The excitement over the potentially transformative effects of the Internet in low-income countries is nowhere more evident than in East Africa — the last major populated region of the world to gain a wired connection to the Internet. Before 2009, there wasn’t a single fibre-optic cable connecting the region
Author: The Conversation
This year saw the 43rd anniversary of e-mail. Compared to a human working life, e-mail has after more than four decades on the job now reached retirement age. Is it time for e-mail to step aside to allow us to embrace the alternative? Every minute in 2012 saw 168m e-mails sent around the world
Imagine launching a robotic spacecraft on a 10-year mission to land on a comet 600m kilometres from Earth knowing that you will not be able to make any physical repairs to the craft during the journey. This daunting engineering challenge has been the ultimate goal of the European Space Agency’s Rosetta
In Interstellar’s near-ish future, our climate has failed catastrophically, crops die in vast blights and America is a barely-habitable dustbowl. Little education beyond farming methods is tolerated and students are taught that the Apollo landings were Cold War propaganda hoaxes. Against this unpromising
The aircraft industry is expecting a seven-fold increase in air traffic by 2050, and a four-fold increase in greenhouse gas emissions unless fundamental changes are made. But just how “fundamental” will those changes need to be
In the developed world, Internet access is getting close to saturation point, with the proportion of those online in many countries in the West approaching 80% for fixed broadband access and 30% on mobile phones. On the other hand, in the
A prime driver of human progress has been trade, in both goods and ideas. Isolation, in contrast, leads to stasis, suspicion, even regression. As Matt Ridley described in The Rational Optimist, when the land bridge connecting
People have a mental model of shopping that is based on experiences from brick-and-mortar stores. We intuitively understand how this process works: all available products are displayed around the store and the prices are clearly marked. Many stores
In sport, we don’t just want to know who won. We now want to know how to replicate success and then improve on it. And to do this, we’re using data — and lots of it. The field of “big data” analytics has come to sport and athletics, with massive implications for sport as we know it. The Women’s Tennis Association
In 2004, Bill Gates pronounced usernames and passwords dead. Gates, a man consistently thinking ahead of the crowd, was right. Most of us — including our employers and the online services we rely on — just haven’t caught up yet. Gates’s statement came at a time when the devastatingly simple consumer-focused