- Inside new Parliament building: Unveiling its features, from grand halls to high-tech modern spaces DNAIndiaNews
- President, Not PM, Should Inaugurate New Parliament: Rahul & Other Headlines | News Wrap @ 4 PM Hindustan Times
- Rahul joins Opposition chorus against PM inaugurating new Parliament building Deccan Herald
- New Parliament Building India Update | Needless Politics Over New Parliament?| English News | News18 CNN-News18
- Parliament building inauguration on Savarkar birth anniversary: Cong says ‘complete insult’ to country’s founding fathers The Indian Express
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Tag Archives: spaces
Development on Dead Space’s PS5 Remake Is Done
The team at EA Motive has completed development of its Dead Space remake, meaning the survival horror will be ready for its announced 27th January, 2023 release date. The studio gleefully announced today that it has “gone gold”, which in the video game industry means the code has been completed, and will now be printed on Blu-ray discs and submitted to storefronts like the PS Store.
It’s probably worth remembering that, in this day and age, development is not truly over at this stage. The team at EA Motive will likely spend the weeks following the holidays working on a day one patch to ensure the product is as polished as possible. It’ll hopefully be able to chill over the festive period, though, knowing that Isaac Clarke’s return to the USG Ishimura is almost upon us.
The Callisto Protocol review: Dead Space’s spiritual successor has problems
The pitch for The Callisto Protocol is an enticing one: Creators behind the Dead Space series of sci-fi survival horror games would finally make a spiritual successor to that franchise, nearly 10 years into its dormancy at Electronic Arts. The Callisto Protocol would also build on the elements of Dead Space — creeping through cold, abandoned space environments inspired by Alien’s Nostromo, being doused in gore ripped from Event Horizon — with a decade of experience and maturity to hopefully make something better.
Developer Striking Distance Studios instead made something largely divergent — a Dead Space spiritual successor with some, but not all, of the best parts of Dead Space. In some ways, it’s a step back.
The Callisto Protocol opens with space trucker Jacob Lee, played by actor Josh Duhamel, pulling off One Last Job. That mission, naturally, goes sideways when an apparent terrorist group sabotages his cargo ship, crash-landing him on Jupiter’s second-largest moon, Callisto. Jacob and his ship’s saboteur, Dani Nakamura (played by The Boys’ Karen Fukuhara), find themselves thrown into the moon’s Black Iron Prison. Disaster doubles when Jacob wakes to find himself outfitted with an invasive implant called a CORE, in the midst of a catastrophic outbreak, and surrounded by mutated monsters wreaking havoc. Jacob, armed with only a stun baton, fights to escape from his wrongful, inexplicable imprisonment.
Where Dead Space focused on high-tension gunplay and the tactical severing of limbs from zombielike grotesques, The Callisto Protocol puts meaty, action-heavy melee attacks at the center of its combat. The game’s monsters swing at Jacob with haymakers, which he can dodge by leaning left or right. It’s a mechanic not unlike Nintendo’s Punch-Out!!, where Jacob can bob and weave until he can find an opening to bludgeon his attacker into a bloody mess. Later, Jacob gets access to pistols, shotguns, and rifles, which become complementary to melee combat, not wholesale replacements. He also gets Jedi-like powers, thanks to the battery-powered GRP, a glove that can grab and throw objects — including the monsters themselves.
Image: Striking Distance Studios/Krafton
Early on, combat can feel frustrating. Jacob’s lumbering movement gives everything a sluggish, inconsistent feel, and knowing when to dodge, or even when you’ve been struck by an attack, can be unclear. Understanding the game’s timing — finding The Callisto Protocol’s groove — takes time. Eventually, switching between melee, gunplay, and GRP controls starts to click.
Even in a one-on-one fight, a successful encounter might involve a series of dodges, bashes, surgical pistol shots (yes, you can remove enemies’ limbs here, too), and telekinetically throwing an enemy to give yourself some space. The GRP occasionally allows for a one-hit kill, letting you throw enemies into spikes or whirling fans, turning them into a chunky spray of gore. But the GRP is a highly limited resource and needs to be used sparingly. Later encounters switch things up, pitting Jacob against sentry robots that can instantly kill him from afar, and blind monsters where stealthy kills with a shiv aren’t just preferred, they’re all but necessary to succeed.
