English

The course introduces the student to the statistical analysis of time series data and simple time series models, and showcases what time series analysis can be useful for. Topics include autocorrelation; stationarity, trend removal and seasonal adjustment; AR, MA, ARMA, ARIMA; estimation; forecasting; unit root test; introduction to financial time series and the ARCH/GARCH models; basic spectral analysis. The use of R for time series analysis is covered.

This course explores the social, cultural, and political history of the global Cold War through the lens of forced migrations and humanitarian aid. While traditional Cold War narratives perpetuate images of refugees fleeing from Eastern Europe to the West, the course challenges this clear-cut dichotomy. It expands the geographical range of forced displacement to include emergencies in the Global South by paying attention to entanglements across and within different regions. It studies major organizations like the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees across other agents, such as non-governmental organizations, regional, and national institutions. It takes into consideration refugees' agencies, trajectories, and cultural production. It then situates refugees within local communities, stressing the challenges and the opportunities of integration. Sessions are organized through a combination of lectures, discussions of primary and secondary sources, and students' presentations.

This course covers the scale and speed at which innovative business models are transforming industry landscapes, which is unprecedented. Students are enabled to understand and methodically address the challenge of business model innovation. Ultimately, business model innovation is about creating value, for companies, customers, and society. It is about replacing outdated models. The course discusses ways in which powerful new business models can be systematically invented, designed, and implemented. The course is guided by Alexander Osterwalder’s book Business Model Generation. It is an interactive course in which there isn’t one right answer. However, this course gives students tools for how to rewrite business models by breaking down patterns and routines. To do so the course also takes a look at some trends, especially the rise of Corporate Social Responsibility or Social Entrepreneurship. What is Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and what are the implications for companies that want to implement it? In particular: Does CSR affect business results? How can CSR help businesses to create, deliver and capture value?

The objectives of the methods tutorial are the practical application and deepening of the knowledge  in methods of empirical media and communication research. The course develops a joint survey project on a current issue (for instance the medial perception of a current topic). Groups work on particular sub-questions and develop and operationalize corresponding theoretical concepts for them. Following a joint pretest and field phase, the results are finally analyzed and presented.

Jazz music is one of the 20th century's most important and enduring art forms.
It is an original American musical art form which emerged around the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It developed out of the interchange between African and European music traditions. Jazz has also evolved into many styles while absorbing the elements of other music genres and has also influenced other cultures, such as theater, dance, and literature.

One of the basic elements that sets jazz apart from other types of music is improvisation, which is the instant composition of a new melody.
This course addresses the basic theory and foundation for jazz improvisation, through playing, singing, listening, writing, analyzing, and tapping. Through performance practices, the course aims to teach how to apply the theory and how to build a jazz vocabulary. Upon completion of the course, students will have the basic tools to create jazz melodies at a simple harmonic level.

Admission is by audition only, which is held on the first class. The audition will comprise of the following: 
(1) All applicants except the drummer will be required to play the major scale and the harmonic minor scale in a few keys; eighth notes at a tempo of 120 BPM.

(2) Playing session: medium up tempo swing blues in the key of Bb

For the horn player and stringed instrument player: improvised solo
For the pianist and guitarist: accompaniment with reading chord symbols and improvised solo
For the bassist: walking bass line with reading chord symbols
For the drummer: swing beat accompaniment

This course is about the economic effects of taxation, and economic aspects of tax policy. It gives students an understanding of the key economic issues in tax policy, and shows how these can be analyzed using standard tools of theoretical and empirical economic analysis.

This course deals with syntactic change in the history of English (in comparison, in particular, with German and French). Phenomena to be discussed will include the loss of inflectional morphology, the loss of free word order, the change from OV to VO word order, the loss of verb movement and the development of do-support, and the shift from a general verb-second language to a residual verb-second language.

In this course, welfare economics, public choice theory, social justice, as well as socialism and market economies are examined using recent papers. It discusses political thoughts, social philosophy, and ethics through tools of neo-classical economic theories like public choice theory and game theory. More specifically, this course studies the economics of Network effects. It first examines the literature on direct network effects developed in the late 70s and 80s, followed by a look at the literature on indirect network effects developed in the early 2000 through what is known as platform economics, or two-sided markets. 

This course offers a wide-ranging survey of European history from the late 18th century to the present. It provides a basic grounding in - and a self-contained survey of - Modern European History, and it demonstrates how European society has evolved as a result of the interplay of major economic, social, political, and cultural developments of the period c.1780 to the present. A course with such a wide chronological and geographical span has to be rigorously selective, and in consequence the lecturers confine their attentions to those general developments that had a far-reaching influence on a major part of the European population.
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This course provides an introduction to fundamental bioinformatics. Topics include biological databases, sequence alignment (pairwise and multiple), phylogeny, genomics, next generation sequencing, expression analysis, RNA-seq, RNA structure, and systems biology.