English

This course focuses on accounting data used by managers to plan and control the operations of an organization. Students examine the design methodologies of management accounting systems that enhance the quality of management decision-making related to each function in the corporate value chain, namely research & development, design, manufacturing, marketing, distribution and customer service. Topics include cost structure analysis, various cost concepts, design methods of various costing systems, strategic decision makings using cost information, and performance measurement systems. This course provides students with contemporary management accounting techniques including ABC, Target Costing, Quality Costing, Lifecycle Costing, Balanced Scorecard, etc.  

The Napoleonic Empire was crucial in the formation of modern Europe. Much of Europe was covered by the Napoleonic Empire and its impact was felt across large parts of the non-European world. The influence of the emperor and his policies was most obvious in relation to the European international system, particularly through his military campaigns and his territorial reorganization of Europe in the wake of his successes. However, the Napoleonic era also saw major developments in the legal, constitutional, social, and economic order of many states, whether allied or opposed to the Napoleonic project. Likewise, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, much attention is paid to the impact of the Napoleonic era on the relationship between Church and State and the rise of national consciousness, whether in political or cultural terms. By studying how Napoleon's empire was created, challenged, and ultimately defeated, the course focuses on the nature of power and legitimacy in this era. An attempt is made to place the Napoleonic empire in a broader context, in part by comparing it to other contemporary, rival states, including Russia, Austria, and the United Kingdom. Finally, the course begins and ends with an assessment of the Napoleonic myth, both in terms of his contemporaries and for subsequent generations of historians.

The course provides an overview of data center technologies, the infrastructure needed to run a variety of workloads, and the design decisions when engineering scalable distributed applications. Students analyze the full system stack for managing and scheduling data-center resources. Further, they discuss the design principles for scalable systems; investigate concepts and techniques to build large scale systems, with a focus on distributed storage, coordination, computation and resource allocation. They get an overview of NewSQL and NoSQL technologies, learn new data models, their associated query languages and systems, and discuss new storage technology and its impact on query execution and data management systems in general.

Why do cities exist? Why do firms cluster? Why is economic activity not equally distributed across space? This course addresses the central questions of why cities emerge, what roles cities will continue to play in the economy, and what determines the rise and fall of cities. Technically, the course provides an introduction to the field of urban economics. It focuses on stylized facts, basic microeconomic concepts, and empirical applications. Special
attention is paid to social problems in cities, including housing, public transit, crime, and the role of local governments. The course aims to make students familiar with economic tools and concepts useful for the analysis of urban issues. More generally, students learn to apply economic theory to real-world problems. A special focus is placed on evidence and examples from Berlin. With its long and vibrant history, Berlin provides an excellent environment to study and explore various features of the economics of cities. Field trips allow participants to learn more about the past and the future of cities, their functions, their internal spatial structure, and their dynamics.

Students will consider hegemonic understandings of the body as essentially linked to histories of colonialism and power. They will investigate frameworks about the body proposed by minoritized groups, developed out of collective struggle and political movements, found in feminism and critical indigenous studies. Students will recognize the essential differences between these frameworks as well as how they intermingle and intersect.

The course covers methods for data mining and business analytics and their usage in making strategic business decisions. It concentrates on the modelling aspects of data mining and provides tools for better understanding key methods of data exploration, visualization, classification, prediction, and clustering. The course starts with data visualization and getting to know features hidden in the data. Traditional regression models and hypothesis testing are practiced using real data. This introduction to traditional approaches then leads to the discussion of more advanced methods such as, discriminant analysis, classification and clustering methods, which are useful in finding patterns hidden in the data. The course deals with various types of data such as categorical data, time series, text data, and network data, among others. The fundamentals of building suitable models are discussed. Illustrations are carried out using the statistical package R. 

 

This course introduces students to photography as a tool for communication and encourages students to reflect critically on issues of form and content to convey meaning. Students will learn key technical processes in contemporary image making and consider existing photographic theories alongside emerging digital practices. Students will work individually to realise set exercises in and out of class and produce a completed series of images to a set brief.

This course begins by exploring the intellectual interventions and traditions that have emerged in the anthropology in and of Britain over the last 50 years, and then swiftly moves into exploring the ways in which interdisciplinary ethnographic research has been conducted across Britain. While reading ethnographies in cross cultural, global contexts, in this course students place a particular emphasis on the urban context of Greater Manchester. Students explore ethnographies that have been based on ethnographic research across Greater Manchester, and which raise and address urgent questions of social, political, and economic change in Manchester and beyond. The course tackles the concept of "the urban’" by exploring ethnographic examples from anthropology, sociology, human geography, and business studies that focus on social and cultural lives and relations. Students take two fieldtrips (Cheetham’s Library and Manchester Airport) and two walking tours (Fallowfield and Rusholme) to visit and reflect on the ethnographic locations of the materials and readings they engage with. 

Data science and machine learning are exciting new areas that combine scientific inquiry, statistical knowledge, substantive expertise, and computer programming. One of the main challenges for businesses and policy makers when using big data is to find people with the appropriate skills. Good data science requires experts that combine substantive knowledge with data analytical skills, which makes it a prime area for social scientists with an interest in quantitative methods. This course extends the foundation of probability and statistics with an introduction to the most important concepts in applied machine learning, with social science examples. It covers the main analytical methods from this field with hands-on applications using example datasets, so that students gain experience with and confidence in using the methods covered.