National Taiwan University

This course provides an overview of world economic history. The first part deals with early economic history focusing primarily on Asia. Topics include prehistory and the rise of civilization, the Buddhist and Islamic trade networks, early Chinese history, the rise of Europe, early imperialism, Chinese emigration and early Taiwanese history, and the British Industrial Revolution. A textbook is not used, but class readings and lecture notes are available on the internet. Assessment: book report, final exam, midterm quiz, group work.

The movies have long exploited biology as a source of bankable plot material. This trend has been even more intensified recently as biological discoveries and biotechnology advanced. Filmmakers capitalize recent discoveries to produce movies with science-based plots to an increasingly aware public. In view of their mass appeal, such movies play a significant role in society as disseminators of scientific facts and misinformation. They thus serve as a useful starting point for exploring various aspects of the relationship between science and the public perception of science. This course discusses various biological topics drawn from movies; explores public misconceptions and naiveté about science that are perpetuated by movies, as well as the extent to which such movies borrow from, or in some cases, even predict scientific fact. This course requires weekly screenings of a feature-length movie prior the one-hour lecture in the classroom. Films and topics are organized around biological themes. Discussion of films that feature different biological transformations focus on distinguishing between science fiction and science fact, understanding the uses of the underlying principles in scientific research, and exploring real world analogies to such fictional concepts as fly-human chimeras and reconstructed dinosaurs. Movies and related discussion topics include LORENZO'S OIL (1992) and the biology of rare genetic diseases; MISSION TO MARS (2000) and origin of life and life from other planets; ICE AGE (2009) and the origin of humans; OUTBREAK (1995) and the small pox virus debate.

The course is aimed to introduce the basic concept of logic and teachs how to reason things in the world correctly. Two important parts of this course are to talk about deductive reasoning and to teach student to separate the concepts of cognitive language and emotional language.

This course examines macroeconomics with a focus on the four basic models: Keynes Is-LM model, Classical full employment AD-AS model, Inflation SP-LP model, and Modern growth model. The course uses the four models to analyze the actual state of the economy with a focus on the United States, Taiwan, and Mainland China. Other topics include macroeconomic statistics; monetary policy, fiscal policy, and government budgets; stabilization policy objectives; money and financial markets; consumer theory; investment theory; and reflection on the rapid economic development of Taiwan over the past half century. Text: Robert J. Gordon, MARCOECONOMICS; and class handouts.

Taiwan has formed a multilingual society rich in languages, an asset accumulated over a long history. This phenomenon was also due to Taiwan’s encounters with different cultures at different historical stages: that between Austronesians and Dutch; Austronesians and Han Chinese; Austronesians and Han Chinese and Japanese, to Taiwan natives and Chinese immigrants in 1949. This course enables students to gain a full understanding between Taiwanese language and historical development and social phenomena, as well as develop an enthusiasm for Taiwanese language. 

The main focus of this course is on the interactions between people and their environment. It covers topics such as perception of environment, the origin of the earth, the evolution of the earth environment, and the earth as the home of human beings. Discussion about atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and geosphere are oriented to human history. They are considered either as natural resources or natural hazards. Historical events are used to illustrate how human history was affected by environment and how the environment affected historical events. Global change and sustainable development are the two main concepts that underlie such discussions. The course uses literature, art and archeological findings along with videos from Discovery and National Geographic Society.

Course description not currently provided. 

This beginning Spanish language course allows students to understand and use familiar everyday expressions and very basic phrases. Moreover, students will learn to introduce themselves and others, and ask and answer questions about personal details (e.g. where they live, people they know and things they have. Finally, students can interact in a simple way provided the other person talks slowly and clearly and is prepared to help.

This course serves as a general introduction to psycholinguistics. It covers basic areas such as neurolinguistics, speech perception, word recognition, lexical ambiguity, sentence comprehension, language acquisition, and production. Prerequisite: Students must have completed the course, Introduction to Linguistics.

The literary material for this course is ancient, medieval, and modern oral poems, including Beowulf, English and Scottish ballads, Middle and Modern English sayings, contemporary US spoken word poets (poetry slam poets), and translations from the world's greatest oral poems and laws. Each student constructs a virtual (oral) book of poetry. The methodology of this course is partly performative: each class meeting consists of an operational discussion of orality--learning and jamming oral poems—as well as a theoretical discussion of orality. In other words, students will read theories of orality and ethnopoetics for the sake of putting them into practice and testing them as performance, and students perform as a way to understand the ahistorical processes of orality, so often misrecognized in modernity. Guest speakers from other faculties are invited to educate students on the brain and memory; the relationship of music, voice, and text; and performance. Individually and as a group we shall build a repertoire, a living corpus of intangible culture. Students will also watch and describe performances of oral poetry from around the world, including the South African ibongi, the Argentine payador, and American poetry slams. The theoretical foundations of this course include cognitive approaches to literature, oral theory, and ethnopoetics. Subthemes include memory and participatory knowledge.