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.
High spec, hardware-intensive PCs like gaming PCs can cost thousands if you buy them ready-built. But the skills needed to put one together are not as impenetrable as some may think. You don’t need a degree in computer science, and you shouldn’t even need a soldering iron.
A recent survey showed that 21% of job applicants’ resumes in the USA stated fraudulent degrees. So a fifth of job applicants say they have a degree when they in fact haven’t. How can this be happening in 2017?
Have you ever used Google’s photo search feature? Type in ‘cat’ and it will pretty reliably bring up any cats in your photo collection. It’s not perfect – it mistakes Land Rovers for cats some of the time – but it’s getting better all the time. And that is the point of machine learning. Among much else, machine learning, a subset of which is called deep learning, now powers Google photo search, speech recognition on Android, and video recommendations on YouTube.
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.
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:
