#universitychallenge

[sensationally-senseless]

🌟 Help Me Out with a Quick Click! 🌟

Hey everyone! I’m currently participating in a super exciting challenge sponsored by Microsoft as part of my role as a Student Ambassador at my university. 🎓✨ This is an amazing opportunity for me, but I need a little bit of help from all of you to make it count!

Here’s the deal: I need to hit a target by getting clicks on a few links to earn points. It’s really simple—just click on the links below and then hit back. That’s all you need to do! 🖱️🔗

Why is this important? 🤔 If I don’t meet the target, I won’t be able to earn the university credits I need for this challenge. Your clicks can make a huge difference in helping me succeed!

How to Help:

Click on each of the links below.

Hit back to return to this post.

Repeat for each link!

Links to Click: 1. Azure 2. VSCode 3. DevBlogs 4. DotNet 5. Microsoft Developer 6. ImagineCup 7. Microsoft Learn 8. Microsoft Cloud 9. StartUps 10. MVP 11. Microsoft Tech Community

It’s a small favor that could mean a lot for my academic journey. If you can spare a moment, it would really mean the world to me! 💖🙏

Thank you so much for your support! 🚀💪

#UniversityChallenge #Microsoft #StudentAmbassador #HelpNeeded #QuickClick #Support #TechChallenge #UniversityLife #StudentSupport #Credits #ClickForPoints #ThankYou

[yassmin-net]

What do you know about YouTube (interesting statistical evidence)

YouTube has become a part of the lives of its users, as it is a great source of profit, marketing, learning, following the news, communication, .....

[universitychallenged]

UNIVERSITY CHALLENGE 2021/22, Episode 12

GASP! As any regular reader will know, I am extremely biased in favour of arts colleges, and the sight of a music college at the start of this week’s show caused my heart to double-time. Honestly, I haven’t been so excited since Courtauld’s magnificent run two seasons ago. 

DUNDEE: 145 ROYAL NORTHERN COLLEGE OF MUSIC: 135

Team Vibe: Dundee: a dinner party, with a Spotify playlist entitled Chilled Out Weirdness, featuring lots of mid-price wine, with polite goodbyes

Royal Northern College of Music: a dinner party, with a Spotify playlist entitled Weird Vocal Shit My Opera Teacher Won’t Like, featuring lots of mid-price wine, descending into the ad-hoc multi-person performance of Eight Songs for a Mad King with additional piano

Grandad Count: RNCM the slightly older with an average age of 24. Who cares! They’re MY PEOPLE.

Diversity Count: Not the worst, but not the best. 

Style News: Dundee the clear winners here, bringing two bold images in the form of strawberry knitted tank top (Russell) and fishy – carp? – print shirt (Spurrell). RNCM, I expect more from you! Plain-coloured tops WILL NOT DO.

Cult Hero Of The Episode: I was dreadfully tense for this episode, because musicians (including one composer, Wills, who looked familiar, and two vocalists, my specialism) on UniChall is basically the same as me being on there. It was a shaky start, and it looked like the casually confident Dundee were going to punish them (I did like Captain Stonier’s unflappability), but minute by minute, RNCM clawed their way back. The last time I was so heartily shouty at the telly I was watching the Euros final. YES! Musicians CAN know stuff about pickled plums and Russian physicists! I’m giving it to all them, because though they were just pipped to the post, they might hopefully come back as a high-scoring loser. 

Handsome Person of the Episode: Captain Chrisp was giving me Anya Taylor-Joy in The Queen’s Gambit vibes. But mmm, Carew. Except for the tattoo of some music on your arm (if this must be done I insist it must be in 5/8 and be serialist), you had me at ‘Sega Genesis?’.

Horror Bonus Round: (Jez, reading this in one breath, the timbre of his voice descending with increasing gloom): ‘Astrophysicists uses the abbreviation CDM for the universal material that is assumed to exist with little or zero relative velocity under the  under the standard cosmological model. CDM stands for ‘Cold what?’

Regular Music Fail By Composition PhD-owning Composer, Kerry Andrew:  ‘The X-Files!’ I yelled, in terror, after 1.234 seconds of the synth-based TV theme round, when I have watched all of Stranger Things (the correct answer) twice because I loved it so. ARGH! Wasn’t quick enough to get Bladerunner or Assault on Precinct 13, though did get Twin Peaks in a heartbeat, because we watched it after Girl Guides in 1990. Good God, I’m old. Props to Carew for getting the Beethoven piano question in no time at all.

Dream Bonus Question Round: 2/3 in the screenwriters round, 2/3 in the Women’s Prize for Fiction, 2/3 in the British coastal geography (’Scarbados!’ I shouted), 3 out of 4 in the John Le Carre film adaptions. Standard.

