National University of Singapore

This course examines questions about the relationship between equality and justice, such as is it unjust for a society to be unequal? Unequal in what way? How do political systems reproduce relations of equality or inequality? Does society have a responsibility to compensate for some inequalities, and which ones? Readings include contributions from the contemporary debate on egalitarianism from John Rawls, Robert Nozick, Michael Walzer and others, as well as consider the application of theories of in/equality to current affairs in Singapore and elsewhere.

This course examines the military situation of Singapore and how it is governed by its place in the Malay world and its fluctuating strategic value to great powers. Students learn the 700‐year approach to the island’s military history and examine the relative impact of its distant and recent past on its present situation. 

This course covers the mathematical fundamentals of probability theory and complex variables which are necessary in the study of integrated circuits, communications, communication networks, control systems, signal processing, energy and new media. There is a strong emphasis on the application of these concepts to electrical and computer engineering problems, such as the Gaussian distribution in communications, random variable distributions for system reliability, complex random variables. This course requires students to take prerequisites.

This course introduces the fundamental concept of carriers, operating principles of PN diodes and MOSFETs. Topics include IV characteristics in different operating regions and their impact on the performance of logic gate, the foundational concepts of inverters and analyze their performance in terms of power and delay trade-off. The course introduces logic synthesis and the fundamental timing analysis of logic gates. Besides the static CMOS logic, students examine pass logics or transmission gates logics.

Arabic 2 is an integrated course that helps students gain higher basic proficiency in the four skills (listening, speaking, reading, and writing), grammar, vocabulary for personal interaction and communication in authentic situations. Themes covered are pertinent to everyday social settings/encounters, such as family, party, food, time and price, holiday and alike. Grammar rules and concepts cover topics such as present tense conjugation, imperative and imperative moods, singular, dual and plural, negation, nominal and verbal sentences, prepositions, etc. This course has a prerequisite of Arabic 1 or students must take a placement test to test into Arabic 2.

This course examines the ways in which theory can be used as an interpretive practice in literary criticism and how literary scholars think, read, and write with theory. It focuses on how to generate and sustain a dialogue between literary and theoretical texts and trains the ability to identify the resonances and tensions that exist between these distinct registers of writing. Through the overlapping exigences of race, gender, and ecology, the course explores how theory—as critically engaged with literature—might clarify and fundamentally transform how to make sense of the world.

This course is the continuation of the intermediate level and serves as a bridge to further study of Spanish language and culture. Students work on refining their writing and speaking skills by engaging in a variety of integrated language tasks. Nuance grammar concepts will be explored in complex sentences and structures using discourse markers and connectors.

This course examines how optimization principles are of undisputed importance in modern design and system operation and illustrates how algorithms can be designed from mathematical theories for solving optimization problems. Topics include fundamentals, unconstrained optimization: one-dimensional search, Newton-Raphson method, gradient method, constrained optimization: Lagrangian multipliers method, Karush-Kuhn-Tucker optimality conditions, Lagrangian duality and saddle point optimality conditions, and convex programming: Frank-Wolfe method. The course requires students to take prerequisites.

This course deepens understanding of Singapore history through an examination of different representations of history: academic scholarship, social memory and oral history, heritage. Each section incorporates fundamental concepts and debates behind the production of history, together with the application of these ideas to specific Singapore case studies. At the end of the course, students will be able to critically analyze Singapore history as a whole in terms of historiography and heritage studies, whilst gaining familiarity with the treatment of key issues in Singapore's past.

This course introduces students to the basic concepts of fluid mechanics. Starting with fluid properties and fluid statics, students’ progress to the conservation laws which allows them to analyze various fluid problems encountered in engineering practice. The second half of the course introduces students to basic fluid flow concepts. Students learn how to apply the prior concepts and laws to pipe flows, hydraulic machinery and pipe networks. At the end students should be able to estimate frictional losses for flows in pipelines, design pumping systems and apply the obtained knowledge to other engineering applications.