In the wake of May’s WannaCry crypto-ransomware attack which brought the UK’s National Health Service and many other large organisations to a standstill, a major provider of cyber security expertise and solutions has rushed out a 10-minute eLearning course it is calling ‘The Human Patch’. It is designed to raise awareness of ransomware and phishing attacks among the rank-and-file staff who use potentially vulnerable networked computers in their organisations.
In the wake of the WannaCry ransomware attack that began on May 12, it might be a good idea for individuals, companies and governments to get to know their enemy.
Machine learning is going mainstream, and it is going to impact education. Does that mean we are all going to be taught by AI holograms now? Not necessarily. It seems that machine learning, in the first few years at least, will act as more of a support for human teachers than as a rival.
British education ministers are interested in adopting what is known as ‘South Asian mastery’ in UK schools in an attempt to revive flagging maths achievement. China ranks fifth in the world league table for school mathematics grades. The UK lags far behind in twenty-seventh place. One in four Chinese pupils achieves the maximum possible grade.
Donald Trump’s recent attacks on the media have inspired a new strand of education.
Canada’s most populous city, Toronto, is undergoing a boom of coding schools. Workers disgruntled with high job churn are seeking to improve their prospects by learning to code. It seems to be working for them: one coding school states that 95% of its graduates are employed within 90 days. Boot camp coding and web development schools require no previous experience or background in computer science. The courses are brief when compared to university coding courses – a few weeks rather than a year or three – and are suitable for a quick career turnaround.
Why exactly did the apocryphal apple fall on Isaac Newton’s head? That’s what Newton wondered, and set out to discover why. Many of us wonder in the same way about why things happen, but don’t have time to dedicate our lives to getting to the bottom of it. Most of us don’t have a nuclear reactor or particle accelerator in our garden shed. Here’s a course for armchair physicists around the world who want to be told how it all works by people who have done all the hard thinking.
With the UK having voted to leave the European Union and right-wing leaders in Europe and around the world celebrating the decision (when this was written), it might be a good time for future leaders, administrators and businesspeople to deepen their knowledge of International Relations. In an atmosphere of growing nationalism, diplomacy and knowledge of world affairs are skills that might be in higher demand.
How can we be free in a world of jobs, debt and alarm clocks? What’s the best way to live life from moment to moment? If we don’t decide this ourselves, the pressures of life are sure to fill up those moments for us and we risk being left without a sense of peace, purpose or pleasure.
‘The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.’
Have you ever wanted to solve a crime? It seems to be a common fantasy – stepping into the shoes of a flinty-eyed detective, assessing the evidence and leaving no stone unturned to tighten the net around the criminal until he is forced to confess. These days a lot of that work is done via forensic science. There are quite a lot of games on the Google Play and Apple Stores based on forensic TV shows like CSI and NCIS in which you analyse the evidence to deduce who committed the crime.
