Author: The Conversation

The chief operating officer of South Africa’s electricity utility, Eskom, warned in May that the government should urgently start building new generating capacity. He was referring to a new build programme which has existed for at least a decade. The country’s Integrated Resource Plan of 2019, a cabinet approved document, sets out the timelines for decommissioning coal-fired power stations and adding 44GW of new capacity, including 18GW of wind energy and 8GW of solar (photovoltaic). The country is already way behind on this programme, limping along with antique power stations and regular power cuts. Outages are a regular ocurrence which…

It may seem strange to look to the discipline of quantum physics for lessons that will help to create future-fit leaders. But science has a lot to offer us. Like scientists, business leaders need to be able to manage rapid change and ambiguity in a non-linear, multi-disciplinary and networked environment. But, for the most part, businesses find themselves trapped in processes that draw on the paradigm of certainty and predictability. This approach is analogous to the Newtonian physics developed in the 1600’s. The ambiguity that business leaders operate in is encapsulated in mathematical models developed by the advances in Quantum…

Voyager 1 is the farthest human-made object from Earth. After sweeping by Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, it is now almost 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth in interstellar space. Both Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, carry little pieces of humanity in the form of their Golden Records. These messages in a bottle include spoken greetings in 55 languages, sounds and images from nature, an album of recordings and images from numerous cultures, and a written message of welcome from Jimmy Carter, who was U.S. president when the spacecraft left Earth in 1977. Each Voyager spacecraft…

Mastercard’s “smile to pay” system, announced last week, is supposed to save time for customers at checkouts. It is being trialled in Brazil, with future pilots planned for the Middle East and Asia. The company argues touch-less technology will help speed up transaction times, shorten lines in shops, heighten security and improve hygiene in businesses. But it raises concerns relating to customer privacy, data storage, crime risk and bias. How will it work? Mastercard’s biometric checkout system will provide customers facial recognition-based payments, by linking the biometric authentication systems of a number of third-party companies with Mastercard’s own payment systems.…

Sub-Saharan African countries are the most ethnically diverse in the world. Within each African country there are more ethnic groups than there are in most of the world’s countries. In fact, the world’s 20 most ethnically diverse countries are all African. An ethnic group is a social group that shares a common and distinctive history, culture, region, religion or language. The reason for this diversity in sub-Saharan African countries is chiefly that almost all of them were carved into colonial territories without regard to ethnic boundaries. The region also accounts for 40% of the world’s extremely poor (around 276 million…

Twitter reports that fewer than 5% of accounts are fakes or spammers, commonly referred to as “bots.” Since his offer to buy Twitter was accepted, Elon Musk has repeatedly questioned these estimates, even dismissing Chief Executive Officer Parag Agrawal’s public response. Later, Musk put the deal on hold and demanded more proof. So why are people arguing about the percentage of bot accounts on Twitter? As the creators of Botometer, a widely used bot detection tool, our group at the Indiana University Observatory on Social Media has been studying inauthentic accounts and manipulation on social media for over a decade.…

As a physicist, I am trained to look for patterns in data. For example, the motion of the tiniest particles may seem random, but it contains patterns and symmetries. The same can be said of human movements and interactions. Most humans move to and between familiar places (home and work, for instance), and may encounter the same individuals, like colleagues, most days. But, naturally, there are also random interactions in our complex modern world. There’s a good chance that we will bump into random strangers as we go from one place to another. Human motion consists of both “regular patterns…

Traditional computer programming has a steep learning curve that requires learning a programming language, for example C/C++, Java or Python, just to build a simple application such as a calculator or Tic-tac-toe game. Programming also requires substantial debugging skills, which easily frustrates new learners. The study time, effort and experience needed often stop nonprogrammers from making software from scratch. No-code is a way to program websites, mobile apps and games without using codes or scripts, or sets of commands. People readily learn from visual cues, which led to the development of “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) document…

Recent decades have seen remarkable growth in astronomy on the African continent. Africa enjoys pristine dark skies and vast radio quiet zones, making it the ideal home for many advanced telescopes trained on our galaxy and beyond. For instance, Namibia hosts the High Energy Spectroscopic System (HESS), which is an impressive gamma-ray telescope. The Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) in the small South African town of Sutherland is the largest optical telescope in the southern hemisphere. The MeerKAT telescope in South Africa’s arid and sparsely populated Karoo region is one of the world’s most powerful radio telescopes. It is also…

Facebook Inc, now called Meta, announced its dating application, Facebook Dating, in May 2018. There was real excitement, with people expecting a revolutionary dating app that would soon beat Tinder. And it is no wonder, when you consider the size of the company, its technical capabilities, and most importantly the large volume of data that Facebook has collected about its users. After all, research shows that Facebook knows us better than our mums, so why wouldn’t it live up to its goal of creating “meaningful relationships”? But four years later, it hasn’t taken over the market – most people have…