Author: The Conversation
The Fifa men’s World Cup 2022 in Qatar is arguably the most political in history. Even during the seemingly innocuous performance of South Korean pop star Jung Kook at the tournament’s opening ceremony, geopolitics were centre stage. For Kook, 25, is not just a good looking young man with a global fan base and a multi-million dollar fortune. In addition, he has a lucrative endorsement deal with the South Korean car maker Hyundai-Kia, which also happens to be a major Fifa sponsor. This kind of relationship is neither an accident nor a simple business arrangement. For years, the South Korean…
Smart urbanism is about using digital technologies to address urban problems. Across the continent, digital technologies and smart initiatives have been applied in myriad ways, including crime control, urban planning and traffic management. It hasn’t always worked, however. Sometimes these initiatives have failed because the technologies weren’t well integrated into the local context. Or policies didn’t pay attention to social realities and technical requirements. Ghana presents one such example. The country launched a smart initiative in 2017: a digital system to give every urban property an address. It’s a phone-based application which is designed to locate features anywhere in Ghana.…
What do a cybersecurity researcher building a system to generate alerts for detecting security threats and vulnerabilities, a wildfire watcher who tracks the spread of forest fires, and public health professionals trying to predict enrollment in health insurance exchanges have in common? They all rely on analyzing data from Twitter. Twitter is a microblogging service, meaning it’s designed for sharing posts of short segments of text and embedded audio and video clips. The ease with which people can share information among millions of others worldwide on Twitter has made it very popular for real-time conversations. Whether it is people tweeting…
The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work. The big idea My colleagues and I have developed a flexible, stretchable electronic device that runs machine-learning algorithms to continuously collect and analyze health data directly on the body. The skinlike sticker, developed in my lab at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, includes a soft, stretchable computing chip that mimics the human brain. To create this type of device, we turned to electrically conductive polymers that have been used to build semiconductors and transistors. These polymers are made to be stretchable, like a rubber band.…
South Africa has the dubious distinction of having one of the highest rates of unemployment and inequality in the world. It is also one of the world’s most emissions-intensive economies, measured in greenhouse gas emissions per unit of economic output. The co-existence of high unemployment and high emissions intensity is not a coincidence. South Africa’s history of segregation and apartheid has had profound implications for its development path. Choices were made that favoured investment in capital rather than labour. Economic growth was based, in part, on cheap (coal-based) energy, overlooking its high emissions. Coal has been the dominant fuel in…
Nigeria’s prison population is more than 76,000, housed in 240 correctional centres. About 70% of these inmates are still awaiting trial. They have been arrested and charged, but not yet convicted or cleared. This is the highest percentage of awaiting-trial prisoners in Africa. World Prison Brief’s latest report puts the figure at 12.4% for Ghana and 32.9% for South Africa. The presumption of innocence is enshrined in Nigeria’s constitution, in section 36(5). It says: Every person who is charged with a criminal offence shall be presumed to be innocent until he is proved guilty. But the reality in Nigeria, as…
There is a widespread view that labour has become irrelevant as a force for change. The argument goes that the proliferation of digital labour platforms – and the rise in job insecurity this brings – means that worker resistance is increasingly futile. The problem with this pessimistic “end of labour thesis” is that it gives globalisation and the digital age a logic and coherence that they do not have. The result is the decentring of workplace struggles over the conditions of work and an obscuring of relations of exploitation. The outcome is that capital is let off the hook. We…
The US embassy in South Africa has twice raised the alarm recently about terrorism in the country. On 26 October it issued a security alert for a possible terror attack in Sandton, the financial centre of Johannesburg. Days later it blacklisted four individuals and eight companies as terrorist financiers for Islamic State (ISIS). This followed media reports, most notably by The Economist, showing that ISIS was using South Africa to add to its war chest. There is a long history of concerns about the country’s deficiencies in dealing with terrorism financing activities within its borders. More than 15 years ago,…
Elon Musk announced that “the bird is freed” when his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter officially closed on Oct. 27, 2022. Some users on the microblogging platform saw this as a reason to fly away. Over the course of the next 48 hours, I saw countless announcements on my Twitter feed from people either leaving the platform or making preparations to leave. The hashtags #GoodbyeTwitter, #TwitterMigration and #Mastodon were trending. The decentralized, open source social network Mastodon gained over 100,000 users in just a few days, according to a user counting bot. As an information scientist who studies online communities,…
South Africa’s 28-year-old, continuously transforming multiparty democracy was reminded of its own fragility when, in September, a coalition running its biggest city, Johannesburg, collapsed. The speaker and the mayor lost their jobs. A new coalition took office, only to be removed by a high court verdict three weeks later. This was followed by the ousting of the mayor of the adjoining metropole of Ekurhuleni. This isn’t the first time that the administration of a city has fallen apart due to coalition politics. Acrimonious scenes have played out across the country in metropoles such as Nelson Mandela Bay and Tshwane, large…