University of Edinburgh

This course is an honors course combining biological and social science perspectives on the field of conservation. The course does not have any pre-requisites, but students are expected to have a background in ecology or biological sciences and to be comfortable reading and interpreting the scientific and social science literature and understanding basic applied statistics and mathematics.

This is an introductory course to the role of asymmetric information in economic situations at the undergraduate level. Decision makers (for example, buyers and sellers) are typically differentially informed about the quality, quantity or value of the traded goods. This course introduces the well-known stylistic models of informational asymmetries.

This course considers advanced applications of thermodynamics in a range of engineering contexts. Topics include advanced power cycles, psychrometry, and an introduction to combustion.

The course examines the field of human mobility by following the trajectories of several interlinked journeys: from the forced movements of refugees into the world of labor migrants, political exiles, and immigrants. These diverse settings are explored through the lens of human mobility, thereby answering a number of key questions: Why do people move? What legal and political regimes govern, allow, and restrict these movements? How are mobility and inequality linked? How are refugees, migrants, immigrants, expats, nomads, and other "moving people" different from one another in practice, and in theory? Combining a close examination of concrete research with discussions of theoretical approaches, the course improves students' understanding of the subject while deepening their theoretical and methodological skills.

This course considers the monuments and arts of the major imperial dynasties of the early and medieval Islamic empire. Our focus is the period from roughly 650, with the establishment of the Umayyad dynasty and the construction of the Dome of the Rock, to the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth-century and the infamous Sack of Baghdad. The course is organized around the cosmopolitan courts of the four early imperial dynasties (the 'great caliphates') and their allies and vassals, from North Africa to Central Asia. The emphasis of the course is on exploring the rise of Islamic art out of Antiquity and the astonishing development of an international Islamic visual language within a context of medieval global networks. Close attention will be paid to architecture and works across a range of media, and we will ask what these vibrant material and visual expressions reveal about early and medieval Islamic societies. We will consider a variety of themes, such as connections to Antiquity, visual culture as a means of self-fashioning, interchanges with non-Muslim polities, conceptions of earthly sovereignty, man's relationship with the divine, women and gender, the connections between the arts and other spheres of cultural production, etc.

This course describes how reasoning can be modelled using computers. It provides a route into more advanced uses of theorem proving in order to solve problems in mathematics and formal verification. Major emphases are on how knowledge can be represented using propositional, first-order, and higher-order logic; how these representations can be used as the basis for reasoning; and how these reasoning processes can be guided to a successful conclusion through a variety of means ranging from fully-automated to interactive ones. Students develop a thorough understanding of modern, interactive theorem proving via lectures, tutorials, and an assignment.

The course provides general techniques for the design of efficient algorithms and, in parallel, develop appropriate mathematical tools for analyzing their performance. In this, it broadens and deepens the study of algorithms and data structures initiated in INF2. The focus is on algorithms, more than data structures. 

 

The image of the 'mass' and the ideas associated with it provide a central theme of this part of the course. At one level, the language of the 'mass' reflects a reality of popular leisure in this period: its often collective nature. People attended sports events, music halls, cinemas and went on holiday in large and ever increasing numbers. Leisure experiences were increasingly shared, and the question must be asked how far this contributed to a growing sense of collective identity in this period. However, the image of the 'mass', as it recurs through the writing of the period, also reflects contemporary concern that increased access to leisure would threaten established cultural standards. As working-class living standards improved, money and time were devoted to amusements which did not match the priorities of moral reformers: drink remained central to working-class culture; instead of classical concerts, more people went to the Music Hall; instead of participating in team sports, most preferred to pay to watch others play. For moral reformers, it appeared that improving, rational amusements were in danger of being swamped by commercial forces. The creation of a mass market for leisure would, it was thought, inevitably lead to a fall in standards, as minority tastes lost out before the economic power wielded by the majority. Such fears were shared on both the left and right of the political spectrum. The course therefore uses the use and organisation of leisure time to examine important themes of social and economic change in the early twentieth century.

This course gives students an understanding of the general principles of the branches of law most relevant to them and, so far as practicable, to set the law in its current commercial context. It is an introductory course, with an emphasis on general principles.