Author: The Conversation
It comes as no surprise that children are spending more time watching screens as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Parents and caregivers in many parts of the world – including South Africa, where I have done research on children’s healthy behaviours – have had a hard time managing their children’s screen time in these last two years. Juggling working-from-home commitments, online educational activities, economic challenges, and illness and grief have been realities, to varying extents, across most households. Screen time can offer a welcome relief when it has all become too difficult to manage. Global studies have found that…
When you enter your personal information or credit card number into a website, do you have a moment of hesitation? A nagging sense of vulnerability prompted by the parade of headlines about data breaches and hacks? If so, you probably push those feelings aside and hit the submit button, because, well, you need to shop, apply for that job, file that insurance claim, apply for that loan, or do any of the other sensitive activities that take place online these days. First, the bad news. If you regularly enter sensitive information online, chances are you’ve had some data stolen somewhere…
The World Health Organisation and the COVID Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) initiative announced in mid-2021 that they were working with a consortium to establish the first COVID messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine technology transfer hub on the African continent, in South Africa. The Conversation Africa’s Natasha Joseph spoke with Petro Terblanche, Afrigen’s managing director and a professor at South Africa’s North-West University, about what this work entails – and what it will mean for the continent. What is a technology transfer hub? The technology transfer model is designed to create a platform that facilitates localised manufacturing of vaccines and stimulates vaccine…
Nigeria recently became the first African country to introduce a digital currency. It joins the Bahamas and the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank in being among the first jurisdictions in the world to roll out national digital currencies. The Conversation Africa’s Wale Fatade asks Iwa Salami what a digital currency is and whether Nigeria can achieve its aims of introducing the currency. What is a digital currency and how does it work? A digital currency is a means of payment or money that exists in a purely electronic form. Central bank digital currencies are issued and regulated by the nation’s monetary…
South Africa is one of the leading countries in Africa in terms of COVID vaccine rollout, along with Mauritius, Tunisia and Morocco. It has, however, had it’s fair share of challenges. Shabir Madhi has been a key player in shaping the country’s response. Ina Skosana and Ozayr Patel asked him for an assessment of plans to vaccinate adolescents, and next steps. Pasha 132: Why South Africa should not vaccinate 12 to 17-year-olds yet. The Conversation Africa, CC BY-NC-ND23.3 MB (download) Should South Africa be vaccinating adolescents? I don’t believe this is the most efficient use of the vaccines. In a…
Lightning is one of the most powerful sources of energy in the natural environment. As anyone who has spent time in Johannesburg during the South African summer will attest, there is nothing as spectacular as a Highveld thunderstorm at the end of a long, hot day: the scent of petrichor, torrents of cooling rain, booms of thunder and great spears of lightning across the sky. These storms are awe inspiring – but also dangerous to people, animals and the built environment. African countries, among them Zambia and Uganda, have some of the highest lightning fatality rates in the world. In…
South Africans are facing another round of power cuts despite promises from South Africa’s power utility, Eskom, that it would keep the lights on. Unexpected breakdowns and scheduled maintenance at various generation plants have been blamed for reduced generation capacity. These have compromised the stability of the national power grid. Since this affects everyone in the country, The Conversation Africa invited Thinus Booysen and Arnold Rix to explain what the power grid is and what keeps it stable – or not. What is the power grid? The grid is made up of three building blocks: generation, transmission and distribution. Generation…
The metaverse is a network of always-on virtual environments in which many people can interact with one another and digital objects while operating virtual representations – or avatars – of themselves. Think of a combination of immersive virtual reality, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game and the web. The metaverse is a concept from science fiction that many people in the technology industry envision as the successor to today’s internet. It’s only a vision at this point, but technology companies like Facebook are aiming to make it the setting for many online activities, including work, play, studying and shopping. Facebook…
