Cristina

Dreamer. Mom of 2. World citizen | Love books and music | #edTech #InternationalDevelopment #SocialJustice

[David Hundeyin @DavidHundeyin]

Africa is not being underestimated by anyone. That is a dangerous misconception that I once had.

What is actually happening is that Africa is being deliberately underreported and suppressed from mainstream global news cycles because some powerful people need to keep it a secret that their dominance over the global economy as we know it is entirely built on extracting 100 for the price of 0.5 from Africa.

If that coup in Niger had never happened for example, we would never have known that France's famously cheap and plentiful nuclear energy which makes up 70% of its energy mix, and which it sells to the rest of Europe, was cheap and plentiful because Orano spent decades bending Niger over a barrel, paying the country 50 euro cents/kg for Yellowcake uranium when the market price was between €150 and €200/kg.

We didn't know this - but France and its EU collaborators absolutely did, which is why they're sponsoring EU resolutions condemning the AES every 5 minutes. They know exactly what they've lost!

The only people underestimating Africa are Africans - because we have no fucking clue what we are sitting on and we still get most of our information from predatory western sources. Don't get it twisted - everybody outside Africa who matters fully understands what Africa is, which is why Ethiopian Airlines keeps recording a new record profit every year, and it is building the world's largest airport in Bishoftu. Most of that traffic is not made up of Africans.

People from around the world don't stampede in such numbers into a continent that they "underestimate." We're the dummies chasing visas to go work for gold elsewhere while we inherited the entire fucking gold mine.

[borjachov @BorjaSelvi]

@gabrielrufian @solecike1 Y todo eso lo ha hecho para evitar que se hable de una cosa....

[Paul Powlesland @paulpowlesland]

“What’re you in for mate?”

“Cleaning a river without a permit. What about you?”

@EnvAgency is really plumbing new depths of malevolent uselessness here.

[The Ocean Cleanup @TheOceanCleanup]

NEWS FROM PANAMA 🇵🇦

Together with local partner Marea Verde, we just deployed Interceptor 025 in the Rio Matías Hernández.

[Manel Márquez 🍉 @manelmarquez]

Estas personas que llevaban ayuda humanitaria por tierra a Gaza fueron secuestradas el 24 de mayo en Libia.
Llevan en huelga de hambre desde hace una semana.
La Global Sumud Flotilla hace un llamamiento urgente de vida o muerte por su inmediata liberación.
Solidaridad. Difunde.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihteshamali]

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.

Her name is Audrey van der Meer.

She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.

The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.

Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.

Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.

When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.

The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.

When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.

Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.

Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.

The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.

Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.

Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.

Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.

Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.

Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.

A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.

The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.

The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.

The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.

That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.

Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.

Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.

Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.

You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.

The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.

Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

[Cristina @Chirbirita]

https://t.co/ediVeFjvXv

[𝕮𝖆𝖕 𝕬𝖕 @CapitanApio]

¿Recordáis cuando el Ministerio de Sanidad del PP dejó morir a más de 4.000 enfermos de hepatitis C porque el Sovaldi "era muy caro"?

El secretario de Estado en aquel ministerio era Moreno Bonilla, hoy presidente de la Junta de Andalucía.

Que no se os olvide quiénes son.

[Gary Stevenson @garyseconomics]

They have no choice but to take all the assets from you

[Cristina @Chirbirita]

EU citizens — please SIGN 🙏🏽✍️🇪🇺

[Almut Rochowanski @rochowanski]

EU citizens should sign this European Citizens' Initiative to suspend the EU-Israel association agreement (=free trade). This is a powerful constitutional tool, which at 1 mil signatures forces EU bodies to take action (see ⬇️). It's already at 750,000.
https://t.co/p4cwjBCu43

[Pedro Sánchez @sanchezcastejon]

Justo hoy, Netanyahu lanza su ataque más duro contra el Líbano desde que empezó la ofensiva.

Su desprecio por la vida y el derecho internacional es intolerable.

Toca hablar claro:

- Líbano debe formar parte del alto al fuego.

- La comunidad internacional debe condenar esta nueva violación del derecho internacional.

- La Unión Europea debe suspender su Acuerdo de Asociación con Israel.

- Y no debe haber impunidad ante estos actos criminales.

[Alvin Foo @alvinfoo]

Sadio Mane, a Senegalese soccer star, earns approximately $10.2 million annually. He gave the world a rude awakenng after some fans were flabbergasted when they saw him carrying a cracked iPhone 11. His response was awesome:

"Why would I want ten Ferraris, 20 diamond watches, and two jet planes? I starved, I worked in the fields, played brefoot, and I didn't go to school. Now I can help people. I prefer to build schools and give poor people food or clothing. I have built schools and a stadium, provide clothes, shoes, and food for people in extreme poverty. In addition, I give 70 euros per month to all people from a very poor Senegalese region in order to contribute to their family economy. I do not need to display luxury cars, luxury homes, trips, and even planes. I prefer that my people receive some of what life has given me.

[Cristina @Chirbirita]

@PaperWhispers Thank you for this, I didn’t know Edna, but I got very sad by the news yesterday after sharing the missing person post last month…
I have been looking up for her name online and I was shocked not to find any “official” information. Like she was never here 😔

[osei @yawoseii]

I need help keeping an accepted paper opportunity alive.

My paper was accepted at IEEE SVCC 2026 under the Emerging AI Cyber Threats Workshop Track. I am a third year Computer Science student at KNUST, Ghana.

[Meidas_Charise Lee @charise_lee]

Respect Spain 🇪🇸

[Cristina @Chirbirita]

@CGEspLondres ¿Dónde se puede encontrar más información? Cuáles son las principales responsabilidades del CRE, cada cuanto tiempo se reúne, etc…

Es esta su página oficial? - https://t.co/CcNoxyxghh

Gracias!

[Cristina @Chirbirita]

@Chioma__Amadi It’s clearly just a joke… a satire about the everyday life of jobseekers in the AI boom era.
The rejection email signed by “AI Talent acquisition” 😂

[mrinank @MrinankSharma]

Today is my last day at Anthropic. I resigned.

Here is the letter I shared with my colleagues, explaining my decision.