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The power of gender-neutral language June is Pride Month, and this year marks the 51st anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall Inn Riots which bears great significance in the Gay Rights and subsequently the LGBTIQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer) movement. The riots acted as a catalyst and highlighted the on-going societal oppression of the gay, lesbian, transgender, bisexual and queer communities.  Whilst the Stonewall Inn Riots didn’t start the gay rights movement as such, they certainly spurred generations of LGBTIQ+ political activists that still play a large role in our society today. In South Africa Pride Month is particularly pertinent due to the on-going violence and persecution members of LGBTQI+ community still face on a daily basis. The good news is [...]

Apple VS. Facebook: The battle of the privacy policies continued Cambridge Analytica is a political data-analysis firm that gained its notorious reputation through its initial work on Trump’s 2016 campaign. Their work was premised around their competitive data collection on the American populace which essentially allowed them to build comprehensive personality profiles to facilitate and provide targeting criteria for the “psychographic targeting of ads.” Now given the breadth of their data that Cambridge Analytica had collected on the American electorate at the time, the question was raised as to how they came by such a sizeable and comprehensive dataset? The firm was ultimately accused of collecting and keeping the data of from between 50 to 87 million Facebook users without their knowledge or [...]

Does the early bird actually catch the worm? Are you an early bird or a night owl? How do you equate your most productive or effective hours with the time of day? For many people, waking up early has a direct correlation with being ‘successful’. It gives you the ‘time of day’ to get to things that you wouldn’t normally during the rest of the day – such as getting in a work out, meditating, having that sacred cup of tea or coffee in your own company, or, if you’re like Apple CEO Tim Cook it means waking up at 3:45am to get ahead of your emails before your East Coast colleagues. From a more local perspective, it could just be a daily [...]

Languishing – finally a way to define the feeling of ‘blah’ In the last couple of months, have you experienced any feelings or emotions that you find hard to describe, they feed into a potential lack of motivation and a lack of desire to simply ‘get stuff done’? Do things that used to be relatively simple tasks now seem to take significantly more effort to complete due to a waning desire to actually get them done or the inability to concentrate on them fully? It can be hard to describe the exact feelings themselves, or determine what causes them – most have described it as an overwhelming sense of ‘blah’ – a word that is almost as nondescript as the feeling itself. The [...]

Ingenuity takes on Mars In another Mars first, NASA has successfully flown a small drone on Mars, granted – the flight was somewhat short lived and actually only lasted for about a minute in total. However, the flight was deemed successful due to the fact that “we can now say that human beings have flown a rotorcraft on another planet” albeit briefly. Since its first flight which set the rotorcraft’s flight capabilities benchmark in mid-April, Ingenuity has since completed an additional two flights over the planet’s surface capturing a selection of images and videos, with each flight pushing it farther.  Unfortunately Ingenuity’s fourth flight did not take place as scheduled due to the fact that the drone was unable to take off. The [...]

Effective Emoji’s in the workplace When last did you send a Whatsapp, post a picture on Instagram, a video on TikTok or post a birthday message on someone’s Facebook profile without popping in a few emoji's? Sometimes it seems, that our messages are almost entirely comprised of emoji’s – as they have become ingrained in all our digitised forms of messaging and online communication. Emoji’s, as the name suggests are essentially how we convey ‘emotions in symbolic or picture format’ in messages, they can streamline our responses by replacing text with picture acknowledgements and the symbols can become almost idiosyncratic in terms of our communication style and the frequency with which our preferential emoji’s are used. Before emoji’s however, came the emoticon. The [...]