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.
In August last year courseindex.com published an article about how blockchain technology might be used to prevent the falsification of academic records. Development of such a blockchain was being developed by Sony and IBM in collaboration at the time. A shocking statistic quoted in the article was that 21% of U.S. job applicants’ resumes stated fraudulent degrees.
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:
