 Hey guys, good evening. I hope your stream has started and hope you see me and hear me. Please write high in the chat if you know where it is. If you don't know, please find out because if you're watching us on YouTube or Facebook, there should be a chat where you can actually post questions today and where we encourage you to post questions. But now let's just find out if you're hearing and seeing us fine. And please also write where you're tuning in from, like are you in Munich now or are you somewhere else? So we are very curious to know from where do we have the guests today. My name is Victoria. I will be your host and moderator of tonight's event. And this is 15 by 4 Munich with our first online event. So we are all a little bit nervous, but we do hope it works out fine. Our speakers are also nervous a bit, but they are also very excited to be here today and to talk to you in this new format of the online events. I do not need to explain you why we go online. I guess everyone knows. But for those who are first time at 15 by 4 at all, if you haven't been to our offline events yet and it's first time for you to join, let me just tell you a couple of words about 15 by 4. So 15 by 4 Munich is a series of science communication events. Usually we have events offline. Usually it's once a month and we have four speakers who talk about four different topics in 15 minutes each. So each talk is 15 minutes. That's how we get our name 15 by 4. And we care about sharing knowledge and we believe in sharing knowledge for people and by people. So we have volunteer organization, everyone in the team and all the speakers work on this in their free time and for free. We don't earn anything and we just want to promote science, technology and all kinds of knowledge that is out there and make it understandable for a general public and for everyone. We are in Munich since 2017. So it's now already three years, right? And today we are doing this online for the first time, but maybe not the last time, let's see. And also maybe this format becomes something new for us in addition to our regular events. I encourage you all to please help us spread this live stream today. So if you like what's happening, if you think your friends will like it, please share it on your Facebook pages, just click the share button and invite your friends to watch as well or send a link on YouTube and also invite your friends, family to join you. Maybe just grab some family who are in the next room and bring them here with us today. I already told you about the chat. I hope by now everyone has figured out where it is. Please use it to interact because unfortunately we cannot see you today, but we do want to be connected. We don't want to hear from you. We don't want to know what you are thinking. And importantly, we really, really want to see your questions because today is all about interaction and answering your questions. I already told you that 15x4 Munich exists for three years and in this time we had 33 events with over 120 speakers of over then 120 different talks and overall over then three and a half thousand guests came to see our events in different locations. And I hope you also, if your first time with us will come to one of the next offline events and if you're already our regular guests, we also hope to see you soon again. Today we also have four topics and 15 minutes each. The four topics all are pretty relevant to what's happening I think. The first one is public health. The second one will be Trump and U.S. politics. The third one online privacy. And the fourth one mind-controlling parasites. And importantly, as I already told you, today is all about you and your questions. So each speaker will get only time for a short talk, three minutes for a talk, and then there will be a lot of time for you to ask questions. So for the rest of the 15 minutes, it's your time to ask questions. And it's totally fine to start asking questions, to start typing them in while you are watching the short introduction. Don't forget we have this live chat. We are waiting for you to ask questions and looking forward to answer them as well. And now without further ado, let's go to our first speaker, Anna. Anna is a researcher at the Institute of Emergency Medicine and today she will talk to you about public health. So I stop sharing my screen and give the stage to Anna, please. Anna, welcome. Hello, everyone. I hope you can hear me and I hope you can see me. And I'm really happy to be here today online from my home and to be able to share with you the science and art of public health. Now, I will not be giving you a definition of public health. I will not be giving you a concept of public health, but rather I would like you to think about health. And to be quite honest, most of us actually think about health when we are not healthy or as the current situation prescribes when our health is at risk. Being sick is a situation that all of us have been in at least once in our lives. And sometimes we might know what the immediate cause of that sickness is, for example, could be a virus, bacteria, or a parasite, but we know it. However, have you actually thought what the root cause of that sickness could be? What chain of events has led you to get into contact with that virus thing, bacteria, that got you sick? What got you exposed to that thing, actually? Could it have something to do with your DNA? Maybe it's something to do with your education or lack thereof. Of course, it could also be backtracked to your friends, family, colleagues, acquaintances. It could also, of course, have something to do with the health services around you. Maybe they're of good or of bad quality. Maybe you can afford to use those or you cannot. Of course, it could also have something to do with the neighborhood or city or country that you live in or with the paycheck that you get or don't get at the end of the month and your social status. All of these are questions that public health is concerned with, and more specifically, how all of these determinants, individually in combination and in combination with other determinants, improve or worsen your health, how they make you sick or how they make you healthy back again. The aim of public health is to prevent disease, prolong life, and promote health through the organized effort of the whole society. And the whole society is something that really needs to be highlighted here because public health can only exist if all of these different stakeholders truly commit to working together. Since it is not only health authorities that are responsible for public health, it is truly the whole of society. It's private companies, non-governmental organizations, governments, the community, individuals as well. And we have already seen the successes of these efforts when these stakeholders commit to working together. This is why most of us have access to clean and safe drinking water. And this is also why we are all committed to wearing seatbelts whenever we're in a vehicle. What has been happening in the past couple of weeks is also a great example of public health, of how different stakeholders, different individuals, and companies commit to working together. This is somewhat our effort, a 2020 effort to prevent disease, to prolong life and promote the health of the public for the public and by the public. Thank you. Great. Thank you, Anna. I'm also tuning in back for the discussion session. Okay. We will now also see questions in the chat. Don't worry, guys. Wherever you're watching us on Facebook and YouTube, we will collect all the questions together in the chat, and we will see all of them and answer all of them. And thanks for happy birthday wishes that I already see in the chat. So, Anna, we also collected some questions before we start, and I maybe will start with this. And one of them is, so what do you think will be the next challenges? So now, probably, quarantine will be slowly getting released. But I guess that's, there are still more challenges that come with it for the public health. Well, absolutely. Even before COVID-19 was a pandemic, there were a couple of challenges that public health was really concerned with. For example, the environment and air quality are a huge problem for public health right now. And the impacts of the lockdown are making really visible that air pollution and environmental pollution is truly made made. This is an impact that cannot be unseen now. And it is a huge public health problem because it costs about 7 million lives per year due to air pollution, environmental pollution. This is approximately the same number of deaths that can be also backtracked to smoking. Another huge problem that has been rising in the past couple of years are non-communicable diseases. These are not infectious diseases, things like obesity, respiratory diseases, mental health diseases. And very unfortunately, while the public health measures that have been taken in Germany and everywhere else in the world to mitigate the impact of COVID-19, these lockdowns, the social and physical distancing, they also have a very visible and will affect on non-communicable diseases that will continue to be more and more visible in the next months and years. We could be quite certain that the rates of obesity and the metabolic syndrome will be growing a little bit more. The impact of mental health diseases and mental health problems as well. And another problem that has been really visibly deepening in pretty much every country in the world is the topic of domestic violence and domestic abuse, which of course is really worsened by the current lockdowns. Does it mean these topics are already discussed in the public health organizations and some measures are developed to deal with this? These topics are absolutely being discussed already, just at the beginning of this week, I think on Monday, Die Leupoldina, which is one of the German societies for Sciences, has issued a statement with recommendations for the government on what to consider for the exit strategy after the lockdowns. And the side effects of the lockdowns, the mental health side effects were also one of the main points that the society highlighted. Thanks. I'm seeing there are questions in the chat, so let me go to them. So, Anis is asking what can I as an individual do to contribute to better public health, I guess? Well, one of the things that I'm really hoping will be a lesson learned after the whole COVID pandemic is over or at least mitigated to some point is that more awareness will be set up in all of the populations of the importance of public health, the fact that it really is a responsibility of us all, not only of governments and health authorities to just provide health insurance for the people or different health products. It is really a responsibility that every individual has to take. And I don't think that there are any specific recommendations that I could give at this point, but just having a clear mindset of what to and how to be considerate of the human beings in environments around you as more than enough that you can do for public health. Thank you. So basically also sharing knowledge and getting the knowledge about this is important. Absolutely. Come more to 15 by four events. And okay, more questions from the chat. Are effects of the immune system to be expected if one has hardly any contact with other people over many weeks? Well, this is kind of a hard question. I'm not sure that I can answer it from a public health perspective since I did not have any specific knowledge on immunology. What I would definitely highlight about the topic of distancing would be the social side of distancing. And I think Angela Merkel also highlighted it a couple of weeks ago when she said it is not that we should not be talking about social distancing, but we're a physical distancing. And this is really something that I would like to point out here. Being physically away from other people doesn't mean that you have to be socially away from them. And that also means that our people should turn into the chat. Yeah, well, people are pretty active here. So let me read some more questions. I think this is one is bothers many of us nowadays should healthy people wear masks as a precaution or should we only health professionals wear them? And there is a parent shortage of masks everywhere across the globe, but also somehow the policies that were communicated by health authorities have changed a bit during the pandemic. So what's the current recommendation? Fresh out of the press conference of the government, the Bundesländer have actually agreed to recommend wearing filtering face, face pieces, more known as FFP masks, and surgical masks in public. Unfortunately, no one gave any specifics on if those will be available to the public, how and if people will be able to buy those or get those for free or if they would be distributed somehow, there is currently no information about it. I'm hoping to be informed about it as soon as possible. What I can definitely tell you from the hospital side of this is that every person entering the LMU clinic right now is wearing the surgical mask. People who are in contact with COVID positive patients are also wearing FFP2 or FFP3 masks and personal protective equipment and more nasal should so filtering face pieces or something that is that every physician and every healthcare professional is wearing at every hospital in Munich. And I personally have been a little surprised over the past couple weeks seeing people on the street wearing FFP2 and FFP3 masks and I have absolutely no idea where they have gotten them, how they found them. It's a complete mystery to me. To sum it all up, for now, health authorities have decided to give out the recommendation to wear masks in public, but there are no specifics on how to find the masks, how to buy the mask or how to get appropriate. Okay. Okay. Well, let's hope there will be some more recommendations and action items here. Then more questions. There one question a bit away from today's current situation is about anti-vaccine movement and are there any specific actions that public health organizations are taking because this movement is pretty strong right now? It is unfortunately very strong. It has generally been extremely strong over the past couple of years and this is one of the reasons that we have not been able to eliminate polio. It is still active in Pakistan and Afghanistan. A lot of this due to misinformation campaigns, but on COVID specifically the director general of the World Health Organization was here in Munich a couple of months ago for the Munich Security Conference. Back at that point COVID was only an epidemic, not a pandemic care, but his statement was very clear saying that we are not just fighting an epidemic, we are fighting an infodemic. It is at that point that the World Health Organization really started to look for misinformation to work with Facebook and Google to delete accounts that are purposely putting false and misinformation online and trying to do the best they can. Even last year, before 2020 even began, the World Health Organization or WHO as a lot of people also know it said that one of the greatest challenges for the next decade will be fighting misinformation and false information on health related topics, not just vaccines. I guess it's actually answered several questions that were already mentioned in the chat, how much of the current pandemic problem is also a problem of awareness, of misinformation and what kind of actions will be taken and as apparently as you say it was actually started even before that World Health Organization and others have taken serious thought about proper information and working on that. So let me then ask you, I see there is a question about disinfection methods, but I will not really read it right now, I'm sorry because I think this is a bit away from the topic and Anna is not a medical expert, so she's not a doctor, so we will not give medical advice right here. However, I wanted to ask you Anna about maybe a happier topic of public health because as you said public health is not only when we get sick but it's also how to be healthier, how to promote health and they know that your master thesis was about nutrition during pregnancy, can you maybe give a short recap of what you worked on, what you discovered and on the positive sides of this? Unfortunately I cannot really talk about what I discovered, but it was a truly interesting cohort study done in all of Bavaria and doing studies with and for pregnant women is unfortunately due to ethical reasons, something that is quite difficult, but what the study mostly aimed to do was to see if pregnant women are following the recommendations for micronutrient supplementation and if specific types of awareness raising would be helping to improve the micronutrient supplementation. What I could really say at this point and this is not only specific to pregnant women but for people in general is that when it comes to vitamins, when it comes to micronutrients, not every micronutrient is right, not every vitamin is necessarily correct for your body, for your organism, it doesn't mean that if it's generally good you have to take loads of it, just keep in mind that it's the doses it makes in medicine and the other way around of course. Yeah okay thanks I'm looking at the time that we actually have to unfortunately finish right now because 15 minutes are run out there are more questions in the chat and we will have a look after words guys and I will ask Anna to provide some links where you can read more to answer these questions. So thank you very much Anna, let's