In conversation with my teenage daughter last week, I pointed out a news report which flagged concerns over the use of facial recognition technologies in several school canteens in North Ayrshire, Scotland. Nine schools in the area recently launched this practice as a means to take payment for lunches more quickly and minimise COVID risk, though they’ve since paused rolling out the technology. When I asked my daughter if she would have any concerns about the use of facial recognition technology in her school canteen, she casually replied: “Not really. It would make things a lot faster at checkout though.”…
Facebook’s smart glasses ambitions are in the news again. The company has launched a worldwide project dubbed Ego4D to research new uses for smart glasses. In September, Facebook unveiled its Ray-Ban Stories glasses, which have two cameras and three microphones built in. The glasses capture audio and video so wearers can record their experiences and interactions. The research project aims to add augmented reality features to smart glasses using artificial intelligence technologies that could provide wearers with a wealth of information, including the ability to get answers to questions like “Where did I leave my keys?” Facebook’s vision also includes…
On paper, privacy rights for citizens of countries throughout Africa are well protected. Privacy rights are written into constitutions, international human rights conventions and domestic law. But, in the first comparative review of privacy protections across Africa, the evidence is clear: governments are purposefully using laws that lack clarity. Or they ignore laws completely in order to carry out illegal digital surveillance of their citizens. What’s more, they are doing so with impunity. This matters because people’s lives are increasingly being lived online, through conversations on social media, online banking and the like. We’ve just published research on privacy protections…
Some have called NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope the “telescope that ate astronomy.” It is the most powerful space telescope ever built and a complex piece of mechanical origami that has pushed the limits of human engineering. On Dec. 18, 2021, after years of delays and billions of dollars in cost overruns, the telescope is scheduled to launch into orbit and usher in the next era of astronomy. I’m an astronomer with a specialty in observational cosmology – I’ve been studying distant galaxies for 30 years. Some of the biggest unanswered questions about the universe relate to its early years…
South Africa has a large, and growing, wage gap. The pay gap between executives and employees at the lowest end of the pay scale is increasing. This has seen an increase in shareholder interest in director pay. South Africa has the highest wage inequality in the world, with a Gini coefficient of 0.639. It is, therefore, not surprising that there has been a concerted effort to put more focus on director remuneration guidelines in the country’s latest set of published corporate governance rules. Governance guidelines for companies are set out in a series of reports, known as the King Reports.…
Suddenly and inexplicably, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Oculus services were gone. And it was no local disturbance. In a blog post, Downdetector.com, a major monitoring service for online outages, called it the largest global outage it had ever recorded — with 10.6 million reports from around the world. The outage had an especially massive knock-on effect on individuals and businesses around the world that rely on Whatsapp to communicate with friends, family, colleagues and customers. It took Facebook nearly six hours to get services back online, albeit slowly at first. Ironically, the outage was so pervasive Facebook had to…
The financial gap between men and women is a global problem. It’s a problem because excluding women financially prevents them from participating and contributing to society’s social and economic activities. This is bad for women, and for society. In South Africa, the government has put in place different measures to address gender equality. But policies on financial inclusion have always been generalised and not gender specific. Financial exclusion is when people don’t have access to – or can’t afford – financial services. Financial inclusion means being able to access credit and manage or mitigate risks with products that satisfy an…
There has been a lot of focus on COVID-19 vaccine inequalities between high-income and low- and middle-income countries. For instance, it is estimated that up to 70% of all vaccines to be produced in 2021 were pre-booked by a handful of countries. This has caused severe bottlenecks in vaccine supply to low- and middle-income countries, leading to huge differences in vaccination rates. On average, out of 100 people in a high-income country, 61 have received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. In the 29 low-income countries, only 3 out of 100 people have received one dose of the…
In little more than a year from the onset of COVID-19, scientists successfully developed vaccines against the SARS-CoV-2 virus for world-wide use. Three main factors contributed to this extraordinary feat. One, unprecedented collaboration between international scientists. Two, scientists were able to obtain exquisitely detailed images of the virus proteins and the human proteins that they interact with – right down to the positions of the atoms. Three, expertise and infrastructure, developed over many years, involving tens of thousands of scientists supported by national governments and substantial private investment. Developing this skilled workforce was only possible because societies agreed to sponsor…