Jezza-Watch: It’s time for Let’s Guess What’s On Jezza’s Tie! What was it tonight? Owls? Snails? Answers welcome; I need to know.

‘Low temperature fusion?’ guessed Dundee’s Captain Stonier. ‘No, it was cold fusion,’ said Jez, stony-faced, in the manner of a terrifying 1970s headmaster from a children’s horror novel. ‘We asked for a two-word term and you gave a three-word term.’ ‘OK. Sorry,’ said Captain Stonier, meekly, bearing the brunt for all of us.

‘Who’d have thought time-wasting would be so useful?’ Jezzo said, after the gaming bonus round. Oh Jeremy, you don’t even BELIEVE in your own curmudgeon-li-ness. You’re not fooling anyone, you know...

Kerry and Andy’s Score: 25, with Andy doing the majority of the leg-work.

Brain Food: Hearty vegetable soup. WINTER IS COMING.

Tweets of the Day:

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[afootnotetoallthisnoise-blog]

on the lucky 10,000, music, and being intimidated

One of my favourite XKCD comics conceptualises the 'You haven't heard of this?!' phenomenon in a more positive light: “for each thing "everyone knows" by the time they're adults, every day there are, on average, 10,000 people in the US hearing about it for the first time.” If we make fun of people for not knowing things, we taint their wonder - and our experience of their wonder - when they do experience them. It weighs down that experience with the panicky sense of catching up, rather than the joyful sense of getting to finally see a cultural phenomenon.

I've always noticed this problem of the 'lucky 10,000' being more of an 'unlucky 10,000', but university-level quizzing has brought it into closer view for me. So much knowledge I don't have is assumed knowledge in quiz, that discovering new facts can be met by more of a 'wait, you don't know that?' than a 'yeah, it's cool, isn't it?' So often, you feel like you're three steps behind, vaguely recognising that song when the person next to you has already recited its name and composer, and spending hours researching to just achieve the stage of 'basic' knowledge. You can get caught in an unhealthy mental complex where embarrassment at what you don't know outweighs the pleasure of learning it. 

Meanwhile, in the public sphere, your painstakingly fought-for general knowledge can be taken for granted, whilst a lacuna in your popular culture experience is pounced on. (Downing College saw this after their Monday episode, when the media 'despaired' when their excellent University Challenge team hadn't heard of Iron Maiden. The same happened last year, when the Emmanuel team (which I was the reserve for) thought a lesser-known section of Stairway to Heaven was Oasis. For the record, I would have been absolutely no help to them, and neither would my mother, who was born in the '60s and thought it was Fleetwood Mac. I actually think it did sound rather Oasis-like.)

Being a quizzer and a graduate student, it's so difficult to see what you haven't experienced as a future joy rather than a present burden. A couple months back, another English student (a lovely and very talented guy) made an offhand comment about 'how could you make it to third year without having read X author' (an author I hadn't read, though he didn't know that). When someone asks me if I've heard of Y author, I often find myself too embarrassed to say a flat 'no' and often opt for the less damning 'yes, though I haven't read any of their stuff'. Rationally, I know this isn't a reasonable anxiety; I should be secure in my abilities in literature now, three years of study is only about long enough to have read something by maybe 200 primary authors (and that's including authors of short stories/extracts), and I'm sure that if the conversation was in my hands, I'd be capable of intimidating people if I deployed my most 'impressive' reading in a suitably nonchalant tone. But as a fairly novice quizzer and a new graduate student, I'm not that secure, nor should I be. I have a lot to learn. And the 'lot' is much harder if the spectres of shame, directionless panic, and What's the Point Anyway are dogging your every step.

Speaking of the Iron Maiden and Oasis debacles, I'd like to mention music in this light as well: I've never understood music snobbery, both of the 'oh my GOD you haven't heard of them?' variety and the 'prog master race / Bieber is cancer' variety. Music is so personal - so bound into how people's brainwaves and bodies and particular affinity for language and melody and rhythm work. (Lawrence Grossberg in 'we've gotta get out of this place' ties affect theory into rock music, if this train of thought interests you at all.) I mostly like electronic / EDM-type music with little infectious cadences which make me reflexively smile or move when I hear them. I can get stuck on how a musician says a particular line for days. I like pop and alt-pop and 'indie' stuff which probably isn't 'actual indie' but it makes me dance and lip-sync when I'm listening on the walk home and that matters to me more than any genre superiority. Fuck, I once got so into a game from a shitty app knockoff of Dance Dance Revolution that I'd have the app on in the background and would repeat the relevant level for hours. Quality is relevant, yes, but so is immanent experience, and you can't police that. If Gucci Gang gives you frissons down your spine, who the hell am I to tell you it shouldn't? Or to legislate what songs should mark your memory of a particular time? By all means look up new stuff, but Led Zeppelin mastery shouldn’t be mandated as a condition of civility. (I presume this is also a chronology thing, too - I’m guessing a more recent acclaimed musician would not have sparked the same furore, Kendrick Lamar for instance. Concretising music as ‘classic’ takes time. But I digress.)

