Using a computer to predict an infectious disease outbreak before it starts may sound like a bit of Philip K. Dick sci-fi, but scientists are coming close. In a new study, researchers have used machine learning—teaching computers to recognize patterns in large data sets—to make accurate forecasts about which animals might harbor dangerous viruses, bacteria, […]
Achieving gender parity is a joint effort between men and women and requires bold steps, not an incremental approach, President Paul Kagame has said. The President was, yesterday, speaking on a panel titled, “What Would You Do to Make the World Better for Women and Girls? A Conversation and Call to Action,” at the ongoing […]
Read More… from Rwanda: Delivering Gender Equality Requires Bold Steps – Kagame
Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg aren’t the only Silicon Valley heavyweights fighting Ebola: IBM is using its tech know-how to help curb the spread of the disease in West Africa. The company is teaming up with Sierra Leone’s Open Government Initiative, Cambridge University’s Africa’s Voices project, telco firm Airtel, and Kenya’s Echo Mobile for various efforts aimed […]
Read More… from How IBM Is Fighting Ebola With Supercomputers
Dibaabish Jaboo kneads the pale, vegetative flesh of the enset plant, like her mother did, like her granddaughters do. When she’s finished, she bundles the plant’s thick, decomposing stalk into its 12-foot-long leaves along with spices and agents to help it ferment for a few weeks. Once it’s ready, she can store the bundle underground, or pound […]
Read More… from Solving Hunger in Ethiopia by Turning to Native Crops
When the taps ran dry in São Paulo neighbourhoods during a drought earlier this year, residents took to storing water in pots and tanks in their homes. The resultant surge in the mosquito population led to the tripling in dengue fever cases across Brazil. The 500,000 Brazilians who caught the disease – the effects of […]
Read More… from The Innovators: The Biotech Firm Hoping To Breed An End To Dengue Fever
Danson Muchemi, 31, is the founder of JamboPay, Kenya’s leading Online Payment Gateway. JamboPay, which was founded in 2009, now has more than 1,500 institutional clients and processes more than $50 million in payments every year. The company has a presence in Kenya, Tanzania and Senegal and is expanding to 4 additional countries before the […]
Read More… from The 31 Year-Old Entrepreneur Who Is Challenging PayPal In Kenya
“Outside of South Africa, there is little to no capacity for cloud computing on the continent,” wrote Erik Hersman on his blog, White African. “This means that few of the programmers in this region have the skill sets necessary to work and build out this infrastructure. We have a severely limited foundation on which to build future services in […]
Read More… from Africa developing its first supercomputer outside South Africa
A team of scientists working in Kenya says it has unearthed the oldest tools ever discovered, dating back 3.3 million years ago. The stone flake tools are 700,000 years older than the earliest known stone tools, predating modern humans by 500,000 years and “suggesting that our ancestors were crafting tools several hundred thousand years before our genus Homo arrived […]
Read More… from Scientists In Kenya Find Oldest Known Tools On Earth.
Abstract: This paper documents a little-noticed feature of U.S. labor markets — very large variation in the labor supply of married women across cities. We focus on cross-city differences in commuting times as a potential explanation for this variation. We start with a model in which commuting times introduce non-convexities into the budget set. Empirical […]
OXFORD – There is understandable consternation over Uganda’s plan to send almost 300 health workers to Trinidad and Tobago. The plan reportedly includes four of Uganda’s 11 registered psychiatrists, 20 of its 28 radiologists, and 15 of its 92 pediatricians. In return, the Caribbean country (which has a doctor-to-patient ratio 12 times higher than Uganda’s) […]