Sometimes major shifts happen virtually unnoticed. On May 5, IBM announced Project CodeNet to very little media or academic attention. CodeNet is a follow-up to ImageNet, a large-scale dataset of images and their descriptions; the images are free for non-commercial uses. ImageNet is now central to the progress of deep learning computer vision. CodeNet is an attempt to do for Artifical Intelligence (AI) coding what ImageNet did for computer vision: it is a dataset of over 14 million code samples, covering 50 programming languages, intended to solve 4,000 coding problems. The dataset also contains numerous additional data, such as the…
Facebook officials had internal research in March 2020 showing that Instagram – the social media platform most used by adolescents – is harmful to teen girls’ body image and well-being but swept those findings under the rug to continue conducting business as usual, according to a Sept. 14, 2021, Wall Street Journal report. Facebook’s policy of pursuing profits regardless of documented harm has sparked comparisons to Big Tobacco, which knew in the 1950s that its products were carcinogenic but publicly denied it into the 21st century. Those of us who study social media use in teens didn’t need a suppressed…
Elon Musk announced a humanoid robot designed to help with those repetitive, boring tasks people hate doing. Musk suggested it could run to the grocery store for you, but presumably it would handle any number of tasks involving manual labor. Predictably, social media filled with references to a string of dystopian sci-fi movies about robots where everything goes horribly wrong. As troubling as the robot futures in movies like I, Robot, The Terminator and others are, it’s the underlying technologies of real humanoid robots – and the intent behind them – that should be cause for concern. Musk’s robot is…
Apple’s plan to scan customers’ phones and other devices for images depicting child sexual abuse generated a backlash over privacy concerns, which led the company to announce a delay. Apple, Facebook, Google and other companies have long scanned customers’ images that are stored on the companies’ servers for this material. Scanning data on users’ devices is a significant change. However well-intentioned, and whether or not Apple is willing and able to follow through on its promises to protect customers’ privacy, the company’s plan highlights the fact that people who buy iPhones are not masters of their own devices. In addition,…
The uptake of educational technology in South Africa’s higher education sector has been highly uneven and very slow. Before the pandemic, most courses offered in South African universities had some form of Learning Management System presence. Students could access course guides and readings, upload their assignments, and possibly communicate with their lecturer and peers via forums. But beyond that, many academics seemed to resist making use of the technology, even though it could allow for greater engagement and interactive learning. And then 2020 happened and suddenly everyone found themselves thrown into the online world. The country’s higher education sector can…
Undergraduate training for data scientists – dubbed the sexiest job of the 21st century by Harvard Business Review – falls short in preparing students for the ethical use of data science, our new study found. Data science lies at the nexus of statistics and computer science applied to a particular field such as astronomy, linguistics, medicine, psychology or sociology. The idea behind this data crunching is to use big data to address otherwise unsolvable problems, such as how health care providers can create personalized medicine based on a patient’s genes and how businesses can make purchase predictions based on customers’…
South Africa’s Constitutional Court has been a beacon of light during a decade-long period of political uncertainty and turmoil. Most recently, the highest court in the land handed down an eloquent, as well as ground-breaking, judgment in defence of the rule of law and the constitutional order. The June ruling imposed a custodial sentence on former president Jacob Zuma for contempt of court, citing his refusal to heed the court’s order to appear before the Zondo Commission of inquiry into state capture. Read more: Historic moment as Constitutional Court finds Zuma guilty and sentences him to jail There could be…
Galaxies – massive collections of gas, dust, and billions of stars and their solar systems – are a fundamental component of our Universe. Understanding how they have formed and evolved over cosmic eras remains one of the greatest challenges of modern astronomy. There are a few reasons for this. First, the number of galaxies: astronomers have estimated that there are roughly 200 billion galaxies in our Universe. Second, the sheer size and age of these galaxies. Their ages range from 100 million to 10 billion light years and the size ranges from roughly 3,000 to 300,000 light years. One light…