Our next speaker is a data artist and software developer at Mapbox. And before joining Mapbox, he was an artist in residence at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, which is a magical place, and a part of the Google Android team. And his work has been incredibly influential and shown at MoMA and many web and print publications. And he's particularly interested in using geographic data to understand and improve the pedestrian transit experiences in cities. So please give a warm welcome to Eric Fisher. So yeah, I wish I could talk in general about design like Mike was. But instead, I'm going to sort of talk about what I've learned through exhaustive churning through one particular kind of design, which is the making maps out of millions or billions of dots. And I guess the first point that I want to talk about is just why make maps out of dots at all? Why is this a thing? And I think that it's kind of a product of the era that we're living in where we've got zillions of devices out in the world that have GPS and have network. And they're not necessarily providing data that is meant to be, it's a report of a single event kind of thing. But when you take all of these location reports that are coming through the network as discrete points, you could have patterned out of them eventually if you put them all together. And some of this stuff is kind of straightforwardly transportation related. There's bus tracker data like Next Bus. There's data like a lot of cities now have GPS trackers on cabs. So this is a data set of where taxis were picked up passengers in Boston. There's navigation systems that have GPS logs. So here's places that people drove around in Boston. And then on the other side of it, you have kind of the more explicit for the purpose of mapping, but kind of the more on the metadata side of it than the map proper. So this is GPS logs that were contributed to make OpenStreetMap. And then you have data from inside OpenStreetMap itself. Like these are buildings in the Boston area that have addresses associated with them. So you can see for some reason parts of it are very well mapped with addresses and parts are not. And who knows what's going on there. And then you also have kind of the data exhaust side of thing where people are doing things that kind of have a side effect of having locations associated with them. So I've done a lot of work with photo location data from Flickr especially. And so here are pictures in Boston. Hero geotag tweets in Boston. And the patterns are similar but not the same. And then you also have just sort of the infrastructure kind of stuff that these remote devices can sense. This is iPhone location data that was cached as part of that bug that the iPhone had where it was storing locations in a public file. So you can see kind of where the cell phone networks are. And then there's also the kind of intentionally gathered stuff. This is Mozilla location service map where they're intentionally having anybody who wants to go around and find out where Wi-Fi networks are. They'll record that information and make it available through an API. Anyway, the thing that these all have together is that you've got a little bit of information about a lot of things rather than one big thing that we know a lot about. But if you take all these dots together and put them on a map, then you can see the patterns. Because that's kind of one of the things that people's vision is just really good at. We can take dots and we can see the patterns in them a lot better than a computer can. We are good at stipples. We are good at halftones. And I don't know why the eye works this way, but this is a power that human vision has. So I'm going to talk mostly about sort of the process of making these things. Things that I have learned in the course of doing this over the course of the past few years. And sort of an overview of methodology. I used to do a lot of this stuff in kind of a very ad hoc, weird way with generating postscript files, basically.  And there's a lot of problems with this approach. And I was doing it because it was easy rather than because I thought it was a really good idea. And I mean, first of all, the main problem is it only gets you a single scale. There's the image rather than here's what makes sense for an overview versus here's what makes sense for a close up. There's a lot of trial and error involved because going into it, I didn't necessarily know what the right size for the dots were, how the colors would combine or anything like that. So try things over and over again until they work. And the last part of it makes the trial and error even worse because it's kind of an unoptimized approach. There's no efficient storage of the data. It's just turn through it and make the image and hope that it looked right. And if it didn't look right, turn through it again. Just sort of very linear. The more dots there are, the slower it's going to be. So the thing that finally forced me to revisit these practices and actually try to do things right was my first project with Matbox, which was this joint project with Gnip, which has just actually been acquired by Twitter. But at the time, they were the public archive of Twitter, I guess not public archive, but archive service of Twitter where they basically had the entire backlog of geotag tweets and wanted to do a joint project with Matbox to make a visualization of different aspects of the data that you could get out of there. So there was a phone brand's one. There was a language's one and also a version of the Locals and Tourists map that I had done before. And so anyway, this forced me to actually figure out how to do, first of all, maps that were meant for the web rather than the static images and how to make them work at lots of different scales. And the things that I learned in the course of doing that and things that I've done since then are embodied basically in this GitHub project that I've got going called Data Maps, which is the toolset that I have been using to make dot maps for the web. And it's got an encoding side to it where you feed data to it, and it indexes it into a file. It's got a rendering part, and it's got a couple of other tools. Not the world's greatest user interface, but that's where this stuff is. That's what I've been doing this stuff in. And I guess now I will start talking about just like the different things that I've learned in the course of this, like how to, why is that showing up? OK, good, sorry. So yeah, the different, just how to tune these things to actually make the visualizations work. So I guess the first thing I want to talk about is just about scale. Because when you're talking about data that you can either view totally zoomed in so you're looking at a single city block or zoomed out so that you're looking at the entire world, there's a lot of different scales to think about. And so as just like a starting point to think about, I should, sorry, I need to mute my phone because it's making noises. And there's kind of this nebulous idea of the human scale, which is thrown around all kinds of architectural and urban design terms, what is the natural human environment? But as far as web maps are concerned, I think the human scale is kind of zoom level 13, which is kind of a ridiculous thing to say, but it's basically the scale where a pixel on the screen is about 50 feet on a side. And that 50 feet on a side is kind of a thing that we experience as people. That size of a pixel is about the size of a building that people live in. It's about the width of a street. And so I think that if we can start off by making things work at zoom level 13, that that's kind of like make it work at the basic level of human experience. And so then the other side of it is, if you take that scale, then what do you do with the brightness as you combine dots? And I'm going to again make the assertion here that if you have something that is kind of on the scale of population, which a lot of these things are, this diagram here is explicitly census data, but a lot of these things are basically population maps in some sense. It might be sort of business focused rather than residents focused or something like that. But if you have something that's on the order of magnitude of population, then you want to make the densities work like population does. And so in this case, the places on the map where you just see the base map are places where nobody lives. The places that are kind of mid-tone color are places where there's about four people per building. And then the places that are fully bright are the places where there's about 16 people per building. And this is kind of arbitrary categories, but it also kind of corresponds to the way that people actually live. And so that's kind of, and I determined these brightness things by experiment a little bit. So I'm kind of retroactively rationalizing where these brightnesses came from. But I think that it's true. I think this is why this brightness range works. The one thing that I should mention here, instead of saying zero, four, and 16 is kind of a weird scale. Why isn't it zero, eight, and 16 so that you're having this linear range? And I don't have a great rationalization for that. I think that it's kind of a, in some sense, it's just what makes it look good. If you actually make it a linear scale, then there's a lot of places that are really dark on here. You can't see it very well. On the other hand, I may not have actually gone far enough because I was reading this research paper from Stanford that was saying that human visual perception actually perceives cube root of brightness. And so maybe this all actually should be cube root rather than square root even, that I've made everything still dimmer than it ought to be. I wish I really understood all these aspects of how vision really works. But hopefully somebody else who really understands vision can clue me in on how it really ought to be. And one thing that's actually very important about this is that if you do the linear brightness thing and you're looking at the outer scales, like country scale, world scale, you really lose all the rural areas. This is another census map. And the one on the left is linear scale and you basically, you lose everything except the major cities. But there's a lot of people who don't live in the major cities too. And if you actually wanna see kind of the qualitative things rather than just the numbers, then you need to be able to represent those parts too. So the one on the right is the square root brightness scale, which you can see the cities are much more populated than everywhere else but you can still see what's going on everywhere else too. So going the other direction, there's a question, what should happen to these dots as you zoom in? If you just zoom the pixels, then it looks like this mess and you can't tell what's going on. And if you're just zooming the size of the dots too, then it's the same kind of problem where everything is drawing on top of each other. It's too fuzzy, it's too bright. You can't really see any more detail than you could at the zoomed out version. So kind of the way that I've been doing this is instead of having a lot of dots that overlap, I've been taking the approach that as you zoom in, the dots should get bigger but not enormously bigger so that you can see increasing amounts of detail as you zoom in and then make the dots individually brighter at the same time so that they still get a little bit of a bonus brightness to them.  And so there's also, so I also do the opposite thing in the other direction, give a brightness bump for each additional zoom level that you go out so that you can still see some places are a lot more, there's a lot more populated, a lot more active than others. The 1.6 is I have no theoretical basis for, this is purely determined by experiment of what looks good. I wish I knew what it meant, but then so hopefully somebody else has a theory for what that actually means too. And this slide is full of text and probably too much text, but it's about kind of the optimization side of it. The thing that I haven't talked about here at all is the whole billions of dots things, it's really, really slow to draw billions of dots. And if you're drawing the zoomed in tile where you really want to see every single dot, then that's fine. But if you're zooming out to the country, you really don't want to draw every dot because it's just gonna take forever to render that tile. And so the basic way of cheating on this is, for each zoom level you go out, basically drop half the dots and double the brightness to compensate. And so you still basically get the same picture because the density, there's still enough dots to compensate as you go out that it's still full, but it means that by the time you get out to the world level you still have something that's practical to do rather than trying to turn through every single person in the world to draw that one tile. And the 1.23 here is basically just by doing the math on the 1.6 from having the number of dots. Again, no theoretical basis for it, it's just what seemed to work. And now to talk more about the kind of making it work part, this is not really a beautiful slide, but there's actually a lot of kind of subtle things to get right if you're doing maps for the web in particular, because if you're making maps for the web, you're not making a big single image, you're making individual tiles that then have to fit together. And so the edges of the tiles, if you don't get things right at the edges, there will be visible seams, and it looks terrible and it's distracting.  I guess one aspect of this slide is basically showing that we can't actually draw these round brushes that I've been acting like these things are made of, because we don't really have brushes, we have pixels. And depending on where these dots are located within the sub-pixel range, you end up drawing somewhere between one and four dots of different brightness to sort of approximate what this round brush is trying to look like. And then the other, and the really nasty part is what happens when the brushes are trying to draw at the edge of the tile. And this is another thing that kind of kills performance if you have a brush that sticks over the edge, you really don't know that there's a brush sticking on from some other tile unless you look at the data from the adjacent tiles too.  It's not terrible, but it's the kind of thing that makes it not look terrible. And I cheat at the, another way that I cheat is at the levels where there's only, where it's basically pixel scale or smaller, is that I don't actually look up the adjacent tiles. It's good enough if you're just drawing a single pixel rather than trying to do the exact detail. But I feel bad about it, because it's still imprecisioned, but it's another sort of the compromise between practicality and perfection. And I also, I want to talk a little bit about color just because there are a few things that have come out of this that have really helped me. And I guess the major thing that I learned is that I kind of had this tendency to draw things that went from black to a color or white to a color. And this actually really doesn't help at all.  But so I tend to let things fully saturate to white rather than fully saturate to a color. And the other alternative is you can use a really bright color or really, as kind of the end point where you're passing through a fairly dim color, you're going to something bright, the range is still, you're still getting a pretty big fraction of the visual range is going to use. And you can see that contrast a lot better. I should have included a slide here that used gray for the middle instead of a color because it really does just, it makes it look a whole lot more obvious that there's a range to it if you have something that has color in the middle rather than just gray. And then I also want to talk a little bit about color because most of these things that I've been showing here have been just a single color for the entire image, but often it's useful to use Hue to convey some other property of the thing. I guess the census map, the national census map had a race and ethnicity aspect to it that was using color. But the big image here is dots from the locals and tourists map and with blue for photos taken by locals, red for photos taken by tourists and they overlap a lot because it's not like there's totally separate spheres for these things. So you have to make it do something sensible when there's colors in conflict. And so the thing that I've been doing that seems to work well for this is to take, put for when there's no conflict, use of pure, purely saturated Hue. And if there is a conflict, then sort of let them average out to gray, basically. Still have the intensity that the colors would have, but don't let them actually saturate so that you can tell that there's conflict there. And then finally here is the, confessing all of the things that I did wrong as part of this. Data maps has problems. And the big one is that generating tiles dynamically really doesn't scale. If you're doing something that is a web map that's gonna be used by millions of people or something like that, it really has to be fast. It really has to be responsive.  