Rise Of Flight The First Great Air War [English] PC ISO !LINK!
Aircraft have means of automatically controlling flight. Autopilot was first invented by Lawrence Sperry during World War I to fly bomber planes steady enough to hit accurate targets from 25,000 feet. When it was first adopted by the U.S. military, a Honeywell engineer sat in the back seat with bolt cutters to disconnect the autopilot in case of emergency. Nowadays most commercial planes are equipped with aircraft flight control systems in order to reduce pilot error and workload at landing or takeoff.[4]
Rise Of Flight The First Great Air War [English] PC ISO
The first simple commercial auto-pilots were used to control heading and altitude and had limited authority on things like thrust and flight control surfaces. In helicopters, auto-stabilization was used in a similar way. The first systems were electromechanical. The advent of fly-by-wire and electro-actuated flight surfaces (rather than the traditional hydraulic) has increased safety. As with displays and instruments, critical devices that were electro-mechanical had a finite life. With safety critical systems, the software is very strictly tested.
Lightning detectors like the Stormscope or Strikefinder have become inexpensive enough that they are practical for light aircraft. In addition to radar and lightning detection, observations and extended radar pictures (such as NEXRAD) are now available through satellite data connections, allowing pilots to see weather conditions far beyond the range of their own in-flight systems. Modern displays allow weather information to be integrated with moving maps, terrain, and traffic onto a single screen, greatly simplifying navigation.
Bottom Line Up Front. Simply this means (and warns the reader) that the key point is summarised at the start or top of the communication. BLUF is a wonderfully potent acronym, useful in many situations. BLUF (thanks M Callaham) originated in the US military in written communications, where it serves as as an immediate emphasis and prefix of the central point of the message or report. It equates to the expressions 'cutting to the chase' and 'without beating around the bush'. In structural terms, the BLUF technique equates to an 'executive summary', which is a very brief summary of the strategically essential point(s) positioned at the start of the communication. This itself is normally a very concisely reduced version of a larger summary at the end of the document, based on the greater detail within the main part of the document or communication. A major learning and usage aspect of BLUF is the communicator's responsibility to present information to the reader or listener or audience efficiently, especially for senior and very busy people, who often have neither time nor need to read and absorb lots of detail. Senior people especially want the main point(s) - the' bottom line' - first - 'up front'. In management, and in the military, senior people rely on junior people to take care of the detail and to provide the strategic interpretation by which big decisions can be made. Incidentally the term 'bottom line' is a figurative reference to the bottom line in corporate financial accounts, which contains the profit or loss figure, crucial to most organized ventures and organizations. While BLUF remains popular in US military communications, its usefulness has spread and its adoption can be helpful into very many situations where effective speedy communication is valued. This includes notably: business and management communications (especially involving strategic decision-making); quick report-writing and conveying updates and status; emergency response and reactions (reporting up and informing down the management structure); presentations and speeches and talks; writing of press releases, PR materials, and also advertising and consumer or 'general-public audience' communications (in which the actual inclusion of the term BLUF is generally not appropriate - here BLUF serves more of a structural reminder to the writer).