Anyway, to return to academia. Even the most brilliant students can feel the pressure to not show a spot of 'weakness'. A chronic overachiever I know had to take a language exam earlier this year, which meant learning a sadistic quantity of verb forms/vocabulary by heart. I asked them whether revising with others was a good idea, and they sort of looked down uncomfortably and conveyed that they didn't want to admit to others that they were 'needing' to learn this stuff, since it's supposedly 'common knowledge'. After I expressed scepticism that they didn't know stuff everyone else knew, they freely admitted 'Oh, most people don't know this stuff off by heart at all. But it's supposed to be common knowledge.' Talk about a communally sustained illusion!

I don't know how you combat this, to be honest. I tend to just always have a book on the go at any one time, so it acts as an 'excuse' of sorts. I'm reading Joyce's Ulysses for my course next term at the moment - probably the most 'canonical' book I haven't read yet, but treating it as its own beautiful, puzzling, maddening, problematic, intense experience rather than a Basic Bitch Mainstay is helping a lot. (That's what practical criticism is about, after all - taking concretised books and viewing them on their own terms, rather than ossifying them behind ten layers of others' perspectives first.)   But it also helps, I think, to be more honest with each other. I've asked a bunch of my friends recently to give me movie ideas - I've seen very few films - and they've been delightedly replying with their favourite movies for days now. Sure, it can feel less 'impressive' to take in the cultural suggestions of others, rather than propagating your own ideas outwards to others. But it's a necessary symbiosis, and I think we all know that. We're just a little afraid to admit it.

P.S. I've just watched the first of the films on the list - Blue Velvet. I like it a lot, I think. It's weird. I didn't know films could really do that. It's surreal but not quite surreal enough that it breaks continuity. And the symbolism at the end feels really heavy-handed, but almost so heavy-handed that it's purposeful? Or maybe not? Stylistically it's mesmerising. So this is David Lynch, huh. I'll have to watch more.

[greek-arete]

That was a great final!  xx

[mrtranceninja]

Visit Original Link

universally challenged 1.0

[universitychallenged]

University Challenge 2020/21 Episode 15

It’s BACK! With a seamless transition between the first round, filmed months ago, and the highest scoring losers bit, filmed very recently. You’d hardly know the difference, apart from:

Something strange having happened to Jeremy P (see below)

Huge plastic screens between teammates

Contestants wearing earpieces so they can hear each other, and thus conferring REALLY LOUD INDEED

I got totes emosh, actually (it doesn’t take much: I lost it during the Strictly opening to see dancers like, dancing together); Jezzo gave a lovely introduction which highlighted the fortitude and badassery of all students everywhere. It was quite ‘we happy few’, except conjuring not lusty Henry V battle scenes but images of students trapped behind campus corridor windows with handwritten signs drolly demanding BEER for their survival. SOB.

Team Vibe:

Imperial: quite FUN and LIVELY

Exeter: quite SWEET and SHOUTY

Grandad Count: Average ages of 20 on both teams. I probably had half the knowledge, aged 20, that I have now, which means that when they were 10 years old, they still knew 20 times more than me.

Gender Diversity Count: Not good enough, but I’m just happy to see students going about their business this week like screens and earpieces are normal, so all is forgiven.

Style News: Pretty good this week! Am I right to think non-Oxbridge teams bring out more festive-wear? Captain Kohn of Imperial had a good shirt, Wong brought the tie-dye, and Captain Gravett of Exeter had a lovely yellow top or dress with bold power-sleeves. My fave, though, was Marrow’s minimalisty graphic T-shirt:

***STOP PRESS! I was wondering why her surname was so familiar - she’s only the twin sister of Marrow from St John’s, Cambridge! So. Damned. Cool.***

Cult Hero Of The Episode: Captain Kohn, my goodness! Answering questions before Exeter had breathed, before I had blinked, before Jeremy had tossed his hair out of his eyes, etc.

Handsome Person of the Episode: I dug Marrow’s unadorned beauty but Parker of Exeter was D.R.E.A.M.Y.

Horror Bonus Round: ‘Your bonuses are on astronomy: if the diameter of the earth is 12,000, the unit is kilometers; what unit is being used if the diameter of the sun is 4.64’?

Regular Music Fail By Composition PhD-owning Composer, Kerry Andrew: ‘Indicating a slow, dignified tempo, what five-letter musical direction links the second movement of Dvor–’

I was still counting ‘A-D-A-G-I-O’ on my fingers while Kohn answered ‘Largo.’ Hahahaha.

