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Digital Planet: Tech does not impact teenage mental health

Factual: Science & Nature

Tech doesn’t impact teenage mental health

04/05/2021 GMT

Tech does not impact teenage mental health

BBC World Service - Digital Planet, Tech does not impact teenage mental health

Little association between tech use and mental health problems in teenagers

Little association between tech use and mental health problems in teenagers.  Also, Africa Teen Geeks and Africa Tech Week and colourising photos with neural networks

There is little association between tech use and mental health problems in teenagers, according to a new study by the Oxford Internet Institute.  Lead author Dr Matti Vuorre explains how they analysed data from 430,000 UK and US teenagers and found little or no associations between adolescents’ tech use and mental health problems. But he says the data they were using is limited. Ideally, he wants to use the data that big tech companies hold on our tech use. The findings are published in the journal Clinical Psychological Science.

Africa Teen Geeks and Africa Tech Week
Founder and CEO of Africa Teen Geeks, Lindiwe Matlali, discusses her work in technology education and improving access for African children. During the pandemic she set up online schooling for South Africa, reaching over 600,000 children, and is working with Unicef to improve access to coding and robotics education across the continent. She also runs the ‘Knit2Code’ scheme that teaches women python coding through knitting, empowering mothers and grandmothers to support their daughters’ technology education.

AI colourisation of historical photos
Gwen Katz, a historical novelist and games designer, explains the problems of colourising historical photos. To test the efficacy of colourisation AI she compared the artificial colourisation of black and white photos with their colour originals and found that the bright colours of the original images were lost when colourised by an algorithm. Marta Mrak from BBC R&D discusses how the problem of loss of colours is being solved, by providing the algorithms with reference images, as well as future challenges for designing neural networks to colourise film. 

Presenter: Gareth Mitchell 
With expert commentary from Ghislaine Boddington

Producer: Ania Lichtarowicz

(Photo: Two girls wearing face masks looking at their phone. Credit: Getty Images)

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