It took the suicide of the headteacher of Hendon School in North London to get pupils and staff talking about mental health. The terrible event shocked them into dialogue, and two years later a group of more than 30 pupils have organised conferences for other schools and created a mental health app to help fellow students find support.
It’s a new year, so how about a new you?
Most of us are free to move around and do what we like, but is that true for our minds? We tend to associate our thoughts with our sense of self, and according to mindfulness teachings, that is an illusion that leads to suffering.
People will always need medical care, so any job associated with the medical profession is a long-term winning proposition. And doctors like getting paid, so they need people to sort out their billing for them. Medical billing in the United States is a professional job involving medical jargon and a complex system of codes and insurance terms. People familiar with this environment are in high demand and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.
How do you speak without opening your mouth? With your hands of course. American Sign Language is a fully-fledged and widely-spoken language consisting of a standardised set of gestures and expressions. It helps to prevent the sign language version of the Tower of Babel, allowing signers worldwide to avoid misunderstanding and confusion. And you don’t have to be deaf to speak it.
What was Edison thinking when he invented the light bulb? Did it occur to him that his bright invention would deprive millions of healthy sleep patterns for the rest of time? Before electrification, we tended to go to bed when it got dark, to avoid the tedium of stumbling into furniture by the feeble light of oil lamps or candles. We pretty much went to sleep when most animals did. Sure, bedtime changed with sunset times throughout the year, but people practiced natural ‘sleep hygiene’. We evolved to function in this way, after all.
On the coast of Cornwall in England lies a section of coastline that has become legendary in UK surfing circles. Surf stores, hire shops and board makers huddle around this gem of a surfing site, with a west-facing beach that gathers Atlantic swells and turns them into consistent, powerful, breaking waves of up to 30 feet that are ideal for the sport. Newquay is the surf capital of the UK and Fistral Beach is its focus. Many of the best surfers in the world can be seen in action at the competitions held there.
TSTI (Teaching Science and Technology) are a training, coaching and consulting company specialising in Space and other domains. They are the go-to people for training in Space Systems Engineering. Their short courses provide the processes, tools, and information necessary to jump-start new hires to the space business or improve the performance of mid-to senior-level engineers, systems engineers, and technical program managers.
Firstly, it can be chilly out there. It can also be scalding hot, full of midges and gnats, snake-ridden and hornet-infested. Apart from that, it’s the beautiful outdoors, and budding Nature Park Managers can train in the skills and knowledge necessary to manage natural parks, keep the ecosystems thriving (apart from the hornets, perhaps) and make them accessible and appealing to visitors.
Won’t it be great when we can plug ourselves into the Matrix and learn Kung Fu in 30 seconds? While we’re waiting for the boffins work that out, though, we still need to teach each other how to do things by explaining. Learning technologies which facilitate explaining in the modern classroom include things like social networking, wikis and game-based learning. These take us one step closer to Matrix-style learning by putting our brains in virtual worlds from which they can download information. So we’re not quite Neo and Trinity yet, but it’s a start.
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.
Bad games can either make you throw your controller at the screen or inspire you to design better ones. If you think you can do better or are just interested in making games, a game design course like that offered by School of Game Design is one way to go to acquire the necessary skills. Game design isn’t producing a polished product, but sketching out the rules and strategies of games at the pre-production stage.