now move on to our next speaker and next speaker will be La Canna, La Canna is PhD student at American Institute of the LMU of Louis Maximilian University, so Munich University and he is an expert in US politics, US military history, military politics and he will talk today about Trump and US politics also very hot topic right now and was very much connected with today some of today's news with the public health topic, I don't know if we get to discuss this but let's see, so welcome please start La Canna with your presentation. My name is La Canna, I'm a doctoral candidate at LMU, I'm going to be doing a brief overview of my 2018 talk about the US presidential election in 2016. In 2016 most of the media and most of the opinion polls were wrong when they predicted Hillary Clinton could win and as we all know Donald Trump became the president of the United States. This is a real magazine cover from Newsweek, they were so confident that Hillary Clinton could win that they printed thousands of copies before the election result became obvious. Once the election results became obvious they had to suddenly withdraw thousands of copies from circulation. This is a real, this is the prediction from the New York Times, they gave Hillary Clinton an 85% chance of winning, 538 is a website run by a journalist and a statistician called Nate Silver and he gave Hillary Clinton a 71.4% chance of winning and this is what actually happened. As you can see, Trump on the south, most of the Midwest and most of the Great Lakes area. Here in Germany you have a parliamentary system, in the US they have a presidential system, so people vote directly for a president. In other countries that have a presidential system, such as France, you have two or more candidates and people vote for those candidates and the person that gets the highest vote becomes president. This is not how it works in the US. The president of the United States is elected through something called the Electoral College and I'm happy to give a more detailed explanation about that later. To become president, Trump had to win an area known as the Rust Belt. It's the area marked by the Red Square. The Rust Belt used to be the industrial heartland of the US, but by 2016 it had gone into decline. So by 2016 there were thousands of unemployed coal miners, steel workers and factory workers. Then candidate Trump visited the Rust Belt and he promised to bring jobs back to the region. Meanwhile, the Democrats ignored the Rust Belt and Trump won the entire Rust Belt and with it the presidency of the United States. White men are the core of Trump's base, but there aren't enough white men to win the presidency. So you need the support of women, minorities and young people to become president and Trump received just enough support from women, minorities and young people to become president. Will Trump win a second term? I think the general election this year will be quite close. If you're asking me to predict a winner, I would say President Trump will win re-election. I'm happy to give a more detailed explanation afterwards. Thank you. Thank you LaKanna. I'm sure and we will see questions now and it's of course my question. So why do you think Trump will be re-elected? Like name, some key things that make you think so? So prior to the coronavirus, the economy was doing quite well. Now of course the U.S. economy and the every economy in the world is a mess because of the coronavirus situation, but the U.S. they plan to reopen the economy latest in July and the general election begins on the beginning of November. So there are three months from July until November. So that's enough time for the GDP growth to pick up for unemployment to fall and also for the stock market to increase. So if the economy is doing well just before the presidential election, things will look up for Trump and also the Democrat nominee Joe Biden is suffering from dementia and his friends in the media are trying to cover this up, but there will be three presidential debates where you can't really hide. Yeah, that's a good point. I think that's hard to argue with those. While we wait for more questions in the chat, one thing came to my mind. I really remember how no one could believe or like many people couldn't believe that Trump was re-elected and there was I think even place for fraud because of that and there was this story about the Dar Spiegel reporter who was sent to U.S. and then wrote an article. Do you remember the story? Can you maybe tell this story? I think it's quite fascinating. Sure. This is an example of fake news involving Germany and the U.S. So Dar Spiegel wanted to find out why people voted for Trump. So they sent a reporter to the U.S. and the reporter really did spend a few weeks in a U.S. town, but he fabricated most of the story and the reason he was found out is because a Democrat from this town she found out about this story online and she wrote her own rebuttal saying he made up a lot of things and these are the 11 most prominent things that he made up and about 60 people, about 60 percent of this town voted for Trump, but the rest of the town voted for the Democrats and he made it sound as if everyone in this town was a redneck, a racist, some people wearing cowboy hats and firing guns into the air and this wasn't the case at all and this woman said she was a Democrat, she opposed Trump, but what this guy said was completely false and she like for example she pointed out things that he made up such as he said there was a sign in the town saying no Mexicans allowed and this was completely false and one year later Dar Spiegel sent a reporter to this town and he found out most of what this guy said was false and this guy was later sent from Dar Spiegel because he made up other stories, he said he was collecting money for Syrian children and he kept the money for himself so because of these reasons he was sent from Dar Spiegel. This part I didn't really know about but that's okay the guy's had special thing happening but I mean I can understand why Dar Spiegel didn't really or got caught in this trap because many people really were surprised that people voted for Trump and that it could only imagine that somehow people should be so weird to vote for him. Let's see there are some questions in the chat. Do you think Bernie Sanders would have more chance against Trump? Well it's kind of hard to say because in the Democrat primaries Joe Biden clearly defeated Bernie Sanders but Joe Biden is clearly suffering from dementia and cognitive decline while Bernie Sanders although he's one year older than Joe Biden his mind is still very sharp and he has a lot of working class support so if he went one-on-one against Trump he might have a better chance than Joe Biden. Okay interesting let me see more questions about social media strategies so I know we you did not really present it so much but this was part of your bigger talk you talked a lot that Trump had very special social media appearance and used it cleverly so what is his strategy right now for 2020 election is he doing something differently? He's doing almost the same thing he's doing the same thing as 2016 so his plan is to win back the Rust Belt. The only difference is this time so last time he had half the money compared to Hillary Clinton and he still won this time he will have more money than Joe Biden so this time the Republicans have an even better online campaign from prominent or like very knowledgeable Democrats that I've spoken to who are also PhD candidates they have told me that the Republican online campaign is superb it's much better than it was in 2016 that being said there's a guy called Michael Bloomberg he's one of the richest men in the US and he ran unsuccessfully as a Democrat earlier this year and he promised to spend two billion dollars helping the Democrats and if he spends two billion dollars that could lead to Trump being defeated also even if Trump wins the presidency the two billion dollars will prevent the Republicans from gaining back the House of Representatives. Okay thank you I'm researching comments in the chat and there is concern that the dementia story is not completely true because I cite the comments most of the sites with dementia associations seem to be Fox news and the likes and can you comment why do you think this is legible actually? Sure so Joe Biden has tried to give a number of public presentations and he can't finish his sentences in a coherent way he has appeared on CNN and MSNBC which are very pro-democrat channels which are very friendly to him and there have been several occasions where the presenters of his program they are very friendly to him they are not interrupting him they are giving him plenty of time to finish his topic they're in fact trying to help him and he can't finish a basic point he simply can't