English

This course takes a comparative perspective to look into early Chinese and Daoist philosophy. It starts with textual reading, follows with comparative ideas, including freedom and fate, illness and death, disabilities and social exclusion, war and peace, tolerance and toleration, language and social practices, etc. It focuses on group discussions, and research methodology.

This course considers the ways that science and technology shape the relationship between humans and the environment. Students examine a number of topical historical and contemporary cases and in the process reflect on the role played by science and technology in how societies understand nature and environment. Themes to be dealt with include science and cultural uses of natural resources; sociology of climate science; science, technology, and international development; science and public understandings of environmental debates; science, knowledge, and power; and environmentalism. Students approach these themes by studying various environmental topics, often reflecting current events.

This course introduces and develops a financial geography perspective, understood as the study of the spatiality of money and finance, and its implications for the economy, society, and nature. It introduces students to the complexity and controversy of financial globalization, vocabulary of finance, drawing on research relating to the global financial system, financial centers of London, New York, Shanghai, and Singapore, and their geographical footprint. 

This course provides students with an in-depth understanding of innovation and its dynamics. It explores the determinants of innovation, drawing on theories to examine how and why innovation occurs, and the types of innovation that may emerge from different political economy perspectives and institutional frameworks. Part of the course involves examining policy evaluation and design, specifically discussing how to provide policy advice that considers the complex societal ecosystem, including societal hopes and fears.

This course examines some ethical questions concerning such issues as: medical paternalism, eugenics and designer babies, organ donation, experimentation on humans and animals, and refusal of medical treatment.

This course offers an introduction to Python programming following the structured and object-oriented paradigms. Topics include: flow diagrams; data, operators, input, and output; flow control--conditionals and loops; simple data structures; functions; object oriented programming; algorithms, recursion, and computational complexity.

This course provides an overview of the applications of big data for decision making from a capital market perspective. As the data storing costs decrease and processing capabilities increase, capital market participants have started to look beyond the traditional financial statements (the balance sheet and income statement etc) to assist their decision making. This has important implications for both reporting firms (i.e., the information producer) and their investors (i.e., the information consumer). The course is to cover the most recent and most important developments in this field.

This course provides business and accountancy students with a rigorous appreciation of the issues and methodologies necessary for ensuring the competitiveness of the operations function in a firm. The course takes an analytics based 'process management' viewpoint while addressing a range of strategic and tactical issues. The course examines the key tradeoffs required for designing, managing and improving operations and processes in both manufacturing and service industries. Students gain an analytical background for further courses in Business Analytics Specialization and managing operations or its interface with other business functions such as marketing, finance, accounting, human resources and information technology.

This course offers a critical analysis and introduction to the fundamental concepts of feminist theories including citizenship, body, mind, rights, equality, freedom, patriarchy, and the sex/gender system.

This course examines philosophical issues about food and its relation to ethics, objectivity, and values. Topics include moral issues such as the debate about animal rights, world hunger, the use of genetic engineering in agriculture, and the justification of health policies about food and drugs. It also looks at the relationship between food and art, and the objectivity of taste.