University of Hong Kong

This course examines the principles of systematics and phylogenetics and an appreciation of current trends and controversies. Current classification theories: phenetic systematics (classifications based on overall resemblances) and cladistics (evolutionary reconstruction). The species concept. Sources of taxonomic data: morphology & anatomy, biochemistry, chemistry, molecular biology, biogeography and ethology. Causes of taxonomic complexity: environmental factors; hybridization; breeding systems. Principles of nomenclature. 

This course examines the diversity in animal behavior and the means of understanding animal behavior. It examines the underlying mechanism and function of behavior, and how did a particular behavior develop and evolve. Topics include behavioral ecology; behavioral genetics; reproductive behavior; mating system; parental care; communication; foraging; learning; migration and biological rhythms; evolutionary stable strategies; sexual selection; altruism; and sociality in vertebrates and invertebrates. 

What is the state’s final frontier? How and why have governments around the world been vested with the authority to manage the most intimate aspects of our existence: from the food we eat to our sexual behavior? What has the impact of this encroachment been on our sense of self? Engaging with these questions from an historical perspective provides a critical lens for re-evaluating our own relationship to society and the state, as well as furnishing a context for considering the extent to which we are ever fundamentally “free” to possess our own bodies. Exploring the birth of “surveillance society” enables us to reflect upon – and challenge – the inherited assumptions which underpin our reliance on government and our aspirations for personal autonomy. This course ranges from the formation of the modern state in Europe and the techonologies it developed for managing populations, to global health surveillance and recent biomedical advances which have resulted in progressively interventionist governmental measures, with profound social, political and ethical implications. Topics include: surveillance; “medical police” and state-sponsored interventions in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Europe; the invention of the “population” as a collective body; colonialism and the global exportation of ideas about what is “normal”; “healthy citizens”: the coercive state and the democratization of society; and, finally, the limits of public health in the twenty-first century.

This course examines the design of effective marketing strategies from a general management perspective. It examines the marketing management concepts underlying both consumer and industrial marketing strategy and tactics. Strategic marketing focuses on the concepts and processes involved in developing market-driven strategies. The key challenges in formulating market-driven strategies include: (1) acquiring a shared understanding throughout the organization about the current market and how it may change in the future, (2) identifying opportunities for delivering superior value to customers, (3) positioning the organization and its offerings to best meet the needs of its target markets, and (4) developing a coordinated marketing program to deliver superior customer value.

This course examines marketing research methods. This course will focus on how both qualitative and quantitative aspects of marketing research can help managers to address substantive marketing problems This course emphasizes the basic methodologies, as well as introduces a variety of techniques, and demonstrates how research applies to strategy.

This course examines techniques of video shooting and editing. During the course, students produce short news stories. The emphasis is on the mechanics of shooting and editing for TV news.

This course examines supervised and unsupervised learning, with emphases on the theoretical underpinnings and on applications in the statistical programming environment R. Topics include linear methods for regression and classification, model selection, model averaging, basic expansions and regularization, kernel smoothing methods, additive models and tree-based methods. We will also provide an overview of neural networks and random forests.

This course examines key issues and debates in western feminist art movements between the 1960s and 1980s. The inclusion of case studies on the works of women artists, including Mona Hatoum, Nikki S. Lee, Yin Xiuzhen, Shen Yuan, and Megumi Akiyoshi. It also covers new artistic contents, and alternative cultural formats and theoretical paradigms to the on-going construction of a feminist history of art within the increasingly interconnected, yet unevenly developed globalizing contemporary society.

This course examines general relativity. Topics include: The principle of equivalence; inertial observers in a curved space-time; vectors and tensors; parallel transport and covariant differentiation; the Riemann tensor; the stress-energy tensor; the Einstein gravitational field equations; the Schwarzschild solution; black holes; gravitational waves detected by LIGO, and Freidmann equation.

This course examines American politics. It covers key aspects of American political system, the formal (executive, judiciary, and legislative) and informal (bureaucracy, media, interest groups, etc.) branches of government, its creation and development into its present form, the way officials at various branches and levels are selected, the contours of American federalism, how domestic policy is done and some of the main issues that animate its domestic political debates.