And especially you can't be doing it because the data format that I used ends up spreading the data for low zoom levels across the entire file rather than having it in some compact range. Which means that if you're doing, rendering tiles for the lower zoom levels that include large areas, you're basically running through the entire, every 30 second or 64th or whatever point from the file, but it's spread across the entire thing so there's no locality. You basically have to have the entire thing in memory for it to be fast, which is terrible if you have more than one dataset to work with. And then the other alternative is to not do things dynamically at all to render static bitmaps. And that's also not great because they end up being huge because if you want something that's zoomable down to the block level or something like that, each additional zoom level that you have doubles the size of the data. And so it just gets enormous. And then kind of the other more conceptual problem with it is that data is better than pictures of data. This is all about sending down to the client, here is a visual representation of a thing. But it's ultimately much better if you can actually send something that is closer to the original data so that you can do multiple interpretations on it. You can make it fully scalable. You can keep the metadata associated with it. So that it's not just here is the one representation so that it's actually going down and letting the client side do whatever is appropriate with it. So I think that ultimately the right thing to do is to, and this is sort of the direction that Mapbox has been going in general is to, we've been working on this vector tile infrastructure. Right now it's mostly used for the open street map base maps, but you can put any sort of data into it. And so I think that really the right thing to be doing is not to have a specialized rendering infrastructure, but to make tile mil two and the Mapbox vector and the Mapbox vector infrastructure be able to do all of the rendering stuff that I've been talking about in the same way so that all of this stuff can be stored as vectors rather than rasters and pass the information, pass the full information all the way down. And the big advantage of doing this is that you still have to make tiles at some level. It's not just the file that has all the data you need in it, but you don't have to render all the way down to zoom level 18 or 20 or something like that. You can do a fairly compact version that still gets all the data into a small enough form that then you've got a tile that represents, say, a neighborhood rather than a block. And you can draw the block from that neighborhood tile because all of the data is actually there. And this is also really good for the future of mobile devices, GL-based rendering, because then rather than having these static bitmap images, you've got actual data that you can work with. So first of all, it's smaller data to get down to the phone because it's just basically a few bytes per point rather than a bunch of pixels. And then also it's fully scalable. You don't have to restrict yourself to just these web power of two zoom levels. You can draw anything you want from it. So that is really all I've got as far as presentation goes. I will be happy to talk about anything else that anybody is interested in hearing about if there's any questions or anything.


Russian New Banzai Tactics in Robertine Village of Zaporizhia Oblast Co-founder and analyst of Deep State Platform Roman Pohorilyi spoke in an interview with RadioNV about the Banzai attacks of the Russian occupiers in Robertine, Zaporizhia Oblast. Enemy continues to pressure our positions in Robertine also uses Banzai attacks. Pohorilyi said, The tactics have been used many times before when they drive on infantry fighting vehicles with infantry in a certain area directly even under risk. Now they are driving right into the center of the village. Our military meet them with fire including drones and drops from them and destroys them. At the same time analysts noted that Robertine cannot be considered a gray zone because Ukrainian military is holding the line and the occupiers cannot gain a foothold. Now they are trying from Novo Prokopivka, from Southern and Southwestern outskirts somehow trying to advance. Pohorilyi also said they are very focused on shelling but there is nothing left to shell. Today a video was released by the 65th Brigade showing that Robertine no longer exists physically, it's just a complete ruin. A flat, levelled ground. There is no longer even the kind of destruction where there are just pieces of buildings left, it's just all turned to ash. And yet, despite this, the enemy is trying to advance. He said that it is very difficult for Ukrainian military to hold on in this area and the situation is getting worse every day. The village of Robertine was occupied by Russians in March 2022. In August 2023, Ukrainian armed forces liberated the village. Since then, occupiers have not stopped trying to regain their lost ground. The Institute for the Study of War said that Russian troops advanced to western outskirts of Robertine and continued intensified offensives in Zaporizia Oblast on February the 20th. In March, National Guard spokesman Ruslan Muzichuk said that active fighting was taking place near the village of Robertine in Zaporizia Oblast. Russians are trying to conduct assault operations from South and East in the direction of Ukrainian settlements. Zaporizia Regional Council member Sirhe Lychenko said on Espresso TV channel that firefighters are in Robertine already on April 9th. Armed forces denied that report and said that Robertine remained under control of Ukrainian armed forces. At the same time, in the area of responsibility of the 65th Separate Mechanized Brigade defending the village, there are regular clashes with subversive groups that enter the village and try to gain a foothold there. Biden will not touch Iranian oil after strike on Israel, the U.S. considers China's request. Iran's unprecedented strike on Israel is unlikely to prompt sharp sanctions on Iranian oil exports from the Biden administration due to concerns about rising oil prices and discontent among its largest buyer, China, Reuters said, citing analysts. Shortly after Tehran launched an attack on Israel in retaliation for an Israeli strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, House Republican leaders accused President Joe Biden of weakness and said they would consider a series of bills this week to tighten sanctions on Iran. Appearing on Fox News, House Republican whip Steve Scalise said the Biden administration had made it easier for Iran to sell its oil, which it uses for military purposes. According to Reuters, political pressure to punish Iran poses a difficult challenge for the U.S. presidential administration, how to deter similar attacks in the future without escalating regional tensions, raising oil prices or confronting China, the largest buyer of Iranian oil. According to former CIA official Scott Modell, even if Congress passes bills against Iran, it is difficult to imagine the Biden administration moving forward with new sanctions, for example, to try to reduce or limit Iranian oil exports in any meaningful way. It is obvious that in the current geopolitical conditions and against the background of internal problems in the United States, the White House does not want to seriously expose itself to satisfy the whims of Tel Aviv. According to ABC News, the U.S. will not help Israel retaliate by launching offensive military operations in the wake of Iran's missile and drone attack. Biden administration officials have privately warned Israel has promised a response following the massive Iranian attack on the country. According to a U.S. official cited by ABC, this message was also delivered directly to Israel's top brass in a private phone call on Sunday between Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Israeli Defense Minister Joav Galant.


