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.
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.
Ever since the robot dog K-9 appeared in Doctor Who in the 1970s, geeks of a certain age have fantasized about having a metallic sidekick that does most things a real dog would do but doesn’t need to poop and can beat them at chess.
