English

This course provides an overview of excise taxes and custom taxes, personal income tax, and corporate income tax. Topics include value-added taxes, specific business taxes revenue stamp, land and building tax, and other related taxes collected by government agencies. The course discusses the societal responsibility of individuals and businesses in relation to taxation, and emphasis is placed upon taxation in relation to doing business in Thailand. 

The course introduces students to selected topics in the legal application of medical scientific expertise. Students learn about the historical development and application of forensic investigation techniques such as toxicology, psychiatry, crime scene investigation, and DNA profiling, and how they were presented to the public in various media (e.g. detective fiction, newspaper reports, forensic television dramas). Students consider who make claims to forensic truth and what tools and techniques they use to arrive at that conclusion.

This course introduces cases and techniques of managing marketing programs in Mainland China. Students analyze cases, identify marketing strategies, propose corrections to elements of the marketing mix, and demonstrate problem solving and decision-making abilities through group work and projects. The course starts with an introduction to marketing management in China, and then discusses such topics as marketing strategy, creating value, choosing customers, communicating value, going to market, capturing value, brands and branding, managing customers, and sustaining value. 

In 1370 the Turco-Mongol conqueror Timur (Tamerlane) founded his empire and made Samarqand his capital. This course introduces a culture Timur and his successors created and its transition during the long 15th century. Students explore the art and architecture under their patronage in the eastern Islamic world, including present-day Iran, Afghanistan, and Central Asia. Emphasis is placed on the impacts of their nomadic tradition, politics, and ideology on the artistic production and urban landscape. The latter part of the course centers around the late Timurid court in Herat.

This course examines multiple interactions/connections/confrontations between popular culture products and acts of political and social protest/resistance in the historical and contemporary English-speaking world. It demonstrates how the political and cultural worlds collide/intersect as they study the uses, meanings, symbolic language, motives, and activations of popular culture works in the context of collective acts of protest. The course not only looks at the obvious tension between popular culture and protest, when the former is defined solely along the lines of the "mainstream," but the overlooked and fertile infusion of the two, as in the connections between the abolitionist movement and slave narratives, between the Harlem Renaissance, Jazz, Civil Rights and the Black Arts Movement, between working class activism and realist writing, between modernist experimentation and feminism, between carnivalization and the LGBT movement, between the Windrush Generation, Reggae, Black British poetry, etc. It also explores the activation and sometimes adaptation of popular culture within contexts of collective acts of protest for greater rights/influence/power for marginalized groups organized around gender, sexuality, ethnicity/race, class, generation/age, etc. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, this course draws on concepts and theories from history, literary studies, political communication (among potentially other options), applied to the study of the connections between popular culture actors and their works and sites of collective action. The course firsts gives a general introduction to the core concepts and theories of the course, followed by modules organized around various genres of cultural production, including (but not exclusively) music (e.g. slave songs, Jazz, Reggae, Hip Hop), theatre (e.g. musical theatre, Vaudeville, literature (e.g. slave narratives, Harlem Renaissance, performance poetry, post-colonial texts, graphic novels), visual arts (e.g. Black Arts Movement, protest graffiti), physical monuments (e.g. Confederate statues, imperial figures). The course thus examines the ways that popular culture is mobilized to advance the collective causes of marginalized and disadvantaged groups in their historical and contemporary struggle for liberation and equality, and how "high" as well as "popular" literature play a role in this.

This courses uses ten topics to explore how the global economy emerged in the past and how global trade and global empires changed the world. The first part of the course traces the connection between European colonial empires and the making of the global economy until the Industrial Revolution, and how the rise of the West impacted other world regions. The second part of the course discusses globalization and deglobalization and the shifts of global economic power in the modern age. This is modern economic history in a global context and focuses mainly on non-European regions.

This course explores how labor markets work and analyzes a wide range of labor issues within Japanese and US economies. Each class begins with the theoretical background of labor economics, then students analyze a related research article to understand how and whether the standard, neo-classical model is applied to real economic life. 

The regular version of this course is worth 3.0 UC quarter units. The Q version of this course is worth 4.5 UC quarter units. Students must submit a special study project form which outlines the requirements for the additional units. This is typically an additional paper graded by the instructor of the course.

This course covers the basic principles of machine reasoning, exploring the foundations of the rapidly developing field of artificial intelligence, and outlining the mathematical techniques used in both knowledge representation and future artificial intelligence courses. Once equipped with the main technical and theoretical tools, students are presented with a selection of different applications of machine reasoning, e.g., natural language processing, machine vision, and robotics, to create a point of contact with real-world examples and future, more advanced AI courses.

This seminar serves as an introduction to Scottish Studies, an interdisciplinary field combining history, literature, sociology, food studies, and other approaches. The three parts are closely linked both chronologically (focusing on the 18th and 19th centuries) and thematically, all three intertwining themes of food, literature (or writing), and Scottish national identity. The first section looks at the ways in which Scotland was “invented” or reinvented in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Perceived until the mid-eighteenth century as a backward land ridden with religious strife and tyrannical politics, Scotland emerged as a proud Romantic nation. The seminar first examines the rise of travelling, tourism, and travel-writing as ways of creating and disseminating new representations of the nation. Then the study bears on the cult of two men who lived in the late eighteenth-century: the national "Bard" Robert Burns and Thomas Muir, a lesser-known defender of the French Revolution, victim of tyranny who was celebrated in Bordeaux and Paris and died in 1798, providing inspiration for later generations of democrats. The cult of heroes raises many questions: who became a hero and why? What aspects of their lives were brought forward, what aspects were hidden? What (ideological, nationalist, etc.) purposes did the cult of heroes serve? Who contested heroes and why? What about heroines? A particular focus of interest is the Burns Supper, a tradition closely associated with Scottish identity: invented in 1801, it is still vivid today, has become global and has taken on many different meanings across time and place, serving in particular to celebrate Scotland’s role in the British Empire. The second section examines writing by a selection of nineteenth century Scottish authors and the influence of their texts on cultural life and popular culture in Scotland and the wider world in ensuing centuries. The seminar touches on the afterlives of Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson as international authors; literary and cultural tourism in Scotland and elsewhere; Scottish food and drink as evolving literary tropes as well as the scholarly annotation of 19th-century Scottish texts for the needs of 21st-century readers. Finally, the course witnesses history at work in family recipe books in the 18th and 19th centuries in Scotland: In England and Scotland, the tradition of the landowning gentry keeping recipe books began in the seventeenth century. By the eighteenth century, these accounts had become a way for the elite to establish their way of life as a continuum, a vital and enduring heritage passed down from generation to generation. The National Library of Scotland holds a large collection of cookery books, some of which come from the papers of one particular family: the Malcolm family of Burnfoot in Dumfriesshire. Readers can witness the evolution of these records from the first manuscript written in 1782 to the last one in 1892. Examining the family’s recipe books gives us a glimpse into the food consumption habits of an upper-class Scottish family and serves as a valuable record of their ascension up the social ladder. The way cultural influences can be traced in these recipe books also tells us about history from a different, fascinating angle: that of food.

The course enables students to become skilled in the use of techniques and tools for modelling, implementing, and evaluating interactive systems, and they learn how to apply the theories, techniques, and tools presented in the course via challenging exercises which combine design, implementation, and evaluation.