Masterclass is an educational company offering online classes delivered by astonishingly big names in their fields. We are talking bona fide A-list people. Looking at their course list, one can’t help wondering “How on Earth did they get Helen Mirren and Samuel L. Jackson to teach acting? Gordon Ramsay to teach cooking? Annie Liebovitz to teach photography? Steve Martin to teach comedy?”
Sometimes you meet people who can recite the entire family tree of rock: which bands spawned which other bands, which members left and formed their own bands, where they came from, who produced them, the names of all their albums in chronological order, what was on the B side of all of their hits, and what their pets were called.
If you are visiting a foreign country, you might take along a pocket guide to the language to help you order things in restaurants or explain to the local police what the person who snatched your cell phone looks like. It beats pointing and grunting or shouting in English, and the natives will admire you for making the effort, even if they bring you squid instead of chicken.
Arts funding cuts in the UK have bitten deep. The Arts Council has lost a third of its funds, forcing it to axe some of its projects and scale down others. In this atmosphere of austerity, arts fundraising needs to go into overdrive to save some of Britain’s best cultural assets from extinction.
Shaan Patel is such a driven and high-achieving person that his claim to boost anyone’s SAT score by 200 points or more carries some credibility. From humble beginnings growing up at his parents’ motel in Nowheresville, Nevada and attending the local public school which had a dropout rate of 40%, he graduated from Yale with an MBA and USC with an MD. And his own SAT score on the way there? A perfect 1600, after starting out with only an average score. This lends weight to his claim that he can boost anyone’s SAT score by 200 or more, because he boosted his own by several hundred points.
International luxury goods group Kering owns brands such as Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent, Boucheron, Stella McCartney and Alexander McQueen. Possibly stemming from the company’s origins in the timber industry – or perhaps in spite of them – since 2012 it has been committed to a sustainability plan that aims to minimise its impact on the environment. This includes avoiding PVC in manufacturing operations, sourcing gold from ethical providers, and purchasing its leather from responsible and verified sources.
What is the real value of an MBA? The skills developed, or the prestige of the issuing institution? For those seeking to add an MBA to their resume, their answer to that question will make the difference between spending thousands of dollars and spending no dollars at all.
Drones are filling our skies. If companies like Amazon manage to negotiate their way past aviation restrictions, drones will soon be delivering our shopping to our homes and workplaces. No longer just toys and aerial photography tools, drones are here to stay. They are used in search and rescue, disaster relief, bomb disposal, military and civilian reconnaissance, archaeology, infrastructure inspection, anti-poaching, conservation, construction and law enforcement.
In 1233 a papal bull decreed that anyone admitted to the mastership at the University of Toulouse should be allowed to teach freely in any other university. Ever since then it has been set in stone that the rite of passage into a master’s degree is a three or four-year undergraduate degree. Pretty much by definition, a master’s is a follow-on from a bachelor’s degree.
Which courses are the most intellectually stimulating? If you ask this question to teachers and students of various subjects, you’re bound to get biased answers. After all, those people are in their chosen fields because they found them interesting in the first place. Unless they are doing it because they have to – more on that later.
Those involved in decision-making in business and law might have heard of the OODA loop. Standing for Observe-Orient-Decide-Act, it is a methodology for treading carefully, avoiding unnecessary conflict, and winning in challenging situations by performing actions based on rational decisions. To make those decisions, one must first fully understand the situation by observation, and get to know one’s opponents’ intentions and likely actions by orientation. The four steps in the loop are:
