University of Edinburgh

In this course, students review the development and prospects for genomic analysis. There are three components to the course: a lecture series, computer based bioinformatics workshops, and a practical. In the lectures, through the presentation of key genomes, both prokaryotic and eukaryotic, students consider the structure, function, and evolution of genomes. They then look at tools, both experimental and statistical, to further their knowledge of genes and their functions. 



 

This course introduces students to the field of behavioral economics. Students explore the reasons why people make irrational decisions; how people decide quickly; why people make mistakes in risky situations; their tendency to procrastination and short-termism; and how people can be affected by social influences, personality, mood, and emotions. Students explore how behavioral economics could help policy-makers to understand the people behind their policies, and facilitate the design of more effective policies.

This interdisciplinary course introduces you to the growing and important field of disability studies. This course has a strong focus on the lived experience of disability and values the knowledge embodied in this experience. It takes an explicit advocacy orientation, exploring the range of challenges experienced by disabled people locally, nationally and globally, while critically examining policies and interventions aimed at helping to reduce and eliminate barriers to full participation. It also takes an intersectional approach, looking at how disability intersecting with other aspects of identity such as race, ethnicity, age, and gender provide additional challenges that need to be taken into account in interventions aimed at eliminating inequities.
 

A continuation of Japanese language beginner. Teaching is aimed at enabling students to speak, read, and write Modern Japanese at a pre-intermediate level, equivalent to Japanese Language Proficiency Test N5 or Common European Framework of Reference for Languages level A1/A2.
The course provides essential grounding for the pre-intermediate level course "Japanese Language Pre-Intermediate" and subsequent study to the lower intermediate-level continuation course. A good deal of private study is necessary to meet the requirements of the course. This course is not available to native or near-native speakers of Japanese. A placement test and questionnaire on students' background in Japanese language studies is conducted in the induction session.

Design is often regarded as the central creative activity of engineering. This course develops a foundation for the skills of analysis, synthesis, and communication required to develop solutions to open-ended problems. It focuses on three things: (1) understanding an engineering problem, (2) finding a solution to it, (3) communicating that solution to others. This course is predominantly taught through interactive team-based design studio sessions with support from lectures on topics including the philosophy, history, and ethics of engineering design. A series of group activities with mini assessments will cover key skills like research, problem solving, and the graphic, verbal, or written communication of engineering concepts.

The theme of the course is the relationship between private troubles and public problems, i.e. how the personal challenges many of us face in our lives are shaped and defined in ways that often appear to be beyond our direct control. The course introduces students to the sociological perspective by examining four significant topics in the discipline of sociology.
 

This course covers concepts of rationality, the "classic" research into the cognitive psychology of reasoning, and decision-making. Topics include nature of representation, operations on representations, and levels of analysis; different types of models in psychology (i.e., descriptive, normative, verbal vs formal); epistemic rationality and its connection to Bayes' Theorem; issues of rational belief revision; deductive reasoning in syllogisms and if-then conditionals, with a specific focus on the debate between mental rules and mental models approaches to these topics; probabilistic approaches to deduction. Dual process models of reasoning; instrumental rationality and its connection to decision theory; abductive reasoning & science of explanation; subjective expected utility theory and Prospect Theory; and decision by sampling and heuristics within the bounded rationality paradigm.

Biotechnology is an exciting subject that combines the application of knowledge and expertise in biochemistry, chemistry, genetics, microbiology, molecular biology, and physics. Biotechnology is relevant to several areas of activity: agriculture and food production; public health and medicines; ecological and environmental management; creation of novel products; development of new advanced techniques. Biotechnology is a very innovative scientific area and is well supported by UK Government Research Councils, in particular the BBSRC. Biotechnology also involves a high level of commercial activity, creation of new intellectual property and start-up companies, and job opportunities (requiring scientific, business and legal skills) in industry. 

This course introduces students to the theory and practice of ethnographic fieldwork. At the heart of this course is collaborative project in which students learn about qualitative methods by putting them to the test in practical group work. Their collective ethnographies require them to write extensive field notes, which are assessed, and which function as an extended period of learning to write effectively in an academic manner. 

This course allows students to explore sound-based interaction methods in the context of new music, live performance, sound installation, and design by looking at creative approaches to using computers and code. Lectures cover a range of areas based on the development of interactive software systems for manipulating, sampling and synthesizing sound in real-time. Students investigate these aspects and apply them through coding their own projects in relation to areas such as interactive sound design, digital musical instrument design, data sonification, sound therapy, algorithmic composition, and audio- visual installation and performance. Projects are developed using an accessible software programming language such as Max.