Environmental Health will offer a ServSafe Certified Food Protection Manager Class on April 24th & 25th (13 hours of class time) with the exam held on the 26th. The cost of the class and exam is $165 and it will be held in the large conference room on the second floor of the Rockingham County Governmental Center. The class is limited to 15 people and is on a first come first serve basis for those that register. If you would only like to take the exam on April 26th, the cost is $50.
The Danville Police Department is seeking the identities of two suspects from a convenience store robbery that occurred Wednesday evening, Feb. 15.
Around 8:40 p.m. Wednesday, the Sunrise convenience store in the 500 block of Memorial Drive reported two black males entered the store.
One of the males, described as six feet tall in a gray jacket was masked and armed with a machete. The other male, described as five foot, six inches tall wearing a multicolored jacket, was armed with a handgun and demanded the cashier open the register.
Both men left the store with an undisclosed amount of cash and cigarettes. They were last seen leaving the store on foot.
No one was injured during the incident.
Anyone who has information is asked to please contact the Danville Police Department through any platform, including patrol at 434-799-6510, investigations at 434-799-6508, calling 911, contacting Crime Stoppers at 434-793-0000, approach any officer you see, through social media, via email crimetips@danvilleva.gov, or use our crime tips app CARE at https://www.p3tips.com/tipform.aspx?ID=818#.
The Danville Police Department is participating in its first year of review after being awarded CALEA Accreditation in March 2022. CALEA, Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies, will be collecting public comment on the department through April 21.
The purpose of this public portal is to receive comments regarding an agency’s compliance with CALEA standards, engagement in the service community, delivery of public safety services, and overall candidacy for accredited status. These comments can be in the form of commendations or concerns. The overall intent of the accreditation process is to provide the participating agency with information to support continuous improvement, as well as foster the pursuit of professional excellence.
IMPORTANT: CALEA is not an investigatory body and subsequently the public portal should not be used to submit information for such purposes. Additionally, there will be no response other than acknowledgement to submissions; however, the information will be considered in context to its relevancy to compliance with standards and the tenets of CALEA® Accreditation.
To submit a comment about the Danville Police Department, click here.
The City of Danville’s Information Technology Department has launched a new real estate dashboard that shows valid residential sales in the city over a rolling three-year period.
The Sales Analysis Dashboard was developed in conjunction with the Finance Department’s real estate division.
“The ArcGIS dashboards enable us to convey information by presenting location-based analytics using intuitive and interactive data on a single screen,” said Scott Longerbeam, geographic information systems (GIS) coordinator for the Information Technology Department. “These dashboards are used to help make decisions, visualize trends, monitor status in real time, and inform our community.”
The Sales Analysis Dashboard displays the following information:
Total sales amount.
Average sale price.
Total number of sales.
“This sales data can further be filtered by predetermined areas, such as the northern or southern parts of the city, or by the tax grids, with the values directly reflecting the areas chosen,” Longerbeam said.
Users can select multiple tax grid areas at once, filter the selection by price or by date, as well as select via a user defined rectangle, circle, or custom polygon area.
“Users can also click on individual sale points to access a pop-up containing some basic information about the parcel, a picture of the house, and a direct link to our Parcel Viewer application for a more in-depth look,” he added.
The GIS division of the Department of Information Technology oversees the Parcel Viewer application, as well as the use and development of other location-based information systems.
Super Bowl ads tend to kick off trends, and it looks like the automotive industry will ramp up its pitch for electric vehicles after giving them center stage. Even Tesla, which has never run a Super Bowl ad, managed to sneak its Model Y into a Popeyes commercial, while Ram boasted that its new electric pickup truck’s smart technology solved the problems of “premature electrification” that left consumers unsatisfied.
In it, Tesla’s self-driving cars run down child-sized mannequins. Tesla CEO Elon Musk shrugged off the ad, tweeting that even bad publicity would end up promoting Tesla’s self-driving cars.
