South Africa’s energy crisis has many dimensions, from political and economic to technical and environmental. Recently, the country’s power utility, Eskom, has been generating only about 60% of its capacity and has had to restrict usage to prevent a regional blackout.
It’s like a tale from a Hollywood movie. The crown prince and future ruler of the wealthiest oil-rich Middle East country uses the most popular messaging service in the world to send malware to the phone of the CEO of the largest retailer on the planet.
Fear of missing out, or FoMO, is commonly described as that anxious feeling you get when you think other people might be having a good time without you. Excessive FoMO is closely related to symptoms of behavioural addiction. It often leads to undesirable behaviour such as the constant checking of social media, even in an inappropriate context, like while driving, and becoming overly preoccupied with reactions to online posts and messages.
Many young people spend significantly more time using screens than is recommended by health professionals. Excessive screen time has been blamed for several ills, including obesity and poor mental health. To mitigate these negative effects, we need to understand the things that encourage children to spend lots of time in front of a screen.
Workplace surveillance sounds like the stuff of nightmares, but we are having to get used to it. In a sign of the times, the European Court of Human Rights has just ruled that a supermarket in Barcelona was entitled to fire employees after catching them stealing on CCTV cameras that they didn’t know were installed. This overturned a decision by the court’s lower chamber that the cameras had breached the employees’ human rights.
Did you know that Facebook has an artificial intelligence (AI) division? Not just the regular stuff that dictates what you see from the many, many posts on the social network, but an AI division with designs on more… practical applications? That division has announced that it’s built a ” large-scale distributed reinforcement learning…algorithm”.
Humans are more connected to each other than ever, thanks to smartphones, the web and social media. At the same time, loneliness is a huge and growing social problem.
Today in Midrand, Johannesburg, LG officially opened its new offices and experience area. LG’s in for a few changes in the South African market. One of those changes is a move out of Germiston, a space the company had occupied for a substantial length of time, and a split for the company’s head offices and manufacturing division.
Samsung unveiled two new smartphones in its A series of handsets in Johannesburg today, the first of several devices in the range intended for the first half of this year.
Globally, 750 million youth and adults do not know how to read and write and 250 million children are failing to acquire basic literacy skills. Literacy is central to education and plays an important role in development and peace.