English

This course examines influential theories of nature and the environment in philosophy and a range of interdisciplinary writings, from Aristotle to the present.  The course explores the following questions: Is there a connection between how nature has been conceived in philosophy and science and the current environmental crisis? Is the notion of nature still a meaningful term in the Anthropocene?  What is the difference between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’? How should humans understand their relationship to ‘nature’? These questions will be addressed from a range of perspectives, such as: Phenomenology, Critical Theory, German Romanticism, environmental ethics, Ecofeminism, contemporary thought and non-Western approaches. Drawing on these diverse traditions, the course examines possible alternatives for understanding the human-nature divide.

This course provides a deeper understanding of migrant lives, experiences, and emotions in the 20th and 21st century, to give a fuller sense of the varied comparative and transdisciplinary methodologies that can be used in the study of the subject, and to introduce students to research work with a view to thesis writing. The course incorporates varied approaches including chronological, thematic, and theoretical aspects. For example: the relationship between psy disciplines and migration experiences; the emergence of refugee psychiatry and its relationship to broader political contexts; and the politics of humanitarian psychiatry. The course centers around a group of comparative and interdisciplinary case studies. These include displaced persons and forced migration from within and outside Europe after the First and Second World War; dissidents and refugees in Europe; guest workers and post-colonial labor migrants after 1945 in Britain, France, and Germany. The course also incorporates varied methodologies and sources, including printed and unprinted sources, oral history and life-story analysis, quantitative, qualitative, and comparative methods as well as film, memoir, and visual analysis.

This course focuses on trust law in Taiwan and under English law. The first half of the course focuses on general legal framework and doctrines of trust law under English law (from which trust law originates) and Taiwan law. The second half of the course focuses on the application of trust. Through case studies and voluntary group/individual presentations, the course reviews different potential applications of trust in the market.

This course examines the rapid development of Information Technology and the relaxation of regulations in the financial industry. Topics include how tech firms can enter the financial industry to reach and provide financial services to customers at scale and the market that is neglected by traditional financial institutions. Under this backdrop, many tech firms build online platforms to mobilize the under-utilized financial resources among customers. This allows customers who need financial services to bypass traditional financial institutions (e.g., banks and venture capital funds) and get served. Students examine peer-to-peer lending platforms, equity-based crowdfunding platforms that link individual investors with founders of startups and how the emergence of these new platforms substantially reduces the financing cost on the borrowers’ side and increases the rate of return on the investors’ side. The course requires students to take prerequisites.

This course takes an ecological approach, emphasizing interactions between different organisms and all aspects of their environment. All environments are now changing under the influence of human activities and many species are under threat as a consequence. In this course, students learn tools that allow them to begin to scientifically address such issues.

This course introduces students to more advanced topics in Probability Theory and Statistical Inference. The first part is devoted to investigating mathematical aspects of probability, with a special emphasis on multivariate distributions and limiting theorems. In the second part, students are guided through the methodological core of point estimation (both from a frequentist and Bayesian perspective) and hypothesis testing. These theoretical aspects are complemented by an in-depth presentation of elementary simulation and computational techniques that are routinely used within most popular statistical procedures. Prerequisites: Solid knowledge of calculus and of basic programming tools in R. 

Through laboratory work, the course introduces students to the chemistry and physical properties of minerals; morphological elements of crystallography; the optical properties of minerals, introduced in conjunction with use of the petrographic microscope; the physical, chemical, and optical properties of the major rock-forming mineral groups; and the intrusive and extrusive igneous rocks and clastic and chemical sedimentary rocks.

This course requires basic programming skills, which includes an understanding of what variables are; the basic structure of loops; Python indexing, and slicing of iterables. It expands on programming skills from a digital humanities perspective. The course focuses on Python pandas for data analysis and data manipulation and uses matplotlib for visualization. The course also instructs on version control using git. The latter half of the course focuses on social media analysis including network analysis, topic modeling, and sentiment analysis.

It is strongly recommended that students have taken the intermediate course “Python Programming for Digital Humanities” or a similar one before taking this course.

This course teaches students the principles underlying the theory of auditing, of the regulatory framework of auditing, and of practical audit approaches and techniques. The latter is taught with reference to case studies. Students are also introduced to the critique of the auditing profession and the profession's response. The course exposes students to current academic research in the field of auditing.

This course offers students an opportunity to put theory into practice, cultivating a sense of the history and theory of documentary film alongside the chance to make their own short non-fiction film. The theory part of the course charts the historical development of documentary through the examination of films ranging from the early 20th century to the present day, with the focus on issues of truth, ethics, technique, and creativity. The practical part of the course supports them to create and complete their own short documentary film. Four key issues are central to the course: 1) locating the truth one wants to convey; 2) adherence to an ethical code during film production; 3) engaging with storytelling, exposition, visual, and structuring techniques, including considering how meaning is made in post-production, and 4) exploring creative formal approaches appropriate to the film.