Lecture Review - Week 2

Database --- Half the lecture was spent on unfinished part of the introduction, the other half is on tables (the one that stores data). Seems like nothing much has been taught.. Headache for my project.


Business Law --- This lecture's on contract law. The two types of contract are verbal and written contract. All contracts are agreements but not all agreements are contracts. Contracts consist of three elements -

1. Offer and Acceptance,

2. Intention to create legal relations,

3. Considerations.



On point 1 -

Offer + Acceptance = Contract made

Invitation to Treat -> Offer + Acceptance = Contract made

Invitation to Treat is asking someone to make an offer to do something, examples include Goods on display for sale. When you shops, you are offering to buy the item at the stated price, and the cashier can accept or refuse to sell you, not the other way round. All news paper advertisements are also Invitation to Treat.

You have to revoke your offer before the other party accepts, no revoking after that. When there is a counter-offer to the original offer, the orignal offer is forgotten. In instantaneous contract, contract is only made when the offeror has received the acceptance while in contracts by post, contract is made when the offeree has posted the acceptance.


On point 2 -

You have intention to sue the other party in case of breach of contract. Domestic and social agreements are presume to have no intention as the agreement is based on mutual trust. After separation of husband and wife, there are intentions to sue. In commercial agreements, there are intention to make a legally enforceable contract.


On point 3 -

Consideration is some benefit accruing to one party or some detriment suffered by the other. Suffering must be after the contract is made, anything before is not counted. Consideration must be real and recognised by law (e.g. money), but need not be what the market value is. Consideration must not be for something within your own duty.



Payment of smaller sum will not discharge you from a larger debt, unless it is agreed by the creditor and consideration is made. Valid consideration is payment before due day by creditor's request, payment at different place at creditor's request, and payment with a delivery of a chattel (a movable article of personal property).



Business Communication --- Second lecture on Business Correspondence, introducing another acronym STARS standing for Specific, Thoughtful, Affirmative, Respectful, Simple.

In writing letter, you have to be thoughtful for the reader. Prevent using negative words, basically you should not put on an air when you write and while doing that, make the reader as happy as you can, and when the reader is happy, any request made will be accepted.


Artificial Intelligence --- I was so lazy to attend the lecture, so I had the webcast lecture instead. Kinda not able to concentrate well on webcast due to the many distractions at home, but lucky this lecture was on searching algorithms on trees which was taught a year ago.

The bad thing about this module is I have no idea how to do tutorial 1 which commences this week, how would I find the answer? Maybe from AIMA, the name of the recommended textbook.


Software Engineering --- Don't really understand the lecture, nonetheless I'll still try to write something about it.

It seems to me that the lecture is trying to give us an overview of what we'll be handing in for the project submission 1, and 2. Starting from the requirement, we then analyse the requirement before coming out with the design.

Requirements are what the system should be able to do. There are functional requirements which describe system services or functions, and non-functional requirements, which identify quality attributes and different constraints.

By prioritising requirements, we can separate them into 3 levels, from those that are absolutely needed, to highly desirable which means should be met, to the lowest level which could be implemented but not necessary.

The next part was on use case diagram, which comprises of all the possible interactions the user can have when performing the task.