Still, the game has a general sense of sluggishness, a seemingly intentional choice to give Jacob and enemies a sense of weight and impact. Some inputs, though, like quick weapon switching, don’t seem to register sometimes, which is a huge problem in difficult encounters. Turning on “performance mode” in The Callisto Protocol’s graphics settings does help alleviate that sluggish feeling. By default, the game uses a more cinematic, graphically impressive visual mode. But the improved frame rate — and more responsive inputs — afforded by performance mode make a huge difference.
Image: Striking Distance Studios/Krafton
But even once you do settle more into The Callisto Protocol’s rhythm, combat scenarios often feel unrefined. Smaller enemies pop up with little to no warning, for instance, locking Jacob into button-mashing quick-time events that drain his health. Monsters also pop up directly behind you, making some encounters feel downright unfair. Dead Space had its “monster closet” moments that delivered fun, well-earned jump scares — but mutant zombies emerging from grates in the floor out of your line of sight? Far less enjoyable, particularly when paired with the game’s disorienting camera movement. That’s nothing compared to multiple moments where the game throws mobs of enemies at you. These are the worst parts of The Callisto Protocol, where any earned tension snaps and turns immediately into pure aggravation. Multiple difficulty spikes pushed the game past the realm of “enjoyable challenge” and into that of “unfair masochism.” I eventually switched to easy mode out of necessity.
The game’s checkpointing system is also inconsistent. There are frequent checkpoints, thankfully, but they often occur seconds into a boss battle, with no time to heal, reload, or reach a position of safety to recompose.
You do unlock upgrades over time that make Jacob slightly more powerful. At 3D-printing stations, you can spend money acquired from chests, corpses, and by selling contraband to improve weapons and the GRP. But no upgrades make Jacob a monster-slaying god, and credits are doled out sparingly enough that it seems impossible to upgrade and unlock everything in a single playthrough. (Or, currently, in a second playthrough, as The Callisto Protocol does not yet have a new game plus mode where upgrades will carry over. That’s due early next year, according to the developer.) Choices about which weapon or device to upgrade can feel tough: Is an extra few seconds of battery life for the GRP worth more than a harder-hitting stun baton? Should I blow credits on the increased ammo-count node to open up the damage boost for bullets later?
Image: Striking Distance Studios/Krafton
The Callisto Protocol’s 3D-printing stations, run by the United Jupiter Corporation that runs Black Iron Prison, may offer my favorite bit of world-building/commentary in an otherwise pretty straightforward sci-fi horror yarn. Posters strewn throughout the prison inform the security workers there they can spend their so-called Callisto Credits to upgrade their gear, forcing them to spend their own money on the very supplies necessary to protect themselves against the inmates.
Beyond that, the story of The Callisto Protocol and the disaster of Black Iron is told mainly through Jacob’s interactions with fellow prisoners Elias and Dani, as well as the warden and his sadistic captain Ferris. Players can also acquire audio recordings from inmates and guards, but unlike similar audio logs in the Dead Space games, which played through the games’ diegetic holographic UI, The Callisto Protocol requires the player to stop what they’re doing and dedicate their full attention to listening to each recording. Given that some of the recordings I listened to added nominally to the story, they started to feel inessential to the game’s narrative. I walked away satisfied with, but not surprised by, The Callisto Protocol’s story.
Where The Callisto Protocol excels is in its atmosphere and environments. The game’s cold, metallic, industrial world is gorgeously realized, giving Black Iron Prison a hard, tangible, weighty feel. Jacob slogs his way through air ducts, through pools of sewage, and between dangerous machinery that can shred him (and enemies) in an instant. Beyond the walls of the prison, players will explore an equally dark and terrifying moon surface, where they’re battered by snow and wind. The Callisto Protocol features an impressively, painstakingly created world; it’s an expensive-looking game, and not just for its Hollywood talent. (In addition to Duhamel and Fukuhara, Striking Distance and publisher Krafton also enlisted actors Gwendoline Christie and Michael Ironside for a six-episode podcast prequel to The Callisto Protocol.)
Image: Striking Distance Studios/Krafton
The Callisto Protocol is extremely linear, with only a few diversions, very little backtracking, and almost no puzzle solving. The original Dead Space’s holographic wayfinding system is absent here, but there are plenty of arrows and graffiti acting as literal signposts to your next objective. In other words, the game does not want you to get lost, even though I can’t imagine doing so anyway. After completing The Callisto Protocol in about eight hours — not counting the dozens of failed attempts in the section that broke me into selecting easy mode — I don’t see a reason to return to the game until Striking Distance adds the new game plus mode, or additional story content. What’s more, the manual save system doesn’t make it easy to return to previous chapters, meaning I’d have to do a full run-through to collect anything I missed.
