University of Edinburgh

Computer security is concerned with the protection of computer systems and their data from threats which may compromise integrity, availability, or confidentiality; the focus is on threats of a malicious nature rather than accidental. This course gives students a broad understanding of computer security. Topics include security risks, attacks, prevention, and defense methods; techniques for writing secure programs; and an overview of the foundations for cryptography, security protocols, and access control models.

This course allows undergraduate students to develop an understanding of international development, aid, and humanitarianism from various social scientific perspectives (including politics, economics, anthropology, geography, and history. The course explores the histories, impacts, and legacies of international development planning and policy, introducing students to foundational issues in development studies, and offers them the opportunity to create a policy brief on a specific theme.  

Normative Theories are theories about how we ought to act, or how we ought to live. This course examines different traditions in, and approaches to, normative theorizing. These may include some or all of Consequentialism, Deontological Pluralism, Kantianism, Contractualism, and Virtue Ethics, as well as Particularism and other anti-theoretical approaches. The course takes some approaches to normative ethics and examines them in detail, assessing how well they do at explaining and justifying moral beliefs (and questioning the extent to which this is a legitimate constraint upon them). It also examines how these theories apply to particular moral questions such as those connected to procreation, duties to future people, aggregating harms and benefits to different people, and imposing risks of harm.

The substantive content of this course changes each year depending on topical issues and is taught by experts on the issue itself or on particular approaches/methods from amongst permanent and postdoctoral staff. Students learn substantive information about the topic itself but perhaps more importantly they acquire the generic skills to analyze any phenomenon: how to place it within a larger context, where to look for information about context, the types of variables (whether social, economic, cultural, or political) to consider when analyzing the phenomenon, how to identify wider theories and concepts to analyze the phenomenon and how to acquire evidence that would support one theoretical interpretation over another.