University of Edinburgh

This course investigates the modern field of popular beliefs and practices known as 'new spiritualities'. It describes, contextualizes, and explains key features of this field with reference to their content and structure, and to its distribution in the population at large. The course focuses on new age and holistic expressions. It has three overall goals: to explore the theoretical value of studying new spiritualities, to explain their international/transcultural appeal for practitioners, and to critically assess their social, public, and political significance in modern societies.

This course introduces students to techniques and tools in modern analysis which have important uses in a variety of areas of analysis, including the study of partial differential equations and Fourier analysis. Students achieve this in the context of linear analysis, introducing normed linear, inner product spaces and their completions, Banach and Hilbert spaces. The structure and geometry of these spaces are studied as well as continuous linear operators acting on them. 

This course introduces students to the social nature of health and illness, and to different models that inform aspects of our understanding of health phenomena. The varying experience of social groups according to demographic and economic patterning are viewed through a global perspective alongside the changing profile of health and illness.
 

Data is one of the most important assets of any enterprise and plays a central role in many aspects of everyday life, from healthcare, to education, to commerce. In order to be turned into meaningful information that enables and supports decision making, data must be stored, maintained, processed and analyzed. Database management systems are complex software programs that allow their users to perform these tasks in an efficient and reliable way. This course is an introduction to the principles underlying the design and implementation of relational databases and database management systems.