wing of kaz has added a photo to the pool:
鹿児島県霧島市、ホテル京セラでアンブレラスカイ / Umbrella Sky at Hotel Kyocera in Kirishima City, Kagoshima Prefecture
Supernatural horror Saccharine and melodramatic comedy Maddie’s Secret are the latest films on body-image anxieties served up by Hollywood
Saccharine is soundtracked by a rumbling stomach. Ping-ponging between binge eating and regimented workout routines, first-year medical student Hana Hitching (Midori Francis) considers how she could drop down to her ideal weight. For someone whose body-image issues appear longstanding – a brief shot reveals the diet books stashed away in her drawer – a quick fix appears irresistible. Hana begins taking an illicit supplement guaranteed to make the weight just “melt off”. The secret ingredient? Human ash.
Soon she begins to be stalked by the ghostly presence of the woman whose cremated last remains she has been consuming. “It’s kind of worth it, right?” says a formerly overweight friend, who once took the same pills and experienced the same ensuing anxiety and audio hallucinations, in a scene that encapsulates the cruel motto central to extreme diet culture: nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.
Continue reading...From north-east Scotland to Romford, London, what do those who spoke to the Guardian during the referendum campaign make of how it all panned out?
The Guardian has revisited five bellwether constituencies we reported on during the 2016 EU referendum campaign, and asked those we spoke to at the time how they now feel about Brexit a decade on from the vote.
Continue reading...Former health secretary decides not to run, making Burnham overwhelming favourite to succeed Keir Starmer as soon as July
Wes Streeting has said he will back Andy Burnham to become the next Labour leader, making it highly likely that Burnham, the former Greater Manchester mayor, will replace Keir Starmer as prime minister in July.
In a post on X, Burnham, who will be sworn in as an MP later on Monday after winning last week’s Makerfield byelection, said Starmer’s announcement on Monday that he would stand down as prime minister “marks the beginning of a transition and it is important that this process is conducted in an orderly and responsible way”, adding: “I will put myself forward as part of this process.”
Continue reading...I haven’t thought about the privacy issues surrounding professional athletes and wearables.
Wearables present serious privacy issues for “Average Joe” consumers, who are entrusting tech companies to safely store and protect their biometric data. Imagine the stakes for a professional athlete, whose entire livelihood could be affected by a single biometric data point. To give one of many realistic hypotheticals: a basketball player has a terrible game, and the coach wonders if they showed up to the gym hungover. The coach has access to the player’s wearable data, and checks to see when they went to sleep, as well as what their heart rate looked like during the night. Should the player have been out partying before a game? No. Should the coach be able to surveil them? Definitely not.
It will not surprise you to learn that there’s an emergent gambling angle here: sports leagues would love to commercialize players’ biometric data, and sharp bettors would love access to data about, say, a hungover player. “We’re going to get to a spot where people are betting not just on the velocity of the puck that was shot by a player in the NHL playoffs, but on what the heart rate of a certain player is going to be running down the field,” said Helen “Nellie” Drew, the director of the University of Buffalo’s Center for the Advancement of Sport, and a professor of practice in sports law.
There are other practical considerations, too. What if wearable data reveals that a player isn’t as speedy as they were before, and a team uses that data against the player during contract negotiations? What if a wearable reveals a player is favoring their leg, or is at greater risk of injury? This information is potentially beneficial to a training staff and an athlete, so long as it’s disclosed and used in a responsible manner—a critical, mostly unresolved caveat. “Aging and injured players are the most at-risk” of wearable data being used against them, said Michael LeRoy, who researches sports labor laws and AI, and is a professor at the University of Illinois’s School of Labor and Employment Relations.
The bit about gamblers is particularly scary.
I have often said that surveillance tech is generally deployed first against people with diminished rights: children, prisoners, military personnel, the mentally impaired. This is another early use case with different dynamics. The surveilled are wealthy and powerful, and—in many cases—unionized.