University of Edinburgh

This course provides a detailed but accessible introduction to the government and politics of the United Kingdom. Students study the main political institutions of the UK and how they have been affected by devolution, voter apathy, and the increasing fragmentation of the party system. Does Parliament matter or does it merely approve decisions taken elsewhere? Does the Prime Minister dominate the British system? Will Brexit lead to the break-up of the UK? Why do people vote UKIP? Students are introduced to important institutions and debates in the study of British government. They consider, in particular: the British parliamentary state and the enduring influence of the Westminster Model; the peculiar nature of the constitution; the management of the (increasingly) multi-national nature of the UK; and the explanations for and impact of the vote for Brexit.
 

The course looks at major, predominantly Western, avant-garde movements, from Dada and Surrealism to the break-up of styles and unitary movements that characterise artistic production and display from the 1960s onwards. It concludes with the effects of globalization and radical new conceptions of art that are current in today's world. Course content also addresses cross-cutting themes and issues, from feminism, economics, display, the environment and aesthetic awareness that are all core to the study of art history in the 21st century.

 

The initial focus is on the emergence of the industrial core and its relationship with the wider world. By 1914 the USA was the world industrial leader, with industrial output equal to that of France, Germany, and Britain combined. Accordingly the case of US economic development is considered in some detail. Global economic history is not just a history of the industrial core, though, and accordingly Chinese and Japanese economic history are also studied in some detail. In the 20th century, elements of the world economy disintegrated during the 1920s and 1930s, most especially the networks of trade and the international monetary system. This led to widespread depression, including in the USA, and students seek to understand what went wrong. The course concludes with a discussion of a second era of global economic expansion since 1945.

This course helps students to better appreciate and understand the contemporary cultural and socio-political importance of film through three central routes. Firstly, a series of nine case studies of important international films released in British cinemas over the past five years illustrates and instantiates a diverse range of key aesthetic, ideological, and industrial contexts that 21st century filmmakers both contribute to and challenge through the work they produce. Secondly, the weekly case studies are drawn from a range of cinematic traditions, including animation, live-action fiction, and documentary filmmaking. Thirdly, and despite their diversity, each of the weekly case studies is taught in such a way as to equip students with some of the foundational critical skills and forms of knowledge associated with the academic study of film. These include an understanding of the relationship between authorial intent, audio-visual technique, and audience experience; an ability to locate and critique individual films within appropriate comparative contexts, such as directorial oeuvre and traditions of film genre; and an informed understanding of the varied range of critical traditions and methodologies that scholars past and present have brought to the study of cinema as both social institution and art form. This course is taught exclusively by filmmakers and film critics from Edinburgh College of Art of Art, School of Design.

This course is an introduction to cognitive science. It provide a selective but representative overview of the subject, suitable for all interested students, including students on the cognitive science degrees and external students. The lecturing team presents a unified view of the field, based on a computational approach to analyzing cognition. The material is organized by cognitive function (e.g., language, vision), rather than by subdiscipline (e.g., psychology, neuroscience). The course covers language, vision, memory, control and action, and reasoning and generalization. All topics are presented from a computational point of view, and this perspective is reinforced by lab sessions in which students implement simple cognitive models.

This course provides a broad foundation in architectural acoustics and the human perception of sound ("psychological acoustics", or "psychoacoustics"), that may be grasped by students from a range of backgrounds. The course brings these subjects together through both theoretical study and a range of practical applications. For example, students explore how the principles of architectural and psychological acoustics have recently come together to drive a revolution in the world of augmented (AR) and virtual reality (VR) systems. This course provides a broad foundation in both architectural and psychological acoustics that combines aspects of acoustics, architecture, engineering, informatics, and music. Whether you are a student of one of these subjects or not, the only formal requirement is that you should have achieved a good pass in mathematics at Higher/A-Level.

This is a second course in real analysis at the University of Edinburgh and builds on ideas in the analysis portion of Fundamentals of Pure Mathematics. The course begins with sequences and series of real numbers, introducing the concept of Cauchy sequences and results for bounded sequences. Subsequently, sequences and series of functions are introduced and concepts of uniform convergence and power series are discussed. The concept of Lebesgue integral on real line is then developed. Finally, the rudiments of Fourier series are introduced.