Despite what some detractors say, torrents have plenty of legitimate uses — one of which is helping organizations distribute digital content at little or no cost. That’s especially important for a non-profit like Khan Academy, which is why its partnership with BitTorrent Inc. makes perfect sense.

Khan Academy is a provider of free, online educational videos. A wide range of subjects are covered, including physics, biology, trigonometry, calculus, and economics. The academy’s vault currently includes more than 2,000 videos, and all are now accessible via BitTorrent apps. Founder Salman Khan told TorrentFreak, “BitTorrent is a great platform to help us fulfill our mission of providing world-class education to anyone, anywhere.”

If you’ve got either uTorrent or BitTorrent installed, just install the Khan Academy app and get studying! Best of all, you’ll also be helping out by seeding content and giving back to the community while you watch.

Source: Khan Academy and BitTorrent partner to deliver P2P educational video

In this project, we have to create and render a scene using a program called POV-Ray for the given open-ended theme “My Toy Story”. We are required to design, model and beautify our own scene, which must consist of objects of different shapes, textures and surface finishes with simple animation. This assignment is worth 10% of the overall assessment for this unit.

We had to demonstrate the use of the required objects/components during the presentation, and being able to change the code to show that we know what we were doing. My tutor (Yasmin) said it was very well done and gave me full marks (according to the marking guide), and told me she would recommend to place it on the unit online gallery.

My Toy Story: Buzz Lightyear

Animation

Early stage of development - putting the "pieces" together. The black lines are placed to intersect at the origin to aid me in positioning.

Original model of Buzz that my image was modelled upon.

More information/source files are available on my school page.

Intelligent MCQ Guessing

• Alternatives with absolute or universal qualifiers are usually wrong (“all”, “every”, “never”, “in no case”, “in every case”, etc.)
• Alternatives that seem impossible or that seem completely unrelated to the question are usually wrong (watch out for alternatives that are true, but have nothing to do with the question).
• If two or more alternatives say the same thing, each is probably wrong (you can have two that are wrong, but not two that are right on m/c tests).
• The answer to one question is sometimes given away in another question (tests contain a lot of information – use it).
• When 3 or more alternatives deal in different ways with one concept, one of them is usually right. The instructor usually doesn’t waste 3 alternatives on single incorrect concept. In this case, he or she most likely wants to have you discriminate knowledge.
• If two answers contain a similar sounding word, such as “subordination” and “subrogation,” choose one of these.
• If two answers are almost identical except for a few words, choose one of these.
• If two answers seem extreme, they should be eliminated, and a guess made as to the remaining answers. As an example, if the answer is to be a number, and 3, 57, 89, 1103 are the choices given, you should eliminate the 3 and 1103, and take a guess at one of the remaining choices.
• If you are unable to eliminate any answer on a 4 answer question, choose the third. Experience has shown that it has a better than 25% chance of being the correct answer.
• Don’t try to apply definitions from outside the course. Answer the questions found on your lecture and class reading; not based on educational knowledge that you have.
• Never argue with a question. Accept it at face value.
• When all else fails:
  1. choose the alternative that makes the best sentence, when added to the open-ended question.
  2. look for subject-verb agreement.
  3. know the instructor’s quirks of language.
  4. choose the longer answer. The instructor may have used more words to make the answer precise; thus the most correct.
• None of these rules works all the time, so use them only if you must.

I stayed up all night trying to understand and do today’s HF lab, and only went to sleep at 4:30am. Woke up ten minutes before the lecture and was almost late. Luckily I’m staying near uni… Anyway, the lab was really hard, only managed to get to halfway in the two hours. My lab mate and I decided to attend the make-up lab lesson at the end of the semester to complete the other half.

Today I got back my SETM assignment… didn’t do that well, but I passed!