Author: The Conversation
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…