form like he can't even form a coherent sentence and even with a very friendly presenter he can't finish his sentences now in the debates Trump is going to be merciless he's not going to give him time he's going to interrupt Joe Biden he's going to talk over him he's going to yell there's going to be a lot of shouting and Joe Biden simply won't be able to compete with that and this isn't just what Republicans are saying there are a lot of people who are I guess they are Bernie Sanders supporters who are all who are saying that Joe Biden is suffering from cognitive decline so it's not just the Republicans or Trump supporters you have Bernie Sanders supporters saying the same thing I see thank you I mean some people are still not not sure about if we can should trust them and some people think Trump also cannot finish sentences but of course since as long as there are no clear statement from them we cannot say this is more or less the discussion there is a comment slash question which I'm not sure if you can answer but I will still read it because someone posted already twice all through 2016 the media in the US implored citizens to go and vote and they did how can young people have the motivation to vote in the system like that do you have a comment for this so I would say the participation of young people is going to be low historically young people are less likely to vote than older people this was the same with Brexit in 2016 and same with the US connection in 2016 if Bernie Sanders had been the Democrat nominee there would be a much higher turnout of young people but since Bernie Sanders is not the Democrat nominee the participation amongst young people is going to remain low and what happened was even during the Democrat nomination process the Democrat primaries earlier this year the reason Joe Biden defeated Bernie Sanders is because older people were voting for Joe Biden and younger people were voting for Bernie Sanders and older people were turning out in much higher numbers for Joe Biden while younger people were turning out in much lower numbers that's why Joe Biden won the Democrat primaries thank you for the comment on that there is another question do you think that Bernie Sanders can live up to the promise he has made promises I didn't really understand this question because Bernie Sanders is not running as the Democrat nominee so there isn't really much he can do he's Joe Biden has said that he will pick a woman as his wife's presidential nominee so it's not going to be Joe Biden I mean it's not going to be Bernie Sanders so Bernie Sanders will have very little influence on the outcome of this election he has not he has said he will support Joe Biden but the same thing happened in 2016 Joe Biden said he endorsed Hillary Clinton and despite that some Bernie Sanders supporters did not vote for Hillary Clinton and a very small number voted for Trump so it looks like the same thing will happen again so some Bernie Sanders supporters will stay home and a very small number will vote for Trump just like in 2016 I see thank you I'm looking at the time it's actually running out but I have one last question with I mean all this discussion of dementia and cognitive decline happens because all the current candidates are pretty aged people why is that why there are no younger candidates in the yes what do you think yeah I mean I actually don't I mean during the Democrat primaries this year there was a guy who there was there were two people who were 38 and 37 but they just weren't well known and with the Democrat primaries earlier this year the four candidates who did the best were all 70 and above and the two highest ranking Democrat candidates Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders both white men over the age of 76 Trump is 74 so basically the top three politicians in the US right now are white men over the age of 74 yeah and that I mean I'm sure in the future there will be someone who is younger who how was it historically were there many younger president much younger presidents yes so basically President Trump is already the oldest person to become president if Joe Biden was to win he would set a new record for the oldest president and if Bernie Sanders had won the presidency he would have set another record as well so past there have been many presidents who were in their 40s when they became president under US rules you have to be at least 35 to run for president so so there won't be anyone under 35 historically there have been a number of presidents who were in their 40s late 40s early 50s when they became president but Trump right now is the oldest US president thank you I still I want to take a last question from the chat why do elections happen to be on Tuesdays I think it's something to do with how things were 200 years ago people are saying it's a bad time it's something to do with the harvest and collecting the harvest but this is something that was happening 200 years ago so many people are saying they should have it on a weekend because then people can vote and on weekdays people have work or university and this would encourage higher voter participation so there is now a lot of people saying they should move the date to the weekend so it's basically historical reasons and it doesn't seem to be reasonable right now anymore exactly okay so thank you very much Lacana we will now go on to our next speaker thank you our next speaker will be Konark who will talk to you about online privacy he is a director of engineering at clicks and he is also data security and privacy advocate and that's why he really cares about the topic so please welcome on the stage thank you Victoria for the introduction and thank you 15x4 for organizing this event I hope my slides are visible to the audience and what I would like to focus on is three important questions for today's evening why we should worry about our privacy from who and what we can do to serve the internet in a much more private manner now most of us including me at some point when heard about online privacy we thought about I should not be worrying about anything because I have nothing to hide but I would actually like to highlight that online privacy is not about something to hide or not it's about the right it's about the transparency of what data you want to share with whom you want to share and what data you put you want to keep it to yourself this is not a lot different from how we perceive privacy in the offline world and this is becoming especially important as internet is becoming integral part of our day-to-day lives we are adding and adopting more digital services more devices into our homes we are sharing data like our medical history our day-to-day movements with all these devices and all of these devices are actually collecting this data sending them back to some server in the cloud and that data is actually accessed by a lot of different companies which in some cases is also being sold to give you two concrete examples if you focus on only the websites that you visit on your desktop or laptop even if you do not have a google or a facebook account google can actually track 81 percent of the web pages that you visit facebook on the other hand can track about 23 percent of the web pages that you visit even if you're not logged into facebook or even if you do not have an account and if you look at the distribution of the services there is google amazon facebook twitter all of them without having you an account they are still able to track a wide majority of your online history on the same hand if we talk about mobile apps we are downloading a lot of apps every day on our phones but we do not pay a lot of emphasis on the permissions that those mobile apps have for example on the left inside if you see why would a weather app need access to photos or media or files on the device when the purpose of the app is to basically show weather about a particular city or a lot of these different apps are actually collecting location data from the mobile device itself and the location data in itself is pretty sensitive because it can reveal how you travel where you travel when you travel and who you are meeting so all of these data points though being very sensitive but yet we do not pay a lot of emphasis when installing apps about these permissions now a lot of these permissions of data collection are actually needed to provide the services i'm not arguing that point what i'm trying to highlight is it is important to understand that knowingly or unknowingly we are sharing sensitive data with a large number of unknown and invisible companies and most of these companies are creating a permanent report of us these companies are then using this data that they should not have in the first place to actually generate profit out of it so imagine this a lot of services