With The Callisto Protocol, Striking Distance proves it can capably create nerve-wracking moments of tension and horror with a well-crafted combination of sights, sounds, and atmosphere. The studio was smart not to create a one-to-one copy of Dead Space — especially with original publisher Electronic Arts now returning to the franchise with a remake due next month. But still: The Callisto Protocol could have borrowed a few more lessons from its spiritual inspiration, and further refined its mechanics to make a game that plays as good as it looks.
The Callisto Protocol was released on Dec. 2 on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on PS5 using a pre-release download code provided by Krafton. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
Elon Musk to hold Twitter Spaces with advertisers
Musk will speak to a vetted group of advertisers on “Twitter Spaces,” a live audio conversation feature on the platform. WPP, one of the biggest ad agencies in the world, is among those participating, according to a person familiar with the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Topics for the discussion are unclear, but last week Musk said Twitter was facing a “massive drop in revenue” as advertisers paused campaigns on the platform. Since Musk completed his acquisition, reports of hate speech and abuse on Twitter have swelled.
Musk has been scrambling to shore up the company’s revenue streams, cut costs by laying people off and find new ways to make money as he faces the reality of having to pay around $1 billion a year in interest on the debt he accrued buying Twitter. The vast majority of Twitter’s revenue comes from advertising. A potential recession and rising inflation has already deeply cut into ad budgets, making now a particularly hard time for the entire digital ad industry.
At the same time, advertisers are hypersensitive to the kind of content their ads might appear beside. Musk has repeatedly said he wants to maintain content moderation standards, but by cutting half of the company’s employees activist groups and advertisers have grown doubtful the company will be able to maintain its standards on keeping hate speech and violent and sexual content out of people’s feeds.
NAACP President Derrick Johnson called on businesses to drop their advertisements on Twitter “until actions are taken to make Twitter a safe space.” Musk, a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist,” accused businesses that participate in the boycott of “trying to destroy free speech in America.”
Automakers Ford, General Motors and Volkswagen have all pulled their Twitter ads, along with cereal and snack companies General Mills and Mondelez, the corporation behind Oreo cookies, Ritz crackers and Sour Patch Kids candy. International ad and consulting firm Interpublic Group, which represents American Express, Coca-Cola, Fitbit, Spotify and dozens of other major corporations, has also advised its clients to suspend Twitter ad buys for now.
“A thermonuclear name & shame is exactly what will happen if this continues,” Musk tweeted Friday as more companies began their advertising exits, threatening to unleash his rowdy online fans on businesses and executives that desert the platform.
In his brief tenure, Musk has laid off roughly half of Twitter’s workforce, decimating content moderation and engineering teams days before Tuesday’s midterm elections. As the company’s remaining staff struggled to keep up with complex infrastructure challenges, the company moved to hire back some of those displaced employees.
Musk has plans to sell Twitter’s blue verification badge for $8 per month, he said, but without actually verifying users’ identities, a prospect that may actually cost the company more money than it brings in. It also threatens to create havoc on a platform that already struggles with the proliferation of disinformation, bots and scammers.
Since taking over, Musk has taunted politicians — including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) — on the platform, shared a meme featuring a Nazi soldier, propagated misinformation about the attack on the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and imposed draconian restrictions on parody accounts.
Those and other of Musk’s moves have spooked advertisers.
“Advertisers are not being manipulated by activist groups, they are being compelled by established principles around the types of companies they can do business with. These principles include an assessment of the platforms commitment to brand safety and suitability,” Lou Paskalis, the president of a major marketing firm, MMA Global, tweeted at Musk.
Musk blocked Paskalis — then unblocked him — after the exchange.
Time spent in blue spaces benefits children in later life, says study | Health
Childhood days on the beach or messing around in rivers can have significant lasting benefits for our wellbeing in adulthood, according to a study.
It found that exposure to blue spaces – such as coasts, rivers and lakes – as a child made revisiting blue spaces in adulthood more likely, as these adults showed greater familiarity with and placed greater value in natural settings.
More than 15,000 participants in 18 different countries were surveyed for the study, published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology by researchers at the University of Exeter.
