Author: The Conversation

by Steve Schifferes The coronavirus has crippled the world economy. Global GDP suffered its sharpest drop since the end of the second world war in 2020, millions were unemployed or furloughed, and governments pumped trillions of dollars into their economies to prevent greater damage. Nevertheless, a 2021 recovery is very uncertain. China’s economy is growing strongly again, but many of the world’s richest nations may not fully rebound until 2022 at the earliest. Inequality is also rampant. While America’s 651 billionaires have increased their net worth by 30% to US$4 trillion, a quarter of a billion people in developing countries…

by Jason Potts, and Kelsie Nabben Bitcoin continues to trade close to its all-time high reached this month. Its price is now around US $34,000 — up about 77% over the past month and 305% over the past year. First launched in 2009 as a digital currency, Bitcoin was for a while used as digital money on the fringes of the economy. It has since become mainstream. Today, it’s used almost exclusively as a kind of “digital gold”. That is to say, a scarce digital asset. In response to the risk of economic collapse due to COVID, governments around the…

by Nazanin Andalibi Recently, when I opened Instagram, I noticed that the usual spot for checking notifications is now a Shop tab. The Instagram blog post announcing the redesign said that the change will support small businesses and connect people with their favorite brands and creators. This made me pause. As a researcher who studies social media, people and society, I’m concerned about the effects of surveillance capitalism. This includes social media companies profiting from collecting user data, making algorithmic inferences about people’s preferences and using this information to target people with advertising. Features like Instagram’s Shop tab facilitate surveillance…

by Rod Crompton Eskom, South Africa’s state-owned power utility, has a litany of financial and operational problems. In 2017 the Goldman Sachs Group declared it the biggest risk to the South African economy. Several cabinet members have said so too. President Cyril Ramaphosa declared that Eskom is “too big to fail”. The first huge problem is debt of R488 billion (about US$32 billion) which Eskom cannot service, of which, R350 billion is guaranteed by government. Sales volumes declined by 4.7% between 2009 and 2019, based on data in Eskom Annual Integrated Reports. Operational costs also increased by 30% in five…

by Badri Zolfaghari The COVID-19 crisis has forced a massive shift towards remote work. What are the implications of this shift for trust in the workplace? Such trust plays a crucial role in how we coordinate, cooperate, reciprocate, and respond to risk and uncertainty. So, just as the need for trust in the workplace is heightened by the severe uncertainty wrought by COVID-19, the massive shift towards remote work may undermine this trust. This concern is shared by many. A simple search on the social media platform LinkedIn results in over 70,000 posts about trust and remote work. Numerous companies…

by Dr Marietjie Botes The most effective way to stop the spread of a virus is to prevent contact with everyone who is infected. Those who are infected can be isolated and treated if necessary. To determine who they are, it’s necessary to actively look for and manage cases. During the COVID-19 pandemic, emerging technologies are being repurposed to help trace whoever has been in contact with an infected person. Some of these technologies, such as the Global Positioning System (GPS), wi-fi and Bluetooth, are not new. GPS has been used to find accident victims at precise geographic locations. Some…

By Matthew Kofi Ocran Over the past two decades various African National Congress (ANC) administrations in South Africa have sought to redistribute income to the poor and the vulnerable. They have also sought to stimulate rapid economic growth. The administrations have made progress in the redistribution effort, but on economic growth the performance has been dismal. For example, the National Development Plan, the first draft of which was released in August 2012, was intended to move the country to a higher annual growth trajectory of 5%. This hasn’t happened. Over the past decade, growth has averaged less than 2% annually.…

By Scott C. Ratzan, Agnes Binagwaho, Heidi Larson, Jeffrey Lazarus, Kenneth Rabin, and Lawrence O. Gostin It has been nine months since the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared the outbreak of COVID-19, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, a “public health emergency of international concern”. Since then, more than 44 million cases have been recorded and over one million lives lost. Economic costs measure in trillions of dollars. Global recovery will take years. A safe, effective COVID-19 vaccine is expected to be developed in record time and may be approved for production, distribution and acceptance some time in 2021. Public health experts say that at…

by Jory Denny The world of computing is full of buzzwords: AI, supercomputers, machine learning, the cloud, quantum computing and more. One word in particular is used throughout computing – algorithm. In the most general sense, an algorithm is a series of instructions telling a computer how to transform a set of facts about the world into useful information. The facts are data, and the useful information is knowledge for people, instructions for machines or input for yet another algorithm. There are many common examples of algorithms, from sorting sets of numbers to finding routes through maps to displaying information…

by Antony K Cooper, Samy Katumba,  and Serena Coetzee, Addresses provide people with a social status: a sense of identity and being recognised as a proper citizen. They are needed for the provision of postal and utility services; billing; disaster relief; emergency response; opening bank accounts – or just visiting friends. During a pandemic like COVID-19, addresses are also vital for mapping cases. Through addresses, authorities can find out where the infected and potentially affected live. They can identify emerging infection clusters, target responses and trace contacts. Many non-pharmaceutical interventions can only be successfully implemented if health authorities know where…