So let me let me just go over what we think is a reasonable process for this home stretch and So all of the we're going to have a report out from the five breakout sessions and what we thought we would do is after each breakout presentation as the full committee here to help us Prioritize their report outs to at least the top one idea that should that could be potentially carried forward Whether that'll work out in practice or not. We will we will see but at the end so that at the end We will have five great ideas coming out of five great breakout sessions and then We we thought we would then vote as a group giving each of us two votes and on the honor system only two votes to Prioritize amongst those five which would be the top two Force allowing us to force rank them in the outside chance that we don't have either enough Resources or BAM with to pursue every single thing that was this group has decided to do right now That we won't do them. It's just we need to sort of we want to be able to at least come out of this session with some Focal points and focal areas of focus Having completed that Terry and I will Will just us begin to sum up both things that we heard this morning because we owe it to ourselves to Take forward at least some of the learnings from The two international and the three NIH presentations from this morning and the discussions that ensued and then we have some ideas about you know some sort of Structure if you will or some sort of process that will ensue from this meeting that will we'd like to discuss with you and get your buy-in And that should take us pretty much to the end of the day And to the reception and cocktails after after we're done Does that make sense any questions or comments? One of the things I should have mentioned is that we want to make sure when we when we do have Any of the breakout presentations that because not all of you are in every breakout session We want to make sure that these experts have not missed something that you think is important. So we'll make sure that we ask you to State something that was missed You're standing here. So it must mean that you but you're the first report out You're number one. So Rita. Are we ready with marks?


What's happening guys? Merry Christmas to everybody. I'm probably gonna be putting this out Day after Christmas, but late Merry Christmas to all of you and happy holidays. I Am just putting this video out to celebrate 5,000 subscribers Happens super super fast And that's that's I guess that's how it happens. Just a video just blows up all of a sudden out of nowhere and and It was kind of weird because I always figured that I would post a video and then that video would blow up You know within the first month, but the two that got really big I I think I posted one of them four months ago and the other eight months ago and then just all of a sudden They just took off. I mean they'd been doing okay, I guess, but you know They were nothing special and then all of a sudden they just took off. So I guess that's how YouTube works I didn't expect it, but I'm super happy about it. It was a nice little Christmas present and You know one of them was a video I spent a lot of time making a lot of time recording and Doing the research on and then the other one was a video where I kind of just threw it together and You know, I came home one evening. I'm like, yeah, I'm gonna make a video Just threw it together and it's actually my most successful video now. How's the most views? So it's pretty crazy how that works Um Don't mind my cough cough is the reason that I have not been able to post videos I Failed the 30-day challenge that I talked to you guys about I think I made I think I made it to like day 20 Or something like that and then I got what I'm pretty sure is pneumonia and viral bronchitis all at once Because I got rid of the pneumonia, but I still have a cough.  I was coughing like Every 10 seconds just like uncontrollably really sucked So it was pretty much impossible for me to make videos. So I failed the challenge Unfortunately, but I still learned a lot from making it to like day 20 or whatever I made it to It was a great experience and a couple of those videos that I posted actually did pretty well Even though I didn't spend that much time on them. So Taught me a lot What really matters is the content not necessarily You know how much time you spend editing the video or you know doing all the fancy stuff like coming up with jokes and stuff a lot of the time it's just the content of You know, it's what you talk about So it's the subject and the content those are the two most important things and videos and then all the other stuff is just like kind of Just sprinkling on top like spice But the main, you know, meat and potatoes is a subject in the content. So that's what I learned from that 30-day challenge I learned a lot of other things too, but that was the biggest thing But yeah, man 5000 people it's crazy I've lived in towns that have less than 5000 people. So it's just crazy for me to even imagine super super grateful and bless that 5000 people thought my video was good enough to Subscribe click the little red button and subscribe. Hopefully they also rang the little notification bell but Yeah I'm still coughing a little bit, but I think hopefully here in a few days. I'll be able to record some videos that'd be great and Yeah It's crazy because my channel blew up right at I think around the 10-day mark or so of Doing the 30-day challenge. So I don't know if it was because I did the 30-day challenge and that kind of sent a Message to YouTube that this channel is not messing around this channel is going to consistently upload So it decided to promote my other videos. I don't know what happened I mean, it's it's a mystery to me But all I got to say is the 30-day challenge is definitely a great challenge to take up Sorry guys Definitely a great challenge to take up. I'll probably do it again at some point Hopefully I won't fail it this next time. Hopefully I won't get super sick Halfway through and then won't be able to do it. That would be great. But uh Yeah, guys, thanks again for You know subscribing to my channel a lot of new subscribers Let me know what other videos you want me to make and I will be happy to make those videos and and do a really good job and Research them and put out some really good content. But anyways, I think I'm rambling at this point Merry Christmas to everybody and I hope you guys have an amazing new year and I'll see you guys next year Bye for now


Simple room acoustics problems, like room modes, might be solved without shifting the problem to monetary conflicts if you play music from audio file player software in your computer. Let's see how that works. In my video, Loudspeaker Placement, the long version, I explain that two groups of acoustical problems might arise when placing speakers in a room. Problems be low, roughly 200 Hz and problems roughly above 600 Hz. The first group has to do with the size of the room and the low frequency wavelength, where half the wavelength equals the distance between two room boundaries, we speak of room mode. As soon as a wave with such length is produced by your stereo, it will cause a resonance in the room. When room treatment is done, often so-called bass straps are used. These are a kind of black holes for the lower part of the frequency band. Sound that enters the bass trap will be converted into another form of energy, like heat. But they are not always practical and often not aesthetically pleasing. So what if we don't have our stereo play the room mode frequencies and its first few harmonics? I have tried this using the room parametric equalizer and it worked quite well. Other player software has equalizers aboard and thus can be used too, like J-River Media Center 24 and Audivana 3 Plus. As always with room correction you must place your loudspeakers as good as you can before you even consider room correction. Again, my two step approach for loudspeaker placement video tells you exactly how to do this. The link is in the show notes. Also do realize that corrections you make on your listening position might only be appropriate for a small area around that position and might not work at other listening positions since standing waves have a position bound behavior. The goal here is to only filter out those frequencies that would agitate the room modes so the differences per place in the room might be smaller than when equalization over the low of 500 Hz is used, as room correction software often does. This is how I went about it. I installed a simple third octave graphics analyzer on my smartphone and monitored a number of tracks