Author: The Conversation
Cryptocurrencies have become popular in African and other developing countries. That’s according to a policy brief released recently by UNCTAD, a United Nations agency. Significant proportions of Kenya (8.5%), South Africa (7.1%) and Nigeria’s (6.3%) populations are using these digital currencies. In June, the Central African Republic adopted bitcoin as a legal tender. The report warns that widespread use of unregulated digital currencies poses danger to the continent’s financial system. In an interview with The Conversation Africa, Iwa Salami, an expert in financial technology law and regulation, examines the future of digital currencies in Africa. Why is cryptocurrency becoming popular…
By now, most of us are aware social media companies collect vast amounts of our information. By doing this, they can target us with ads and monetise our attention. The latest chapter in the data-privacy debate concerns one of the world’s most popular apps among young people – TikTok. Yet anecdotally it seems the potential risks aren’t really something young people care about. Some were interviewed by The Project this week regarding the risk of their TikTok data being accessed from China. They said it wouldn’t stop them using the app. “Everyone at the moment has access to everything,” one…
Over the past 25 years there has been lots of research and debate about the concept, the history and state of globalisation, its various dimensions and benefits. The World Economic Forum has set out the case that the world has experienced four waves of globalisation. In a 2019 publication it summarised them as follows. The first wave is seen as the period since the late 19th century, boosted by the industrial revolution associated with the improvements in transportation and communication, and ended in 1914. The second wave commenced after WW2 in 1945 and ended in 1989. The third commenced with…
We all like to think we’re immune to scams. We scoff at emails from an unknown sender offering us £2 million, in exchange for our bank details. But the game has changed and con artists have developed new, chilling tactics. They are taking the personal approach and scouring the internet for all the details they can find about us. Scammers are getting so good at it that even cybersecurity experts are taken in. One of us (Oliver Buckley) recalls that in 2018 he received an email from the pro-vice chancellor of his university. This is it, I thought. I’m finally…
Digital labour platforms are rapidly transforming the world of work. Many governments in the global south have welcomed platforms that bring businesses, workers and consumers together, creating opportunities to reduce unemployment. But what happens when jobs are turned into tasks? Workers are increasingly managed by apps that allocate these tasks and monitor their performance. Platform workers face low pay, poor working conditions – and algorithmic surveillance. The number of digital platforms has expanded rapidly over the past decade, a trend accelerated by COVID-19. Most are concentrated in just a few locations, among them the US, India and the UK. There…
South Africa’s power utility, Eskom, has not been able to provide a steady electricity supply for several years now. At the start of the 2022 winter the utility warned the public to expect up to 100 days with rolling power outages. At the end of June there was at times a 6,000 MW shortfall in electricity supply, which corresponds to about 20% of the evening peak demand. While there is consensus that new electricity generating plants are urgently needed to minimise power outages, there are radically differing views on how this is best achieved. The official electricity plan approved three…
Website cookies are online surveillance tools, and the commercial and government entities that use them would prefer people not read those notifications too closely. People who do read the notifications carefully will find that they have the option to say no to some or all cookies. The problem is, without careful attention those notifications become an annoyance and a subtle reminder that your online activity can be tracked. As a researcher who studies online surveillance, I’ve found that failing to read the notifications thoroughly can lead to negative emotions and affect what people do online. How cookies work Browser cookies…
Andrew Kerr, University of Cape Town Millions of South Africans rely on minibus taxis to get around. Without these vehicles, people wouldn’t be able to get to work, school or simply visit friends and family. Data from Statistics South Africa’s Quarterly Labour Force surveys suggest that there are around 250,000 minibus taxi drivers in the country; there are likely about the same number of minibus taxis. Statistics South Africa’s 2020 National Household Travel Survey, meanwhile, indicates that 60% of households report taxis as their main mode of transport and the 2014/5 Living Conditions Survey showed that 79% of households reported…
When one of our students told us they were going to drop out of college in August 2021, it wasn’t the first time we’d heard of someone ending their studies prematurely. What was new, though, was the reason. The student had become a victim of a cryptocurrency scam and had lost all their money – including a bank loan – leaving them not just broke, but in debt. The experience was financially and psychologically traumatic, to say the least. This student, unfortunately, is not alone. Currently there are hundreds of millions of cryptocurrency owners, with estimates predicting further rapid growth.…
Now that Rajesh and Atul Gupta have been arrested in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), there is a great deal of speculation as to when the brothers may ultimately set foot on South African soil to face charges of money laundering and other financial crimes. The brothers are the alleged kingpins behind state capture in South Africa – the massive corruption and repurposing of state organs for private gain during the ruinous reign of their friend, former president Jacob Zuma. They fled South Africa for Dubai in April 2016. The judicial commission into state capture and corruption – Zondo Commission…
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and founder of Tesla and SpaceX, recently made an offer to buy the social media network Twitter for $44 billion. In a statement Musk declared Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated. His reference to the ‘town square’ immediately recalls two familiar concepts. Firstly, it is a reference to the ancient Greek town square or Agora of 2,500 years ago where issues of the day were debated. It is on this ancient town square where…
Legal cannabis consumption rose in the US and Europe during the COVID pandemic, with some people turning to marijuana to help them cope with lockdowns and broken routines. Meanwhile, fewer people today view the drug as harmful compared to previous decades. These factors may have contributed to a trend towards cannabis-related tourism, with destinations developing new holiday products to tempt customers, and rising travel bookings to destinations where cannabis is legal. But there are risks for both destinations and tourists in embracing this trend. Work by MMGY Travel Intelligence found 29% of leisure travellers are interested in cannabis-related tourism. A…
READER QUESTION: I am 59 years old, and in reasonably good health. Is it possible that I will live long enough to put my brain into a computer? Richard Dixon. We often imagine that human consciousness is as simple as input and output of electrical signals within a network of processing units – therefore comparable to a computer. Reality, however, is much more complicated. For starters, we don’t actually know how much information the human brain can hold. Two years ago, a team at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, US, mapped the 3D structure of all the…
Narrative frames are fundamental to unifying ideologies. They frame what is possible and impossible, which ideas can be accepted and which must be rejected. In her book, Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics, storyteller and political analyst Nanjala Nyabola examines the framing of the Fourth Industrial Revolution narrative in this light. She argues that it is being used by global elites to deflect from the drivers of inequality and enable ongoing processes of expropriation, exploitation and exclusion. During a recent policy dialogue on the Future of Work(ers) she commented: The real seduction of this idea is that it’s apolitical. We can talk…
Apple has joined the thriving “buy now, pay later” industry, with a customised service called Apple Pay Later. The service was announced earlier this week at the 2022 Worldwide Developers Conference, and will initially be launched in the United States later this year. Pay Later will be built into the Apple Wallet and eligible for use on any purchase made through Apple Pay. Customers will be able to split the cost of a purchase into four equal payments, with zero interest and fees, spread over a period of four months. To qualify, however, Apple will first do a soft credit…
Economists are growing increasingly concerned about South Africa’s economy. This is because the country’s three major macroeconomic problems – lacklustre economic growth, growing inflation and very high unemployment – have been exacerbated by a series of major disruptions. These include the COVID pandemic that started as a health crisis but escalated quickly to an economic crisis. Millions of people lost their jobs as economic activity came to a halt under lockdown. In the middle of the pandemic violence that lasted for eight days erupted in Kwa-Zulu Natal and Gauteng. Further pressure has been piled on by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine…
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…