Digital Archive No. 1 – The #Afrobarometer
▻http://africasacountry.com/the-digital-archive-no-1-the-afrobarometer
A few weeks ago, at the North Eastern Workshop on Southern Africa in Burlington, Vermont, I got a chance to participate in a roundtable on Digital Southern African Studies with Africa Is a Country’s Sean Jacobs. Sean asked me if I would be interested in starting a weekly series on digital African projects and I […]
#Google s’offre une flotte de satellites
▻http://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/video/2014/06/11/google-s-offre-une-flotte-de-satellites_4436145_4408996.html
►http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCrB1t8MncY
Pour 500 millions de dollars, Google s’offre Skybox Imaging, une société américaine spécialisée dans la fabrication de petits satellites d’imagerie en haute définition. Grâce à la technologie développée par Skybox Imaging, Google mettra à jour ses cartes de la Terre et étendra son service d’accès à Internet.
Dans les exemples : vue satellite d’Alep pour y suivre une « crise humanitaire »…
Inside a Startup’s Plan to Turn a Swarm of DIY Satellites Into an All-Seeing Eye (18-06-2013)
▻http://www.wired.com/2013/06/startup-skybox
Here is the soaring vision that Skybox’s founders have sold the Valley: that kids from Stanford, using inexpensive consumer hardware, can ring Earth with constellations of imaging satellites that are dramatically cheaper to build and maintain than the models currently aloft. By blanketing the exosphere with its cameras, Skybox will quickly shake up the stodgy business (estimated to grow to $4 billion a year by 2018) of commercial space imaging. Even with six small satellites orbiting Earth, Skybox could provide practically real-time images of the same spot twice a day at a fraction of the current cost.
But over the long term, the company’s real payoff won’t be in the images Skybox sells. Instead, it will derive from the massive trove of unsold images that flow through its system every day—images that, when analyzed by computer vision or by low-paid humans, can be transmogrified into extremely useful, desirable, and valuable data. What kinds of data? One sunny afternoon on the company’s roof, I drank beers with the Skybox employees as they kicked around the following hypotheticals:
— The number of cars in the parking lot of every Walmart in America.
— The number of fuel tankers on the roads of the three fastest-growing economic zones in China.
— The size of the slag heaps outside the largest gold mines in southern Africa.
— The rate at which the wattage along key stretches of the Ganges River is growing brighter.
Such bits of information are hardly trivial. They are digital gold dust, containing clues about the economic health of countries, industries, and individual businesses. (One company insider confided to me that they have already brainstormed entirely practical ways to estimate major economic indicators for any country, entirely based on satellite data.) The same process will yield even more direct insight into the revenues of a retail chain or a mining company or an electronics company, once you determine which of the trucks leaving their factories are shipping out goods or key components.
Plenty of people would want real-time access to that data—investors, environmentalists, activists, journalists—and no one currently has it, with the exception of certain nodes of the US government. Given that, the notion that Skybox could become a Google-scale business—or, as one guy on the roof that afternoon suggested to me, an insanely profitable hedge fund—is not at all far-fetched. All they need to do is put enough satellites into orbit, then get the image streams back to Earth and analyze them. Which is exactly what Skybox is planning to do.
Monitoring Oil Reserves from Space (08-04-2014)
▻http://www.skyboximaging.com/blog/monitoring-oil-reserves-from-space
Alphabet Said in Talks to Sell Skybox Satellite Business
▻https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-09/alphabet-said-in-talks-to-sell-skybox-satellite-business
New leaked Merck missive reveals deep drug, medical device company opposition to South African patent reforms | Knowledge Ecology International
▻http://keionline.org/node/1908
KEI has obtained an email sent out on January 10th, 2014, by Michael Azark, Merck’s Managing Director for Southern and East Africa, that illustrates the deep involvement of two dozen companies in the campaign to undermine patent reform in South Africa. The Merck email, not public before today, sheds new light on industry lobbying to undermine South Africa patent reforms.
#big_pharma #brevets #santé #afrique_du_sud
(suite de ►http://seenthis.net/messages/218353)
“No longer a forgotten right” – UN expert hails a decade of right to food progress - Olivier De Schutter | United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food
▻http://www.srfood.org/en/no-longer-a-forgotten-right-un-expert-hails-a-decade-of-right-to-food-progre
Mr. De Schutter used his final report to the UN General Assembly, after six years as Special Rapporteur, to identify where and how progress had been made in implementing the right to food, and to outline further steps that must be taken to make it a fully operational right.
His report was based on eleven country missions, submissions from a range of States from all regions, and regional right to food consultations in Latin America and the Caribbean (2011), Eastern and Southern Africa (2012) and West Africa (2013).
Climate threat to Southern Africa’s crops
►http://www.climatenewsnetwork.net/stories
Communiqués de presse par un groupes de journalistes environnementalistes parmi les meilleurs que je connaisse
By Kieran Cooke
Southern Africa could be among areas hardest hit by climate change. A rapidly expanding population is likely to add to future problems, says a new study.
LONDON, 11 September - The study, published by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), and with contributions from scientists in countries across the southern Africa region, uses available data and a variety of models to examine likely agricultural developments, particularly related to crops, in the period to 2050.
Agriculture is the primary source of employment and income for most of the rural population in southern Africa. In Malawi about 40% of gross domestic product (GDP) comes from agriculture. In Zimbabwe, about 80% of the population depends directly on agriculture.
Travel Infographics of South Africa: 150 Days Through Seven Countries | Design.org
▻http://design.org/blog/travel-infographics-south-africa-150-days-through-seven-countries
Copywriter Jeff Tyser and designer Kerryn-lee Maggs started their blog—The Lost and Found Blog—to document their travels through Africa and beyond. Over the course of 150 days, the Johannesburg, South Africa-based couple traversed seven countries and 22,500 kilometers—about 13,981 miles—across Southern Africa.
To capture and remember details from their trip, they created these playful infographics. They noted that the designs were intended to be personal mementos rather than technically accurate infographics—a graphic design scrapbook of sorts.