English

A century of politeness and Enlightenment, but also one of revolution and filth, the 18th century was a period of excitement and change. The literature of the time both reflects and shapes this perception, and the Irish literary scene is particularly striking for the variety and richness of its literary productions. Many of the 18th century’s greatest writers attended Trinity College Dublin – Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Burke, Jonathan Swift – while many also attended the city’s brothels and taverns, as well as frequenting Smock Alley Theatre or visiting Marsh’s Library. Different urban and rural venues provide the setting, the stage, or the inspiration for a variety of literature across genres, including poetry, plays, life writing and novels. Many of the male and female writers on this course also had cosmopolitan aspirations, and several moved to London to pursue careers there. The course will highlight these connections between Ireland and England, and indeed France, investigating the realities of authorship and readership across the 18th century. As well as familiarizing students with the literary developments taking place in Ireland, and Dublin in particular, the course also engages with issues such as gender, sexuality, and the commodification of the female body; performance and the self; and politics and national identity. It also draws on the wonderful richness of built literary heritage from eighteenth-century Dublin, and includes a research visit to Marsh's Library. 

This course covers concepts of rationality, the "classic" research into the cognitive psychology of reasoning, and decision-making. Topics include nature of representation, operations on representations, and levels of analysis; different types of models in psychology (i.e., descriptive, normative, verbal vs formal); epistemic rationality and its connection to Bayes' Theorem; issues of rational belief revision; deductive reasoning in syllogisms and if-then conditionals, with a specific focus on the debate between mental rules and mental models approaches to these topics; probabilistic approaches to deduction. Dual process models of reasoning; instrumental rationality and its connection to decision theory; abductive reasoning & science of explanation; subjective expected utility theory and Prospect Theory; and decision by sampling and heuristics within the bounded rationality paradigm.

This course explores the role of Psychology in explaining variation in performance levels in sports and other aspects of physical activity. The course considers how levels of performance, including elite performance, might be influenced by psychological concepts including individual differences (such as in confidence, personality or perception), amount and nature of training or practice, effects of competitive stress, and other factors. The course also describes how techniques based on psychological theories and models may be used in interventions designed to improve performance (including coaching, and techniques such as imagery, arousal regulation, and goal setting). Students are introduced to the evidence base for these interventions, as well as the practicalities and challenges of applying these psychological techniques.

This course surveys Irish labor history. It examines the character of rural and urban social protest movements representing the working poor, the development of trade unionism throughout the island of Ireland, the impact of radical ideologies, the competition from nationalist and unionist politics, and the reasons for the stunted political development of Irish labor. It considers how trade unionism became part of the "social furniture" in the mid-20th century, and examines the ideological and practical challenges faced by the movement in the closing decades of the century.

This course introduces students to the sociological study of deviance and social control, distinguishing it as a field of research from biological and psychological explanations of deviance. It traces the historical development of sociological theories on deviance and introduce students to contemporary approaches to deviance and crime. These perspectives are utilized and illustrated through a study of the changing patterns of defining and controlling deviance in modern societies with reference to selected substantive issues. 

This course introduces basic concepts and methods of statistics as a tool to perform appropriate data analyses. The statistical software R is taught alongside the material to introduce statistical computing. Students learn to load raw data, make numerical and graphical summaries of data, and conduct various estimation and testing procedures. Topics include programming in R, descriptive statistics, concepts of probability, random variables and probability distributions, sampling distribution, statistical estimation, hypothesis testing, linear regression, and applications to real-world problems.

This reading-intensive course explores the meaning of the Age of Extremes by examining how violence, the state, and society interacted with one another to create a turbulent 20th century. This course addresses crucial questions by reading canonical texts on violence, civil disobedience, and decolonization, including writings by Thoreau, Arendt, Gandhi, Fanon, and King, among others. 

The principles covered include caching in order to overcome latency; pipelining to increase processor utilization; Multi-Threading and Multi-Core principles, along with potential structures, and challenges such as memory coherency and consistency.

This course explores various perspectives on identity and life in Israel. It includes meetings with representatives of Israeli cultural, religious, and national groups to learn from them about their work and life and explore how these experiences shape their identity. Students conduct observation and interview assignments in different locations of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and participate in excursions to other parts of the country to understand the complexity and intersection of culture, language, religion, and national identities in Israel. Students reflect on these experiences, field trips, and course readings through a research report on identity and experience in Israel.

This course addresses a number of topics in computer and network security. Topics include memory errors, Web, network, countermeasures, and pointers to research papers. The course prepares students to identify software vulnerabilities, shows how to address these, and introduces how vulnerabilities are exploited through malware.