“Learning to swim and appreciate the dangers in terms of rip currents, cold temperatures etc is of course primary,” says Mathew White, a senior scientist at the University of Vienna and co-author of the study, “but the message we are trying to get across is that to only teach children about the dangers of water settings may make them overly afraid of, and ill-equipped to benefit from, places that can also be hugely beneficial to their health and wellbeing as they grow up.
“The vast majority of blue space visits both for adults and children do not involve getting wet – so there are also many advantages from spending time near water, not just in it.”
There has been a growing body of research over the last decade about the specific beneficial effects of blue space on mental health.
A review published in the International Journal of Hygiene and Environmental Health in 2011 suggested visits to blue space could increase people’s physical activity levels and lower stress and anxiety, while boosting their mood and psychological wellbeing.
Another review published by the Environmental Agency in 2020, found that blue spaces were associated with improvement of mood and feelings of restoration to a greater degree than green spaces.
The study’s lead author, Valeria Vitale, a PhD candidate at Sapienza University of Rome, said via email: “We recognise that both green and blue spaces have a positive impact on people’s mental and physical health. Also, prior studies examining childhood nature exposure and adulthood outcomes have largely focused on green space, or natural spaces in general. However, as we highlighted in our paper blue spaces have unique sensory qualities (light reflections, wave motion, sounds, etc) and facilitate a distinct range of leisure activities (swimming, fishing, water sports).”
She added: “We believe our findings are particularly relevant to practitioners and policymakers because of the nationally representative nature of the samples. First, our findings reinforce the need to protect and invest in natural spaces in order to optimise the potential benefits to subjective wellbeing. Second, our research suggests that policies and initiatives encouraging greater contact with blue spaces during childhood may support better mental health in later life.”
Positive Childhood Experiences of Blue Spaces Linked to Better Adult Well-Being
Summary: Positive exposure to blue spaces, such as spending time playing at coastal locations or at lakes, during childhood is associated with a greater sense of well-being later in life.
Source: University of Exeter
New research based on data from 18 countries concludes that adults with better mental health are more likely to report having spent time playing in and around coastal and inland waters, such as rivers and lakes (also known collectively as blue spaces) as children. The finding was replicated in each of the countries studied.
Mounting evidence shows that spending time in and around green spaces such as parks and woodlands in adulthood is associated with stress reduction and better mental health. However, we know far less about the benefits of blue spaces, or the role childhood contact has in these relationships in later life.
Data came from the BlueHealth International Survey (BIS), a cross-sectional survey co-ordinated by the University of Exeter’s European Centre for Environment and Human Health. The current analysis used data from over 15,000 people across 14 European Countries and 4 other non-European countries/regions (Hong Kong, Canada, Australia and California).
Respondents were asked to recall their blue space experiences between the ages of 0-16 years including how local they were, how often they visited them, and how comfortable their parents/guardians were with them playing in these settings, as well as more recent contact with green and blue spaces over the last four weeks, and mental health over the last two weeks.
The research, published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, found that individuals who recalled more childhood blue space experiences tended to place greater intrinsic value on natural settings in general, and to visit them more often as adults – each of which, in turn, were associated with better mental wellbeing in adulthood.
Valeria Vitale, Lead author and PhD Candidate at Sapienza University of Rome, said: “In the context of an increasingly technological and industrialized world, it’s important to understand how childhood nature experiences relate to wellbeing in later life.
“Our findings suggest that building familiarity and confidence in and around blue spaces during childhood may stimulate an inherent joy of nature and encourage people to seek out recreational nature experiences, with beneficial consequences for adult mental health.”
Dr Leanne Martin, Co-author and Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Exeter’s European Centre for Environment and Human Health, said: “Water settings can be dangerous for children, and parents are right to be cautious. This research suggests though that supporting children to feel comfortable in these settings and developing skills such as swimming at an early age can have previously unrecognised life-long benefits.”
Dr Mathew White, Co-author and Senior Scientist at the University of Vienna, said: “The current study is adding to our growing awareness of the need for urban planners and local bodies responsible for managing our green and blue spaces to provide safe, accessible access to natural settings for the healthy mental and physical development of our children.
“If our findings are supported by longitudinal research that tracks people’s exposures over the entire life-course, it would suggest that further work, policies and initiatives encouraging more blue space experiences during childhood may be a viable way to support the mental health of future generations.”
The study is entitled ‘Mechanisms underlying childhood exposure to blue spaces and adult subjective well-being: An 18-country analysis’ and published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology.
Funding: The project was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No. 66773.
About this blue space and well being research news
Author: Louise Vennells
Source: University of Exeter
Image: The image is in the public domain
See also
Original Research: Closed access.
“Mechanisms underlying childhood exposure to blue spaces and adult subjective well-being: An 18-country analysis” by Valeria Vitale et al. Journal of Environmental Psychology
Abstract
Mechanisms underlying childhood exposure to blue spaces and adult subjective well-being: An 18-country analysis
Contact with natural environments is associated with good health and well-being. Although childhood nature experiences may be important in the development of an individual’s relationship with nature and subsequent well-being, previous studies have tended to focus on ‘nature’ in general, and the mechanisms by which childhood experiences influence well-being in adulthood remain insufficiently studied.
Drawing on cross-sectional survey data from an 18-country sample (N = 15,743) the current work extended previous research by examining: a) blue spaces (coasts, rivers, lakes, etc.) in particular; b) associations between adults’ recalled childhood exposure to blue spaces, frequency of recent visits to green and blues spaces, and adult subjective well-being; c) the role of childhood exposure to blue spaces on intrinsic motivations to spend time in nature; and d) the consistency of these relationships across different countries.
Tests of a model where childhood exposure to blue spaces was linked to adult subjective well-being serially through intrinsic motivation and then recent blue and green space visits exhibited a good fit, a pattern largely consistent across all 18 countries. However, an alternative model where recent visits predicted intrinsic motivation also demonstrated good fit, indicating that these processes may be iterative.
Building familiarity with and confidence in and around blue spaces in childhood may stimulate a joy of, and greater propensity to spend recreational time in, nature in adulthood, with positive consequences for adult subjective well-being.
‘The Lost World’: New book highlights Japan’s abandoned rural spaces
(CNN) — Simply saying the word “Japan” can bring up images of manga, maid cafes and neon lights.
But for Dutch photographer Maan Limburg, Japan is a series of rural landscapes punctuated by empty houses.
Her photographs of these places — from houses departed in the wake of natural disasters to closed-down theaters with the lights still cued up — are now featured in a book, “The Lost World,” which published in May.
Japan’s ghost houses
Japan has one of the oldest populations in the world, with an estimated one in every 1,500 people over the age of 100. As more young people move to the cities in search of jobs, rural areas have become more difficult to maintain.
And that’s not the only major force affecting Japan’s landscape. Events like earthquakes, typhoons and the Fukushima nuclear disaster have also caused widespread destruction or abandonment.
Enter the phenomenon of akiya, or ghost houses.
A 2014 government report sounded the alarm, saying that, should things continue at the present rate, about 900 villages and towns throughout Japan will be “extinct.”
Limburg didn’t just find empty homes — there were also abandoned businesses like this DVD store.
Maan Limburg/The Lost World
But even free houses aren’t necessarily the cure for Japan’s akiya situation. While other countries with aging populations, like Italy, have given away or sold very cheap houses to foreigners, they often come with a visa or residency permit attached. Japan’s houses, though, do not.
As a result, it can be hard to find people willing to live in the homes and fix them up, especially if they don’t speak Japanese or have access to a car.
Limburg, who is based in Utrecht, found herself irresistibly pulled to the lesser-known regions of Japan where many of these houses exist. She and her partner spent months there at a time, renting a car or van and driving through parts of the country that many tourists rarely explore.
Finding ephemera like calendars and newspapers can help Limburg figure out when a place was abandoned.
Maan Limburg/The Lost World
Leaving the cities
Limburg says she “fell in love” with rural Japan.
“Every village we got to, the people were like, ‘What are you doing here? The nearest tourist attraction is 35 kilometers. We can send you there. We can draw you a map if you want to.’ It was just really nice to see this different side of Japan,” she says.
And once she began visiting smaller villages, it was practically impossible not to find empty homes or abandoned buildings. At one point, Limburg says, her boyfriend asked if they really had to stop at every single one.
One of the reasons Limburg connected with rural Japan is that it reminded her of her native Netherlands. Though both countries have a reputation for being cold and not always welcoming to foreign visitors, Limburg disagrees.
“As soon as Dutch people see you’re actually interested, they will share a lot of information with you. That’s something I also really found in Japan to be true,” she says. “It’s one of the things I really enjoy in both countries that, if you have real interest in the people, suddenly they really share their life with you,”
But of course not all countryside is the same, and that was reflected in the kinds of empty buildings she found.
In Hokkaido, Limburg explains, many people had time to properly close up and weather-seal their houses before moving away. But in areas like Fukushima, where people had fled in a hurry, it wasn’t unusual to find teacups still set out or TV sets still plugged in.
One of her personal favorite discoveries was a former theater. The sets, costumes and lights were still intact, as if the actors had merely taken a lunch break and were due back any minute.
Some of the smaller homes had the most emotional punch. Limburg saw family photos still tacked up on the wall and found herself wondering what had happened to the people who lived here and what had made them leave.
“I hope to have treated the locations with enough respect,” she says.
Her favorite region was the “magical” northern island of Hokkaido.
“it’s rough and it’s rugged and it’s weird,” the photographer says. “We had a feeling that we were in an Edward Hopper painting without any people.”
“Once you start looking for empty houses,” Limburg says, “they’re everywhere.”
Maan Limburg/The Lost World
Reflections
In all, Limburg has visited Japan about 10 times, beginning when she was a teenager.
Because she is a freelancer, she’s able to spend long periods of time away, so her average Japan visit was three weeks. Multiple trips enabled her to see different parts of the country, as well as to meet and connect with some of the people she encountered along the way.
“The Lost World” is more than just a photo book — it’s an homage to the country she loves and respects.
Twitter Blue subscribers on Android can now pay to remove the Spaces tab
Twitter Blue has finally started letting subscribers on Android customize the app’s navigation bar. The feature, which was previously available only on iOS, lets you get rid of the Spaces icon that’s smack-dab in the middle of your navigation bar (and of course, remove some of the other tabs if you want, too).
With custom navigation, you can reduce the number of displayed tabs to as few as two, or keep all five that appear by default — handy if you’re tired of stretching your finger over the Spaces tab just to get to your DMs and notifications. Twitter first started testing the Spaces tab on iOS last year and rolled out the tab on Android in May, which seemed to only give more inconvenienced users a reason to sign up for the $2.99 / month Blue subscription launched last year.
But Blue can’t save us from every feature that’s cluttering up the app. Twitter announced last week that it’s going to start including more information in the banner that shows active Spaces at the very top of your timeline. While there still isn’t a setting to turn this banner off entirely (neither for free or Blue subscribers), it will now show who’s hosting the Space, who shares a tweet in the Space, as well as relevant Topics.
Illinois COVID Update Today: IL reports 7,709 new cases, 7 deaths; CDPH recommends masks in public indoor spaces
CHICAGO (WLS) — Illinois reported 7,709 new COVID cases and 7 deaths Friday as the CDC said 9 Chicago-area counties have reached a “medium” risk of transmission.
There have been at least 3,169,315 total COVID cases as of Friday, including at least 33,660 related deaths in the state since the pandemic began.
As of Thursday night, 808 patients in Illinois were reported to be in the hospital with COVID-19. Of those, 66 patients were in the ICU, and 24 patients with COVID-19 were on ventilators.
A total of 22,018,536 vaccine doses have been administered in Illinois as of Thursday, and 64.76% of the state’s population is fully vaccinated. The seven-day rolling average of vaccines administered daily is 14,163.
Ahead of a busy weekend of Mother’s Day celebrations, officials are urging people to mask up and avoid gatherings altogether if you have any symptoms at all.
Chicago and several suburban counties are now at a “medium” community level, defined by the CDC as having more than 200 new cases per 100,000 people in the past seven days.
“There unfortunately is a misconception that we’re out of this, and so I think people are not as cautious as they were before,” said Dr. Susan Bleasdale, director for infection prevention at UI Health.
Chicago city officials are now strongly recommending masks be worn in indoor public spaces, including on CTA and in CPS schools.
“Everyone should be wearing a mask,” said Dr. Emily Landon, director of infection prevention at UChicago Medicine. “If you’ve got an event coming up that you don’t want to be sick for, a vacation that you don’t want to miss because you’re home with COVID, you need to be wearing a mask all the time.”
For now, it’s still a recommendation and not a requirement. But if hospitalizations continue to climb, that could be on the horizon.
The move to medium level comes ahead of busy Mother’s Day weekend for many with families planning get togethers. Doctors caution rapid tests may not detect COVID if your symptoms are mild.
“You want to be really careful,” Bleasdale said. “If you’re visiting your mother, and there’s someone that is vulnerable, if you’re going to visit them, you may choose to wear a mask the entire time you visit together.”
