Hong Kong

This course topic is human-animal relationship in the global market place. Animals are everywhere and nowhere in modern societies. Except for the pets and animals in zoos, most animals are segregated from human's everyday lives. Yet we eat them, wear them and “consume” them on a daily basis. In a globalizing world, our diverse relationships with animals stimulate questions on compassion, economics, urbanization, transnational mobility, global ethics and citizenship. The promotion of animal rights and ending animal cruelty is often regarded as one key mission for 21st century global citizens and has become a global social movement. There is now an increasing awareness of the global economy of animal trading and entertainment industry, rethinking the sociological, anthropological and scientific distinctions of human and non-human animals, and also of the new patterns of human-animal co-existence in urban cities. This course aims at stimulating students' critical reflections upon different social constructions and moral implications of our relationships with the non-human creatures across cultures in the global marketplace.

Advances in the understanding of human genome have resulted in the emergence of a new science called Nutrigenomics. This course provides an understanding of the biochemical mechanisms underpinning nutrition research and the relation between genetics and diet-related diseases. The course also reinforces the role of nutrition at the molecular level and the concepts of nutrigenomics and nutrigenetics. Topics covered include principles of molecular biology, the study of gene and its function, structure and function of chromosomes, DNA replication, control of gene expression, epigenetics, genetic variation and human diseases, and tools of molecular biology.

The "Arab World" today refers to a large geographical area: from the Atlantic coast of North Africa in the West to the border of Iran in the East. Arabic is the principal spoken language of this region, which is also linked by shared cultural and religious traditions. The course presents a historical survey of the "Arab World" from pre-Islamic times to the modern era. The first part surveys the rise and spread of Arab political rule and Arab language and culture with the advent of Islam in the 7th century, with later emphasis on some of the principal political, economic, social, religious, and cultural developments and their relevance to the contemporary "Middle East" region. Two main themes referred to throughout the course are the unity and diversity of the "Arab World" and how various Arab cultures and societies have interacted with other peoples in this region and beyond.

The course examines a broad range of sustainability issues such as population and urbanization; transportation and logistics; resources: water, energy, and food; (natural) disasters; community and governance; technology and mobility. These are explored through the perspective of contemporary and historical examples of how people, in their visions of the future, have sought to perfect built environments as the setting for model communities. The ideas raised are discussed in weekly tutorial sessions and are brought together at the end of the course with an intensive workshop, in which students look to define their own vision of a sustainable community. This course is intended to inspire thinking about the way we should construct our living environments in future, in order to find a sustainable balance.

This course explores the information processing approach and its central concepts in the study of human cognition; the methods and skills used in empirical investigation of cognitive processes; the writing of empirical reports; and the relations between cognition and other areas of psychology. Topics covered include information processing model: transduction, sensory store, rapid attentional integration; preattentive processes and selective attention; pattern recognition and reading and top-down and bottom-up processes; working, short-term, and long-term memory; rehearsal, transfer, and loss of information; semantic memory; implicit and explicit memory; concept learning and the structure of concepts; cognitive style and cognitive processes of the Chinese; and cognition and emotion.

This course addresses the ways in which social media and other related interactions in cyberspace have become a central element in the everyday lives of humans across the globe in the 21st century. Modern lives are now largely interwoven with digital technologies that have not only changed our own cultures, but also have brought forth new cultural forms through mobile phone technologies, networked “smart”-products, and cultural groupings only possible through digital means. The course approaches the anthropology of these digital cultures through its main themes—the transformation and expansion of social media, social research online, the intermixing of our online and offline lives, critical social issues of online lives, and the question of posthumanism. These themes are addressed explicitly in the course, and are also the subtexts of the different lectures, readings, and project work. The course presents the techniques of online fieldwork and referencing; explores a diverse array of new ethnographies on social media: on gender, political movements, online dating, hacking, and gaming culture. These ethnographies also serve to model online social research and provide examples of methodology and design. The social consequences of cyberspace are addressed in the topics of internet pornography, addiction, surveillance, activism, and social networking. Gender and identity issues are a continuous theme throughout the course, highlighting how online lives accentuate already existing dynamics. Hong Kong connections to these subjects will also be critically discussed, often drawing on topical themes presented on blogs and forums.

This course covers the principles of data mining, exploratory analysis and visualization, as well as predictive modeling for complex data sets. It introduces modern tools for regression and classification for high-dimensional or ultra-high dimensional data from the perspective of statistical decision theory and makes comparison to traditional methods. The course explores statistical principles, computational issues, and hands-on data analysis on high noise, observational data.

It is interesting and useful to understand why people do what they do in everyday life. Sociology helps us understand human behaviors by examining the social settings in which people live their lives. The primary goal of this course is to help you think sociologically—to think about the social factors that shape people's actions and beliefs—and to show you how such thinking is useful. Through systematic examination, we will try to use sociology to make sense of people's behavior and ideas. The course is divided into three parts. It first starts with the question: Why do people do what they do? We develop the basic building blocks or tools of a sociological perspective to begin to answer this question. Sociology is fundamentally about patterns (we will sometimes call them “structures”) of social relations and interaction and how these patterns influence what people do and think. We introduce ideas and concepts that help analyze and explain how behavioral patterns differ from person to person, from culture to culture, from one time to another. Second, questions: Who gets what? And why? Here we look at structures of inequality and try to make sense of uneven distributions of valued resources among individuals, groups, and societies. We investigate the social mechanisms that maintain or change those inequalities. Third, questions: Why do things change? And why do they sometimes stay the same? Our focus here is on the great social institutions common to, yet different in, all societies, starting with family and marriage and moving from there to religion, politics, and criminal justice. The course also examines sources of social change that shape and challenge inequalities and institutions.