that we use we are not paying for them right but yet these companies are somehow making money and these companies are actually making money from all the data that has been collected and then profiling you and monetizing you to give you another example we most of us have experienced that when we look for something when we search for something online like a shirt or from the hotel and the next time we visit a different website we tend to see an advertisement talking about the same product that we had just seen now this is one way to monetize on the internet which is online advertisement and in order to serve online advertisement online the traditional advertisements on televisions on newspapers these online advertisements need to be super targeted so they actually want to hold as much data as they can about you they will create a profile about you that what are your likes what are your dislikes and then make that data available for advertisers so that they can share or show you a sponsored content for an ad so that's why whenever you search for shoes or shirt or a hotel the next time you visit the website you are able to see an ad exactly about the hotel that you that you searched now it is important to understand that if you're not paying for something you are actually not the customer you are the product being sold and this data about you your interest your sexual preferences your religious beliefs your political views is now actually not only known to you but also known to a lot of different companies data breaches are not unheard of so if malicious actors can get hands on this data they will learn much more about a particular individual governments can tap into these invisible companies either by force or actually do partnerships with them and get access to the same data feed so given all these all these things that we've just heard about data collection and privacy on the online world what can we do now there are three directions that we can move into first is change in the mindset we have to get rid of the notion that we have nothing to hide we have to raise awareness and teach and learn amongst ourselves that why online privacy is of the utmost importance and then we need to adopt and learn more about safer alternatives for example you could use different browsers that actually protect your privacy you could read more about awareness and online privacy on EFF.org or food track structure or privacy through survival government is stepping in by passing regulations like GDPR, CCPA and e-privacy and as technologists we can ensure that we are developing software that actually respects privacy by providing transparency informed constants and not collecting data when it's not needed at all and now I'd like to open for discussions and thank you for listening. Thank you Konark I'm getting back online well there are many questions already in the chat but I will start with one that we have gotten earlier and this is connected to today's situation so in Germany as well and many other countries government has suggested that people use the app or in some countries the government did not really suggest but rather enforce the use of the app in Germany it's still a suggestion and they suggest to install the app to share some fitness tracking data and to help contain coronavirus. I checked today according to the institute the Robert Koch Institute that takes care of the pandemic in Germany is 300 000 people already in Germany use this app to share their data and generally according to the Bayer Scherundfunk the radio survey over half of people say I'm happy to share my personal data to help fight the pandemics I mean and the cause is good right but your your talks make me think okay is it a really good idea so what do you think about this kind of situations? Sure thank you for asking that question I'd like to split that into two parts so the first is about these apps that now we are hearing about a lot also known as contact tracing apps which is basically a way to install apps and then if you are if you were in proximity of an infected person in the past then these apps tend to give you an alert that looks like you were in contact with a person who is infected now the way these apps work is GPS is not very efficient in these apps because it cannot detect that whether you were in close proximity to a person or not so GPS would only detect you were at a certain location so that's why these apps are built on this premise of exchanging data via Bluetooth and then it also tracks GPS to see which areas in the city you were and if you were in a particular area in a city and your Bluetooth approximation data says you were in proximity to a certain person who has an infection you would be alerted while the approach is very good but the data that we're talking about here is very sensitive so if the implementation is not done in a privacy preserving manner this could actually soon enter into a dystopian world where a central authority could be a private company could be a government actually is tracking all the citizens all the time by getting their Bluetooth data which will tell who XYZ person are meeting at such and such time and at which location right so that's why there is this whole notion of how do we do this proximity or contact tracing but in a privacy preserving manner so that the most important thing which also leads to the second part is the data that is being used or is needed to detect the infection should not be of any use to do any other or solve any other purpose right now coming back to the second part of the question which is these these sort of so-called movements by Robert Cook Institute that this is an app and you could share your health data with us I think the name of that app is Dr. Chen so I haven't looked into the app per se I've just read a bit on their privacy policy and what they say again it is a good initiative and of course it also boils down to where the initiative is coming from Robert Cook is an institution and I do not see that they would be doing any malicious intent with the data itself whereas if a company like Facebook or Google is asking me to do the same I would be a bit more skeptical because these companies in the past are not known to put your data for non-profit reasons but also profit for them but again as mentioned earlier whenever you install an app or share your data you should always go through privacy policies be very sure of what you're sharing or how long you're sharing and how the company is trying to use the data you can always use gtpr and exercise your right to know more about how the company is using the data so you should also as an individual try and use as much as possible that's right thank you Conor that was very elaborate answer let's see how many questions we still could get into discussion okay well one of the obvious questions nowadays how safe is zoom and is there a risk to be hacked or what's current situation with zoom if you know the details sure so zoom has a lot of us know it's basically a online meeting client right and just like you should have basic hygiene principles for any app that use it goes the same for zoom now of course zoom has had its fair share of trouble and rightly so in some cases but at the same time I do not see why the concerns raised for zoom are different for other applications that we use for example one of the concerns that was raised in zoom was that whenever you open a zoom app on your mobile phone it sends data to facebook right but I actually tend to believe that if you open any app on your mobile phone it will be sending some data to facebook right similarly if you are using an app on your desktop zoom was found to be doing some activity tracking of what kind of applications the user has opened right and that's primarily because the way zoom is trolling the app they could do this thing right so if you take out any other app it might have the same permissions and to do the same same kind of tracking right so yes zoom has had its share of trouble they've had bad practices in way they had implemented the software they should improve that but we should not also isolate one company in particular but have the same checks and balances for all different software that we use thanks so generally we should be careful and zoom doesn't seem more evil than others at least at this point well in some sense it is a bit evil but also the way they are trying to patch all these issues is also also commendable so a lot of time what happened is like companies do not come forward or do not take into account the concerns right but reading a bit more on zoom these days they are trying to also patch these issues yeah that sounds good okay let me go back to the chat is the situation somehow different between us and europe if you know maybe the country differences is somehow somewhere