Denmark

The central idea of the course is to study the mechanisms and processes that control ecosystem functioning via interactions between organisms, the environment, and human activities. With a focus on quantitative analyses in lectures and exercises, it analyzes systems from the global scale through the ecosystem to the scale of the soil microenvironment in order to understand the background of fundamental services that ecosystems provide. The course analyzes the influence and impact of human activities including different land uses, pollution, and climate change, as well as potential climate change mitigation strategies including bioenergy production.  The course focuses on exercises with quantitative analyses where students learn how to apply the knowledge obtained during the course, such as evaluating various environmental footprints of human activities and assessing the sustainability of climate change mitigation strategies. The course concludes with a course “conference” where students present and discuss the concepts of planetary boundaries and the sustainable use of global resources. The core elements of the course are: the functioning of the Globe and the three spheres (atmosphere, hydrosphere, geosphere); characteristics and differences of the global cycles of major elements (C, N, and P) and their interactions; the triangle of interactions between organisms, processes, and the environment; succession, diversity, and ecosystem functioning and how this affects stability, resistance, and resilience of ecosystems; evaluation of impacts of human activities through the assessment of the flow of energy and matter through ecosystems.

The course explores different aspects of Danish culture such as literature, mythology, history, film, music, architecture, painting, the welfare state, and national identity. The course is a unique combination of lectures and excursions, which includes trips to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and Frederiksborg Castle. This version of the course (50 Q) is worth 12 quarter units and requires a 15-20 page individual research paper.

The course is interdisciplinary, and will introduce commonly used models of work-related stress, as well as broadly applicable methods for measuring the physiological effects of stress on the body. 

This course addresses the interdisciplinary applicability of phenomenology, including best practices, use and application in a non-philosophical context, what qualifies a discipline or practice as phenomenological, and the core commitments of phenomenology. The first third of the course offers an introduction to core ideas and figures in phenomenology. It makes clear how phenomenology, by offering an account of human existence where the subject is understood as an embodied, socially, and culturally embedded being-in-the-world, is not only addressing specific issues relevant to several disciplines from within the humanities and social sciences, but also contributing to the philosophy of the human sciences. The rest of the course looks at successful applications in qualitative research and psychology, in discussions of gender and race, in health care (primarily psychiatry and nursing), in cognitive science (primarily developmental psychology and neuroscience), and in the social sciences (including sociology, anthropology and political science). The course offers some reflections on what a phenomenological interview might look like and discusses how ideas from phenomenology can be used in corporations and private companies.

The course offers students “Danish Perspectives” to a wide range of fields within arts and the humanities. Students gain an overview of Danish history, but also Danish culture and cultural history. Throughout the course students discuss how one can describe the Danes as a people – while at the same time being critical as to whether it is possible to determine a people in such a stereotypical way at all. The student is given a general introduction to various perspectives of Danish culture ranging from literature, music, film and TV to the narrative culture of the Vikings, the Danish history of slavery and the perceived particularities of Danish identity and Nordic “exceptionalism”.

This course introduces concepts and theories behind causal inference in order to predict and analyze a system’s behavior under manipulations. Topics include causal models versus observational models; observational distribution, intervention distribution, and counterfactuals; graphical models and Markov conditions; and identifiability conditions for learning causal relations from observational and/or interventional data. Working with graphs and graphical models, students derive causal effects, predict the result of interventional experiments, perform variable adjustments for computing causal effects, and gain an understanding of and ability to apply different methods for causal structure learning.