that contain a fair amount of low end. Over these tracks the 125 Hz bar often peaked higher than the neighboring bars. If I would only have monitored just one track the peaking could be a fingerprint of that recording. By monitoring several clearly different tracks this is avoided. So now I know that somewhere around 125 Hz there is a resonance but I want more precision. Making high precision measurements on low frequencies in a room is rather complex but since room modes are the consequence of the spacing of walls I calculated the frequencies. That can be done since we know what the speed of sound is, which is about 334 meters or 1100 feet per second in dry air, at sea level and at 20 degrees Celsius or 68 Fahrenheit. In other words in the standard climate as used by aviation but usually doesn't occur on many places on the earth. I say this to prevent you from calculating frequencies with three decimals to be exact. Routing at integers doesn't harm. Now the speed of sound. Some use 331.2 m per second at speed, which seems to be scientifically correct. Others use 333.3 m per second since that would give 1 km per 3 seconds. And I have used 334 m per second in the past so I will consequently keep using that. The differences are only of academic importance since in most instances climate conditions will differ anyway. The ground floor of my house is almost completely open with the exception of the hall and the cupboard below the stairs. Halfway there is a room divider that for low frequencies is acoustically transparent. So acoustically the room is 10.6 by 5.4 meters. To find out the frequencies that belong to these measures some complex math is needed for we need to divide the speed of sound by the length in meters, or feed if you prefer. I will use meters, so brace yourself, here it comes. The speed of sound is 334 meters and the length of the ground floor is 10.6 meters. So we divide 334 by 10.6 to find 31.509 434 339 Hz, which we round off to 32 Hz. We do the same for 5.4 meters, 334 divided by 5.4 is 61.8518519 Hz, which we round off to 62 Hz. Room modes start working at half the wavelength, so in my case 16 and 31 Hz. 16 Hz is so low that I don't expect problems there, but the full wavelength is 32 Hz, which is about equal to 31 Hz. And the harmonics are at 62, 64, 93, 96, 124 and 128 Hz. I decided to filter at 32, 63, 95 and 126 Hz and play with the width of the filter. The 126 Hz must have been the problem I have seen on the 3rd octave analyzer and I will try the lower 3 to see what impact they have. I will use these frequencies in the examples below but you should of course use the problem frequencies of your room. To filter out a very small part of the frequency spectrum, we use the parametric equalizer. It has this name since all parameters that define a filter can be varied. Center Frequency, Gain and Cue Factor. The center frequency is the frequency that is attenuated or amplified the most. The gain defines the amount of attenuation of amplification and the Cue Factor defines the width of the filter. It might be clear that we want to maintain as much low frequency energy as possible and only want to lose the problematic frequencies. So we are going to use a very narrow filter and thus a very high Cue Factor. Now let's see how we do this in three software players, Roon or Divina Plus and J-River Media Center 24. After starting up Roon, click the volume control in the lower right corner and click DSP. Select Parametric Equalizer in the left column. If it isn't present, first click Add Filter in the lower left corner and select Parametric EQ. Now you see four peak-dip filters set at 0 dB gain. Click on the pencil on the first filter and choose Bandstop. Set the frequency to 32 Hz, or your frequency of your home of course, and the Cue Factor at 15. Do the same for the next three filters but set them for the three higher frequencies, 63, 95 and 126 in my case. You can experiment with more filters at higher multiples but it brought me no further improvement. Now the filters are set, we want to go to Headroom Management. I set the Show Clipping Indicator to On and set the Headroom Adjustment to minus 3. This is needed to give the DSP function room to calculate without clipping. The clipping indicator is integrated in the signal part light that will turn red when clipping occurs. If that happens, just load the Headroom Adjustment DB setting with one or two more DBs until the clipping goes away. In Audivana go to Preferences and select Audio Units. Select AU Parametric EQ and click Configuration. Now drag the white dot to the right frequency or alternatively click on the frequency and change it to 32 Hz. Also change the gain to minus 20 dB, which is the maximum setting. Change the Q into 15 and click Apply. Take this for three more filters using the three frequencies you have found, in my case 63, 95 and 126 Hz, as frequency or rather use those frequencies that give problems in your room of course. Click the Use Audio Units Effect checkbox and you are set. In Media Center, open the menu Player and select DSP Studio. You can also use Command D on a Mac or Control D in Windows. Click Add and select Parametric Equalizer in the left column. Do not use Room Correction. And select Adjust the Frequency. In the lower part of the window enter 32 at frequency, 15 at Q and minus 40 at Gain. Leave left right as it is. Click Add again and enter 63 Hz frequency, 15 at Q and minus 40 at Gain. And do this again for the other two frequencies. Of course you need to enter the problem frequencies of your room.  It is important to get used to the new sound before judging since our ears correct for coloration to a certain degree and removing the room resonances will decrease the level of low frequency energy to a proper level but our ears, rather our auditory system, might initially experience it as lacking bass. So by listening to the new sound for a week that will be reset. After a week listen not to the timbre but to the details you can hear in both situations. So not how much bass is heard but how precise you can follow the bass lines of the instruments. If it doesn't work, switch off all filters but the one closest to the dominant resonance you saw in the third octave analyzer and start playing with that one. Vary the frequency slightly or play with the Q factor. If that improves the sound use the same Q factor for the other filters and use the integer division of the dominant frequency. When in doubt you could switch off three of the four filters, reduce the playback level on your amp and choose an amplification of 10 dB in the dominant frequency filter. Then vary the frequency until you hear a strong increase in level. By boosting you agitate that frequency easily but therefore make sure you play it at a low level. If that doesn't work well, temporarily low the Q factor to say 5. After finding the resonance frequency set the gain back to the initial attenuation and increase the Q factor to regain the fullness without exciting the room resonance. Then when ready set the other filters to the same Q factor and use integer divisions of the frequency used in the dominant frequency filter. This simple and cheap method will usually yield lower results than professional acousticians can achieve. Even if you would have the same education professional acousticians have, you would lack the experience. Well despite all the computer models they can use, like ray tracing software, it appears that experience is eminent and it doesn't come cheap. But if your room and speakers pose little problems, this is a fine and cheap solution. You might lose some quality due to the signal processing. How much is easily tested by disabling the filters and do a minus 0.1 dB low frequency high Q filter will be inaudible to our hearing so if there is a degradation in sound, it's due to the DSP algorithms. Room correction takes time to do well and that's not different in this situation. And you are on your own, I can't help you, for each and every situation is different and I simply can't spare the time to give you personal support. But I am researching automated systems, like direct in the NAD receiver I described already. So if that's more your thing, subscribe to this channel or follow me on social media. If you like this video, please consider supporting the channel through Patreon or Paypal. Any financial support is much appreciated. The links are in the comments below this video on YouTube. Help me to help even more people enjoy music at home by telling your friends on the web about this channel. I am Hans Beekhuyzen, thank you for watching and see you in the next show or on theHBproject.com. And whatever you do, enjoy the music.


