Some of us remember TV ads from when we were kids telling us not to climb over fences by railway tracks, play ball games around tracks, fly a kite near overhead wires, and to be generally wary of railways. It makes sense to warn children not to go near railways when they are playing, but what about adults who have to be around railways in their work?
The Fourth Industrial Revolution is upon us, even with the Third is still in progress. Big Data, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are three of the driving forces behind it. While the term ‘Industrial Revolution’ has always applied mainly to manufacturing, it now also involves service industries such as banking and insurance, who are investing heavily in Big Data to help them model credit risk, fraud, marketing success and other key data.
The man responsible for the UK’s finances, Chancellor Philip Hammond, issued the nation’s 2017 budget last week. In his budget speech, he acknowledged that the UK trails much of the rest of the world when it comes to post-16 education in vocational subjects. In an effort to tackle this problem and boost the nation’s productivity, he plans to overhaul how technical education is administered and taught.
It’s all very well talking about advanced pivot tables in Excel, but what about people who need to grasp the basics of using Microsoft Office? Like how to create a Table of Contents, copy some formatting or filter a column? It’s often the type of thing you are struggling with at the office when a colleague leans over, grabs your mouse and does it in two seconds. That’s a bit embarrassing, isn’t it?
FileMaker is a relational database application that runs on Mac and Windows. It’s owned by Apple, Inc. via its subsidiary FileMaker Inc, formerly Claris. It began life in the early 1980s as an MS-DOS program called Nutshell and has been through many iterations.
The word ‘entrepreneur’ comes from the French verb entreprendre, to undertake. It denotes a person who sets things in motion – a prime mover, rather than someone who takes instructions from others in order to make a living. It could be said to define a character trait rather than a job title. If so, how can entrepreneurship be taught?
If we really want the cool stuff we see in Science Fiction Movies, we are going to have to train more people in nanotechnology: the manipulation of matter on an atomic, molecular and supramolecular scale. We’ve already got graphene, bendy screens, hydrophobic coatings and bandages infused with silver nanoparticles to help heal wounds faster. Those are cool. But where is Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak? Where are the sci-fi chairs that grow out of the floor and disappear when you stand up?
In 2010, Katy Perry walked into the MET Costume Institute Gala wearing a dress that constantly changed colour. 3000 shimmering LEDs created the effect, with Perry lighting up like a rainbow in the couture dress designed by wearable tech company CuteCircuit. Back in 2009, Sony Ericsson and the London College of Fashion ran a contest to design digital clothing, and the winner was a Bluetooth-enabled cocktail dress that lit up when a call was received.
When we go into a restaurant, we put our trust in its staff to give us food that’s in tip-top shape. Our health and happiness depend on procedures like maintaining the cold chain, cleaning surfaces, sterilizing utensils, checking cooking temperatures and a lot of other details that can make the difference between healthy and dangerous. A chef can kill a customer with a bad scallop, and even if everything is impeccably clean, you can still kill an allergy sufferer with a fragment of peanut. Hence the need for a tightly-regulated catering industry.
The macros function within Excel is such a powerful feature that only the initiated can handle it. You are ready to enter the realm of Excel macros when you are a confident and experienced use of Excel and comfortable creating formulas and manipulating spreadsheet data. A little experience in Visual Basic won’t go amiss, either. You will have mastered most of the functions that come as standard with Excel and be ready to create your own.
If you are into comic books, it can seem that their creators are so far beyond the rest of us in skill and imagination that only they have the divine right to produce comic books. The fantastic epics that roll off the presses and into comic book stores seem to be born in another realm to which mere mortals have no access. Yet if you stop to think about it, those people had to start somewhere and were once shaky novices producing forgettable work.