people are more protected by the law than elsewhere I think it's again a very good question because laws like GDPR are only enforced for EU countries right so US still does not have a law like GDPR they're still passing laws like CCPA which is Californian Privacy Protection Act also the way companies develop software in my personal experience I've seen companies in Germany especially who have not worked with other companies in Europe in Europe I see a tendency of treating data as more of a human right whereas companies would be a bit more skeptical in using it for profit but companies in US kind of take it for granted that if you're using our service we have all the rights to collect your data and use it however so I also see a difference in the way companies themselves organize when they're doing data data collection we have not so much time left thank you guys for engaging in the discussion I seen the chat that your exchange opinions and that's that's also very helpful because I'm afraid we cannot answer all the questions right now one of the I want to combine actually two questions from the chat together so one is we are already living in certain world and we're used to nice things like using Facebook using Google and so on and can we actually be at the same time safe and keep the good things and maybe there isn't like an alternative coming up for Facebook and Google like VEP 3.0 that will be better safer for everyone what do you think thank you for the question so yes there are alternatives and actually there are alternatives where people are trying to make money but not compromise users privacy right so even if you talk about online advertisement the concept in itself is not bad but the implementation is right there are alternatives Twitter and Facebook and WhatsApp and people are adopting it but the challenge here is even if one user adopts Facebook or two users adopt Facebook unless your complete social circle adopts the alternative you will still be hanging around on these on these networks right but even if you are supposed to use use these social networks or these websites what you could do is try and use them in the browser and not install apps frequently for them because as soon as you install an app on your mobile phone they will have variety of permissions the other thing you should do is try and revisit the privacy settings that you have on on these and these apps and change if you think you should not have some privacy or some setting which is public review the apps you have installed in your phone go through permissions and you will be amazed to see how many permissions you ended up giving at some point in the time but again all of the owners of protecting one's privacy should not be shifted to the users right when we talk about safer alternatives we are talking about shifting the onus to the users rather technology companies themselves need to take it upon themselves and build safer alternatives and actually think about these things as they're building software. Thank you let me take one last question from the chat I suppose companies use our IP addresses to identify us if we are not connected if yes when we log on a website with our personal info can they link the IP address with our personal identity and use it or sell this info? Right so I mean the way web is structured whenever you visit a website you do send an IP address right and IP address in certain cases could be unique to a person for a long duration of time it could be one IP for hundreds of people for example when you're in the corporate network right and one way to track a particular user using a website or a large number of websites on the internet is attaching these pieces of information so for example one piece of information is this IP address the other piece of information could be a browser which we call user agent or some sort of a cookie value and things like these and then they start to see from this IP which all websites are being visited whether this IP has been shared by multiple people if yes then can we attach user agent or a cookie value to see and probably filter them into smaller buckets to identify what's happening so yes IP is a bit concerned but yet there is not concrete solution on how to serve the internet without leaking your IP you could use services like tall browsers which are very nice if you want to mask your IP I personally also use it for on those two sites like Facebook and stuff so basically I don't know what could be with my IP to Facebook but I still want to serve Facebook so I would use Facebook on tall browser so these are some of the alternatives that you can already follow the network. Thank you our time has run out unfortunately I see guys there are more questions we will transfer them to Konark and hopefully he can provide some more links where you can read more about this topic and where you can get some more advice but we already got some actionable items I guess everyone check what your apps are allowed to do already think maybe you can use safer browsers for certain things that you do and maybe stop using some things all together if that's not actually so important thank you Konark let us move on to our next speaker now our next speaker will be Dmitri he is a PhD student at University of Lausanne he studies something pretty scary and he will talk with us today about this scary things so mind controlling parasites what these are please go on thank you Victoria hello everybody and I'm happy to join today's special event and as you can see today I will talk to you about parasites so let us first examine what is parasitic relationship so this is the relationship between two or maybe more organisms that coexist together and in this relationship one partner the parasite uses the other one the host as a source of food and shelter basically harming the host all the time and taking its resources and energy and using them for its own benefit so there are many different types of parasites it can be worms can be insects or even single cellular organisms but some parasites are extremely unique because they develop the unique ability to manipulate the behavior of their hosts in order to take maximum from them and ensure that their life cycle is completed and also their transmission is facilitated and there are many amazing stories about such parasites I'm just going to tell you why and just to make it a little bit more interactive let me ask you a question do you like cockroaches so I want to give you a five six seconds just to quickly write in the chat yes or no and then after my talk we can see what was your opinion so yes or no just imagine you see a cockroach in your kitchen and then would you like to pet it or maybe you would be afraid and you'd like to kill it yes or no and maybe we can see well I assume most of you wouldn't like the cockroach and would not appreciate it to be in your house and that's understandable that's what most people think about the cockroaches but let me ask you why cockroaches are actually very very sad creatures and there is a important reason for that because they have a very very powerful enemy an emerald cockroach wasp this guy is a real monster when he sees a cockroaches it attacks it and during the fight it stings it twice and I want you to notice that the wasp is much smaller than the roach but it really hunts so during the fight the wasp stings the roach twice if the first thing it paralyzes the roach so the roach cannot fight back or run away and while it is paralyzed it stings it for the second time precisely into the brain and there it injects a very special venom which doesn't kill the roach neither it seduces it instead it just makes the roach very obedient slave it could fight or run away if it wants to it just doesn't want to well all it does it just stands still and waits for the orders orders from its master the master wasp and on the wasp then drops the roach by its antennae and just walks it home like a dog on a leash and the roach is just following it's very submissive has no opinion and when I said that the wasp walks roach home it is really like that because the wasp had previously dig the hole and it's guiding the roach directly into this hole there in the hole the wasp will lay an egg on the surface of the roach and then barricade the entrance basically burying the roach alive and then the egg will hatch and the small larvae will suck the nutrients out of the roach crawl inside and eat the zombie roach which is still alive inside out well I didn't really put any videos of this part because I think it's too graphic anyway after about a week or eight days a fully mature wasp emerges out of the body of the zombie roach so for all of you who wrote no in the beginning I think it's time to reconsider and really feel bad for the poor cockroach and if you did so please write