The black viking is back and ready to react to the Avenger that I care the least about, but I actually know the least about and his name is Ant-Man and when I think of Ant-Man I think of Little Man and I think about Little Ant-Man I just think of a guy with an antenna on his head just saying my name is Ant-Man and I just think of a small man but I know he gets big I did see one Avengers cartoon where the Hulk broke his fucking kneecap and dropped it choked him to fuck out too so let's see what we can see here hopefully this first trailer is pretty good because you know I tell you this there are movies that have made me a fan of characters that I never was a fan of until I saw the movie Thor was one of those movies for example Blade was one of those movies for example Iron Man was one of those movies for example so let's see what they have to tell about Ant-Man I trust you Marvel I've been watching you for a while now they would tell you that you have nothing to offer second chances don't come around all that often I suggest take a really close look at it this is your chance your daughter's eyes all our children it's time about saving our world it's about saving theirs like what people gonna think when I announced myself as Ant-Man that was cool that shot was cool when he hit the button or whatever and he he shrunk he could tell because he was down there on the floor with little microscopic jacket floor pieces or whatever it was I would assume so um it looks more interesting to me now interesting and seeing it flying around on wasps or whatever that was a flying ant uh looks interesting and what was funny was when I'm watching it a lot of y'all was like nah it's gonna be kind of comedic and this and that and I'm watching it the music and the way they're talking I'm thinking to myself this is actually going to be serious I was just about to say it looks like it's got a serious tone to me man besides when he was like oh okay so he broke the tension right there let you know all right we're probably gonna have a serious theme running through this movie but we're gonna have a comedic kick to it every once in a while so hopefully it'll be good um I actually liked another movie that was more on the comedic side was Green Lantern I liked it more than I thought I would have but I would have liked it to be more serious like if a character I don't know um I don't really read DC that much or did I when I was younger so nor did I when I was younger so um was Hal Jordan a real funny guy is that why they you know chose um what's his name for him you know he's funny you say I don't know who I'm talking about he's supposed to play Deadpool Ryan Reynolds is that the reason why they chose him because Hal Jordan is funny because when I watched it the Justice League I don't remember him being a funny character or the black dude so I don't know anyway let me know your first thoughts of what mean subscribers


Mom hides camera to find out why doctor insists on alone time with kids. Molly watches Dr. Smith whisper something into her daughter's ear, and an uneasy feeling hits the pit of her stomach. She thought it was strange when he started requesting alone time with her daughter Lola, but doctors know best, right? Don't worry, Dr. Smith said to Molly, his tone soft and calm. A look after her, he said with his Hollywood smile sparkling in the light. She didn't know why but an uneasy feeling shivered up her spine. When Molly finally found out the truth about this doctor, she was lost for words. There was no coming back from this. If you asked anybody about Molly Jones, they'd say first and foremost she was a devoted and dedicated mom to her 10-year-old daughter Lola. The mom and daughter duo were inseparable, they were best friends. But this devoted mom had no idea what was coming to her, when her daughter ended up in a hospital bed, one cold winter night. Molly knew all too well how much of a struggle being a single parent could be. She was working three jobs a week, all while trying to balance motherhood. Being a single parent was hard work, there was no denying it. But not even Molly could have predicted what was going to happen when she put the safety and well-being of her own daughter in the hands of a so-called doctor. It was a cold day in winter when Molly woke up to find Lola crying at the bottom of the stairs. With tears rolling down her face, she was cradling her stomach, complaining of pains. Molly knew something was up, so she dialed 911 and the hospital told her to come in immediately. While on the way, Molly looked at her daughter and saw a sadness in her eyes. The hospital will take good care of you, she told her daughter. But Molly was so wrong. As soon as Molly arrived at the hospital she saw Dr. Smith standing in the corner. He was a handsome doctor with a Hollywood smile that made butterflies flutter around in her stomach. But Molly had no idea something sinister was behind this doctor's fake cheery smile. Dr. Smith took Lola away for checks, tests, and X-rays, meanwhile, Molly had to sit in the waiting area. Molly flicked through the decade-old magazines and watched the hands on the clock go around as slow as a snail. She had no idea what Dr. Smith's hidden agenda was. After coming back from tests with Dr. Smith, Molly was expecting her daughter to be happier, but instead, she seemed even quieter and reserved. In fact, she seemed even lower than before. What had Dr. Smith done? What was wrong with her? Hundreds of questions ran through Molly's mind. But when she found out the truth about this doctor, she was lost for words. Dr. Smith concluded that Lola had a stomach infection and needed to be kept in overnight so they could monitor her. Like any worried mom, Molly agreed to whatever was best for her daughter. Bishi had no idea that leading her daughter with a doctor would turn her world upside down. Throughout the afternoon, Lola was still quiet and moody. She seemed troubled and whenever Dr. Smith came near her, for a long time she climbed up as if she was hiding a terrible secret. Nighttime soon arrived and it was time for Molly to leave her daughter overnight at the hospital. A look after her, don't worry, Dr. Smith said, his white teeth sparkling in the light. Molly was soon going to regret her decision. Molly kissed her daughter goodbye and walked out of the ward. She turned around and saw that Dr. Smith was whispering something in Lola's ear. Molly didn't know why, but a terrible feeling hit the pit of her stomach. The following day Molly, functioning on around four hours sleep, arrived at the hospital to see her daughter Lola. Throughout the night Molly was restless, worried about her daughter 20 miles away lying in a hospital bed. But when Molly walked into her daughter's hospital ward, Lola was nowhere to be found. Neither was Dr. Smith. Where were they? Molly was getting more worried by the second. Then suddenly, in the corner of her eye, Molly saw Dr. Smith wheeling her daughter into the room. Molly lets out a sigh of relief. She asked where they had been, and Dr. Smith merely replied alone time. Something strange was going on and Molly knew she had to get to the bottom of it. But when she did, she was lost for words. Molly was