Hong Kong

This course examines basic communication in Hong Kong Sign Language. An emphasis will be placed on the essential grammar of the Hong Kong Sign Language. It also offers a general introduction to the culture and customs of the local Deaf community.

This course examines major statistical techniques in analyzing categorical data. Topics include measures of association, inference for two-way contingency tables, loglinear models, logit models and models for ordinal variables. The use of related statistical packages will be demonstrated. 

This course examines interpretations of urban legends from Hong Kong and other parts of the world using anthropological, sociological, psychological, and literary approaches accompanied with case-studies from different media and platforms. 

This course examines the fundamentals, basic properties and use of classical and modern nonparametric statistical methods for data analysis. Topics may include: order statistics; goodness-of-fit tests; rank tests for single-sample and two-independent samples; tests for designed experiments; permutation tests; tests for trends and association; jackknife and bootstrapping methods; nonparametric regression; nonparametric estimator and statistical functionals.

What is sexual and gender diversity? How does the experience of our own genderedness and sexuality define members of sexual and gender minorities as people, and shape our opinions about those people who do not share our experiences or who do not express their sexuality in the same ways as we do? This course looks at these sorts of questions and does so while teaching about (and in many cases meeting and talking with) people whose gender or sexuality places them on the fringes of mainstream society. People who are gay, lesbian, bisexual or asexual; transgender people and individuals who cross dress, or play with bondage, domination, use pornography, and/or are involved in commercial sex activities. In lectures and tutorials we will examine questions such as: To what extent are sexual and gender diversity biologically ‘hard-wired’ rather than learned? What is ‘normal’ in human sexuality and gender? How, in an increasingly interconnected world, are our ideas about sexual and gender diversity changing? What are the intersectionality that we can discover in the whole course of learning and how do we use these learnings to help make a better world? 

This course is a beginners’ reading and writing course in Putonghua, focusing on acquiring elementary level vocabulary and grammar. Students are introduced to the romanization system of Putonghua (Pinyin) and the Chinese writing system (Chinese characters). Content covered in the course is based on daily situations. 

This course examines signals and systems for modelling and analyzes a variety of engineering systems. It covers continuous‐ and discrete‐time Fourier analysis, Laplace Transform, interactions between signals and linear time invariant (LTI) systems, sampling theorem, differential and difference equations as LTI systems, and application examples in communications, control, and multimedia. 

The course aims to develop "T-shaped" characters who can develop the depth of expertise in a single field (one's major as represented by the vertical bar of the T shape) while acquiring the ability to communicate and collaborate with others from different disciplines (the horizontal bar of the T) to address challenges. The ability to connect horizontally is "Design Thinking", which is the bridge between creativity and innovation, combining divergent and convergent modes of problem discovery and problem solving to integrate user-experience, technology tools, and business models to create values. 

This course examines multi-disciplinary perspectives to examine significant and complex issues of Northeast Asia in the past and present. It aims to help students understand how the historical legacy of Northeast Asia is reflected in today’s states and societies of these regions, and how political, economic, social, and cultural characteristics of Northeast Asia continue to evolve in a comprehensive way.

This course examines economic history and its persistent impact on economic development in the context of China. Particular attention will be paid to explaining the missing industrialization in the Ming-Qing period and the historical roots of China’s recent economic rise. To this end, the course will compare China to the West in terms of culture, institutions, human capital, and other fundamental forces of development, and will employ historical data and econometric tools to examine the economic impacts of these fundamentals.