this in the comments give a like to this stream and I would be happy to tell you more about this and other stories and you can also write to me on Twitter or Instagram or visit my website thank you very much and I hope you had a great evening thank you Dmitry I was pretty scared with this whole story I'm happy you did not show the last part as a video I guess our audience probably also appreciated this concern yeah well someone actually wants to make friends with the wasps the comments say with the roach yeah well some people have them as pets yeah what about the wasp can you make be a friend with the wasp because this is the powerful creature here well I'm not aware if people would have them at home perhaps some some might I personally wouldn't but who knows okay while we are waiting for more questions about the talk you just gave I wanted to ask you about your phd project so I know that you study something else you also work in presdology but study something else as far as I know you actually start study how one parasite can become a super powered parasite is it true yeah this is so what I study I study another parasite which is called Lishmania which is just a single cell organism that gets inside our cells and there it multiplies so we're like human cells yeah okay well that's scary it could be precise special cells of our body and so normally our immune system can after a while defeat this pathogen and kill it so what I study is a very special case when inside this parasite lives in other organism a virus and then becomes like a like a Russian doll you know we have a human cell and then we have a parasite inside and then inside the parasite we have a virus and I think is our immune system responds differently to the virus then it would respond to the parasite alone and because of these different response it creates the conditions that actually benefit the progression of the parasitic disease so in a way these two pathogens one living inside another one they become a super pathogen which are more resistant to our immune system wow that's getting scarier and scarier yeah no mind control here but still I find it very fascinating other actually some mind controlling parasites in humans also people in the chat are asking about this we're very concerned apart from government which I think the most extreme mind controlling parasite of nowadays there is one which is called Toxa Plasma which is actually also a simple cell parasite that multiplies in cats and probably you might have heard about it as it is common threat to pregnant women there is some scientific evidence that if you infect with this parasite it can exist in your neural tissue in the brain in the form of a cyst in the kind of dormant form and there is a correlation that if you're positive for Toxa Plasma you are more likely to be involved in car accidents it also you can have more aggressive or altered behavior and it might it might have effect on our behavior but still it is very very far fetched and it's still not proven so there is still a lot of speculations so we cannot really say there is really a parasite that can manipulate our behavior okay and at least there is just one suspicion not too many are doing this with humans to my knowledge yes okay okay let me see what people are asking in the chat so there is one question coming back to the cockroach and wasp story sorry will the wasp only infect cockroach or can it also infect other organisms and control them so for this wasp so it is designed in a way evolutionary to hunt only cockroaches and actually if you I can provide with some scientific literature to people who are interested to know more in detail it is absolutely fascinating how it evolved to specifically hunt the cockroaches and also so when I said it injects it stings it into the brain when it stings it for the second time the stink of the wasp has some sort of a receptors which can distinguish the texture of a neural tissue and so it delivers the venom into very special ganglion of the of the cockroach brain and it actually the the venom that it injects messes up completely the the chemical signals and hormonal signals of the roach and to me all there is there are many many stories like that but I find it like I can't really explain how evolutionary it came to pass and this and other stories and I think nature is just crazy pretty incredible yeah well how many cockroaches will this one wasp kill within one lifetime so so the main point for this parasite is to kill the cockroach for its offspring because the the cockroach which will not be dead it will be alive but its metabolism will be slowed down so it will be enough time for the for the baby wasp to develop from the larvae inside the roach and basically you know once the wasp matures gets out then it will repeat this cycle so unless for whatever reason it did not succeed then it might look for another roach okay okay okay people comment that this was pretty scary and gross and they might have some nightmares I hope you guys don't have nightmares okay let's maybe let's see if there are some more questions that will lead us to positive discussions well like this one is there a vaccine that pregnant women can take to prevent toxoplasmos infection or is there any other precautions that pregnant women there are there are preco so the the reason is like if you if we're talking about texoplasma now so if you had texoplasmosis before pregnancy so you're more likely you most likely have antibodies already developed if your immune systems is okay and then when you pregnant there should be no problem but if you get infected with texoplasma for the first time during pregnancy then it can be a problem for the baby I'm not sure to be honest there is a vaccine I really need to look it up I don't think so though but I'm not sure yeah I also haven't heard of it so I don't think it is yeah but the precautions basically to stay away from places where you can be infected right so like yeah so if you so if you infected and well it's always good to have a test and to know if you have antibodies already or not we're infected before and if you're not then stay away from cats and you know right if an organism is affected by a parasite like this I guess like for example the wasp cockroach star is there any cure for it or is a fact is the only solution is to kill this zombie but you asking if there is a cure for the cockroach well let's talk about the two cases you you present right the texoplasma case and the case with a cockroach and wasp so for texoplasma there is a cure I mean there is of course medicine for like pregnant women and the means to avoid complications during pregnancy I'm not sure anybody came up with the cure for the cockroach in this situation although I know some researchers who tested this so they did some experiments to sort of rescue the cockroach but there was I don't know if there are other complications that might be on the road but that was done for the research purposes to really prove the effect of the venom so can cockroach do anything to prevent the situation from happening well run away fast probably not to be attacked because the wasp is really really tricky so because you know as you could see it's smaller and let's say in an equal fight it is unlikely could win but so it paralyzes the roach first because it needs to deliver very precise sort of surgical second thing and then most likely it's got no chance actually it's even more tricky than that because before guiding the roach to the hole the wasp takes a little bite from the antennae and takes a taste a little bit of hemolyph from the roach and it's still not fully understood why it does that and some researchers claim that it kind of measures in a way the amount of venom in the roach so it's not too little so the roach could not suddenly you know start behaving normally and it's not too much so the roach could not die wow that's incredible your question i don't think the roach can do anything and that's why i'm saying please don't be that mean to the roaches there is also a question about tuxa plasma again and this is apparently someone who watched your full talk where you talked quite longer about tuxa plasma and the question is the following when you have tuxa plasma do you start to like all the cats or just the one where you took the parasite from well well that's an interesting question well first of all we're talking about people it's not proven okay that you really become a cat lover let's say it's a speculation i wouldn't even if it's true i wouldn't say you would be specifically affected to a particular cat because if you have a cat at home probably you would love it more than other cats i don't know there is one scientist in check republic who is a big fan of the theory that tuxa plasma really affects people and makes them really love