France Bans Mobile Phones in French Schools - What does it mean for Maastricht University

Labour market becomes overcharged Until 2022, the number of people in work in the Netherlands will grow by 520,000, which amounts to an average annual employment growth rate of 1.0%. Graduates of research universities and universities of applied sciences will have the best job prospects until 2022. People with a degree in technology, engineering or health care will have good to excellent job prospects, regardless of whether went to a school for senior secondary vocational education (MBO) or to a university. Employers will continue to struggle in the next few years to fill vacancies for technical staff and ICT specialists. The most significant employment growth is expected in the health care, wholesaling, specialist business consultancy and construction industries.

Read more at Maastricht University

Youth in Maastricht - Mr Robot Easter Egg Could Change Everything

During the opening of Mr. Robot “eps3.5_kill-process.inc”, we were shown a scene where a young Angela was at a party for her mother; this was after the accident that ultimately killed her mother and Elliot's father. 

Calling it a "party" sounds weird, but there was definitely a gathering, and it felt like Angela's mother was saying her last goodbyes. Angela had a conversation with Elliot's father, in which he made her understand why she should speak to her mother during this time, convincing her to be upfront with her mother during this ordeal. Angela's mother makes an interesting comment about there being "another world" out there, and that they'd "see each other again." Khal and Frazier Tharpe

Virtual reality users must learn to use what they see in Maastricht

Virtual reality users must learn to use what they see

by Chris Barncard, 4 December 2017

Anyone with normal vision knows that a ball that seems to quickly be growing larger is probably going to hit them on the nose. But strap them into a virtual reality headset, and they still may need to take a few lumps before they pay attention to the visual cues that work so well in the real world, according to a new study from University of Wisconsin-Madison psychologists.

 "The companies leading the virtual reality revolution have solved major engineering challenges—how do you build a small headset that does a good job presenting images of a virtual world," says Bas Rokers, UW-Madison psychology professor. "But they have not thought as much about how the brain processes these images. How do people perceive a virtual world?" Turns out, they don't perceive it like the real world—at least not without training, according a study Rokers and postdoctoral psychology researcher Jacqueline Fulvio published recently in the journal Nature Scientific Reports.

"Most importantly, they confused whether the object was coming toward them or going away from them," she says. "It was a surprising finding. Nobody believed it, because it's not something that happens often in the real world. You'd get hurt." The researchers decided to move the test to virtual reality to provide more realistic indications of motion in three dimensions—such as binocular cues, in which slightly different views from the left and right eye reveal depth, and parallax, where closer objects appear to be moving faster than those farther away.

"We thought it was as easy as taking the same object-tracking task, putting it in the virtual environment, and having people do it the same way," Fulvio says. "And they did do it the same way. They made the same mistakes." Given a one-second snippet of the movement of a small, round target across a plane that stretched away from the viewer at roughly eye level, study participants correctly moved a virtual paddle to intercept the target's course less than a quarter of the time. Continue reading at MedicalXpress

An End to Maastricht University As We Know It

Quartz

“Not enough people are innovating enough in higher education. General Electric looks nothing like it looked in 1975. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or Stanford look a lot like they looked in 1975. They’re about the same size to within a factor of two; they’re about the same number of buildings; they operate on about the same calendar; they have many of the same people or some number of the same people in significant positions.”

Larry Summers, the economist who served for five years as president of Harvard Think of the college library. A musky, magnificent space—rooms topped out by cathedral ceilings, golden light angling in with otherworldly might, illuminating rows of students camping out amongst shelves or hunching over at wooden tables riddled with decades of frustrated pencil marks and the thuds of limb-tearing textbooks. That is what it was. No longer.

Over the last several decades, the university library has become less vital, its books getting dusty with disuse, its edge-worn card system replaced by digital catalogs and powerful scanning machines that could put entire tomes online in minutes. Some schools, like the University of Chicago, moved much of their physical collections underground. Others, like the University of Texas at San Antonio, rethought the idea of a library, opening study spaces without physical books at all.

Instead of going to libraries for resources and information, most students these days congregate there mainly to toss ideas back and forth, write essays together, work on group projects. Shocking as it might seem, there is one catch-all answer that could be the remedy to many of these concerns: Cut the campus loose. Axe the physical constraints. The library? Classrooms? Professors? Take it all away. The future of the university is up in the air. Rapid-fire innovation out of Silicon Valley has allowed students to chat over an array of messaging apps from their dorm-room beds and work at lightning-fast speed across digital platforms.

The same radical disruptions are taking place, simultaneously, in other spaces on campuses: Ancient classrooms and musty hallways are no longer a requirement for university education, as they have been for the last several centuries.

 Texas A&M University is currently debuting a first-of-its-kind online lecture, which will replace a mandatory introductory economics lecture: Students can pass the entire semester (with flying colors, at that) without ever having to see the professors, or one another, in person. At many other universities across the US, textbooks are going the way of Netflix. That means they no longer need to exist in physical form. In some cases, even the teachers are going virtual. Continue reading at Quartz From Part Four of a series.

Part One: The college lecture is dying.
Good riddance Part Two: College textbooks are going the way of Netflix 
Part Three: Imagine how great universities could be without all those human teachers

What’s Not at Maastricht University Library | Virtual Reality & Smoothie Bars

The Mercury News NOT Observant

by Emily Deruy 

Librarians at UC Berkeley are holding workshops for students on what to do with the information they collect using drones. At Stanford, they’re experimenting with virtual reality. And across the Bay Area, as more textbooks gather dust and coursework moves online, universities are reimagining their libraries.

“We’re like fish, If we don’t keep swimming, we die.” Karen Schneider, Sonoma State University librarian University libraries used to warehouse knowledge, but they’re places where it’s created now. And that, students and school officials say, makes them more relevant than ever.

Numbers back up that notion. While book circulation is down at each of the libraries the Bay Area News Group surveyed, the number of students using library space is up. Librarians say students are looking for places where they can take the work they do individually online and use it to collaborate as part of a team in the real world. “The digital age has actually raised the importance of spaces for people to actually come together.”

Jeffrey MacKie-Mason, Cal’s librarian and chief digital scholarship officer The exterior of Berkeley’s Moffitt Library is pure 1970, a harsh gray building that from certain angles resembles a parking structure. But the recently renovated top two floors, designed by San Francisco-based Gensler, look like a modern startup office. There are writeable glass walls where students scribble equations and notes, furniture that can be rearranged for individual or group work, study rooms with web conferencing capabilities — and even a nap pod.

For a long time, information was expensive and scarce: “A big part of the problem is dealing with the flood. There’s also the challenge of figuring out which information is useful and reliable — and how to access it.” Jeffrey MacKie-Mason There’s also the challenge of figuring out which information is useful and reliable — and how to access it.

 Students today might be digital natives, but many still come to college not knowing how to search an online database, said Cody Hennesy, Cal’s e-learning and information studies librarian. So he visits classrooms and offers workshops. Samberg, an intellectual property attorney in a past life, helps students and faculty navigate an ever-changing web of open source material, fair use policy, privacy concerns and ethics issues. Continue reading at The Mercury News