English

In this course, students explore the intersection between land use planning and environmental sustainability within the context of urban and rural development. Through a multidisciplinary approach, students study the principles, theories, and practical applications necessary for promoting sustainable land use practices in contemporary settings. The course explores the factors influencing land use patterns and methodologies to assess the environmental impacts of land use decisions, including climate change, biodiversity, and natural resource impacts. Through international case studies and policy reviews, students compare existing land use policies and develop strategies for integrating sustainability principles into land use planning, while exploring strategies to engage diverse stakeholders for equitable and inclusive decision making.

This course is an introduction to meat science. The course covers meat in the context of the human diet, the structure and composition of meat, and meat quality attributes. The impact of pre-slaughter factors on carcass and meat composition and on the sensory and nutritional quality of meat are explored. The impact of post-mortem factors, including aging and packaging of meat, on meat quality attributes, particularly color, flavor and texture, are studied. Students learn how selected meat products are manufactured.

This course examines social media marketing from three perspectives—principles, applications and strategies. Social media and network theory, popular social media strategies, and data analytic tools will be introduced. 

This course introduces some key themes, concepts, and debates in urban geography. In particular it focuses on the concept of urban regeneration. Taking a critical view of urban regeneration, the course first considers the emergence of these tropes out of concerns about de-industrialization and dereliction brought about by the restructuring of the global economy following the 1970s recession. It then focusses specifically on the urban impacts of globalization, in particular how cities in the developed world have managed the shift from industrialism to post-industrialism. Next, the course examines regeneration from a number of perspectives. Finally, the course reflects on the extent to which urban regeneration remains a relevant approach in the post-crisis period characterized by austerity urbanism and growing precarity. Particular attention is given to the circular nature of processes of urban growth and decline and how regeneration efforts include and exclude particular social groups and identities.

This course introduces mathematical and programming skills that are employed by researchers in the Molecular and Biophysical Life Sciences to analyze and integrate data and to understand the physics of living systems. The course is divided into two parts that run in parallel. The mathematics part of the course consists of nine lectures that cover: basic algebra, goniometry, differentiation and integration (including functions of multiple variables), limits, (partial) differential equations (first order and second order), Taylor expansion, basic probability theory and statistics and vectors (including dot product and cross product). Each lecture is followed by a supervised practical session. The programming part consists of six lectures that introduce the basics of programming by discussing the modulare structure of programs (modules, functions, loops), different data types and variables, as well as good practices. For some calculations of the mathematics part of the course it is explained how to perform those calculations using Python. After each lecture, students work individually on a series of practical coding assignments that familiarize them with the basics of programming in Python during supervised tutorials, where regular instruction and feedback is provided.

This course introduces basic concepts in Financial Modeling and Business Analytics that are typically implemented in spreadsheet models and shows how data can be used to solve business problems. The course discusses methods that are used extensively in business organizations to solve large, structured problems. Such methods generate results that support decision-making at all levels of the organization over various time horizons. This course carries the Quantitative Reasoning flag, which are courses designed to equip students with skills that are necessary for understanding the types of quantitative arguments regularly encountered in professional life. Students should therefore expect a substantial portion of the grade to come from use of quantitative skills to analyze real-world problems. This course includes the use of Excel and R to estimate financial models and variables, such as NPV and IRR, WACC, FCF, assets Beta and return, efficient frontier, CAPM, SML, variance and covariance matrixes, and options pricing. Students use basic operations in R, scripts, data manipulation, and programming using R.

The course focuses on the new media technologies that have emerged and spread from the time of the Second World War and onwards. A clear emphasis is on digital media and network cultures, as well as the broad influence of television. Highlighted themes are the cultural understanding of technological development, convergence culture and intermedial relations. Different aspects of media and communication as moral panic, paper bureaucracy and tourism are also discussed. Finally, the arguments of some of the most influential late 20th century media theorists such as Raymond Williams and Marshall McLuhan are analyzed.

The extremes of human experience have been contemplated by Eastern and Western thinkers beyond traditional philosophic categories of logic, epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics in a movement we refer to as "existentialism". In this course, students explore Western existential philosophers such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, de Beauvoir, Sartre, and Heidegger, as well as existential aspects of Asian philosophies such as Buddhism, Daoism, and the Kyoto School writings of Nishitani Keiji. Students also read the works of existential literary figures, such as Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Camus, Oe, or Kawabata. 

This course examines Chinese film history and criticism via an examination of selected films directed by several of Greater China’s most skilled directors.