spread from neuron to neuron in Parkinson’s and LBD, apparently transmitting the disease process through the brain. But precisely how alpha-synuclein aggregates build up and spread in this way has been unclear.

One clue, uncovered by Lipton’s lab and others in prior research, is that the Parkinson’s/LBD disease process generates highly reactive nitrogen-containing molecules including nitric oxide. In principle, these reactive nitrogen molecules could disrupt important cellular systems, including “housekeeping” systems that normally keep protein aggregates under control.

In the new study, the Scripps Research team demonstrated the validity of this idea by showing that a type of nitrogen-molecule reaction called S-nitrosylation can affect an important cellular protein called p62, triggering the buildup and spread of alpha-synuclein aggregates.

The p62 protein normally assists in autophagy, a waste-management system that helps cells get rid of potentially harmful protein aggregates. The researchers found evidence that in cell and animal models of Parkinson’s, p62 is S-nitrosylated at abnormally high levels in affected neurons. This alteration of p62 inhibits autophagy, causing a buildup of alpha-synuclein aggregates. The buildup of aggregates, in turn, leads to the secretion of the aggregates by affected neurons, and some of these aggregates are taken up by nearby neurons.

“The process we observed seems very similar to what is seen in Parkinson’s and LBD brains,” says study first author Chang-Ki Oh, PhD, a staff scientist in the Lipton laboratory.

The researchers also tested postmortem brains of LBD patients, and again found that levels of S-nitrosylated p62 were abnormally high in affected brain areas-;supporting the idea that this process occurs in humans.

Lipton and Oh say that S-nitrosylation of proteins becomes more likely in many situations of cellular stress, including the presence of protein aggregates. Thus, this chemical modification of p62 could be a key factor in a self-reinforcing process that not only stresses brain cells beyond their limits, but also spreads the source of stress to other brain cells.

The team is now working to develop drug-like compounds that specifically inhibit the S-nitrosylation of p62. Although it would take years to develop such compounds as potential commercial drugs, they could, in principle, slow the Parkinson’s/LBD disease process or prevent its further spread in the brain after it begins, Lipton says.

Source:

Scripps Research Institute

Journal reference:

Oh, C., et al. (2022) S-Nitrosylation of p62 Inhibits Autophagic Flux to Promote α-Synuclein Secretion and Spread in Parkinson’s Disease and Lewy Body Dementia. Journal of Neuroscience. doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1508-21.2022.