Hong Kong

This course provides an understanding of how love, sex, and marriage constitute a useful lens for understanding Chinese culture, thoughts, values, and ways of life. It provides a glimpse into the complex interconnections between political, cultural, economic, and interpersonal realms of experience. The course begins with issues that are personally relevant to young people – mate choice, love, marriage, sex, and family – with a view to helping to think about the historical and cultural roots of values concerning love, sexuality, marriage, and family life in China. In particular, the course examines the profound transformation in Chinese values, lifestyles, norms and desires, from Maoist utopianism to reform-era hedonism, brought about by market reforms and the opening of China. Through case studies of love and marriage in Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta, the course looks at the diverse characteristics of Chinese ways of life, and how Chinese people may currently experience love, sex, marriage and cross different types of borders and boundaries to look for intimacies. Documentary films are used to give a vivid sense of the different strategies modern Chinese men and women use to fulfill material, affective and sexual desires as a response to social changes.

This introductory course takes a macro-level view of the hospitality, tourism, and real estate industries. The primary objectives of this course are three-folded. First, this course discusses the historical developments, business models, and management structures of lodging, restaurant, managed service, casino/gaming, meetings / conventions / expositions, recreation, club, theme park, cruise, airline, and other hospitality and tourism organizations. Second, experiential learning opportunities are provided to understand the operations of hospitality organizations and the importance of service quality. The course also introduces the business world of real estate, including terminology, transaction process, issues, players and activities in the real estate industry. Third, the course provides descriptions of the key management functions and the characteristics and practices of leaders and managers.

This course introduces a variety of approaches towards filmmaking, as evidenced in recent works of contemporary world cinema. While the films included on the syllabus have been selected from the past two decades – featuring active, present-day filmmakers – the course encourages the appreciation of such cinematic achievements as not only arising out of an immediate context, but as indebted to the past and to the history of cinema. The course begins with a consideration of Hollywood and its global dominance through commercial genre cinema, before touring the world for a series of alternative approaches to film making that challenge Hollywood's hegemony, with a particular emphasis on art cinema in both its national and transnational forms. The formal achievements and aesthetic merits of individual titles are discussed in relation to the filmmaker's personal artistry, influential trends, and movements in film history that had an effect on the work in questions, as well as relevant contextual (i.e., social, economic, cultural, &/or political) factors.

In view of the prevalence of the aging population and accompanying chronic illnesses, demands for medical instrumentation and design have been escalating worldwide. This course presents design-thinking skills and their application to the broad medical fields. Laboratory sessions are arranged to train in developing prototypes and enrich understanding of the fundamental design concepts covered in lectures. The course has a main project to develop an innovative medical device.

What does it mean to live a worthy life? This is one of the most fundamental questions of human existence and this course addresses the relevant issues through an engagement with various philosophical and religious traditions, such as Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam and Secular Humanism. The course discusses how the teachings of important historical figures from these traditions have influenced the choices of people over the centuries, and how they have been contextualized and adopted in contemporary society; examines how these figures regard the place of bodily pleasures, intellectual pursuits, power, status, possessions, accomplishments, virtues, relationship with other human beings and the relationship (or not) with the transcendent in their vision of a good life; explores the resources they offer for dealing with stress, temptations, disappointments and failures, social oppression, the loss of possessions and of loved ones, and with one's own death. The course helps students connect across different disciplines and cultures, and develop the ability to examine controversial issues from multiple perspectives. Students will achieve these aims through interactive learning and high impact practices such as group debates and interviewing contemporary advocates of different worldviews concerning the question of “What makes a worthy life?”

This course introduces telecommunications and computing networks used in the support of business activities. Topics include data, voice, image and communication technologies; networking and communication architectures; and protocols and standards.

This course introduces the principles, mechanisms and implementation of cyber security and information protection. Topics include cyber-attacks and defense; notion and terms of cyber security; introduction to cryptography; symmetric key cryptography and public key cryptography; authentication techniques; access control methods; network and Internet security and protection (e.g. firewall and IDS); application and web security; analysis and models of secure systems; cyber threat assessment and penetration testing; mobile code security.

This course studies language as a cognitive system which interfaces with other subsystems of the mind. It examines the biological foundations of language and the nature of language competence from an evolutionary and developmental perspective. The ways in which language, thought, and culture interact are explored. Emphasis is placed on the principles and mechanisms that underlie speech perception, sentence processing, and discourse comprehension, as well as structural factors in language production.

This course examines the relationship between global environmental change, population growth, and socio-political stability, with a special focus on the likelihood of environmentally related violence in the developing world. The course investigates climate-induced and human induced environmental change and covers the associated physical and social dimensions of environmental change. The course emphasizes how environmental stress triggers human conflicts in geopolitical perspective. Other topics include nonlinearity, complexity, values, and the limits to adaptation; geopolitical theory from the Greeks to the global era; and the contested grounds of human conflicts in the new environmental politics.

This course serves as a cross-cultural and intercultural introduction to the advanced study of literature from comparative perspectives. The concepts of comparative literature and world literature and even post-world literature are investigated along with the various cultural and literary issues we come across in the study of literature. We examine such areas of interest as influence, reception, genres, and style as well as focusing on themes and of course historical and political context. The course covers recent cultural and literary theories and also classic texts in literary and cultural criticism. The course also examines recent Asian humanities texts in seeking to set up an intercultural perspective on important world texts.