stumped. Why did this doctor keep on insisting on alone time with Lola? Was he up to something? Surely he wasn't? He's a doctor after all, right? Nobody not even fellow doctors and nurses knew what Dr. Smith liked to do when he had alone time with his patients. Molly's maternal instinct kicked in, and she knew she had to find out the truth. So the following day, this mom-on-a-mission set up a secret camera that would record the doctor's alone time with her daughter. When Molly watched the footage back, her life turned upside down. Molly set up a camera on her daughter's bed, hidden between a cushion and a super fluffy throw. This plan was foolproof. Not only would she be able to see her daughter, but she'd also get to see what Dr. Smith was up to. But never in a million years did Molly expect to see what she saw. Once the camera was set up, Molly sat back and waited for Dr. Smith to arrive. Like clockwork, he did and he soon whisked Lola, and the secret camera, off for alone time, in another room. Unbeknownst to this doctor, Molly was watching his every move. About 20 minutes passed and Dr. Smith arrived back with Molly. As expected Molly didn't have a smile on her face, in fact, her eyes were watery as if she had been crying. When DR. Smith dropped Lola off, he went to see another patient so Molly quickly retrieved the camera and sat back to watch the footage. She wasn't prepared for why she would find. Molly watches the footage, and at first, it's just Dr. Smith wheeling her daughter Lola into another room. Once inside, he pushes Lola, lying on the bed, up to the wall and turns on the light. Molly can see her daughter's face washed with fear and confusion. Then within a matter of seconds, this doctor did something truly unimaginable. You see on the footage, it showed Dr. Smith pacing around the room. He turned some music on using his cell phone, and then, right in front of Lola, he started dancing.  Molly watched this footage with a tear in her eye, she knew she had to share it online. But she never could have expected the response she got. As soon as Molly posted the funny video of the Dr. dancing, it racked up hundreds, then thousands of views. Many people, all across the globe, were touched by the doctor's attitude and willingness to turn Lola's hospital visit into a positive experience filled with laughter and smiles. But then somebody super famous came across the video. Worldwide star and legendary talk show host Ellen DeGeneres came across the video and shared it with her millions of followers online. In the end, the video of Dr. Smith dancing reached over five million views. But it's no surprise, right? After all, Dr. Smith clearly loves his job, and we commend him for it.


Hey guys, before we hop into today's video, I just want to let you know that I have partnered up with beatopia, which is a really cool platform that's dedicated to us teaching artists and producers, industry tips, tricks, all that good stuff that will help you grow. They pretty much aligned with our brand and the type of stuff that we do. Now we are doing a giveaway of a no women TLM one or two condenser microphone and all you have to do is follow beatopia. And they will announce the winner in about a month. Now the link isn't in the description below. Just go over there, check them out, give them a follow, tell them I sent you and you could potentially have the chance at winning this $700 microphone, which I'm gonna be real with you. I didn't know microphones cost that much before this. And if this is what artists are going through, this is the type of stuff you have to spend your money on, then I feel you bro, music is expensive. But the mic almost made me feel like I should be a rapper. So like I said, if you're interested in that, if you want a chance to winning that mic, just go and follow beatopia on Instagram. Once again, I will put that link in the description below. Make sure you let them know that I sent you another than that. Let's get into today's video. Oh, what's going on? It's your man Kory. Welcome to the digital dashboard. I'll be giving you tips on how to market your songs to get those numbers booming. Now today, what I want to do is give you a couple of tips that if you do these right, should make any promoter that you come in contact love you. Now I throw local events here in Atlanta. I have a festival that me and my friends have grown from the ground up called Blue Summer. We've been doing it for about two going on three years. And just throughout that entire process, I have seen a lot of things that artists have done well, that have made us love them and want to work with them again. And I've seen things that a lot of artists do wrong that just completely turns you off from their artists and makes you never want to deal with them again and never put them on any type of concert, showcase, festival, whatever. So for those of you who are doing shows who are wondering to yourselves, hmm, how can I make a good impression on a promoter so that I get these show opportunities again? Or just for those of you who are planning, you know, want to be in the best positions for when they finally do start to get those opportunities. This is the video for you and I'm willing to bet that if any promoters out there watching this video, let me know if you agree with some of these things because I really do feel like these are universal across all promoters, not just me. But before we get into all of that, come and follow me on Instagram. I make sure to put my ad name in the description below. Come talk to me, come engage with me, come give me some video ideas, all of that good stuff. Now with that being said, let's get right into it. Now the first thing is to make sure that you are organized and timely. The last thing that any promoter wants is to be held up on a flyer or to be held up on some type of promotional video because you were taking too long to get them back the files that they need. Now I will recommend that you have a folder already created that has any hot quality photos, all of your show versions of your tracks, meaning your songs without the vocals over top and just any additional information that they might need from you ready to go in a zip folder that you can send to the promoter as soon as you get booked for the opportunity and make sure that you are responding to their messages on whatever platform that you guys choose to talk on text, email, Instagram, whatever it is, make sure that you're looking out for messages from that promoter and responding back to them in a timely manner. Because like I said, when it comes to events, everything is time sensitive.  We need you to be organized and for you to get back to us as fast as you possibly can.  