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.
Drones come in different types and sizes. Anyone can buy a small one and fly it around their garden for fun. But to fly a commercial drone – bigger versions that fly faster, higher and longer and carry high-resolution video cameras – you’ll need a licence. They are, after all, small aircraft and can cause damage or injure people and animals when they crash, not to mention the dangers of invading the flight paths of passenger jets at take-off and landing. You need to know where and when you are allowed to fly a commercial drone to avoid trouble with the law.
80 students from all around the globe are displayed on a curved screen measuring 45 square metres. The lecturer is a hologram moved around the lecture hall by a robot. The students collaborate on documents and take part in simulations in real time. The professor uses artificial intelligence and big data to run simulations that test the students’ abilities. He or she has a rolling live feed of data on students’ participation, including their emotional engagement. There is no back row of seats where students can hide. Everybody sits front and centre on the giant screen.
Bletchley Park, a suburb of Milton Keynes in England, was central to World War Two intelligence efforts. Scientists including Alan Turing designed the first ever electric programmable computer there (Colossus) and used it to crack the Nazi’s Enigma Code. Bletchley Park is synonymous with British codebreaking and also now houses the National Museum of Computing.
There are hotels in Europe without any staff. You drive up and check in via a machine that issues your room key, the door unlocks and you go up to your room. Then you eat from vending machines, stay the night and check out, all without any human contact.
This concept has now been brought to classroom education. There’s a coding school – started in Europe, just like the hotels – that offers programming courses without any teachers, and does not issue any diploma or degree qualifications. It’s open 24/7, and it’s very popular.
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.
