Anja Lächner

Das Denken ist ein kostbares Gut. Das kritische Denken insbesondere. Es ist unangenehm und unbequem aber unausweichlich!

🤦🏽‍♀️

China has more connections to Europe than the graphic shows. In Germany, for example. Disinformation, cyberattacks, espionage, and sabotage. That's probably more hidden.

Very helpful to get a better understanding of #disinformation system

How Russian-funded fake news network aims to disrupt European election - BBC investigation An undercover reporter discovers a network is offering to pay for social media posts undermining Moldova’s ruling party.

In-depth investigation from the BBC, which infiltrated a disinformation operation to interfere in the Moldovan elections.

This operation is coordinated remotely by pro-Russian actors through Telegram.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

For authoritarian it is an easy way to point on people, they don‘t like and want to exist. It seems like a random act, it could hit everyone. Ridiculous!

"Health losses attributed to anthropogenic climate change," a brief communication in the journal Nature Climate Change. There's a map showing regions of the world, and pie charts of relevant studies as they apply to different health impacts like "heat-related deaths" and "maternal and child health"

🚨 NEW: Climate change is already causing 30,000 deaths per year - a global annual economic loss of $100-350B USD - but the true damage is probably 10x higher. Out TODAY in Nature Climate Change: the first systematic look at the science of "health impact attribution" 🔓 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Robert Redford on the phone, plus Dustin Hoffman. From All the President’s Men

When journalism was cool. And risked everything to challenge power.

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

Indeed. Independent journalism is a resource democracy needs!

Grok is a propaganda instrument that is tuned to cohere with ideological fantasy rather than mind-independent facts. If sums were politicised tomorrow, you can bet that 2 + 2 wouldn’t stand a chance

Sam Altman: Warum der OpenAI-Chef davon abrät, stets auf ChatGPT zu hören | t3n Immer mehr Leute fragen ChatGPT in verschiedenen Lebenslagen um Rat. Für das Geschäft der Entwicklerfirma OpenAI ist das gut – doch CEO Sam Altman macht das auch Sorgen. Der Chef des ChatGPT-Entwickle...

🙌🏼 ChatGPT is a unintelligent machine not a human. This is why it won’t help in Life challenging questionnaire! t3n.de/news/sam-alt...

Something Is Very Wrong Online The cycle of violence will continue as long as the medium doesn’t change.

Shooters now know that their violence will be flattened, picked apart, argued over, and amplified, @cwarzel.bsky.social writes. The internet's poison is in its very architecture.

Charlie Kirk war nicht "konservativ" oder "rechts-konservativ". Charlie Kirk war ein rechtsextremer Rassist, Sexist und Faschist. Jemand mit Einstellungen, die Teile der AfD moderat erscheinen lassen. Man muss sein politisches Projekt nicht beschönigen, um seine Ermordung zu verurteilen.

Zwei männliche und eine weibliche Silhouette. Im Vordergrund Mikrophone wie bei einer Pressekonferenz

🔥Hot off the press: Studie zur Repräsentation weiblicher Forschender in den Medien 👉
doi.org/10.1177/0963...
📰 Inhaltsanalyse: 4.860 Medienartikel
👩‍🔬 Nur 18% der zitierten Expert:innen sind Frauen
📊 Frauenanteil in der Forschung: ca. 31%
➡️ Deutliche Sichtbarkeitslücke für weibliche Forschende

Petition unterschreiben Keine WiSo ohne PoWi! Für eine starke Politikwissenschaft im Bachelor & Master

The University of Cologne plans drastic cuts to its Political Science department, potentially abolishing the MSc in Political Science and eliminating the professorships in IR and Comparative Politics. This would severely weaken the social sciences at @unicologne.bsky.social.
Petition (de/en) ⤵️

How Australia’s anti-immigration rallies were amplified online by the global far right Prominent figures such as Elon Musk and Tommy Robinson are increasingly using social media to unite far-right groups and causes around the world.

🚨 New article in The Conversation from Callum Jones and myself.

We wanted to focus specifically on how the white nationalist rallies were supported and amplified online by far-right actors like Elon Musk and Tommy Robinson

theconversation.com/how-australi...

Important reading as you prepare for your semester

True! 5G La La Land hits it on the nail! The only problem resolve is not using 5G as German citizen

I wonder if the elite political scientists are thinking, "Just one more regression analysis in a Q1 journal and Trump is through!" The dominance of impenetrable quantitative stats as the sole method of academic publishing has helped deliver us to this moment. Total disgrace.

Für die @taz.de habe ich aufgeschrieben wie man mit den Kulturkampf-Kampagnen der extremen Rechten und des radikalisierten Konservatismus umgehen soll. Andere Wange hinhalten und „we go high“ ist der falsche Ansatz, man muss schnell und scharf reagieren.

taz.de/Seid-schnell...

The Definition of Happiness - FilmInk … fun, upbeat ...

What's the definition of happiness?

It's in the title of new Australian documentary.

Annette Basile reviews.

The Definition of Happiness screens at the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival

It would be interesting to know whether this panelist himself believes in this fictitious story or whether it was an order to do so

*in Tasmania

I don’t know about the Dutch but I‘ve seen carrots exactly how it is on the picture on a Australian farmers market in Australia in 2015

Exciting women's match Italy vs Spain today. But the rhetoric of the German #ARD broadcaster focuses on problems. Funniest: Spanish women have a 94 percent passing accuracy. I mean, wow! But the presenter undermines it in the same sentence: It's not difficult in a small space. Just saying 🤷🏽‍♀️ #WEuro25

Elon Musk: That was how I felt when asking Grok 4 questions about materials science that are not in any books or on the Internet Tim Sweeney: Grok 4 feels like Artificial General Intelligence to me. It is clearly not just constructing statistically likely connections, but is drawing fairly deep insights on problems it hasn't seen before, in ways I haven't seen elsewhere. Here's an example: grok.com/share/bG...

What do you think is more likely, that Musk’s Nazi robot has made new discoveries in materials science or that Musk can’t tell when he’s being told scientific-sounding gibberish?

The thing is, the way Americans burn their coffee into oblivion before serving you don't even need Brazilian coffee beans. Could just as easily ground some dried twigs into a powder and pretend it's coffee.