You would be surprised at how many artists get booked for these shows, they get booked for these events, the flyer drops, the promo video drops and it's just crickets. They don't talk about it, they don't put it in front of their audiences and then when the show happens they're mad at the promoter because only eight people are in the crowd for them. It's like, it's your fault. You didn't tell anybody you were gonna be here. Now, when we book artists, the understanding agreement is that, hey, we're going to put you in front of our audience in hopes that you put us in front of your audience. It's supposed to be a mutually beneficial arrangement but we both grow and we both get engagement and awareness off of us helping each other out, right? But if you're not holding up your end of the bargain, you're not promoting the show, then we or any promoter starts to feel like you're leaching off of their movement and you're not really trying to contribute to what's going on. And like I said, that's huge, right? Like, how do you expect your audience to know you're going to be at the show if you're not even promoting it? And like I said, man, you would be surprised at how hard it is to get people to do things that they say they want to get paid to do but then they can't even do it when the time comes for it.  Sometimes you gotta like threaten certain things to get shit done and it really is a pet peeve of any promoter when once again we're kind of looking to you to bring people out or looking to your audience to bring people out. Now I have once heard like a veteran promoter say it's not on the artist to necessarily promote the show and bring people out. I don't necessarily agree with that because I feel like why do the event or why do the show if you have no intentions to promote? Like I personally would much rather book a mere sized artist or a smaller artist who is going to go hard with the promotions for it than to book like a big artist who's not going to tell people they're going to be there because it makes us look like we're a scam like it's not even really going to happen.  Nobody, no promoter. And third thing, make sure that you're on time for sound check in your set. If they tell you that sound check is at 6.30 get there at 6.15. They tell you that your set is at 9.45 get there at like 9.15 the latest. Once again, no promoter wants to be running around the venue during that busy, hectic night looking for you because you're on stage in three minutes and no one has seen you for the last 45 minutes. This is really big. And if you realize it, the big theme of a lot of this stuff is just professionalism. Being professional in these spaces with these promoters would have you getting looked at in a much more positive light than the artists who are not professional because once again, this is a job. I'm doing my job in the hopes that you do your job the best and just the best that we both do our jobs the best the event would turn out. And the more likely I will want to book you and work with you again. Another thing is to make sure you give a good performance for the show. I get it. Not every artist really has promotional experience to what they may give the best show that they can. Some of you are still figuring it out figuring your sets out. And if you are an artist who hasn't really performed that much let the promoter know a friend. Say, hey, this is like my second or my third show but I am going to do this to the best of my abilities. We will appreciate you for that. We may not always feel you but we will at least appreciate you for it. Now I also know that a good show is subjective. So just some general tips for making sure that you have a good performance or a good set is to one, don't rap or sing over your vocals. We hate it. Everyone hates it. No one thinks it's lit. No one thinks it's cool. Stop rapping over your vocals. It makes you look unprofessional and very amateurish. And remember when you're in the music industry you're not just competing with local artists. You're competing with artists as big as Drake. And they're doing it to the highest degree. And that's a very small thing that every artist can do that makes them look professional. It's to rap over a performer's version of their track. Performance version is pretty much just your song without the lead vocals. You can leave like ad libs and backgrounds and the stuff but you shouldn't be rapping over the main chorus or the main verse. The second thing that you can do is to engage with the crowd. No one likes to stay a performer.  So incorporating skits or routines or just conversation points that allow you to pull the audience into your set is a huge win and a huge plus.  Like the audience loved it. We loved it. The fans loved being a part of it. And it just took his set to a different level compared to the other artists who just were like there, right? And another big thing is to if you're performing in front of a crowd and they're not responding the way that you would like them to respond, do not berate the crowd.  No one wants to hear that because once again, we spent our money to be entertained by you, not the other way around. So if it's just not striking, perform your set, taking a stride, get some feedback and then focus on making sure your next show is better.  But the better your performance, the better your set, the more we want to book you and put you on shows again. And lastly, support other events that the promoter has going on, whether you're on them or not.  Show some love, promote the event on your stories or in your other socials. That goes a long way because then that shows the promoter that you are an artist who is genuinely trying to build a long-term relationship with us and not just another artist trying to leech off of the movement in the audience that we have built with our platform because that is how a lot of you guys come off. When you are jumping into the DMs of promoters, you jumping into the promoter's face, trying to get certain opportunities. When we can smell the bullshit, like we can smell the cap.  You just want exposure in our platform. Like I said, man, we've gotten some wild DMs before. We've had people walk up to us and ask us wild stuff. And the main thing that we always take away from it is, man, you don't really love me, bro. You just want the cloud, bro. Like you not really here for me. Now, like I said, all of these things pretty much tie back to professionalism and relationship building. Two key things that are huge in the music industry and especially huge with building with promoters who can potentially put you on local shows, bigger shows, festivals or even tours sometime depending on what type of relationships and connections those different promoters have. And once again, I feel like these things are universal to any promoter. And if you do these things and you do them well, then promoters should love you.  And hopefully that opens up other show opportunities for you. Now, I would love to hear what you guys think. Do you think that these things are actually feasible? Do you feel like these things should be done? If you are a promoter or anyone who throws and shows and books artists in your city, do you agree with me? Are there any extra things that you think I should have added to this video that you would love to see artists do? Or that artists have done that made you want to work with them again? Like I said, drop those in the comment section below or feel free to hit me up on Instagram or Twitter. Now, other than that, if you feel like you learned anything today, please like and share this video, hit those post notifications as well as I wouldn't want you to miss anything. Once again, my name is Kory and I'll see you next time.