Does the above picture make you want to yodel? If so, you are probably Swiss, Austrian or Southern German. Now we’re not saying it’s silly season for course news or anything, but this one did catch our attention. So here it is: there is a course in yodelling.
Evening classes, you might be thinking. Or a video-based online course a few weeks long? After all, how long does it take to learn how to wobble your voice up and down?
Does the above picture make you want to yodel? If so, you are probably Swiss, Austrian or Southern German. Now we’re not saying it’s silly season for course news or anything, but this one did catch our attention. So here it is: there is a course in yodelling.
Evening classes, you might be thinking. Or a video-based online course a few weeks long? After all, how long does it take to learn how to wobble your voice up and down?
The 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea opened with a high-tech display involving 1,218 drones flying in tight formation, making various shapes including the Olympic rings, a snowboarder, and other fabulous coloured shapes in the sky. It totally wowed the crowd at the event and viewers around the world, and was a tour de force of what this article is about: entertainment engineering.
Have you seen Ready Player One? In a not-too-distant future, the film depicts humanity spending most of its time in a virtual world called the Oasis. Built by fictional software genius James Halliday, the Oasis becomes a refuge for the world’s population in the face of grim living conditions in the real world due to a breakdown in geopolitics and overpopulation. In this VR world, you can be anyone or anything you want, go anywhere you like, and live out your fantasies. It’s like Second Life on steroids.
Modern smartphones have a host of software tricks to make photos look better, plus cameras in some models that are as good as dedicated digital cameras. Almost everybody has a good quality camera in their pocket at all times now. But, as the saying goes, you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. The technology takes care of a lot of things, like exposure, colour and effects processing, but it does not (yet) point the camera in the right place and compose a scene for you.
The current record for fastest rapper is held by Spanish rapper Chojin, who rapped 921 syllables in one minute on December 23, 2008. It’s an impressive feat, but the only trouble is that at that speed he is totally unintelligible. Good rap isn’t about speed but about rhythm and good enunciation. It’s a shame to write or improvise lots of words and garble them out so that nobody knows what you’ve said. When you’re a professional wordsmith, it’s best not to waste your words.
What did the Romans ever do for us? Well, they gave us roads, sanitation, a legal system, and lots of cool gadgets. The Greeks weren’t half bad either. Some of the great engineering feats of history were accomplished two millennia or so before our own era, which we tend rather arrogantly to consider the pinnacle of technology.
The Open College in the UK is offering a course in Dog Psychology. Upon completion you will have earned the right to have after your name the designatory letters Dip.Dog.Psy and will be awarded with a Diploma Certificate bearing the title.
It’s a cruel fact that the world’s call centres and fast food restaurants are full of workers who have an arts degree but don’t know how to capitalise on it. World famous Central Saint Martins arts and design college aims to change this. It doesn’t just train people to be arty and then release them into the wild to fend for themselves – it also offers a trio of courses in business skills aimed at helping students live their dream and make a living from it.
Despite globalization, each country and region has its own business systems and culture. From one country to another there can be dramatic differences in how people view authority, how much personal responsibility they take for their companies’ fortunes, and how organisations are structured. Finance and accounting methods vary widely. HR practices are by no means homogeneous around the globe. So executives working in global business need to be made aware of these regional differences and develop the ability to function effectively within them and transition smoothly between them.
Bletchley Park, a suburb of Milton Keynes in England, was central to World War Two intelligence efforts. Scientists including Alan Turing designed the first ever electric programmable computer there (Colossus) and used it to crack the Nazi’s Enigma Code. Bletchley Park is synonymous with British codebreaking and also now houses the National Museum of Computing.
