Has it been six months since the last update? Evidently so. I’m sorry for the lack of responses, be it to emails or comments here – I cannot lie, I haven’t been busy, but I haven’t really been bothered to login and update here. But I herald my brief return with the two updates you see below. Just one thing: I’ve moved all the notes so that they’re hosted on WP now, for your (but mainly my) convenience. In case I linked anything wrongly, drop me a note in the comments, thanks.

Two FAQs below:

1. Can you upload history/literature/physics/etc. notes?
I really wish I could, honest. But unfortunately these aren’t subjects that I took during As and as such I’m not really the best person to come up with notes on any of these subjects. But you know what? You could play a part, upload your notes and drop me a link, and I’ll gladly link your notes from my site. After all, all those biology notes on this site didn’t come from two years of not taking biology.

2. I’ve noticed that your notes are missing sections on _____. Can you append them or upload new notes?
I’d hate to tell you this, but I’ve graduated a good one-and-a-half years and unfortunately, I really am not in the position make amendments/additions to the repository I have here. However, all these notes are licensed under a Creative Commons remix license, which basically means you can take them and do whatever you want with them – yes guys, I’m telling you to edit them or make suggestions to improve them. (More info on the About page.)

Smashing Magazine has a fantastic article up, 50 Free Resources That Will Improve Your Writing Skills, the title of which pretty much speaks for itself. Grammar got you confused? Need to know how to style your essays? Or perhaps want to learn how to write a fantastic copy? I’m pretty sure you’ll find something of use in Smashing’s extensive compilation.

Book Boon is a site with free downloadable textbooks about subjects ranging far and wide, from statistics to mechanical engineering to microeconomics. Right now I’m looking at the 109-page environmental pollution textbook, and can say that I’m suitably impressed. It is comprehensive, perhaps a little bit too, but can I fault them? Most of the contents are quite definitely out of your A-Level syllabus, but if you’re up for a little further (and I actually mean much further) reading, this site might just be for you.

Thanks Antonia for the tip.

Caught in Geog is a pretty comprehensive for your H1/H2 Geography needs. Summaries, essay outlines, case studies etc. for your perusal. Kudos to Stacy for setting this up, and for sharing your work!

Hm. This probably comes a bit late, but let’s stick to the old adage that it’s better late than never. (Actually, “last ditch” comes to mind.) If you’ve never really bothered to read the news, this IHT/Oxford Analytica collaboration would probably be a little more than useful to you. If you need a quick brief on what’s been going on, or (more probably) are severely desperate, these digestible and page-long analyses should be of some help. Sure there are lots of articles to read, but search enough and you’ll find the gems among them.

Just a quick look at the links down on the first page:
INTERNATIONAL: Global financial regulation is illusory
LATIN AMERICA: FTAs generate long-term benefits
INTERNATIONAL: Financial crisis goes global

And what to expect, taken from the article about FTAs:

A parallel argument suggests that the main benefits of FTAs in developing countries lie in their long-term qualitative effects, rather than short-term quantitative gains:

• Institutional and policy stability. FTAs, particularly with industrialized countries, and their prospective benefits provide a framework that helps to lock in pro-market structural reforms and, particularly, macroeconomic discipline.

• Environmental, phytosanitary and labor standards. FTA disciplines in these areas — although risking their use as non-tariff barriers — serve as an incentive for improvements that benefit local quality of life as well as long-term growth.

Thanks Yee Sian for dropping me this link on MSN just a few minutes earlier.

Just a quick follow up from the previous posts: to all J2s this year who are starting their As (and this comes late for the few that have already started their L3 As, but, yeah): all the best in the next few weeks! This is all that you’ve been slogging out your guts (at least I hope you have) for in the last two years. Like I’ve been telling all my juniors, it’s gonna pass faster than you think it will, so don’t worry too much. Dive in and do your best!

I’ve been getting a whole lot of hits in the past two months, and I’m really hoping that these notes are making something of a difference to you. So here’s my best regards from the sidelines now, one and a half year on since I started the site – you’re gonna shine. (:

Hello all! This is just a shoutout to all the J2s this year (especially my juniors), whose Prelims have already started. All the best, and hang in there, this is your second last lap, give it your best and it’ll be over soon!

(Update! I’m halfway through this list of study tips, but the army has been keeping me a little busy. I’ll try to get it up sometime this weekend.) Update again: I’ll probably never get down to it.

Okay, I figured since I was back to put the previous post up, I might as well write something here. It’s been some four months since I did anything substantial here… but I guess it’s been an eventful four months. Army has been interesting, and thank goodness, my A-level results were pretty good. (Okay, so I can’t technically say that wasn’t an endorsement for this site since I made most of the notes here :D) Haha anyways, I see the traffic is picking up (almost hitting 20k!) a little over the past week in preparation for the J2 CTs that are a few days away.

To the J2s this year, don’t worry, you still have a while to go before the big As, but study hard because, more often than not, hard work more than makes up for where you lack in smarts. All the best, and hang in there!

Anyway. One thing. Check iPaper out. Sounds like something cool to implement here? I’m considering also, so you won’t have to bother with plugins and applications to view these documents. But we’ll see. (Since WordPress doesn’t like JavaScript embedded on its posts… yeah, it gets annoying)

Someone dropped a link to his math site a while ago, and I haven’t really gotten the time to update, but here goes.

Mastering Maths Smartly, he calls it. Step-by-steps on how to solve your typical math problems, plus some practices as well. Cool stuff.

Alright, I’m pretty much done with what was the rather unexciting culmination of twelve years with the Ministry of Education.
But to the biology/physics/literature/TSD/random H3 people, all the best for your remaining papers – hang in there for just a while more – you can almost smell the freedom.

So this marks the end (somewhat) of what started out early this year as an unassuming attempt at what I’ve called utility maximizing since this site’s inception at the old page. And as much as I’m the RJ guy with nothing better to do than to make and upload his notes, I honestly hope that all this effort has been worth the while and have made some sort of a difference. It’s seriously been pretty encouraging for me all this while to see all the comments, the emails, the mysterious hits I get from Hotmail and Gmail, and I guess the end of the As more or less ends my job here.

So I’ll leave all this at that, and assure whoever’s interested that this site will remain online as far as I’m concerned. I won’t be checking or updating it much for now on – but we’ll just see what happens. If you’re interested in continuing this site, or doing something more, feel free to contact me at any time.

Once again, thanks everyone who’ve been supporting me and this site for the past few months or so. Just so you know, I end this with 15,000 hits – an immense number that would’ve seemed unimaginable when I first started on Google Pages in the middle of March. This has been awesome.

Signing out for what would probably be the last time,
Zhuoyi

Update: 17/11/07
Richard Baraniuk speaks to my heard in this presentation well worth watching. I just felt like I needed to remind all users that everything (at least, everything by me) on this site is on the Creative Commons under the license you see in the right hand sidebar. This means that everyone out there has my express permission to not only use, but to modify and improve on the notes that are on this site and distribute these derivatives. The only conditionality attached to this is that you redistribute these works under the same license as the original work.

I just felt like I needed to make this clear that you are free to continue whatever legacy you feel like I’m leaving. This is my experiment in open-source so that you don’t have to start from scratch.