Research reveals common challenges preventing IT progress in Africa recommends steps to overcome technology roadblocks
Nairobi, Kenya – 27 Jan 2014: IBM IBM today announced the results of a new study entitled ‘Setting the pace in Africa: How IT leaders deliver on the potential of emerging technologies’, which found that while nearly 87 percent of African IT leaders rank new technologies such as analytics, cloud, mobile and social media as being critical to business success, only 53% are pushing forward with adoption. (more…)
Jordanna Bailkin is a University of Washington professor of history and author of the new book “The Afterlife of Empire.” She answered a few questions about the book for UW Today.
Q: What is the central concept behind this book?
A: I wanted to understand how Britain and Britons were affected by losing their empire, and how they were changed — often in deeply personal ways — by this process of decolonization. (more…)
Former U.N. secretary-general Kofi Annan predicted during a campus visit that the civil war in Syria will become even more tragic before the international community takes action to help resolve the conflict, but said he is optimistic about the political and economic prospects for Africa in the years ahead. (more…)
UCLA infectious diseases doctor played key role in finance strategy for therapy
A new international program, conceived in part by a UCLA physician, has rapidly transformed access to lifesaving anti-malarial drugs by providing cheap, subsidized artemisinin-based combination therapies in seven African countries that account for a quarter of the world’s malaria cases.
The first independent evaluation of the Affordable Medicines Facility–malaria (AMFm) program was recently published in the journal The Lancet. The program is based at the Global Fund in Geneva, an international financing institution dedicated to disbursing funds to prevent and treat infectious diseases. The evaluation shows that the program improved access to key artemisinin combination therapies, or ACTs, which offer broader protection and less antibiotic resistance than anti-malaria medications currently available in those African nations.(more…)
Workshop helps to define the human right to benefit from science
Conscience. Expression. Property. Fair trial. Peaceful assembly. And science?
Yes, says the University of Delaware’s Tom Powers, the international community has declared that there is an inalienable human right to science.
In 1948, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which guarantees in Article 27 “the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.”
The same right was reaffirmed by the U.N. General Assembly in Article 15 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in 1966. (more…)
Some 140 participants and 30 visiting faculty from more than 45 countries arrived at Brown to take part in the Brown International Advanced Research Institutes (BIARI). The two-week program began June 11, 2012.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Some 140 participants and 30 visiting faculty from more than 45 countries arrived at Brown to take part in the Brown International Advanced Research Institutes (BIARI). Participants, who were chosen from a pool of more than 850 applicants, come from several countries, including Brazil, China, Nigeria, India, and Ethiopia.
The two-week program began Monday, June 11, 2012. Now in its fourth year, BIARI is centered around four two-week intensive institutes, convened concurrently by Brown faculty, in which participants and leading scholars in their fields share their research and develop new collaborative projects through sustained, high-level dialogue spanning disciplines and continents. This year’s institutes touched on global health and HIV/AIDS; theater and civil society; population and development; and climate change. (more…)
Dmitri Talapin, associate professor in chemistry, was one of 10 young scientists from around the world who delivered a message that “Scientific Research is a Global Necessity” to political, scientific and business leaders participating in the 2011 Science and Technology in Society forum last October in Kyoto, Japan.
U of T leading centre for study of global Christianity
A century ago, 80 per cent of the world’s Christians lived in Europe and North America; today, nearly 70 per cent live in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, making Christianity a predominantly non-Western religion.
A critical mass of scholars who are looking into the implications of this shift has made the University of Toronto a leading centre for the study of global Christianity.
Christianity today has more than 2.2 billion adherents worldwide. The majority are overwhelmingly poor, displaced from rural villages into overcrowded cities in search of work, and adhere strictly to the word of Scripture, which can command their loyalty far more than state or society. (more…)