cats and alter their behavior but as i said again it is just a speculation it's not proven we can only assume that might be yes our behavior somehow is altered from the animal experimentation so if you take a rat or a mouse and then infect them with tuxa plasma and then place them in a sort of a maze with different samples of a urine from the same species like a mouse or a rat or from a cat or from a rabbit then if they're not infected so they would stay away from the urine of the of the cat as it is a predator and if they're infected they would be less cautious and they would be more likely hang out in the corner with cats urine and i don't think it matters what kind of cat it was okay well makes sense yeah well um let me see if i can take last one question how do you think uh dmitri actually if you it's the dmitri they want asking a question in the chat i'm not completely sure what some bios is your mean um if this is about the leishmania and i think it's leishmania and the virus because that was the only example of some symbiosis that we talked about right so how do you think this can could have appeared in evolution this leishmania virus symbiosis to make leishmania a better parasite or stronger good question so um you know and evolutionary uh you know it's always like a race for you know as we developed a stronger immune system to protect us from different uh germs different bugs so the bugs in the way they also you know evolved uh to be more efficient in their job because everybody wants to survive right so uh i think at some point uh you know it became uh beneficial for both of them so the virus gets a physical shelter uh and the leishmania uh the parasite gets well it is more complicated because our immune system responds to the virus you know because it detects the viral particles and responds to the virus in a as i said certain way which is we can say in our anti-viral response and this response would create the conditions which favor the the progression of the leishmania disease so somehow uh evolutionary you know it happened not all the leishmania has this uh virus as inside and actually uh this is just one example of many because now this field is really um getting bigger and bigger as there are more evidence coming up every year that there are other uh parasitic germs like tuxa plasma also become another and others have viruses that live inside and there it may be it's not yet proven how this presence affects the course of the disease but you know as even the endosymbiosis theory that you know somehow erocaryotes became because you know the bacteria got inside another cell became a mitochondria so evolution the life finds a way thanks i now see the more response in the chat and apparently the question was about the cockroach and the wasp can you give a short theory hypothesis actually how we develop the evolutionary if there is any that you know of i to be honest i didn't really look that through uh i guess there are some assumptions uh as you know the insect world is very diverse so we have uh very different um wasps you know venomous uh organisms i wouldn't really claim how exactly it evolved i would just assume that uh somehow somehow you know because there are many examples when uh some insects they actually lay their eggs on other organisms and then use the body of this you know uh either dead or in this sort of hibernated mold uh hosts as a source of food food for air offspring um but i i can't really say like how many thousands of years it took to develop even more yeah or how exactly true on the other hand insects are known for high to be highly specialized there are many insects that specialized in what kind of food they eat like they there are insects that it's specific species of plants only and they apparently well sometimes the things are really not what they seem to be as i said there are many examples and the one which i also find very interesting that there is a relationship between the caterpillar and the ants and which seem to be purely mutualistic so win-win relationship for many years when um caterpillar uh which is you know needs to turn into a butterfly in a vial is very very fragile and can be attacked by you know the big variety of predators around so it needs protection and it is protected by the ants and they protect it because caterpillar secret some kind of sugary uh well secret sorry produces sugary secret uh so the ants eat this secret and then in exchange they give protection and there was belief for many years to be purely you know mutualistic win-win relationship until it was discovered that actually caterpillar drugs this ants and makes it addicted and even if there are other sources of food so the ants don't really need to you know stick around the caterpillar they will still be there and they will be protected because caterpillar needs them so wow this this this border between relationship either it's plus plus mutualistic or you know parasitic relationship sometimes it's it's better well thank you very much for another cool story uh we unfortunately have to finish now thank you guys for all the questions i hope we answered the majority and i'm sure Dmitri will give some additional links where you can read more about the cool parasites that control the mind i invite now all the speakers tune in with the cameras that we give our a virtual applause to all of you i hope uh everyone can then applaud now thank you all so much for being with us today for discussing these interesting topics for bringing your knowledge and sharing your knowledge with us thank you so very much i have a few words to say before we finish this event so first of all thanks to all the guests who joined today to listen to the four 15 minutes talks that topics discussions that we had today we actually miss very much our offline events we miss interaction we miss listen hearing real questions we miss that the space that we usually have where speakers and guests can talk to each other and you can talk to each other and there was one thing that we have developed and we have launched recently and maybe many of you have seen it or some of you have seen it it's a random coffee very much our offline events we miss interaction we miss uh and we will now post a link also if you haven't seen it yet you're welcome to join this is a tool that helps you meet someone else in our Munich 15x4 community and we are all really cool people i think you all are very cool guys who are with us today and who are regular guests so i encourage you to have a link to see what it is and enjoy meetings for like just a casual chat with each other another thing that i wanted to tell you about is that we are launching the crowdfunding campaign and if you like 15x4 Munich events if you want to support us we would very much hope for your help as many other organizations in this difficult coronavirus times we are a bit in difficult situation because we are lacking the support and we normally very much rely on the help from our partners from our partner organizations who provide us with space with some money to support our functioning but this is now getting more difficult again because of the coronavirus and general recession so please stay tuned and our social media in the next days we will share with you our crowdfunding campaign we'll be very happy if you support us and you help us become a sustainable organization and come back to you with more events with hopefully also very soon offline events as well and now i already mentioned to you that we have our birthday today so it's actually 15th of the fourth month that's why it's our birthday but also because it's actually three years of 15x4 Munich and i think the celebration is in order so i invite now all our speakers to tune in back and also our volunteers and let's see the faces well take us a couple of seconds i think that more people tune in you see now Jovgeny who was our tech specialist today and the speakers are here Nina is here Marcos nice to see you guys i hope more joining in the second thank you all very much for helping us organize this event it's not just me who is in front of the camera but all the people behind who helped us prepare who helped us prepare the speakers who just promoted us on social media and i there are more already joining very good so i think now it's the time to sing a short song for the 15x4 happy birthday right happy birthday to you happy birthday happy birthday thank you thank you all very much so thanks again to our speakers thanks again to all our guests we hope you enjoyed tonight please leave us some more comments now if you like the format where we had more time for discussion and short talks please let us know if you have some suggestions for how we should do it differently or some additional things that we 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