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.
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.
A virtual reality simulation of a nuclear facility is one of the new training tools presented at the 61st IAEA General Conference in September. Training specialists will be using it to navigate through realistic scenarios, threats and risks. The 3D tool is focused on preventative and protective measures against insider threats, and there are plans to cover other areas of nuclear security in the future.
It’s official. We now live in the future. Why? Because we have self-driving cars. We even have a few flying cars, that long-fantasised-about sci-fi staple. Pretty soon autonomous vehicles will be mainstream, and the industry will need armies of young boffins to design and engineer them. So it’s about time there were courses that introduced smart young people to the autonomous vehicle industry and prepared them for careers in it.
Today, London’s great clock above the Palace of Westminster will fall silent for up to four years as its chimes are stopped for major restoration work. Its famous ‘bongs’ will not be heard again, except on special occasions, until 2021. For a nation of fastidious timekeepers whose evening news reports on BBC radio and TV traditionally begin with the great clock striking the hour live, this is quite disconcerting news. Some worry who will maintain this national symbol in the future. Will the skills and knowledge of clock maintenance be lost in our digital world?
The term ‘mechatronics’ was coined in 1971 by a Japanese engineer working for the Yaskawa Electric Corporation. As the word suggests, it originally combined mechanical engineering and electronics. But it has grown to encompass other disciplines such as control engineering, computer engineering, telecommunications and systems engineering.
One of the outstanding small business opportunities of our times is selling courses online, and one of the best systems to do it on is Moodle. The world of education is moving away from traditional college degrees, evening classes and correspondence courses towards a ‘just-in-time’ model in which learners pick and choose what they need to learn right now, and can get instant access to it.
Want a Computer Science certificate from Harvard? Here you go. And you don’t have to go to Massachusetts. What’s more, this is the most popular course on the Harvard campus, with Harvard students calling it ‘the best of the best’. Now it’s online at edX, and enrollment is a snap. The course is known as CS50x: Introduction to Computer Science, and it teaches the essentials of basic computer languages while training students both with and without prior programming experience to think algorithmically and solve problems.
Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.
-Mark Twain
How do you plan to age? Will you let the river of time carry you along helpless, or have you armed yourself with a paddle to steer with so you can explore the banks? How much value do you place on longevity? Is it worth growing very old just for its own sake?
If you have ever taken an eLearning course, do you remember the essentials of it now? Did it get the knowledge into your head in an engaging way that helped you to retain it? If the answer is yes, you were lucky enough to have taken a course created by a good instructional designer. Instructional Design is the practice of creating learning experiences which make the acquisition of knowledge efficient, effective and appealing.
What do private detectives actually do? Well, they don’t spend all their time solving murders. The police tend to deal with that. In reality what private detectives do is work that the police won’t or can’t do, don’t have time and resources for, have failed at, or are not required to do. PIs are also often employed by people who for various reasons do not want the police to be involved. And they are not all men.
