LATEST NEWS

MIND ALTERING IMAGES How much time do you spend on the internet per day? Be honest. It’s more than you may be comfortable admitting to others, or yourself. The truth of the matter is though, that you aren’t alone. The average person spends approximately six hours and forty minutes online every day. South Africa is significantly above average in this regard. According to 2023 statistics, the average South African spends a whopping nine hours and 27 minutes online daily across multiple devices. It is estimated that we spend slightly more time on mobile devices at an average of five hours and 13 minutes a day versus the four hours and 25 minutes spent on computers. With so much time spent online, it calls [...]

Adult ADHD The terms ADHD and ADD are often thrown around to describe children with high to excessive levels of activity and ‘excitement’, although the flippant use of these terms is often incorrect. Not every super active or distracted child or adult for that matter suffers from ADD or ADHD. The same analogy can be made between hyper-organisation and Obsessive Compulsive Order (OCD) as well as someone who is sad being termed depressed. In actuality, all of these classify as mental health disorders and need to be properly diagnosed by a medical professional. While ADHD and ADD are largely associated with children and are more commonly diagnosed at that age, that’s not to say that adults don’t suffer from either of these- the [...]

AI-Allies Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not so slowly working its way into our daily lives, whether we are cognisant of it or not. Some AI functions and tools are overt and we go looking for them purposefully, just like ChatGPT. It requires some level of input from us in the form of prompting in order for it to assist. If you ask the App how it defines itself, it provides the following explanation: “ChatGPT is considered an overt form of AI. Users interact directly with the model through conversation, making it clear that they are engaging with an AI. This transparency allows users to understand that they are communicating with a machine designed to generate text-based responses.” On the converse side of AI, [...]

Is the end of Ultra-processed Foods in sight? The term Ultra-processed food comes from the NOVA food classification system which was developed by researchers at the University of São Paulo who devised a system that divides food into four different categories based on the levels of processing they undergo throughout their production. The four categories are defined as follows: unprocessed foods which include the majority of our fruit and vegetables as well as eggs, nuts and seeds – ultimately foods that have had very little added to them, they aren’t altered. This is then followed by Processed Ingredients i.e. “foods that are added to other foods” such as oils, salt and sugar. Processed foods are the third category and are produced by combining [...]

Soft skills to set you apart These days it’s no longer enough to purely posess an education and the technical qualifications and skills that go with that, employers are looking for more. ‘More’ comes in the shape of soft skills that help set you apart from your colleagues as these aren’t skills that can necessarily be taught in a typical classroom. Soft skills are often used interchangeably with ‘people skills’ and can be innate, rely heavily on a person’s emotional quotient and general environmental exposure too. Soft skills are defined by the Oxford Dictionary as the “personal attributes that enable someone to interact effectively and harmoniously with other people.” To simplify it further and perhaps to state the obvious, soft skills are the [...]

Heritage Day 2024 On the 24th of September annually, South Africa celebrates Heritage Day. This day was first declared as a public holiday in 1996 with the intention of encouraging South African’s to “celebrate the day by remembering the cultural heritage of the many cultures that make up the population of South Africa.” This is especially pertinent in a country as culturally diverse as South Africa, as the acknowledgement of our cultures plays a big role in shaping the future too. South Africa is known as the ‘Rainbow Nation’ for precisely this reason. It is also known as a ‘Rainbow Nation’ due to the different ethnic groups that our country is home to, the majority of the population consists of black Africans, followed [...]