University of New South Wales

This course examines the fundamentals of Bayesian inference, including the specification of prior and posterior distributions, Bayesian decision theoretic concepts, the ideas behind Bayesian hypothesis tests, model choice and model averaging, the capabilities of several common model types, such as hierarchical and mixture models. It also looks at the ideas behind Monte Carlo integration, importance sampling, rejection sampling, Markov chain Monte Carlo samplers such as the Gibbs sampler and the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm, and use of the WinBuGS posterior simulation software.

This course focuses on the role of women in five of the world’s major religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It examines the traditional theological principles and the practical laws that have directly impacted, for better or for worse, upon the lives of women within these religious traditions. It also explores historical and contemporary challenges to doctrines and practices that are seen to undermine women’s equality and freedom. Rather than study each religion in serial fashion, the course adopts a comparative, thematic methodology, tracing key themes across the religions concerned. Those themes include femininity and divinity, historical founders’ attitudes to women, key scriptural texts and their interpretation, life-cycle rituals, marriage and divorce, sex and procreation, clothing and social freedom, worship and purity, and leadership and authority.

This course examines the core of persuasive communications: the ability to reach a deep understanding of the people you are communicating with. This means listening, thinking critically, and asking the right questions. Who are they? Where are they? What do they desire? What keeps them awake at night? How do they make sense of the world? These questions are the building blocks for crafting the insightful campaigns that transform a clients' problem into a strategic and creative public relations or advertising solution. To answer them you need the right tools to understand and analyze consumers, publics, and media audiences.

This course provides a foundation in computational thinking. It assumes no previous programming background, but requires use of digital devices, such as tablets and smart phones, for a range of tasks (e.g. social networking, reading, essay writing, etc.). The course uses Python as the programming medium and uses real world examples from a variety of domains to motivate understanding.