In South Africa 15.6% of the households are not connected to an electricity supply. This is unlikely to change in the near future with centralised power production because it requires major investments to extend power lines to remote communities. For these communities, having their own decentralised grid solutions holds tremendous economic potential.
Browsing: The Conversation
Some of the world’s most popular video games track your activity as you play – but they’re not just gathering data for business or marketing purposes. They’re accumulating information about the way you and others play the game, the patterns or habits that lead to success or failure.
More than one-third of American adults view social media as harmful to their mental health, according to a new survey from the American Psychiatric Association. Just 5% view social media as being positive for their mental health, the survey found
Trump’s trade war is based on a simplistic understanding of the trade balance. Expanding tariffs to more and more goods will weigh on U.S. consumers, workers and businesses. And there’s no guarantee that the final outcome will be good when the dispute ends.
We are continually introducing more technologies to our vehicles. Drivers can now ask Alexa or Google assistant a question, listen to text messages read aloud by the vehicle and use voice commands to initiate phone calls. All of this tech also works on the assumption that if it’s only your voice you are using, there are no safety implications.
As digital technologies facilitate the growth of both new and incumbent organisations, we have started to see the darker sides…
A number of prominent figures have called for some sort of regulation of Facebook – including one of the company’s co-founders and a venture capitalist who was one of Facebook’s early backers. Much of the criticism of Facebook relates to how the company’s algorithms target users with advertising, and the “echo chambers” that show users ideologically slanted content.
We might be on the right track to achieve a more comprehensive, human-level artificial intelligence. Applying this kind of learning to other tasks – perhaps applying it to signals…
In one San Francisco hospital and other places, delivery robots – about the size of a mini-fridge – zip through the hallways delivering pills, bringing lunch to patients and ferrying specimens and medical equipment to different labs
The year of the tech IPO is 2019. Uber went public on May 10 with a US$82.4 billion valuation. Fellow ride-sharing app Lyft floated in March with a U$24 billion valuation and Pinterest had a US$10 billion IPO in April. More big names – including Slack, Airbnb, WeWork and Palantir – are set to follow.