All posts tagged: distancing

‘After months of social distancing, my whole family came together’: Matteo Fagiolino’s best phone picture | Photography

‘After months of social distancing, my whole family came together’: Matteo Fagiolino’s best phone picture | Photography

Published by skeptic

As a portraitist and wedding photographer, Matteo Fagiolino likes to reflect his subjects’ personalities in his work. This photograph was taken after the first Covid lockdown ended, at the beach at Torre Pedrera, a town on the Rimini riviera in Italy. “It was a summer afternoon after months of social distancing,” he says. “It had been so long since my whole family had spent the day together, it was a breath of fresh air for everyone.” Fagiolino’s brother came, along with his two children – Andrea, in the foreground of this image, and Alice. “He is a very calm boy, she is a very determined girl, and I can see precisely these aspects of their character by looking at this image, especially in their eyes.” While the children were playing in the sea at dusk, “the sun began to set and warm their faces, and I noticed their expressions reflected in the water,” Fagiolino says. “I thought it might be nice to have a memory of that day spent together, so I got out of the …

Conservative MP Campaigning To Be Mayor Is Distancing Himself From Tarnished Tory Image

Conservative MP Campaigning To Be Mayor Is Distancing Himself From Tarnished Tory Image

Published by skeptic

Ben Bradley launching his local election campaign alongside Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in March. (Alamy) 4 min read1 hr Tory MP Ben Bradley, who is also the Conservative candidate for the East Midlands mayoralty, has said he is trying to separate his own campaign from the image of his party, as there is “clearly not a brilliant national picture”. Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire will elect their first mayor of the new East Midlands Combined County Authority on Thursday 2 May, on the same day as other mayoral and local elections are held across the country. Last month Prime Minister Rishi Sunak joined Bradley at a bus station in Derbyshire to launch the Conservative local election campaign in the region.  Labour is currently polling on average 20 points ahead of the Conservatives nationally, as Prime Minister Rishi Sunak continues to struggle to turn his party’s fortunes around in time for the local elections and for the general election, expected by the end of this year.  A report published by the Centre for Cities think tank last …

Despite distancing itself from politics, the topic is dominating Threads’ trends

Despite distancing itself from politics, the topic is dominating Threads’ trends

Published by skeptic

Meta’s newest app Threads, a would-be Twitter/X rival, may not want politics on its platform, but it’s coming to the app anyway — or so Threads’ search trends indicate. The app began testing its Twitter-like trends feature last month with a small group of U.S. users, but it’s now more broadly available to Threads’ user base across both desktop web and mobile, according to users’ reports. (Instagram says it’s still in testing, however). And with the expansion, it seems the topics that Threads users are talking about the most are, in fact, political in nature. As of the time of writing, three of the top five search trends on Threads are related to President Biden’s State of the Union address, including people’s reactions to the speech itself, as well as the Republican response and the heckling from Marjorie Taylor Greene. Image Credits: Threads screenshot The fact that the SOTU address dominates Threads’ trends indicates that when you present users with a real-time platform, similar to Twitter, where they can dash off quick reactions as short, …

Seals practise social distancing, aerial survey of North Sea shows | Marine life

Published by Sam

Aerial surveys of the North Sea have revealed that seals practise social distancing – and the discovery may have profound implications for the spread of disease among the marine mammals. In a paper published today by the Royal Society, researchers conducting censuses of grey and harbour seals detail new evidence that the two species not only maintain distances between their own kind (unlike walruses, for instance, who cluster close together) but also that this behaviour may “reflect an evolutionary response to viral susceptibility”. “By comparing harbour seal colonies with grey seal colonies, we have found that harbour seals keep a greater distance from their neighbours than grey seals do,” the report’s lead author, Jeroen Hoekendijk, told the Guardian. With catastrophic rates of bird flu currently contributing to serious concerns about disease in wildlife, the new report may have important implications for the way such outbreaks are tracked. The area surveyed was a wild expanse on the coast of the Dutch Wadden Sea, where both species of seals “haul out” on the intertidal flats and beaches …