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NDCS TBC
Everything is a little quiet in the fun world of international climate negotiations at the moment. The last big news was November’s COP29 meeting in Azerbaijan, which was a roaring success – for the fossil fuel companies that promoted their goods on the sidelines. Then came Donald Trump’s return to the White House as the President of the United States. He immediately ordered the country to withdraw from Paris Agement, which controls international climate measure. Dealers could be excused for being a little shell-choked.
Nevertheless, the wheels of the climate agucracy are sanded on. This year, signatories of the Paris Agreement are obliged to submit up -to -date national -specific contributions (NDCs), which is essentially a list of promises to intervene to deal with climate change. The deadline was February 10, and most countries mashed it. Climate strategist Ed King Naded in his newsletter that “three small, hilly countries with lots of sheep” (UK, New Zealand and Switzerland) had managed to submit theirs, but that we would have been to “wait until 2025 for China, India and the EU ”.
No urgent people; You take time. It’s not like half of Los Angeles just burned to the ground. Have a cup of tea, put up your feet, live your best life. It will be when it is therefore.
The V-Word
Reporter Matthew Sparkes draws our attention to the experience of a David Birch who went online with Virgin Money to discuss savings births and asked its chatbot: “I have two ISAs with Virgin Money, how do I merge them?” The chatbot replied, “Please use words like that. I will not be able to continue our cat if you use this language.
It seems that the online assistant had been a program to avoid certain words and phrases that had been considered discrimination or otherwise offensive, included “Virgin”. After Birch sent Angoly about this on LinkedIn, there was some media coverage and Virgin Money apologized and withded chatbot (which was an outdated model anyway).
This was another example of a recurring problem in online discussions: Context is crucial. It is certainly possible to use the Thong Virgin letter to be insulting, but it is also the name of a multinational company. Tools that simply filter to certain strings are listed to block a lot of innosy messages, while they are also lacking abuse that are not dependent on obvious swallows.
The problem gos back to at least 1996 when AOL refused to give the residents of Scanthorpe in England the opportunity to create accounts. The name of the city contains a letter -Thong that may find offensive -hence the term “scanthorpe problem” for such technological accidents.
The “Virgin” incident is just the latest. The Wikipedia page for the Scunthorpe problem is a treasure trove of unintentional pot-mouth humor and, more importantly, surprises. You are likely to be able to guess the problems that promoters of a particular sponge with a Japanese name are facing, but we defy readers to predict why the New Zealand city of Whakatāne, a software specialist and even a London museum fell off similar context -blind checks.
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Does it happen fine?
On January 26th Daily Express The newspaper issued a larger alarm: “Yellowstone warning as Supervolcano could be” ready to explode “. Good sauce, we thought. Could it be that Supervolcano under Yellowstone will cease its perennial rumbling and finer letting ripping, blanket North America in ash and wiping out the sun?
Upon closer examination, the story just reported the existence of a Short YouTube -Documentary titled What if yellowstone volcano broke out tomorrow? This was released on a channel called what if in March 2020. Feedback -Foused and readers can agree that this did not justify Express‘S heading.
Still filling it pages. Feedback found half a dozen articles from the beginning of January on exactly this theme, with headlines like “Yellowstone Crater Movement Sparks Fear for Superolcano Explision as researchers Assss risk”. This noted that some scientists had found “movement deep in the crater” and that this was alarming before he quietly noted that the main source was a paper in Nature It used a new imaging technique to decide that the volcano contains no one that is near enough magma to erupt. Others said this study “sparks new debate about where and when it will break out”, which is certainly a way of interpreting a study that there is no outbreak.
Lurching further back in time: On July 23 last year, there was a small hydrothermal explosion in the cookie basin is of Yellowstone, essentially caught steam that burst out garbage as it escaped from the group. Cue heading “Is Yellowstone outbreaked?” This was easily answered by a geophysicist who explained that volcanoes only break out if “there is enough erupted magma … and pressure” and that “none of the conditions are in place at Yellowstone right now”.
We tried to go further back, but after the 50th article with Loanty pretty much the same headline, Feedback’s brain broke. At this point, there have been so many stories that declare that a Yellowstone outbreak is imminent, we are not sure that we will think that, even if we see it going live on -TV.
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