I loved the topic of the music bonus round – band’s songs sung by someone other than the main vocalist – but Kohn was so speedy that we couldn’t get there before him: ‘ABBA?’ he said, to the starter, after 0.6333 seconds of ‘Does Your Mother Know’. Jez looked quite put out. ‘There’s no need to say it so dismissively!’ he pouted. ‘It’s great music!’ Jez used to go regularly to Inferno’s in Clapham on Ladies Go In Free Night; you’d see him twerking to ‘Money Money Money.’ Fact.

Dream Bonus Question Round: 2/3 musicals, discombobulatingly. Andy was hot on the bodies of water round. Mockumentaries, 3/3.

Jezza-Watch: ‘He looks . . . weird,’ I said, before realising that this was the new batch of filming. Now we all know what he was been up to during the yawning maw of lockdown: GROWING HIS HAIR, presumably while bingeing ‘I May Destroy You’ or making sourdough whilst listening to ABBA deep cuts. It flopped voluminously either side and frankly made me worry that he’d let himself go a bit. He also had fresh glasses; he looked like the picture you upload of yourself on a cheap glasses website to virtually try on frames, except IRL.

Kerry and Andy’s Score: 29! 

Brain Food: Homemade collard soup. I know how to party.

Tweets of the Day:

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[universitychallenged]

University Challenge 2020/21, Episode 12

You know sometimes when you are playing pool ( I mean, in the olden days), and even though you’ve got zero hand to eye co-ordination, somehow the second pint of cherry beer gives you the confidence to just go for it, and you have a streak of brilliance and beat your opponent in ten straight moves and think about joining some sort of exclusive league? The UniChall equivalent is when you start well, and just keep correctly guessing indecipherable algebra questions and integers and the names for swellings on the throat, and tonight, friends, THIS WAS US.

Warwick: 255

Wolfson, Oxford: 105

Team Vibe:

Warwick: I am daring to believe that they are a little more naughty than they look.

Wolfson, Oxford: much less naughty than they look, and they don’t look the slightest bit naughty.

Grandad Count: Warwick brought a composite age of 24 and three-quarters. Composite, not average. Honestly, how were two of those young waifs doing PhDs? They’ve only just finished prep school and are off down the newsies to get a bag of pick-a-mix and a Beano!

Gender Diversity Count: 8 chaps. 

Style News: FFS. I can’t even. Tonight’s episode was literally the rail in the darkest corner of Next on every chain-infested high street in the country, where men just buy things without trying, because they hate shopping and would rather read their 1,000 page history of the Second World War in Costa Coffee before heading into Millets for some padded gloves for the winter.

Cult Hero Of The Episode: Go, Warwick! I’m always biased in favour of the non-Oxbridgeys, as anyone who blinks at this blog will know, but my step-nephew goes there, and the team did steam ahead. Braid did it for me, what with his adorably-delivered knowledge of Nigerian writers, Renaissance painters, Lowestoft, the boiling point of water, the meaning of the universe, etc. I still sniggered with Jez’s ‘Your bonuses are on personality, Warwick,’ because I am very naughty (unlike these eight fellows).

Handsome Person of the Episode: Shirt-jumper blunders negate handsomeness in my sort of algebra. I pinned all hopes on Wolfson’s Moore, because at least his jumper was a roll-neck and his hair was quite raffish. 

Horror Bonus Round: ‘Giving the name of a US state using a simple 7-segment display pocket calculator, the capital of which state is effectively spelt by entering the number 35108 and inverting the screen?’

Regular Music Fail By Composition PhD-owning Composer, Kerry Andrew: ‘Mozart,’ said Andy, correctly, after literally 0.0065 seconds of the starter. We failed to get any of the bonuses on Classic FM’s Revision playlist, but that's because our revisions playlists consisted of Radio 1’s Mark and Lard show circa 1996 (me) or Sepultura in 1995 (Andy).

Dream Bonus Question Round: 2/3 BAFTA Rising Stars, 2/3 in the Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty!

Jezza-Watch: ‘So you’re storming your way to 5,’ Jez said to Warwick, with ill-disguised snarkiness, on eventually getting themselves a set of bonuses, and with Wolfson on 50. Warwick’s response was, rightly, to bounce ahead and march onwards to a magnificent score.

Kerry and Andy’s Score: *drum roll* THIRTY-FOUR! And yes, this is answering before the contestants. Andy turned into a scientist for the evening, and there was additionally some excellent team-work: ‘JOHN!’ I shouted. ‘Wyndham,’ he completed. “JOHN!’ I shouted. ‘Boyega,’ he completed. Yes, OK: I basically just shouted ‘John,’ the whole time. 

Brain Food: Homemade vegetable soup, hummus, sardines

Tweets of the Day:

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