There was an old kids’ game in the 1980s called Operation in which players used tweezers to attempt to extract bones and other bits and pieces from a hapless patient called Cavity Sam. If their hand wasn’t steady enough, the patient’s nose lit up red and a buzzer sounded. Oh no! Ha ha, start again.

The game drew on the drama and tension of real-life surgery, and it would be interesting to find out how many kids who later became surgeons remember playing this game. Maybe it was what first inspired some to become doctors.

Courseindex.com provide a suite of services around Moodle. Here we explain what we do and how it is of value to people and organisations who are entering the eLearning space.

Why is machine vision a hard problem? As humans, we look at a dog and we see the dog. That’s all there is to it. Surely making machines that do the same isn’t that hard, right?

It actually turns out to be one of the toughest problems around, because that ‘simple’ seeing we do is in fact managed by our brains more than our eyes – and the brain is, well, the most complex object in the universe.

A lot of what engineers do is hidden away. Few members of the public give much thought to sewer systems, road bridges, power grids and flood barriers, impressive feats though they are. As Councillor Hamann says to Neo in The Matrix Reloaded, “See that machine? It has something to do with recycling our water supply. I have absolutely no idea how it works. But I do understand the reason for it to work.”

England’s Bletchley Park, famous for its World War II codebreaking success, is about to put on display some of the actual Nazi messages it decrypted. Bletchley’s National Museum of Computing houses a working replica of the five-tonne ‘Colussus’ decryption engine, of which 10 were in use at the peak of the wartime codebreaking effort. The ‘original and freshly discovered’ messages will be available for visitors to marvel at.

The first ever bug bounty program was launched in 1983. The prize for finding a bug in the software? A Volkswagen Beetle (a bug – geddit?). Such is the pressure on software firms to produce vulnerability-free code that they will offer cash rewards to white hat security researchers who can find and report flaws. Bug-hunting has become an industry, and anyone with the right smarts can try for a slice of the bug bounty pie.