As a media scholar interested in how cultures deal with disruptive technology, I see similarities between today’s concerns over EVs and the early days of cars.
Back then, the public conversation usually contained a mix of optimism and fear. Then automakers turned to advertising to allay those fears.
Sound signals and safety
As it happens, advertising safer technology is as old as the automotive industry.
Because automobiles can endanger human life, engineers have long been trying to solve their safety problems. In the early 20th century, along with better brakes, headlights and steering wheels, engineers promised that advances in sound signaling technology – the car horn – would make driving safer by letting people know a car was coming.
In my new book, “Danger Sound Klaxon! The Horn That Changed History,” I tell the story of early sound signals. At first, engineers adapted the bells, gongs and whistles from other types of conveyances to automobiles. But eventually the industry settled on the squeeze bulb horn – the kind that makes a “honk honk” noise.
Squeeze Bulb Horn.
The only issue? In crowded streets, they weren’t loud enough to hear.
So in 1909, a new horn from the Lovell-McConnell company called the Klaxon solved that problem, promising drivers the ability, with just the touch of an electric button, to let loose a metallic “aaOOga” sound so loud that no one could miss it. They quickly set to work to convince the public that their patented noisy technology made driving safer.
Klaxon horn.
Klaxon’s ad campaign used a new technique called “situational advertising” that put readers in imaginary situations where they were given a choice. Many of these ads, run in some of the era’s most popular magazines, asked readers to consider the best way to protect themselves from other people’s carelessness.
One Klaxon ad from a 1910 issue of the Saturday Evening Post portrays a distracted pedestrian stepping in front of a car in New York City’s Herald Square with the tag line “You Can’t Change Human Nature.”
“The auto must have a signal that really warns,” reads the copy. “If all minds were always alert – if children could protect themselves – if the weak were strong, there would be no need of any auto signal.”
And so the ad suggests that the only responsible solution for car owners is to own a Klaxon, because its distinctive noise said “AUTO COMING! LOOK OUT! NOW!”
Quieter tech to keep drivers safe
People bought the medium and the message. For two decades, Klaxon dominated the global car horn market and pumped its technocentric safety message into the media ecosystem.
But reliance on loud signaling technology to keep people safe became an odious proposition after the traumas of World War I, when Klaxons were used in the trenches as a gas alarm. In the postwar period, a transnational culture war against noise took off.
So societies everywhere turned to different forms of technology, like traffic lights, to solve the safety problem that noisy car horns could not. The Klaxon went into diminuendo as engineers turned their attention to the problems of quieting automobile noise with muffling technologies such as closed cabins and “silent gearwheels.”
Yet though their focus changed, the underlying message did not: Emerging technologies could always solve the problems caused by existing ones.
Smart technology promising less thinking
Flash forward to today and you can see that the more things change in technology advertising, the more they stay the same.
Titled “Those Guys,” the clever ad shows a wired-in zoomer, transfixed by his smartphone and oblivious to the world around him, walking the streets while Doris Day’s “It’s a Lovely Day Today” plays in the background. Like the man in the 1910 Klaxon ad, this guy steps right in front of a moving Atlas. But, thanks to its “Standard Front Assist and Pedestrian Monitoring” technology, the car brakes automatically and everyone is safe.
Human folly – epitomized by ‘those guys’ – is still cast as a problem to be solved by technology.
Obviously, the situation portrayed in the ad has changed. Today’s new quiet technology protects both pedestrian and driver from harm by sensing movement and automatically braking, so it doesn’t really matter whether either is warned.
But the subtext remains the same: Since you can’t change human nature and there will always be “those guys,” rest assured that emerging technology “built with safety in mind” can protect us.
And no matter what gadget the advertisers are trying to sell, that underlying technocentrism – a civic religion in American consumer culture that is practically as important as football – is a constant you can count on.
So whether it’s noisy horns, self-driving cars, smart speakers or cryptocurrency, people are bombarded with messages encouraging them to adopt new technology – without stopping to consider if they really need what companies are selling.
Virginia drivers may soon be required to have car insurance to drive in the commonwealth after bipartisan support sent legislation to the governor for approval.
Senate Bill 951, which is being carried by Republican Sen. Frank Ruff of Mecklenburg, would repeal an option in state law for drivers to register an uninsured motor vehicle by paying a $500 fee. The registration does not provide vehicle insurance to drivers.
Virginia and New Hampshire are the only two states in the U.S. to not require car insurance, according to AAA.
Macaulay Porter, a spokeswoman for Gov. Glenn Youngkin, said the governor will review the legislation.
“Most uninsured drivers have limited assets to either pay for their repairs at the time of the accident or assets for others to attach,” said Ruff in an email to the Mercury. “Therefore, they are doing the repairs partially themselves or junking the vehicle.”
Under the legislation, all registrations of uninsured vehicles would expire prior to July 1, 2024.
Insured motorists generally have to pay for their own damages if hit by an uninsured driver. Ruff said he hopes the focus on the issue will help drivers understand the need for insurance.
The law allowing vehicle owners to register an uninsured motor vehicle and still comply with Virginia’s insurance laws was enacted in 1958, according to Jessica Cowardin, a spokeswoman with the Department of Motor Vehicles. The fee was originally set at $15.
Fees are deposited into the Uninsured Motorist Fund, which aims to reduce the cost of insurance coverage for accidents involving uninsured motorists.
The fund also receives revenues from penalties and fees for noncompliance with Virginia’s financial responsibility laws.
Today, approximately 5,000 of Virginia’s 7.5 million registered vehicles are uninsured, according to fiscal year 2022 data collected by the DMV. Of the $5.3 million transferred by DMV to the fund that year, approximately $650,000 was from the uninsured motor vehicle fee.
In January 1995, the DMV convened a task force to study issues related to liability insurance. The group recommended that Virginia continue to offer motorists the option to pay an uninsured motorist fee rather than requiring mandatory insurance.
“Compulsory insurance appears at first glance to be the right answer,” says a 1996 report on the task force. However, it concluded, “compulsory insurance is not the solution to the problem of uninsured motorists. Instead of reducing the number of uninsured motorists, compulsory insurance requirements have prompted citizens, who are trying to circumvent the state’s insurance requirements, to acquire short term policies that are canceled as soon as the vehicle is registered or, obtain a fraudulent insurance card that is shown at the time of registration.”
Ron Jenkins, executive director of the Virginia Loggers Association, said the group reached out to Ruff about addressing the issue of uninsured motorists after logging truck drivers began installing dash cameras to document “some of the crazy things we see on the highway these days” and protect themselves in a potential court case.
“We think it’s a good policy,” said Jenkins. “We think it’s a perfect time to change policy, and we hope the governor signs it.”
Matt Overturf, a regional vice president with the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies, said it’s difficult to predict how drivers of uninsured vehicles might respond to the proposed elimination of the fee option.
“Some may continue to obey state laws and obtain coverage despite the likely higher costs, some may opt to continue driving but without coverage, and some may simply stop driving,” Overturf said. “But what remains certain is that having insurance coverage is a positive for both the driver and others on the road and a financial lifeline in the wake of an accident.”
Ruff admitted he had had no expectation of the legislation passing since the law allowing drivers to pay the fee had been in place for decades.
He said drivers would also illegally use a “farm use” placard to avoid insuring vehicles. Last year, lawmakers passed legislation that requires vehicle owners using the farm use exemption to obtain a nontransferable permanent farm use placard from the DMV for $15 and certify that the vehicle is insured.
Lawmakers last year also passed Ruff’s legislation to automatically fine drivers $600 every time a car was stopped if a driver could not show proof of insurance within a couple of weeks. He said a no-frills liability policy can often be purchased for less than the fine.
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