Minecraft is a fun, blocky, Lego-like virtual environment in which to build anything you want, or play as a survival game. Each procedurally-generated world is a unique place to explore, mine for materials, and acquire ever more sophisticated tools. The catchy combination of immersive reality and alchemy has had child and adult geeks hooked since its first release in 2009.
Abertay University’s Professional Masters in Games Development is Europe’s leading Postgraduate Programme in Game Design, and among the top 10 worldwide – and that’s according to the Princeton Review. It produces graduates with high levels of professional experience who now occupy key positions at major studios like Rockstar, Crytek, Codemasters and Ubisoft.
Still paying piecemeal for your coding classes? Locked into a long academic IT course? Get with it. A new style of pay-once-and-study-all-you-want training offer has hit the web, and here we’ll look at two examples that cost just $50 for a lifetime subscription. Welcome to the All You Can Eat Coding Buffet where you can come in any time you like and snack to your heart’s content, then come back again and again, all for a one-time payment of $50.
Events make the modern world go round. Corporate awards ceremonies, annual parties, charity fundraising events, concerts, school fetes, weddings, political rallies, sports events, product launches, exhibitions and conferences all need someone to organise them. Bars don’t just pop up out of nowhere, performers don’t turn up randomly and play for free, food doesn’t materialise out of thin air. At large events, professional management companies organise every facet and ensure it all goes smoothly.
A new degree course for aspiring actors and performers is to begin this September in Brighton and Hove, England.
Think you could design a building like this one? Maybe you can, after some lessons from the man who designed it (Frank Gehry). Want to play tennis like Serena Williams or cook like Gordon Ramsay? Be as funny as Steve Martin? Act as well as Kevin Spacey or Dustin Hoffman? If you want to try, how about hearing these stars’ tricks of the trade in their own words?
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.
Sometimes the Earth bites. Some would say ‘sometimes the Earth bites back,’ with climate change and rising incidents of flooding in mind. But most natural disasters are not man-made. There’s very little we can do at the moment about earthquakes and volcanoes, for example. And hurricanes and typhoons were around long before we started filling the atmosphere with CO2. So studying natural disasters and preparing for them shouldn’t be undertaken with a sense of guilt about self-inflicted damage. It should be done with a simple sense of self-preservation.
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:
