Hong Kong

This course presents how to recognize and appreciate the importance and values of cultural heritages in Hong Kong, China and around the world, and to understand how digital technologies can be used to conserve and preserve cultural heritage worldwide. Three digital preservation projects serve as running examples throughout this course: one from Hong Kong (King Yin Lei virtual reality website), one from Mainland China (e-Dunhuang online gallery), and one from Europe (European digital collections). The course also gives a broad understanding on how economic development and heritage preservation impact us as global citizens in this information age. The capstone of the course is a group project where each group of students uses an off-the-shelf and easy-to-use Web application to create a digital gallery for a cultural heritage in Hong Kong or their own places of origin. The digital gallery is a unique contribution to preserving cultural heritage of the world!

This course examines social change in Hong Kong since from the post-war period. The focus is on how industrialization, urbanization, globalization ,and modernity affect everyday lives, institutions, relationships ,and identities. The first two sections of the course will look at the mechanics of these changes and selected social problems associated with them: the transformation of community life, mental health, political, economic and gender inequalities. The final part will examine the implications of and responses to these problems; the rise of social movements for democracy, experiences of discrimination, the emergence of distinct Hong Kong cultural identities, the search for intimacy, and family life.

This course examines contemporary anthropological theory including post-modernism, post-structuralism, practice theory, political economy, globalization, feminist anthropology and the material turn. It introduces major figures in contemporary theoretical debates and key ongoing controversies in the discipline. 

This course focuses on philosophically interesting questions surrounding religion, including such issues as the evidential value of religious experiences and testimony of miracles; the existence of God; and the dependence or independence of morality and meaning on religious foundations.

This course introduces matrix algebra and its applications. Key topics include: systems of linear equations; linear transformations; matrix representation of linear transformations; linear operators, eigenvalues and eigenvectors; similarity invariants and canonical forms, and inner product spaces, elementary matrices, determinants and its properties, Cramer’s Rule and inverse formula, areas and volumes, vector spaces and subspaces, subspaces associated with matrices, linear independent sets and bases, coordinate systems and dimension, orthogonality and orthonormal sets, orthogonal projections and Gram-Schmidt process, least square solutions and applications. Text: David C. Lay, LINEAR ALGEBRA AND ITS APPLICATIONS. Assessment: homework (10%), midterm exam (30%), final exam (60%).

This course examines the links between environmental protection and economic development. It focuses on how the world manages its natural and environmental resources to meet the human needs of the present while at the same time preserving these resources for future generations. The course introduces students to different views on how human society achieves the goal of economic growth without depleting earth’s capital and jeopardizing the planet’s life support system. Other topics include the concept of sustainable development and its evolution; the challenges, equity issues, technology development, and free trade; sustainable development indicators and ecological footprints analysis; governance and international cooperation; and the sustainability of city and country. The course uses Hong Kong and China for case studies. 

This course examines the evolution of Buddhist meditation: from its origination to its latest manifestation as psychosocial interventions spanning more than 2000 years. Through the study of Buddhist meditation texts and experiential learning, the theories and practices of several important Buddhist meditation methods will be introduced, such as mindful-breathing, compassionate meditation, samādhi and vipassanā.