Long-term groundwater level (GWL) measurement is vital for effective policymaking and recharge estimation using annual maxima and minima. However, current methods prioritize short-term predictions and lack multi-year applicability, limiting their utility. Moreover, sparse in-situ measurements lead to reliance on low-resolution satellite data like GLDAS as the ground truth for Machine Learning models, further constraining accuracy. To overcome these challenges, we first develop an ML model to mitigate data gaps, achieving $R^2$ scores of 0.855 and 0.963 for maximum and minimum GWL predictions, respectively. Subsequently, using these predictions and well observations as ground truth, we train an Upsampling Model that uses low-resolution (25 km) GLDAS data as input to produce high-resolution (2 km) GWLs, achieving an excellent $R^2$ score of 0.96. Our approach successfully upscales GLDAS data for 2003-2024, allowing high-resolution recharge estimations and revealing critical trends for proactive resource management. Our method allows upsampling of groundwater storage (GWS) from GLDAS to high-resolution GWLs for any points independently of officially curated piezometer data, making it a valuable tool for decision-making.

Fibre optic communication system is expected to increase exponentially in terms of application due to the numerous advantages over copper wires. The optical network evolution presents several advantages such as over long-distance, low-power requirement, higher carrying capacity and high bandwidth among others Such network bandwidth surpasses methods of transmission that include copper cables and microwaves. Despite these benefits, free-space optical communications are severely impacted by harsh weather situations like mist, precipitation, blizzard, fume, soil, and drizzle debris in the atmosphere, all of which have an impact on the Quality of Service (QoS) rendered by the systems. The primary goal of this article is to optimize the QoS using the ensemble learning models Random Forest, ADaBoost Regression, Stacking Regression, Gradient Boost Regression, and Multilayer Neural Network. To accomplish the stated goal, meteorological data, visibility, wind speed, and altitude were obtained from the South Africa Weather Services archive during a ten-year period (2010 to 2019) at four different locations: Polokwane, Kimberley, Bloemfontein, and George. We estimated the data rate, power received, fog-induced attenuation, bit error rate and power penalty using the collected and processed data. The RMSE and R-squared values of the model across all the study locations, Polokwane, Kimberley, Bloemfontein, and George, are 0.0073 and 0.9951, 0.0065 and 0.9998, 0.0060 and 0.9941, and 0.0032 and 0.9906, respectively. The result showed that using ensemble learning techniques in transmission modeling can significantly enhance service quality and meet customer service level agreements and ensemble method was successful in efficiently optimizing the signal to noise ratio, which in turn enhanced the QoS at the point of reception.

Despite being an integral tool for finding health-related information online, YouTube has faced criticism for disseminating COVID-19 misinformation globally to its users. Yet, prior audit studies have predominantly investigated YouTube within the Global North contexts, often overlooking the Global South. To address this gap, we conducted a comprehensive 10-day geolocation-based audit on YouTube to compare the prevalence of COVID-19 misinformation in search results between the United States (US) and South Africa (SA), the countries heavily affected by the pandemic in the Global North and the Global South, respectively. For each country, we selected 3 geolocations and placed sock-puppets, or bots emulating "real" users, that collected search results for 48 search queries sorted by 4 search filters for 10 days, yielding a dataset of 915K results. We found that 31.55% of the top-10 search results contained COVID-19 misinformation. Among the top-10 search results, bots in SA faced significantly more misinformative search results than their US counterparts. Overall, our study highlights the contrasting algorithmic behaviors of YouTube search between two countries, underscoring the need for the platform to regulate algorithmic behavior consistently across different regions of the Globe.

Speech technology is a field that encompasses various techniques and tools used to enable machines to interact with speech, such as automatic speech recognition (ASR), spoken dialog systems, and others, allowing a device to capture spoken words through a microphone from a human speaker. End-to-end approaches such as Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) and attention-based methods are the most used for the development of ASR systems. However, these techniques were commonly used for research and development for many high-resourced languages with large amounts of speech data for training and evaluation, leaving low-resource languages relatively underdeveloped. While the CTC method has been successfully used for other languages, its effectiveness for the Sepedi language remains uncertain. In this study, we present the evaluation of the Sepedi-English code-switched automatic speech recognition system. This end-to-end system was developed using the Sepedi Prompted Code Switching corpus and the CTC approach. The performance of the system was evaluated using both the NCHLT Sepedi test corpus and the Sepedi Prompted Code Switching corpus. The model produced the lowest WER of 41.9%, however, the model faced challenges in recognizing the Sepedi only text.