Author: The Conversation

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,…