Digital currencies like Bitcoin are in the middle of an epic explosion. Bitcoin and similar currencies are worth 6 times their value at the beginning of the year. Currently around $6.6 billion of digital tokens changes hands every day, and we could be at the beginning of a global financial realignment as cryptocurrencies go mainstream.
For those who don’t know it, Britain’s Open University is something of a national treasure. Its abiding image is of bearded professors with questionable fashion sense delivering maths and computer science lectures on grainy black-and-white TV sets in the early hours of the morning when airtime is cheap. Established in 1969, the OU delivers degree and postgraduate courses to mainly remote students, though it does have a campus in the city of Milton Keynes.
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.
If we really want the cool stuff we see in Science Fiction Movies, we are going to have to train more people in nanotechnology: the manipulation of matter on an atomic, molecular and supramolecular scale. We’ve already got graphene, bendy screens, hydrophobic coatings and bandages infused with silver nanoparticles to help heal wounds faster. Those are cool. But where is Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak? Where are the sci-fi chairs that grow out of the floor and disappear when you stand up?
In 2010, Katy Perry walked into the MET Costume Institute Gala wearing a dress that constantly changed colour. 3000 shimmering LEDs created the effect, with Perry lighting up like a rainbow in the couture dress designed by wearable tech company CuteCircuit. Back in 2009, Sony Ericsson and the London College of Fashion ran a contest to design digital clothing, and the winner was a Bluetooth-enabled cocktail dress that lit up when a call was received.
When we go into a restaurant, we put our trust in its staff to give us food that’s in tip-top shape. Our health and happiness depend on procedures like maintaining the cold chain, cleaning surfaces, sterilizing utensils, checking cooking temperatures and a lot of other details that can make the difference between healthy and dangerous. A chef can kill a customer with a bad scallop, and even if everything is impeccably clean, you can still kill an allergy sufferer with a fragment of peanut. Hence the need for a tightly-regulated catering industry.
The macros function within Excel is such a powerful feature that only the initiated can handle it. You are ready to enter the realm of Excel macros when you are a confident and experienced use of Excel and comfortable creating formulas and manipulating spreadsheet data. A little experience in Visual Basic won’t go amiss, either. You will have mastered most of the functions that come as standard with Excel and be ready to create your own.
If you are into comic books, it can seem that their creators are so far beyond the rest of us in skill and imagination that only they have the divine right to produce comic books. The fantastic epics that roll off the presses and into comic book stores seem to be born in another realm to which mere mortals have no access. Yet if you stop to think about it, those people had to start somewhere and were once shaky novices producing forgettable work.
