Author Archives: Andrea

Researchers in U.S., U.K. measure volume of automated tweets, find that bots may have contributed to, even tipped, elections.

Bloomberg: Twitter Bots Helped Trump and Brexit Win, Economic Study Says.

“Twitter bots may have altered the outcome of two of the world’s most consequential elections in recent years, according to an economic study.

Automated tweeting played a small but potentially decisive role in the 2016 Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s presidential victory, the National Bureau of Economic Research working paper showed this month. Their rough calculations suggest bots added 1.76 percentage point to the pro-“leave“ vote share as Britain weighed whether to remain in the European Union, and may explain 3.23 percentage points of the actual vote for Trump in the U.S. presidential race.

“Our results suggest that, given narrow margins of victories in each vote, bots’ effect was likely marginal but possibly large enough to affect the outcomes,“ “

Link via MetaFilter.

“When the actions of the parents, neighbors, and school fail, there remains one last backstop: The state.”

The Atlantic: The Futility of Trying to Prevent More School Shootings in America. “As long as there is easy access to guns, there’s no way parents, teachers, and other specialists can thwart every violent teenager.”

“Details are only beginning to emerge about the gunman, and now it seems he kept his plans to himself, described in his personal journal. This would be unusual. In many of the other 21 (by CNN’s count) school shootings this year, there were clues to what would come to pass, to varying degrees. Typically, someone—a parent, a classmate, a teacher, a neighbor—had a hunch as to what would happen. Sometimes it was clear the child was mentally ill. Sometimes he had overtly displayed psychopathic traits. Sometimes other students steered clear of that particular boy at lunch in the hallway, because he was just plain scary. As Mary Ellen O’Toole, a retired FBI agent who’s an expert on school shootings, notes: “They never come out of the blue.“

If the clues were there, couldn’t these teens have been stopped? Faced with a dangerous child, families, schools, and police can do their utmost, and their utmost frequently staves off tragedy. But events like this point to a discomforting reality: Even though many potentially violent children can be treated and do get better, it’s impossible to ensure that every dangerous child will be reached. And, in the end, there’s not much that anyone can do to stop a determined shooter, aside from preventing him from getting a gun in the first place.”

“Point a gun at someone, and you’ll have 10 pointing right back at you, and that’s how we like it.”

The Washington Post: Gun violence’s distant echo. “After school shootings, a teenager challenges the gun culture in her conservative Wyoming town.”

“Alan had rarely heard anything described as liberal in northeast Wyoming, and now he listened as the disc jockey explained how 10 Campbell County High School students had marched downtown the previous afternoon to demand tighter gun laws. They said they wanted mandatory background checks on all gun purchases. They said they wanted to build a gun-control movement in solidarity with survivors of a shooting in Parkland, Fla., and tens of thousands of other teenagers protesting across the country.
[…]
“They should be expelled,“ Alan remembered joking to his co-worker, once the radio switched back to classic rock and they turned onto the highway toward Gillette. “That bleeding-heart nonsense might fly in New York or D.C., but in Wyoming? That’s treason.“
[…]
He parked at a ramshackle house on the outskirts of town, where the newspaper waited at the kitchen table. On the front page he noticed a story about the gun protest, the first that anyone could remember in Gillette. “A Walkout for Change,“ the headline read. Above that was a picture of several students marching, and there in the midst of them, holding a protest sign, was his 16-year-old daughter, Moriah.”

Ein halbes Grad Unterschied

Deutsche Welle: Klimawandel begrenzen, um Arten zu schützen. “Naturschützer kämpfen dafür, Arten vor dem Aussterben zu bewahren. Klimaschutz ist möglicherweise eine Schlüsselmaßnahme. Er könnte die Tiere bewahren, von denen wir am abhängigsten sind.”

“Die Forscher untersuchten drei Szenarios: eine Erderwärmung von 1,5 Grad, 2 Grad und von 3,2 Grad Celsius. Auf letzteren Wert laufen wir derzeit zu, wenn alle Länder ihre international abgegeben Versprechen in punkto CO2-Emissionsreduktion einhalten.

Nach derzeitigem Verlauf würden bis zum Jahr 2100 etwa 49 Prozent aller Insekten, 44 Prozent aller Pflanzen und 26 Prozent aller Wirbeltiere die Hälfte ihres Lebensraum verlieren. Beschränkt sich die Erderwärmung auf 2 Grad Celsius, wären es noch 18%, 16% beziehungsweise 8%. Und bei einer Erwärmung von 1,5 Grad Celsius erniedrigt sich die Zahl der betroffenen Arten auf 6% der Insekten, 4% der Pflanzen und 4% der Wirbeltiere. In dem Fall hätte quasi der Großteil der weltweiten Arten Glück gehabt.

“Die aktuelle Studie bestätigt frühere Erkenntnisse, dass der Klimawandel die Biodiversität bedroht”, sagt Tiffany Knight vom deutschen Zentrum für integrative Biodiversitätsforschung in Leipzig. “Es gibt klare und eindeutige Belege dafür, dass der Klimawandel bereits die geographische Verbreitung, die Häufigkeit und die Migrationsmuster von Arten beeinflusst hat und damit die Biodiversität des Planeten bedroht.”

Aber, so fügt die hinzu: “Wenn wir als globale Gemeinschaft die Ziele des Pariser Klima-Abkommens erreichen oder übertreffen können, dann können wir einige der prognostizierten dramatischeren Verluste verhindern, die fatale Folgen für uns Menschen hätten.” “

Apotheken in Deutschland

In diesem YouTube-Video wird in 3 Minuten 30 erklärt, warum ich nicht bei Versandapotheken bestelle – weder rezeptpflichtige noch rezeptfreie Medikamente. Ich finde es wichtig, dass die Apotheken vor Ort bestehen bleiben, und dazu müssen sie genug Kunden und genug Umsatz haben.

In Not – die Apotheken in Deutschland. Das Video wurde von den beiden Apothekerinnen Pharmama (Schweiz) und Ann-Katrin Kossendey-Koch (Deutschland) erstellt.

Ich möchte nicht dazu auffordern, die verlinkte Petition zu unterzeichnen (zumal fraglich ist, ob sie etwas bringt), sondern zum Nachdenken und bewussten Einkaufen von Medikamenten.