Massive Open Online Course/Courses. The term is relatively recent, apparently emerging first in 2008. MOOC is commonly pluralized - MOOCs - in references to the education market/industry and trends within education. According to Wikipedia 2012, "...the term MOOC was coined in 2008 by Dave Cormier, Manager of Web Communication and Innovations at the University of Prince Edward Island, and Senior Research Fellow Bryan Alexander of the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education in response to an open online course designed and led by George Siemens, associate director, Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute at Athabasca University and Stephen Downes, Senior Researcher at The National Research Council (Canada)..." A MOOC (a sort of VLE - Virtual Learning Environment) tends to have certain characteristics, although the concept is new and developing and subject to change, not least because some early market entrants/pioneers are commercially underpinned. MOOCs typically comprise the following elements: 'higher education' or 'further education', i.e., in the college/university space, not schooling for children; accessible via the web; free to learners (although some MOOCs require fees); available to/used by very big numbers of learners (from hundreds up to potentially millions per course); the learning is mainly learner-driven/controlled; registrations and certifications are (so far) less formal than in conventional further/higher education (although we can expect this aspect to become progressively more rigorous over time, and certain MOOCs and MOOC providers definitely require registration). MOOCs - and the concept itself - potentially represent a very big part of future further/higher education, especially for the 'mass market' of learners not wanting to be solicitors or doctors, etc., and especially considering the arguably declining and pressurized costs/value/quality of education in traditional 'bricks and mortar' universities, which, just like traditional books, newspapers, recorded music, retailing, etc., is an older, more rigid and expensive delivery model when competing with vastly more efficient supply/services available digitally via the web. MOOC critics and detractors may suggest that learning, like other forms of communication and relationships, always works best when conducted 'face-to-face' or at least in the physical presence of a teacher, and that the university life experience cannot be replaced by online activities. In many situations this is very true, except that an entire global generation is now growing up using phone/computer/tablet/digital systems for managing virtually every significant aspect of their lives. Future generations simply will not need the face-to-face contact that past generations did, just as nowadays we don't need horses for transport, and young people don't need watches to know the time. People living a few generations ago would never have imagined that the telephone (never mind email and texting) would completely eclipse the centuries-old tradition of writing letters. Picture-house/cinema customers in their millions never considered TV or radio as a threat. Even when computers first emerged commercially in the 1960s they remained purely a business/commercial tool for decades because no-one considered they could have a purpose for ordinary people. Now most children (other than those in genuine poverty) possess a smartphone which can outperform a business mainframe computer of the 1990s. So MOOCs - or something very similar - are very probably the long-term future of the main parts of higher/further education. MOOCs could also easily become very significant in teaching very young people. Young people find and use things that are useful, whether they are supposed to or not. The MOOC model will no doubt alter (probably financially, and the technology will become more sophisticated), but a big part of the future of higher/further education (for teachers and lecturers too) is online for sure. So perhaps we should begin thinking about what to do with all these university buildings everywhere.. They could help solve the homelessness problem, for example. (It is maybe not wholly coincidental that MOOC finds itself very close in dictionary listings and glossaries to MOODLE below, which is a closely related and often integrated system within the MOOC concept.)
No Income, No Job or Assets. A relatively recent acronym which achieved prominence during the summer 2007 'sub-prime' loans crisis, in which banks and financial markets questioned (for a day or two anyway) the wisdom of lending too much money to people who would be unlikely to be able to make the repayments, especially when interest rates rose. (Ack S Gilbert) The term 'sub-prime' is a banking euphemism for dodgy, risky, unethical, idiotic, short-sighted, reckless, irresponsible, etc., (delete as applicable). The leaders of the big corporate banks don't actually really care if the loans are risky and irresponsible because their corporations are expert at laying off these debts elsewhere, and ultimately are effectively immune from even the most extraordinarily high levels of self-inflicted bad debts, because the losses can always be recovered from their millions of other fee-paying customers who are far too passive and trusting for their own good. You will gather that I am not a great fan of the big banks, and I enjoy very much the following question and answer: What do you call twenty 20 bankers at the bottom of the sea?......... A good start. I am sure there are one or two ethical corporate bankers out there who have experienced feelings of human kindness and consideration at some time in their lives - if only towards their wives and children, or maybe as infants themselves prior to suffering their own desperate childhood sadness and neglect as tends to produce a fixation on greed and exploitating others - but they are a rare breed indeed. "A power has risen up in the government greater than the people themselves, consisting of many and various and powerful interests, combined into one mass, and held together by the cohesive power of the vast surplus in the banks." In essence nothing much has changed - other than the situation has gone global - since the American politician John Calhoun made this observation in 1936. The banks - and other similarly large and greedy industries (oil, construction, defence notably) - hold the well-being of our world, and the testicles of our politicians, in their hands. God help us all.