CDPH also said Chicagoans should also ensure that they and everyone in their social network is up-to-date with COVID-19 vaccines and boosters, test in the setting of any potential COVID-19 symptoms and continue to follow all isolation and quarantine requirements.
As of today (5/6/22), Chicago’s COVID community level is “medium” per the CDC. Because of this, we are now strongly recommending wearing a mask in public indoor settings.
Do your part to #ProtectChicago. Make sure you are up to date on vaccination: https://t.co/CaEaU8sAu7. pic.twitter.com/lWytPaEksk
— CDPH | Chicago Department of Public Health (@ChiPublicHealth) May 6, 2022
Still, CDPH Commissioner Allison Arwady said Chicago moving into the “medium” level does not mean a citywide mask mandate, restrictions on public gatherings or reinstatement of vaccination requirements at this time. Arwady said CDPH would consider those measures if the city moved into the “high” community level, “which we aren’t close to reaching in Chicago right now.”
“We obviously don’t want to get there, and exercising some more caution now will help us keep COVID in control in Chicago,” Arwady said.
She added that moving into the “medium” level is not cause for alarm.
“We’ve been expecting to reach the Medium Level for some time now,” said CDPH Commissioner Allison Arwady. “It’s not a cause for alarm, since most cases right now are mild and thankfully our COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths remain at or near all-time pandemic lows in Chicago. But it is reason for more caution, and for more care with masking, since more people in Chicago are infected with COVID right now. Remember that people can spread COVID for two days before they develop symptoms, so putting on a mask in public indoor settings is an easy way to help protect our city while we’re at a Medium COVID Level.”
Cook, Lake, McHenry, Kane, DuPage, Will, DeKalb, Kendall and Winnebago counties have “medium” COVID risk levels, according to the CDC.
“You know, especially that 0 to 19 group, they’re reporting the most cases every day,” said Chris Hoff, with DuPage County Health Dept. “But we are seeing increases in every age group across the community.”
Cook County has a weekly COVID case rate of 259.31 infections per 100,000 people.
Lake County has a weekly COVID case rate of 331.64 infections per 100,000 people.
McHenry County has a weekly COVID case rate of 254.41 infections per 100,000 people.
Kane County has a weekly COVID case rate of 248.68 infections per 100,000 people.
DuPage County has a weekly COVID case rate of 365.69 infections per 100,000 people.
Will County has a weekly COVID case rate of 239.6 infections per 100,000 people.
DeKalb County has a weekly COVID case rate of 275.51 infections per 100,000 people.
Kendall County has a weekly COVID case rate of 251.96 infections per 100,000 people.
Winnebago County has a weekly COVID case rate of 218.35 infections per 100,000 people.
The video in the player above is from a previous report.
Copyright © 2022 WLS-TV. All Rights Reserved.
Twitter reverts change that left blank spaces in place of deleted embedded tweets
Twitter has confirmed it reversed a change that altered the appearance of deleted tweets embedded on websites outside of Twitter (thanks to @RuinDig on Twitter for pointing this out). Instead of leaving a blank gap in place of the deleted tweets, the site will go back to displaying the tweet’s original text.
“After considering the feedback we heard, we’re rolling back this change for now while we explore different options,” Twitter spokesperson Remi Duhé said in an emailed statement to The Verge. “We appreciate those who shared their points of view — your feedback helps us make Twitter better.”
If you head to any third-party webpage with an embedded tweet (like this one from The Verge), you’ll see that you can once again see the tweet’s original text, date, and the name of the user who posted it. Judging by Twitter’s response, it looks like this reversal is only temporary while the company figures out an alternate way to display deleted tweets on websites. It’s unclear what kind of “different options” Twitter might try out, but, hopefully, it won’t involve completely blocking out any information associated with the tweet.
On Wednesday, Kevin Marks pointed out that Twitter quietly began using Javascript — potentially as early as late March — to block out deleted tweets (pictured above) embedded on other websites. This includes tweets from accounts that have been banned or suspended from Twitter, making it impossible to see embedded tweets from people like Donald Trump, who Twitter banned last year. This had pretty big implications for news stories that included deleted tweets or tweets from banned users, which are typically important for context.
Earlier this week, Twitter announced that it’s working on a long-awaited “edit” button, sparking concerns over whether people could abuse the feature to change the content of a tweet (including those that are embedded) after it had already been shared.