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The world’s longest running professional surfing event went viral on social media this week – for all the wrong reasons. The Ballito Pro was globally slammed for the discrepancy in prize money between the girls’ and boys’ division of the Billabong Junior Series after a picture of the 2018 under 18 winners was shared on the Ballito Pro Facebook page.
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In South Africa, language has been a key consideration for many years. From the 1976 riots objecting to the use of Afrikaans as a teaching language, to today’s mother tongue education for early grade learners, to the incorporation of 11 official languages to provide more inclusiveness, language has been central to the country’s conversations about identity.
South Africa has once again made headlines for an interesting archaeological find. When Sanral started repairing the N2 between Grahamstown and the Fish River, it found that the Waterloo Farm area held a number of fossils. Construction was immediately halted and Sanral brought Dr Robert Gess from Rhodes University on board to search out the fossils.
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Meteors striking earth have played a large role in a number of action movies, often with planet-altering effects. A meteor is considered the prime suspect for the extinction event that made the dinosaurs extinct, and most people would be forgiven for assuming that a meteor strike would have cataclysmic consequences.
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On 2 May 1933, a local newspaper in Inverness reported that an enormous dinosaur-like creature had been spotted in one of Scotland’s largest freshwater lakes. This was the start of the legend of the Loch Ness monster. In the years since, the world has seen grainy, blurry footage of something that may or may not be a creature living in the water, with common opinion being that the Loch Ness monster is nothing more than an urban legend.
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The news seems to constantly be littered with details of one massive security breach after another, and this week it was a South African company’s turn to make headlines. Sensitive personal information about nearly one million people who pay traffic fines online was leaked, with records containing identity numbers‚ e-mail addresses‚ full names and passwords.
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For a century, the youth have been accused of being lazier, more entitled, and less adept than their parents’ generations – despite the fact that those parents were once viewed in the same light by their own parents. This is still true today, despite the fact that history proves that attitude preposterous.
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The #DataMustFall movement brought attention to the high data prices South African consumers pay, leading to a review by the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) into pricing at the mobile networks. The review has resulted in the first of a number of changes to regulations, which will help data users get more bang for their buck.
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According to a recent report by Accenture, around 5.7 million South African jobs will be at risk over the next seven years due to digital automation. In a country with the worst labour-employee relations in the world (we are ranked bottom out of 137 countries), not to mention our extremely high unemployment rates, the Fourth Industrial Revolution could lead to a local crisis on an unimagined scale.
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The dire state of South Africa’s schools is well documented, but while much has been said about the poor quality of our education in general, and our STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) subjects in particular, there is an increasing crisis that has not been spoken about enough – what poor literacy will mean to us as a country.
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For years, we have heard about the promise of the MeerKAT radio telescope, which will help us see further into space than we have ever been able to before. With a decades-long build time, every new discovery made by the telescope in its incremental stages highlights the potential once it is completed – and once the full Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is operational.
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Sport on a national level is so much more than the game being played: It becomes a representation of a country; of its abilities, its superiority (or inferiority) compared to its neighbours; its standing on the world stage. This seems to be true whether athletes are representing their country at huge events like world cup tournaments or smaller sporting events.
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The fact that climate change is a real problem may be up for debate among denialists, but that the fact that the world has seen many extreme weather patterns over the past few years is undeniable. Not only do the denialists ignore the evidence of increasing levels of flooding, drought, typhoons and other extreme weather, but they are ignoring the scientists who have studied these phenomena and found that the world’s weather patterns are changing as a result of a variety of factors – primarily human.